ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes how Victor Hugo and Jean-Paul Sartre allow themselves the freedom of manoeuvre between the concrete and the creative allows people to chart the dynamism of both writers' philosophies of being. The self-conscious bad faith that Santoni implies in Sartre's thinking can be compared with Hugo's act of poetic voyance, with Hugo and Sartre animating each other through the complementary terms that they operate within. As with Sartre, it is not enough for Hugo to pay lip service to the principle of freedom in his thinking. The poet-philosopher has to tackle all the complications engendered by that liberty. Something cannot simply be free, since freedom for Hugo involves both independence from purpose and yet an intentionality of function. That same transformative logic twists and turns through every page of Sartre's thinking on the human condition, as evidenced in his ongoing search for an ethics of human being.
