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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

6. The Rationality of the Dialectic: Jean-Paul Sartre

Author : Dick Howard

Published in: The Marxian Legacy

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

The sharp rupture that appeared in May 1968 threw into question not only the functional machine of modernizing French capitalism; the spontaneous creativity it revealed was also so much sand in the smoothly oiled machinery of orthodox Communist practice and Marxist theory. Neither the Gaullist victory at the polls in June nor the promise of the electoral Common Program of the socialist and communist parties deceived anyone: the specter of May had replaced the ‘specter of communism’ announced in The Communist Manifesto. The New Left specter has not achieved an institutional identity, and this makes it all the more dangerous to the established order while at the same time preserving its explosive force. The discovery and self-discovery symbolized by May was in fact a rediscovery of that unfinished work and elemental hope that Ernst Bloch showed to be not just the driving force but as well the arché and logos of revolution. More prosaically, it could be suggested that the nineteenth-century bourgeois revolutions, followed by bitter proletarian struggles, achieved only one of the three emblems that adorned the banners of 1789—equality—and that May 1968 represented the forms of liberty and fraternity that remain to be realized. This was expressed most emphatically in Cohn-Bendit’s iconoclastic insistence that ‘Tu fais la révolution pour toi’; the insistence on the role of pleasure and desire in the festive atmosphere of fraternization and communality turned the revolt into a positive affirmation. Underground, surfacing only in occasional and punctual actions, the specter of May, like that ‘old mole’ whose image captured the imagination of poets and philosophers alike, is digging away and undermining the structure of bureaucratized capitalist daily life.

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previous chapter From Critical Theory Toward Political Theory: Jürgen Habermas

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Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Victor, Philippe Gavi, On a raison de se révolter (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), p. 17. C.f., also Epistemon [Didier Anzieu], Ces idées qui ont ébranlé la France (Paris: Fayard, 1968).

Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations X (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). Citation from the interview with Michel Contat, ‘Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans’, p. 217 (hereafter, ‘Interview’).

Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le Néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 370.

On a raison, p. 139.

Ibid., p. 101.

Ibid., p. 142.

Ibid., p. 344.

‘Interview’, p. 216.

On a raison, pp. 47–8.

‘Interview’, p. 144.

Replying to Michel Contat’s question whether his theory of freedom is too abstract, Sartre admits: ‘I think that in effect a theory of freedom that does not explain at the same time what are alienations, to what degree freedom can let itself be manipulated, deviated, turned against itself, can very cruelly disappoint someone who doesn’t understand what it implies, and who thinks that freedom is everywhere’ (‘Interview’, p. 223).

The ontological reading of Kant as opposed to treating his epistemology as central to his project is open to disagreement. This is not the place to argue about Kant. Suffice it that, for the Sartrean project, ontology is the condition of the possibility of epistemology.

All citations, unless otherwise noted, are from Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Gallimard, 1960). This volume includes a preliminary essay, ‘Question de méthode’, which is translated into English as ‘Search for a Method’. As throughout this book, all translations are my own.

‘Question de méthode’ is not integral to the ontological theory of the Critique. It was in fact drafted in 1957 in reaction to the liberalization of Polish communism. It is not the methodological ‘key’ to Sartre’s theory, as George Lichtheim argues in his typically urbane, and chatty manner (in ‘Sartre, Marxism and History’, in The Concept of Ideology, p. 294). The Critique stands quite well as an ambitious attempt to understand the ontological foundation to Marxism.

I will follow Sartre’s usage throughout, italicizing the term praxis to emphasize its ontological usage in the Critique.

Cf. Critique, pp. 214–24. The problem of the origin of negativity is present in Marx’s Capital as well. The final section of Volume I, the ‘So-Called Primitive Accumulation’, was tacked on in order to meet this problem by rounding out the first volume. Marx’s previously unpublished manuscript explaining the philosophical grounds for this transition was published in 1969 as the Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses (Frankfurt, Neue Kritik Verlag, 1969). Marx intended to explain the transition from production to consumption in his analysis of the difficulties of the circulation of commodities. As I have tried to show elsewhere, this 120-page manuscript demonstrates that Marx did not need the historical account of Primitive Accumulation to round out his theory.

‘Abstract’ is used in the sense of Hegel, meaning the least complex, most immediate moments which are false in isolation but constitutive as moments of the totality. ‘Abstract’ here means the same thing as ‘immediate’, as opposed to mediated structures which are, for Sartre and Hegel, the most concrete.

In interview with M. Contat and M. Rybalka (Le Monde, May 14, 1971), Sartre indicates that the promised second volume will not appear. This is not, he insists, for theoretical reasons but simply because he ‘will not have time … before [his] death’. Contat and Rybalka’s monumental Les écrits de Sartre (Gallimard, 1970) notes that Sartre had written two chapters for volume II, one on boxing, the other on Stalin (p. 340).

In fact, Sartre does not follow through on this claim, as will be seen. As opposed to the Hegelian dialectic of Spirit, which is present only in an incomplete form in each category, and whose incompleteness motivates the ascent to higher concretions, Sartre’s nominalism insists that the individual is fully present at every stage.

Self-proclaimed Marxists have not always seen this important notion, as witnesses the East German Introduction to Rosa Luxemburg’s Ausgewählte Schriften (1953) whose catalogue of her errors, denounces this as one of them. Sartre’s theory makes this point clearly but does not give a satisfactory definition of scarcity. He cannot explain the overcoming of scarcity because its elimination would imply that human praxis has come to an end. That is surely one reason that, in the late 1960s, under the influence of André Gorz, Sartre recognized new forms of scarcity, such as unpolluted air, free time, and the like.

This interpretation of ‘alienation’ as the product of free praxis implies that what some call ‘false consciousness’ that prevents people from acting in their own (collective) best interests is an aberration that can be overcome. It can be understood as Sartre’s way of formulating the Marxist idea of ‘immanent critique’.

C.f. Sartre’s Preface to Antonin Liehm’s Trois Générations (Gallimard, 1969) which analyzes the frozen culture of Czechoslovak communism through the application of this categorial framework. This essay is no doubt Sartre’s best political analysis, perhaps because its object is a culture whose yearning for freedom betrayed itself.

The role of the Third was prepared in Sartre’s earlier account of individual praxis. He explained that

[i]t is not possible to conceive of a temporal process which would begin with the dyad and conclude with the triad. The binary formation as an immediate relation of man to man is the necessary foundation for any ternary relation; but inversely, the ternary relation as the mediation of man between men is the foundation on whose basis reciprocity recognizes itself as reciprocal bonding. If the idealistic dialectic made an abusive usage of the triad, it is first of all because the real relation of men among themselves is necessarily ternary. But that trinity is not an ideal signification or characteristic of human relations: it is inscribed in being, that is, in the materiality of individuals. In this sense, reciprocity is not the thesis, nor is the trinity the synthesis (or inversely); it is a question of lived relations whose content is determined in an already existing society, which are conditioned by the materiality, and which one can only modify by action. (p. 189)

The parallel between the two levels of categorial analysis again illustrates the way that the basis of dialectical intelligibility is reflexive. The role of the Third will return in a moment.

Whereas for the individual praxis the Third was a menace threatening to make it an Excess Third, in the group-in-fusion each is made Other (hence, by analogy, excess) by the menace of an Other outside the group; and hence each is the Same.

The rumor need not be true. This is the technique used by states, for example, which maintain their ideological cohesion by installing a permanent fear of an outside threat and (eventually) an internal menace.

I will return to the implications of this crucial implication in due course.

Cf. pp. 417, 431, 507, 667, and so on.

I am indebted to my former teacher, Klaus Hartmann, for this point (among others), although the implications I draw from it are my own. C.f., Sartre’s Sozialphilosophie (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966). Not surprisingly, Hartmann finds the same problem in Marx’s Capital; cf. Die Marxsche Theorie, De Gruyter, Berlin, 1970. (I add here that I tried to reconcile my views with Hartmann’s shortly before his early death in my contribution to a Festschrift for Hartmann, ‘Revolution as the Foundation of Political Philosophy’, in Hegel Reconsidered. Beyond Metaphysics and the Authoritarian State, edited by H. T. Engelhardt Jr. and Terry Pinkard [Dordrecht: Kluwer Verlag, 1994], pp. 187–209.)

Sartre seems to be aware that his theoretical framework has led him to political positions that he disapproves. As a result, he moves, in mid-paragraph, from the historical illustration of Stalinism to a demonstration of the way in which the ‘Hearst press’ manipulates public opinion (pp. 605–6).

In Situations V (Gallimard, 1964), p. 213.

Reprinted in Situations X, op. cit.; the following citations are from pp. 42f.

On a raison, op. cit., p. 166.

Ibid., p. 171.

C.f., Jean-Paul Sartre, in Situations II, p. 254 and p. 7, cited by Simone de Beauvoir in ‘Merleau-Ponty et le pseudo-Sartrisme’ (Les Temps Modernes, 10, II, 1955), pp. 2075, 2082. Beauvoir’s reply to Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre in Les aventures de la dialectique is based on her misunderstanding of the point of Merleau-Ponty’s essay, as will be apparent in the following chapter.

On a raison, op. cit., p. 126.

Ibid., p. 45.

Ibid., pp. 144–5. Merleau-Ponty emphasizes a similar point (AD, p. 275) when he insists that intersubjective action is impossible for Sartre because his transcendental freedom has no history, springing forth a new and full blown in every moment.

Ibid., p. 342.

Title: The Rationality of the Dialectic: Jean-Paul Sartre
Author: Dick Howard
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: The Marxian Legacy
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-04410-7

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-04411-4

Copyright Year: 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04411-4_6