Reading notes: The Work of Sartre by István Mészáros

Reading The Work of Sartre was by turns interesting and exasperating. Sartre never launched a project without giving up halfway through: Roads to Freedom, Being and Nothingness, Critique of Dialectical Reason, The Idiot of the Family.

Meszaros takes Sartre seriously as a thinker, but by the end not as a Marxist. I agree with him on that!

Below is simply what I underlined as I spent a week with Meszaros' book.

Introduction

5.
....IT IS NOT EASY TO LOCK SARTRE into anything, let alone into the prison cell of timeless literary excellence. His view of the writer's commitment is a total one:

If literature is not everything, it is worth nothing. This is what I mean by 'commitment.' It wilts if it is reduced to innocence, or to songs. If a written sentence does not reverberate at every level of man and society, then it makes no sense. What is the literature of an epoch but the epoch appropriated by its literature? . . . You have to aspire to everything to have hopes of doing something. 18

This conception of literature as a "critical mirror" 19 of man and the epoch shared by the writer with his fellow men sounds outrageous—a scandal— to all those whose sensitivity has been modeled on l'art pour l'art and on the self-contemplating irrelevance of various "isms." Goethe could still take for granted that every poem was a Zeitgedicht, a poem of its time. But that was before the ravages of alienation succeeded in inducing the writer to fall back upon his own inner resources. And while this isolation of the writer from its epoch and from the fellow human beings is the real scandal, as a general acceptance of alienation by prevailing literary opinion, Sartre's passionate rejection of it appears as unforgivable scandal, as betrayal, indeed as blasphemy....

7.
....Kant asserted the primacy of practical reason (i.e. the supremacy of moral judgement) in the architectonic of his system, and he carried through this principle with exemplary consistency. Sartre—not only as a young man, but also as the author of an ethical work written at the age of sixty 31 — quotes Kant's "you ought to, therefor you can," and insists on the primacy and cen-trality of individual praxes vis-à-vis collective and institutional structures. Such a statement clearly assigns a prominent place to the world of morality. This could not be otherwise without undermining the inner unity and consistency of Sartre's work. For, as he remarks in 1944, "Morality is . . . my dominant preoccupation; it always has been." 32

8.
...."All my works," says Sartre, "are facets of a whole whose meaning one cannot really appreciate until I'll have brought it all to an end." 34 This is true enough. But not quite. Were it categorically true, evaluation of a contemporary author would be a priori impossible. The job of the critic would oscillate between arbitrary subjectivity ("inventing" the author entirely out of one's own concerns, using his words only as a pretext for pseudo-objective self-exhibition) and the dead objectivity of mere description of the works reviewed: a superfluous and hopeless venture....

...."All my works," says Sartre, "are facets of a whole whose meaning one cannot really appreciate until I'll have brought it all to an end." 34 This is true enough. But not quite. Were it categorically true, evaluation of a contemporary author would be a priori impossible. The job of the critic would oscillate between arbitrary subjectivity ("inventing" the author entirely out of one's own concerns, using his words only as a pretext for pseudo-objective self-exhibition) and the dead objectivity of mere description of the works reviewed: a superfluous and hopeless venture….

PART ONE
THE UNITY OF LIFE AND WORK : OUTLINE OF SARTRE'S DEVELOPMENT

"By what activity can an 'accidental individual' realize the human person within himself and for all?" 36 This makes it clear that the form in which we encounter the problem in so many of Sartre's works (Words, Saint Genet, "Of rats and men," The Idiot of the Family, for example) is a searching confrontation of a typical modern problem rendered increasingly acute by a certain type of social development: a process of individualization and privatization inseparable from the advancement of alienation....

....Sartre's conception of history as singular and "non-universalizable"; a conception that seeks to demonstrate the "dialectical intelligibility of that which is not universalizable." 38

....while Sartre is right in defending himself against sectarian attacks on account of Heidegger's Nazi past, his arguments on the real issue are far from convincing. He says: "And then Heidegger, so what? If we discover our own thought à propos of another philosopher, if we ask him for techniques and methods susceptible to make us accede to new problems, does that mean that we marry all his theories? Marx had borrowed from Hegel his dialectic. Would you say therefore that Capital is a Prussian work?" 41 The point is not only that Sartre borrows from Heidegger much more than "techniques and methods" but also—and this is far more important—that he never submits Heidegger's work to that "radical settling of accounts" which characterizes Marx's relationship to Hegel.

....the meaning of a writer's personal experience is dialectical: it should not be turned into a frozen fetish. Does not Sartre always insist, rightly, that "the work makes its author while he creates his work"? This dialectical interchange between work and experience could not find a clearer manifestation than in Sartre. We can sense it already in his first original piece of theoretical writing, a letter contributed to an enquiry among students published in Les Nouvelles littéraires at the beginning of 1929. There is only one earlier theoretical work by Sartre, an essay entitled "Theory of the state in modern French thought," 49 but that is a very different proposition. It shows nothing of Sartre's future path. It merely puts a few sultanas of originality in the insipid dough of academic conventionality....

....the overriding characteristic of the work must be synthesis and not analysis: the latter can only assume a subordinate position, as a well marked preliminary stage to the emerging synthesis. This is why Sartre considers himself diametrically opposed to Proust, despite his great admiration for this French classic writer, insisting that Proust takes delight in analysis while the inherent tendency of his own work is synthesis . 51

....If sharply focusing on one aspect at the expense of others represents distortion, since only the proper conjunction of the one with the many constitutes the relevant whole, he aims at clarifying and revealing indeterminacy, paradoxical as this may sound.

....adoption of this principle of overdetermination, corresponding to the structure of totality, in conjunction with what Sartre terms "the principle of individuation," 59 which defines the specificity of his style and the vitality of his method as arising from the soil of his totalizing quest for being. The whole is grasped through the simultaneity of "calculated indetermination" (overdetermination) and the shifting presence of graphic individuation whereby even absence becomes tangible as a vital dimension of totality (see for example the discussion of Pierre missing from the café in Being and Nothingness). Thus movement and rest, the whole and its parts, the centre and the periphery, the premier plan and the background, the determinations from the past and the anticipations of the future converging on the present, all come to life in the synthetic unity of a dialectical totalization in which subjectivity and objectivity are inextricably fused.

....Both Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason are centrally concerned with conflict as inherent in the ontological structure of being as manifest in human destiny. The same drama is indicated in Sartre's definition of the core of his moral philosophy, structured around a fundamental antinomy:

"In the choice I make of my freedom, the freedom of others is reclaimed. But when I find myself on the plane of action, I am compelled to treat the other as means and not as end. Here we are evidently in the presence of an antinomy, but it is precisely this antinomy which constitutes the moral problem. I shall examine this antinomy in my Morale." 86

The fact that after 2,000 pages of examination Sartre remains dissatisfied with the solutions he arrives at and abandons the project does not mean that he changes his mind about the fundamental underlying drama, but, on the contrary, that he finds it even more overpowering than originally thought....

....Sartre's totalizing quest. For the concern with singular universality cannot stop at that level but must strive through totalization towards universality or the "absolute," whatever formal transformations may necessarily follow from such movement. On the other hand, the Sartrean absolute is not some rarefied abstraction occupying a mysterious sphere of its own, but is existentially situated and therefore must always be rendered tangible through the evocative power of condensation and individuation at the writer's disposal. This is why, despite his boundless admiration for Kafka, the latter's fictional style and method of representation, with its hidden yet threateningly mysterious omnipresent absolute, constitute an altogether different universe of discourse which cannot conceivably be adopted by Sartre as the model of his novels.

....In History and Class Consciousness (1923), Lukács analyses "possible consciousness" as the consciousness of a historically progressive class which has a future ahead of it and therefore has the possibility of objective totalization. In our epoch, according to Lukács, only the proletariat has proper temporality, inseparable from the possibility of socio-historical totalization, because the bourgeoisie has lost its future—because its temporality, as Sartre puts it about Proust and Faulkner, has been "decapitated"—in that its fundamental aims as a class are radically incompatible with the objective tendencies of historical development. Given this fundamental contradiction between aim and reality, the class without future cannot realize the "unity of subject and object" but must, instead, produce a dualistic-antinomous structure of thought, centred around individualism and subjectivity, and dominated by the conditions of "reification" which it can oppose only in and through subjectivity, thus exacerbating the contradiction between subject and object. Heidegger, facing the Lukácsian problematic, proposes a "solution" by transcending Lukács towards his youthful essay, "The metaphysics of tragedy" (1910) published in the volume Soul and Form, in which nearly two decades before Heidegger Lukács had spelled out some of the central themes of modern existentialism. 115 Heidegger offers a conception of temporality which ascribes possibility (projection towards the future ultimately identified with death, in the spirit of "The metaphysics of tragedy") to consciousness in general. Thus, by turning possibility into an ontological dimension of consciousness as such, Lukács's Marxian critique of bourgeois class consciousness is theoretically liquidated, and a project of unified ontology is announced, on the basis of the Heideggerian reconstruction of subjectivity. Significantly, however, the project is never brought to its conclusion. And twenty-five years after publishing Being and Time - originally intended as the founding preliminary to the overall project - Heidegger is forced to make an admission: "While the previous editions have borne the designation 'First Half,' this has now been deleted. After a quarter of a century, the second half could no longer be added unless the first were to be presented anew." 116 This sounds very reasonable, except that no reasons are given for the failure to complete, not just in twenty-five years but ever since, the whole project. Clearly we are not concerned with Heidegger's Nazism— which is more like a consequence than the cause—but with the nature of the project itself: the extreme subjectivism of its temporality and being. Ex pumice acquam —one cannot squeeze the foundation of being out of a mythically inflated subjectivity by calling it "Fundamental Ontology."

....Knowing only too well that we are always within the parameters of man's fundamental quest, he does not simply "observe" and "describe"; he participates and moves at the same time as he demonstrates. His way has nothing in common with the pseudo-scientific "objectivity" of socially insensitive academic jargon that resembles the enzymes of the digestive system which turn everything that comes their way invariably into the same sort of end-product.

Sartre's conceptual framework is radically different. It is more like a sensitive dual prism which collects from all directions the lightwaves of the epoch of which he is an exemplary witness. He breaks up the received impressions into their constituents through the dual prism of his compelling personality only to resynthesize them in his totalizing vision that powerfully re-enters the world from which it is taken. "To show and move at the same time," from the standpoint of the feasible future —that is his aim. This implies being simultaneously outside and inside and it explains why he needs the combined powers of philosophy, literature and "myth." "I'd like that the public should see our century, this strange thing, from outside, as a witness. And that, at the same time everyone should participate, for this century is made by the public." 124 Sartre takes his full share in making this century, by attacking its fetishes and increasing its self-awareness. It is this character of participating testimony, creative and revealing commitment to a total involvement, which gives his lifework its philosophical depth and its dramatic intensity.

....described variously as "radical conversion," lapse into "ultra-bolshevism," "radical break with the past," and so on. It is both the paradoxical form of the continuity and the heterogeneous tensions which determine its relative transformations, which together define the specificity of Sartre's intellectual development.

....continuities are not broken off at points of transition but persist sometimes throughout the whole of a lifework.

....principal phases of Sartre's development as follows:

1. The Years of Innocence: 1923- 1940

2. The Years of Abstract Heroism: 1941-1945

3. Search for Politics in the Key of Morality: 1946-1950

4. Search for Morality in the Key of Politics: 1951-1956

5. Search for the Dialectic of History: 1957-1962

6. The Discovery of the Singular Universal: 1963 onwards....

....The frustration of the previous phase—the exasperations of the Cold War period and Sartre's feeling of impotence to make an impact in a positive direction by means of his moral-political appeals to the concerned individual—brings a major soul-searching. Its outstanding results are Saint Genet (1950-52) and, above all, Le Diable et le Bon Dieu (1951, translated as Lucifer and the Lord in English), a magnificent play—perhaps his greatest single work: a drama we might call Sartre's Guernica.

The objectivity of history is discovered obliquely, under the threat of nuclear self-annihilation: "In order to prevent the world from following its own course, they threaten with the suppression of history through the liquidation of the historical agent." 149 Sartre throws himself into feverish political activity, in order to help prevent such ultimate disaster. He becomes a prominent figure in the World Peace Movement, writing articles, and making numerous public speeches on the subject of world peace; and on the plane of internal politics he is a passionate advocate of a new Popular Front. 150

....The "new treatise of the passions" for which Husserl is supposed to have cleared the ground is, of course, Sartre's Being and Nothingness in which we learn that "Existential psychoanalysis is going to reveal to man the real goal of his pursuit, which is being as a synthetic fusion of the in-itself and the for-itself; existential psychoanalysis is going to acquaint man with his passion." 188 In truth, it is not Husserl who clears the ground for this conception—except in an indirect sense, by providing the field for Sartre's corrective reflections—but Sartre himself in his early works, and to a large extent also in Being and Nothingness. As we know, volume two of the latter, which should have carried out in detail the programme announced in the last quotation, has never been written - at least not in the originally intended form. But of course many of Sartre's subsequent writings - not only the abandoned Morale but also Saint Genet, as well as numerous short essays, and above all The Idiot of the Family - take up the problematic of making man acquainted with his passion, and try to carry it nearer to a conclusion. Thus the Sartrean quest for the absolute - the elucidation of the real goal of man's pursuit, which implies the refutation of various misconceptions - has to set out from the analysis of passion and emotion as we encounter it in the world of contingent existents: in the goal-directed life-activity of living individuals. The question: what makes man drive on through success and failure, achievement and disaster, cannot be answered in abstraction, at the generic plane of some mystifying universality (like "World Spirit"), but must find its supporting evidence in the various manifestations of human passion as ways in which living individuals take cognizance of the world in which they are situated and try to cope with the problems and challenges of their situation....

....Having successfully liberated himself from the shackles of academic philosophy (Brunschwicg, etc.), Sartre is determined not to get involved in some other kind of academic operation which might turn out to be merely an intellectual method, a complicated erudite methodological procedure preserved for the few. He is looking for a method which has an existential basis in life and is thus open to all. This conception, which directly links the epoché to anxiety and dread, establishes through the same link also the vital relationship with the existential categories of freedom, thus indicating the possibility of self-liberation through "purifying reflection"—of which Sartre speaks in Emotions, a closely related work 191 — as the tangibly relevant function of the whole philosophical enterprise he is engaged in. Thus, in the course of the Sartrean analysis, a rather abstract problem of phenomenological methodology is transmuted into a major pillar of existential ontology.

PART TWO: SEARCH FOR FREEDOM

....The efficacy of Sartre's critique of reified consciousness is, moreover, vitiated by the extreme dualism of his approach. The active character of consciousness is established on the basis of the tautology that the existence of consciousness is one and the same thing as the consciousness of its existence—in other words, that consciousness is conscious and self-consciousness is conscious of itself—which is then declared to be "the supreme ontological law of consciousness." This "ontological law" is in turn used to rule out a priori the "middle ground," and thus all possibility of mediation is foreclosed. As a result we are presented with the ultimate "ontological law" according to which there are two types of existence: the "thing in the world," and consciousness. The whole argument is built on this dualistic assumption without which it cannot be sustained. As it stands, its critique can only apply to some inconsistent dualism which might wish both to retain its dualistic principles and to make use of the notion of a "middle ground" as a bastard third type of existence; this is why Sartre insists there can be only two types.

But what if we entertain as an alternative the monistic framework of explanation? What if we seek in the dialectic of the one and the many—the one and only type of existence and its manifold mediations and transitions— the answer to the problems at stake?

Clearly, in that case the argument that rests on the categorical assertion of extreme dualistic assumptions evaporates in thin air. Sartre, however, never makes a serious attempt at facing the monistic alternative, for such a confrontation would compel him to justify his own assumptions. He prefers to thunder, instead, against "metaphysical materialism" and the "dialectic of nature," while simply reaffirming the categorical validity of his own premises as the necessary basis of all discussion on the subject. And thus, starting out from the positions of methodological dualism —the programme of a phenomenological reduction of experience to its "irreducible" elements within consciousness—we end up with the ontology of a radically fractured totality from which mediation is exiled, with the antinomies necessarily inherent in this fracture. As we have seen above, Sartre censured Husserl on account of the "miracle" of the epoché. Now, as a result of his own dualistic "ontological law" which produces his radically fractured totality, we are presented with a mystery in place of the miracle: the bewildering ability of consciousness to use the sensory world as the vague "occasion"—for heaven forbid to think in terms of dialectical determinations —of its own spontaneous self-generation.

The second point to mention is the negative determination of totality. This solution appears in the course of Sartre's application of some Heideggerian principles (with significant modifications) to the analysis of the imaginary....

....This position should not be mistaken for some advocacy of arbitrariness. Sartre makes explicit his firm opposition to such views....

....Sartre's intention is perfectly clear. On the one hand he wants to assert the complete freedom of consciousness and its vital negating function. On the other hand, he is very much concerned with showing that consciousness, despite its freedom—or rather because of it, since "consciousness is always 'in situation' because it is always free," and the other way round, as we have seen above—cannot possibly construct another world than exactly the one in which we happen
to live. Of course, this is a most uneasy solution that constantly oscillates between the extreme poles of total indeterminacy and its diametrical opposite: the massive contingency, facticity, "absurdity" 205 and absolute givenness of the "things in the world," with all their iron determinations. The very moment the freedom of consciousness is affirmed in its categorical form, it is already negated, in an equally categorical form, by the absolute contingency of the real as it exactly happens to be—thus the feeling of absurdity. Equally, the moment the real is asserted as exactly given, it is already negated and "surpassed," for the function of consciousness is the "surpassing of the real in order to make a world of it." 206 Nevertheless, no matter how paradoxical this conception is, the existential motivation behind it is the affirmation of great concern: the full acknowledgement of the objectivity of the real in its exact givenness (in opposition to any attempt at directly inflating "nothingness" into a pseudo-objective myth), and the equally full and passionate rejection of its iron determinations in the name of "surpassing" through the existential projects of the human world....

....attempt to provide a "foundation" to marxism through his own existential phenomenology. It would again be quite wrong to see this only in the Sartre of The Problem of Method and its aftermath. For in point of fact the origins of this orientation go back in his work at least as far as The Transcendence of the Ego, although his early attitude to marxism shows greater reservations than in the late 1950s.

We have to bear in mind two important considerations in this respect. First, that Sartre as a student learns about a mechanical kind of marxism both from those hostile to it (his professors) and those (like Politzer) who champion its cause. And second, that there is a long-standing philosophical tradition—Simmel and Max Weber are among its founders—which concedes to marxism, after many years of Totschweigen (execution by silence) the value of being of partial interest (as a supplier of interesting historical hypotheses) while insisting that it is devoid of a proper philosophical and methodological foundation.

Accordingly, even the young Lukács entertains for a number of years the idea of producing the "missing" philosophical-methodological foundation, and Heidegger moves in the same intellectual orbit as far as the problematic of "founding" is concerned, although, understandably (in the years of German disintegration following the 1914-18 war rendered only more painful by the success of the Russian revolution) his "fundamental ontology" is meant as a foundation not for marxism but against it, transferring the problems of alienation and reification from the socio-historical sphere (the world dominated by capital) to the plane of existential-ontological temporality as manifest through the "human condition" in history as such. 241

....if the value of marxism is assessed in a framework whose centre of reference is the existentialist individual and his consciousness (with the aim of ascribing responsibility even to "unreflective consciousness" 242 ), even a dialectical conception of marxism must appear mechanical.

....any form of marxism evaluated from the standpoint of an existential-individual ontology must appear in need of "founding." In such a framework, marxism cannot be more than a fertile (maybe even: the best) "historical hypothesis" whose possibility, however, must be established on the foundation of a phenomenological-existential methodology. That history is made under determinate socioeconomic conditions, indicating certain laws at work, all this may be very plausible—but how is it possible in relation to consciousness and its fundamental "project"? So long as this foundation is not defined in terms of the individual and his existential project, the historical conditions and laws must appear as external mechanisms that precede the individual, and the philosophy which concentrates on them as a mechanical philosophy, whatever its merits at the level of "historical hypotheses" that, by definition, must be established on the ground of a "fundamental ontology" (existential anthropology) and therefore cannot found themselves. Thus, in so far as the "historical hypotheses" of marxism cannot be subsumed under the existential conception of ontology
anthropology), marxism must be "validated," "complemented," "corrected," etc.—in short it must be superseded by the existentialist quest. This is why Sartre maintains an ambivalent attitude towards it even in works in which his explicit aim is to announce the "dissolution" of existentialism within marxism....

....given his political-moral solidarity with the perspective of a socialist transformation of society, he is anxious to stress his complete agreement with Marx. All the same, the ambivalence transpires through the shift in his arguments, as well as through his final summing up of the prospects of integrating existentialism and marxism. He gives three different explanations for his critical attitude: (1) His criticisms are meant for Engels; 258 (2) He is critical of contemporary "mechanical marxism;" 259 (3) His critical qualifications are intended "to assign certain limits to dialectical materialism—to validate the historical dialectic while rejecting the dialectic of nature." 260

....praised historical materialism as a fruitful working hypothesis (now he wants to validate the hypothesis) and rejected the "absurdity which is metaphysical materialism" (now he limits dialectical materialism by rejecting the idea of a dialectic of nature, worried that it would "reduce man" 261 to a simple product of physical laws, which exactly corresponds to the early complaint against "metaphysical materialism").

....for Marx, ontology and anthropology are not synonymous; the former is the unquestionable foundation of the latter and in that sense "precedes" it. Consequently, the problem is not simply "materiality," namely "the fact that the point of departure is man as animal organism which sets out from needs and creates material ensembles," 265 but precisely the objective ontological conditions under which such development can take place. This is what makes Marx insist on the ontological principle inherent in the development of modern technology which consists in "resolving each process into its constituent movements, without any regard to their possible execution by the hand of man." 266. Whether or not one should apply the term "dialectic of nature" (and if so, with what qualifications) to the study of such
conditions, need not worry us here. What matters is that they are clearly not "anthropological" - they concern nature's fundamental laws of motion and the prerequisites of human development in accordance with and in response to such objective laws - but constitute the ultimate points of reference of ontology into which a dialectical conception of anthropology must be integrated as a part in the whole. Since, however, the integration of existentialism and marxism envisaged by Sartre is diametrically opposed to this, his programme of "founding" marxism remains for Sartre as far from its realization today as in 1934.

....Sartre worked out the notion of mauvaise foi [bad faith] which, according to him, embraced all those phenomena which other people attributed to the unconscious mind. We set ourselves to expose this dishonesty in all its manifestations: semantic quibbling, false recollections, fugues, compensation fantasies, sublimations, and the rest. We rejoiced every time we unearthed a new loophole, another type of deception. 273

....instead of a passionate identification with the struggle for a new society, we find a paternalistic intellectualism, confined to taking part in merely theoretical discussions and arguments.

....The decision to be "critical rather than constructive" 276 is a rather vague way of describing what is at stake here. For in reality it means that the criticism itself—which is devoid of a positive ("constructive") frame of reference—is condemned to be extremely abstract and remote from the tangible social realities. The young Sartre takes up his stand in the no-man's-land of the self-oriented outsider....

Since his moral rebellion is voiced in a social vacuum, his criticism can only be
manifested in the form of an abstract moral imperative that must remain latent and wedded to the categories of an existential ontology since the idea of social-political commitment is rejected by Sartre—although the concept of moral commitment is an integral part of his philosophy right from the early 1930s—the existential categories in which his views are spelled out in his original system tend to be ahistorical ("for-itself," "in-itself," "vertigo of possibility," "absolute flight," "monstrous spontaneity," etc.), notwithstanding "the experience of history" which he describes retrospectively in 1947.

....as far as the relations of domination and oppression are concerned (which, again, he condemns in the form of a moral "ought"), in his early works they are converted into the abstract existential-ontological antagonism between the "for-itself" and "the other" at one level, and into the conflicts of "interpsychic" (and indeed "intra-psychic") relations at another, thus depriving them of their socio-historical specificity. (Also, alienation and objectification tend to be fused with the help of variants of the category of reification, and such fusion produces the same sort of effect.) Finally, since the standpoint of Sartre's early works is that of the negatively defined, self-oriented outsider who emphatically rejects the orientation of his own class
without being able to adopt the perspective of its polar opposite, the "subject" of his philosophy cannot be a socio-historically specific and tangible collective subject but an existentialist fusion of particular individuality (the contingency and facticity of the existential individual) and abstract universality (consciousness as such in its "impersonal spontaneity").

....later Sartre has to admit that the unsurpassable opaqueness of lived experience—for instance, suffering—vis-à-vis knowledge holds only "to the degree that knowledge remains powerless to transform it"; 279 which means that the whole question of "absolute irreducibility" and "unsurpassable opaqueness" hinges on social praxis itself, of which knowledge and lived experience are integral dimensions and therefore cannot be abstractly-antinomously opposed to one another on the alleged ground of some "fundamental ontology."

....The war years shatter the self-erected walls of his social vacuum, and the problem of commitment—not only moral and literary-aesthetic but also social and political—comes to occupy a central place in his writings in the most varied contexts (from literary analyses to political polemics) and at all levels (from occasional remarks to systematic philosophical treatments). Naturally, the increasing social awareness carries with it a conscious effort to put into relief the political and the historical dimensions of his concerns, which calls for the modification of some fundamental early propositions and categories. Inevitably, though, such an enterprise—however passionately felt in the circumstances of tangible social crises—must be carried out by Sartre in the framework of a philosophy whose structure has been constituted under very different conditions and with rather different preoccupations in mind. Thus he is forced to respond to the challenge of the dramatic socio-historical developments (during the war and after) in terms of his philosophy as originally articulated during the 1930s, while restructuring it to the extent to which this is feasible internally. This of course is not possible without the constant manifestations of major tensions 280 between the original structure and the new demands of which he becomes a passionate champion.

....Sartre's individualistic presuppositions.... There can be no genuine social consciousness, not only at the level of "humanity as ours" but equally in the domain of class relations. We are either confronted with the direct symbolic manifestations of allegedly
profound ontological relationships, or with the "psychological experience of historic man." Accordingly, the idea of "class consciousness" is relegated to the position of a derivative and "strictly psychological experience" which cannot significantly affect the fundamental ontological relations....

....while it is certainly true that the historical and social dimension would greatly enhance their significance, it is equally arguable that Sartre's conscious distancing of himself from the prevailing social and historical theories was an essential condition of the production of these insights.

....his almost fanatical insistence on the freedom of the For-itself was an essential condition of undertaking at all such an enquiry in the circumstances of apparently uncontrollable collective forces.

PART THREE
THE CHALLENGE OF HISTORY

....Accordingly, it would take the labor of Sisyphus to "fill with content the abstract liberties of the bourgeoisie," and of course to no avail. For the distance from the formal liberties of the bourgeois order to their socialist counterparts which are inconceivable without all-embracing real content—as for instance the question of substantive equality —is literally astronomical. The actual constitution of a radically different social metabolic order, structurally defined in a qualitatively different way from capital's mode of societal reproduction—from its elementary material productive practices to the highest levels of cultural interchanges, together with the corresponding decision making practices of its substantively equal social individuals emancipated from capital's antagonistic second order mediations 82 —is required for the realization of such relationships to which the bourgeoisie could not significantly contribute even in the abstract heroic period of its historical past prior to the French revolution. And that would need infinitely more than to "fill with content the abstract liberties of the bourgeoisie." For the sobering truth of the matter is that those abstract liberties—devised in accordance with the requirements of a structurally iniquitous social order, and therefore within their

....Sartre was absolutely right in stressing that "socialism is not a certainty." 237 But it is very problematical that he defined socialism—of course fully in the spirit of his moral negation of the existing order—as "a value: it is freedom choosing itself as the goal." 238 Here the point is not to deny that socialism as the commended general perspective of human emancipation is a value, which certainly it is and must continue to be. But it is also something else on the basis of which one can assert its irrepressible validity. Otherwise socialism could be simply ignored or cynically dismissed by the "hired prize-fighters of capital" as nothing more than a wishfully propounded but futile value, as befits the ideological dominance of the ruling order.

The reason why such dismissal cannot permanently prevail is because, come what may, socialism is also the objectively one and only sustainable — and in that sense objectively necessary — historical alternative to capital's destructive social metabolic order. In this sense socialism as the ruling order's hegemonic alternative is the—contradictorily but nonetheless objectively unfolding —historical necessity of our time. A necessity once undoubtedly possessed also by capital's reproductive order; in its own —now by its incorrigible destructive determinations in objective historical terms fatefully anachronistic— historical time.

Sartre's radical negation of the established order, with its leverage centered on the moral and political dimension posited by him on the cat-egorial basis of possibility, induced Sartre to demand as a general moral imperative what cannot be achieved, for the sake of realizing the "society without powers" advocated by him. He insisted for this reason that "it is the social structure itself that must be abolished, since it permits the exercise of power." 239 The problem is that the social structure itself cannot be abolished. In the case of capital's dehumanizing social structure, it can and must be radically restructured, in accordance with the requirements of historical sustainability, through the constitution and ceaseless recreation of a productively and humanly viable alternative social structure. Equally, the question of exercising power can only be
decided in terms of its historical specificity and sustainability, through the shared determination and substantively equal exercise of power in a socialist global order. But what is at stake is the constitution of a global order which cannot conceivably function without the conscious determination and emancipatory exercise of power by the social individuals for themselves. It is indeed the measure of viability of the social structure the way in which it not only permits but also facilitates that kind of exercise of power.

Understandably, in the light of bitter twentieth century historical experience Sartre was deeply concerned with what he called "the existing order—as "a value: it is freedom choosing itself as the goal." 238 Here the point is not to deny that socialism as the commended general perspective of human emancipation is a value, which certainly it is and must continue to be. But it is also something else on the basis of which one can assert its irrepressible validity. Otherwise socialism could be simply ignored or cynically dismissed by the "hired prize-fighters of capital" as nothing more than a wishfully propounded but futile value, as befits the ideological dominance of the ruling order.

....irreducible singularity of every man to the History which nevertheless conditions him rigorously." 240 Six years earlier, when he was still engaged with the task of trying to elaborate his conception of real history in a combative mood, Sartre wrote about the vital imperative to realize the "concrete universal" in these terms: "So we others—rats without cerebella—we are also so made that we must either die or reinvent man. . . . without us, the fabrication would take place in the dark, by tinkering and patching, if we, the 'debrained,' were not there to repeat constantly that we must work according to principles, that it is not a matter of mending, but of measuring and constructing, and finally, that mankind will be the concrete universal, or that it will not be." 241

By the time Sartre gave his lecture on Kierkegaard in Paris, in 1964, he had already abandoned writing the Critique of Dialectical Reason, but not his passionate engagement with the difficult problems of the "singular universal." He tried to bring Kierkegaard and Marx together in that spirit, in the interest of the "tasks that await us within the historical dialectic." 242 Thus, despite the solemn centenary celebrations he did not try to hide the failures on Kierkegaard's side, arguing that the Danish philosopher by "Pitting himself against Hegel, he occupied himself over-exclusively with transmitting his instituted contingency to the human adventure and, because of this, he neglected praxis, which is rationality. At a stroke, he denatured knowledge, forgetting that the world we know is the world we make. Anchorage is a fortuitous event, but the possibility and rational meaning of this chance is given by general structures of envelopment which found it and which are themselves the universalization of singular adventures by the materiality in which they are inscribed." 243

But he did not stop there. After stressing the great practical risk arising from the exclusion—in the name of a one-sidedly interpreted Marx—" the human singularity of the concrete universal," 244 he finished his lecture on Kierkegaard with these challenging questions, formulated fully in the spirit of his own philosophy: "How can we conceive of History and the transhistorical in such a way as to restore to the transcendent necessity of the historical process and to the free immanence of a historicization ceaselessly renewed their full reality and reciprocal interiority, in theory and practice? In short, how can we discover the singularity of the universal and the universalization of the singular, in each conjuncture, as indissolubly linked to each other?" 245

Sartre was right in leaving his questions open. For the task of providing an appropriate answer to them can only be fulfilled by the most radical emancipatory mass movement. A movement capable of qualitatively restructuring capital's hierarchically entrenched socioeconomic and cultural order in such a way as to secure, on a historically sustainable material ground, the shared determination and the substantive exercise of power by the freely associated producers on a fully equitable basis. Our most extraordinary comrade in arms, Jean-Paul Sartre, made in many different ways—even with his wake-up calls voiced in despair—an immense contribution to the development of that movement.

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The Work of Sartre by István Mészáros (Monthly Review: 1979 2012)