Tuesday was not only the summer solstice, but the 100th birthday of
Jean-Paul Sartre. While he has never been the center of my intellectual
attention, I've had occasion to think about him recently, and in many ways
he serves as an important historical test case for philosophy and social
theory.
There are numerous web sites on Sartre. Here's one:
Sartre Online
http://www.geocities.com/sartresite/home.html
I keep bumping into this forbidding volume in bookstores: Critique of
Dialectical Reason, Volume One, which has recently re-appeared (2004) in a
new translation. I doubt I would survive reading 835 pages of this
stuff. There are also numerous book-length critiques of this
critique. The introduction to this word was translated into English and
published as Search for a Method (1968).
I have numerous problems with what I know of Sartre's politics and
philosophy and their various zigzags over the decades. I'm mostly familiar
with key essays of the 1940s, of which the famous "Existentialism is a
Humanism" (1945) and "Materialism and Revolution" (1946) are most dubious,
revealing an untenable and intolerable Cartesian/Kantian
dualism. Basically, Sartre was confronted with a philosophical dualism he
spent all of the 1950s attempting to surmount: abstract individualism vs.
Stalinist regimentation. Struggling to worm his way out the cul de sac of
quasi-Heideggerian existentialism towards a sociologically conscious
perspective, Sartre, as a free-floating intellectual, struggled with the
Stalinist version of Marxism institutionalized in the French Communist
Party. This was the stark duality that many radicals in many nations faced
after the Second World War. (Titles of novels of the period are most
revealing of the dilemma that gelled as the Cold War began: Albert Camus'
The Stranger, Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Richard Wright's The Outsider.)
A few days ago I stumbled across an essay which I think aptly critiques
Sartre's not totally successful attempt to surmount this duality:
Parsons, Howard L. "Existentialism and Marxism in Dialogue (A Review of
Sartre's Problem of Method)", in: Marxism and Alienation: A Symposium, ed.
by Herbert Aptheker (New York: Humanities Press / Marzani & Munsell, 1965),
pp. 89-124.
I have some historic gripes about Parsons, but he does an excellent job in
this review. Also, I think it reveals a very general theoretical and
practical dilemma, and a historic dilemma at the very center of 20th
century philosophy. Personally, I think that Sartre's early philosophy is
pretty much bankrupt, as evidenced by his own attempts to break out of its
limitations. I don't know if Sartre's critique, which he considered among
his top theoretical works, has been absorbed into the consciousness of the
theory industry, which is now organized against the outbreak of
individualism of any kind, let alone the good kind, but those who have the
wherewithal to wade through this stuff perhaps should do so. I have SEARCH
FOR A METHOD buried deep and unread somewhere. Maybe I should read it one
of these days. Anyone want to go to the beach?
_______________________________________________
Marxism-Thaxis mailing list
Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu
To change your options or unsubscribe go to:
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
