Wasn't Sartre in the Resistance and in a German war prison ? Charles
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
