Arms and the Man: Metaphysical Stalinism
Abel, Lionel
Sartre's New View of Existentialism The first volume of Sartre's newly published Critique of Dialectical Reason contains two sections, and these, in the author's own phrase, are "unequal in...
...In waiting for the bus, the group has its single being in this object, which is still to arrive, and each individual is singled out by this object, the bus, only insofar as he is exactly like all the others...
...And Sartre is...
...Yet, according to Sartre, the Danish thinker would be right against Marx if the latter's view could not do justice to real facts, specific events, particular individuals...
...Let us see whether Sartre's numerical terms do not add up differently when made to express individual responsibility rather than individual power...
...Thus class expresses the victory of matter over the human mind and the individual personality...
...He also writes: "Terror is directed against seriality, not against free dom...
...The value, then, in Sartre's discussion of Tintoretto is not to be ascribed solely to the method employed by him...
...tive which gave his portrait of the Venetian painter a depth I do not find in his analysis of Flaubert...
...In fact, the whole of the Critique turns out to be a systematic withdrawal from the individual of what was granted him in Questions of Method as well as in Being and Nothingness...
...Having said in the first section of his book that Kierkegaard had been right against Hegel in affirming the specificity of the human individual, Sartre can permit himself to write in the second section that the individual's understanding of his own life "should go as far as to deny the particular qualifications of that life and to look for that life's dialectical intelligibility in the whole human adventure...
...it arises from a chance fact: Sartre could see himself in Tintoretto as he did not see himself in Flaubert...
...This concession of Engels is, it seems to me, entirely to the credit of that thinker...
...Much of what I have had to say about Questions of Method has been critical...
...and its value was shown to be dependent on the motive for employing it...
...In fact, it underwent an eclipse: in the general struggle it directed against Marxism, bourgeois thought leaned on the post-Kantians, on Kant himself and on Descartes...
...the only real difficulty is that "contemporary Marxists" have not truly understood the suppleness of their own doctrine...
...it will not please genuine Marxists...
...Sartre has justified the transformation of the individual into a Party member...
...Often brilliant and provocative, openly critical at all times of typical Stalinist formulations and perspectives, there is nothing in this first section of Sartre's new book which prepares one for the meta physical exaltation of Stalinism with gether, the two works remind me of which the much longer and more im- those twin satellites sent up by a sinportant section terminates...
...To be sure, Sartre devotes only a few pages in Questions of Method to Flaubert...
...not a practical solidarity but, on the contrary, the absolute unity of destinies through lack of solidarity...
...Now undeniably there is a certain truth in looking at the role of fighting political groups in this way...
...No doubt he now thinks that in showing how an individual makes his experience into a "whole" it is of very great importance to take note of that individual's "class...
...The pathetic and ac tive rule he now hands over to the political group, which, if you please, is seen as the ontologically terrified entity, terrified precisely because it lacks an ontological structure, lacks Being, is nothing but its practice, its acts, exactly as in Being and Nothing ness, the individual was seen to be nothing but his practice, his acts...
...But now in his Critique, in discussing the relation of the political group or party to the individual, Sartre has given the political group or party the importance in understanding the true individuality of Flaubert and of Val& y. This procedure is not unlike that of Stalin, who could demand a Communist Shakespeare, or Moliere at the very least, after he had liquidated the talented writers of his period...
...What I object to about dogmatic Marxists is, that in speaking of an individual, they tend to give the same answer, no matter what the question...
...the only way the group can assure its safety, is to require that each of its members give up his individuality and become other than he is.* The group, or party, is composed of persons who, fighting against serialization, and striving for access to historical action, have freely consented to become one "common" person...
...the individual is inexhaustible...
...Sartre's claim is that the Marxist view, proper...
...If Sartre had said this much and no more one would have to go along with him...
...In the first section of his new book, Sartre concerned himself with the psychology of the individual...
...this is Marxism as amended, and such is the author's contention, the definitive philosophy of our time...
...But this is not enough to account for its superiority...
...Here is the fundamental structure of obedience: it is realized in the milieu of 'Fraternityand Terror' and against a background ofviolence...
...Men, it can be assumed, even under socialism, will be serialized by signs indicating they have unfaithful wives...
...the catch, though, is that he cannot do so by his own effort alone, or as an individual...
...Now by "contemporary Marxists" did he not mean in the main Marxists who are members of the present-day Communist Party, which last, according to his own analysis changes individuals— and according to Sartre has no alternative but to change them— into party people...
...it is ontologically a Nothingness...
...needless to say, he wants the answer to be a better or more profound, one, to encompass a greater number of details, a wider range of fact...
...The individual was seen, in other words, as a lack of being, and as tormented by this lack...
...And I think Sartre had a personal motive for wanting to understand Tintoretto...
...Clearly "alienation" and "serialization" are related...
...The kind of group the contemporary individual will most likely have to join if he is to escape from "serialization" and be come capable of action, is an "organized" group or party...
...No one of those waiting is especially interested in the others...
...What if the particular action were the lynching of a Negro in the South...
...Why superficial...
...We are never informed why Flaubert preferred literature to anything else, why he lived like an anchorite, nor why he wrote his own books rather than those of Duranty or of the Goncourts...
...as a status of seriality in themultiplicity that constitutes it...
...it is not what is called in science a "working hypothesis...
...prised, then, that Sartre finds one of the great moments of human freedom in the Terror of the French Revolution...
...when asked about other aspects of an individual, would they not have to reply in some other capacity than as Marxists...
...but if Engels was willing to admit that Marxism is not equally valid in every context, Sartre is not...
...thus, a living Marxism is heuristic with respect to its concrete investigations...
...Society has transformed him into the member of a series...
...Unhappily, as a fighting group it is in danger, even in mortal danger, and can only overcome such danger by reducing to one common person all those who join it...
...Of course, heconcedes that this possibility can only be realized after "a long dialectic of alienations...
...moreover the method has no particular relation to Marxism, for there is no reason why in terms of this method the class connections of an individual should be privileged as against some other type of data...
...t The Political Group and the Individual Jean-Paul Sartre thinks of the political group as fighting against the inertia of the masses, who cling to their inertness as the result of having been serialized...
...The means for transformation were the false confessions of the Moscow Trials, during which, under the threat of terror, individuals like Zinoviev, Bukharin, Radek, and other old Bolsheviks, confessed to crimes they had not committed and expressed judgments we know were not their own...
...To act he has to join a group, and take on an individuality held in common with others...
...Kierkegaard was right against Hegel, even as Hegel was right against Kierkegaard...
...Suppose one puts one's individual interests above those of the group...
...So cial psychology has something to say about childhood...
...Moreover, the two sections of his new work negate each other...
...To be the hundredth in a group of one hundred, is not that to be merely a numerical entity...
...In Tin...
...Critique" In the Light of "Questions of Method" I have shown, I think, that Sartre's Critique is not without difficulties...
...He remarks, too, that you make the other ninetynine into one hundred...
...The notion of serialization developed by Sartre is certainly interesting but one wonders immediately: is it so important...
...Is it right, though, to judge the Critique as I have done, when it is still incomplete...
...Taken to- gle rocket into entirely different orbits...
...If exploitation is ended and serialization continues, as Sartre grants is very likely, does this mean there will still be classes...
...Sartre's method for understanding individuals is really a method for inventing individuals...
...All this would seem rather good...
...dramatically it is force ful, pathetic, often terrible...
...Not just the basis for a sociology at the expense of an understanding of the individual, but at the same time, a deeper grasp of both the individual and the social, in short, a philosophical anthropology...
...According to Sartre, the desirable group to join must be a fighting group —otherwise it would not offer the opportunity to fight against serialization...
...An example given by Sartre is the group formed by Parisians to take the Bastille...
...they are no longer keys, interpretive schemas: they appear in their own right as an already total knowledge...
...also, they will have to listen to television broadcasts wherein what will be said may not conform with their opinions...
...As for Valery, he has evaporated...
...I do not believe that in actions which involve a minimum moral responsibility the individual can really be himself...
...To explain what he means by serialization, Sartre begins with a grouping of the most humdrum sort, a number of people waiting for a bus...
...Since Sartre speaks of "alienation," too, and in a waywhich seems to fall in line with the general use of the term in Marxist literature, I assume that he considers "serialization" to be an instance of "alienation," and, from the space he devotes to it, a mostimportant instance...
...The individual...
...toretto's competition with Titian for the admiration of the people in Venice, Sartre saw, I think, an analogy with his own struggle to capture the admiration of the young men of France, who have continued to regard Malraux as the one "genius" in contemporary French literature, just as the people of Venice, despite all the prodigious efforts of Tintoretto (Sartre is a prodigious worker too) continued to regard Titian as the unsurpassable creator of "the beautiful...
...Let us look at this positive possibility: According to Sartre, the organizedgroup rests on the destruction of individual differences, a destruction formalized by the oath of allegiance, and concretized by group terror...
...At first sight, on reading this passage, one thinks that Sartre is making good his claim for Marxism and against "contemporary Marxists," and that he is trying to do justice to the individuality and specificity of the historical individual, Flaubert...
...Sartre's Sociology of Classes Sartre maintains in his Critique that such classifications as bourgeois, petty bourgeois, and proletarian express different varieties or instances of serialization, and that classes exist fundamentally because individuals are serialized...
...But why, it may be asked, does this have to be the case...
...What I wonder, though, is whether an individual engaged in this kind of action, is really himself...
...Clearly this announces a different Sartre from the one of twelve years back, who propagandized for Existentialism, calling it a "Humanism...
...one can always ask still another question for which no established discipline has a ready answer...
...cated molds...
...Sartre's present interest is to show that history is a potential "whole" and that it is being made into such a "whole" by the frustrated strivings of individuals to be "wholes" themselves...
...And the work is verbose, unmeasured, disproportioned...
...it didn't then dream of going to Kierkegaard for help...
...He thinks he can show by means of his dialectic, that it is logically possible for there to be a multiplicity of "totalizers" or "makers-of-the-whole," and yet but one single eventual "totality" or "whole," that is to say, history...
...certainly it is proper for social psychology to treat the effect of a parent's work upon a child...
...Yet Sartre does not scruple to introduce this metaphysic by asserting that these, his new ideas, could only have been formulated or advanced in the post-Stalin era...
...In that work, as was remarked beReason" fore, the individual was seen as trying to form his experience into a "whole," and the emphasis in that work was on the effort of the individual to do this...
...class-being .. . is disclosed...
...serialization," as explained by Sartre, implies only the victimization of men bythings...
...In Being and Nothingness the individual was a pour-soi (a Nothingness) confronting the en-soi (Being), and the pour-soi was seen as disturbed, terrified, as well as stimulated by the presence of the en-soi...
...The Organized Group But Sartre does not really hold out the possibility of joining a "group in fusion" to the serialized contemporary individual...
...In this case thegroup may have to invent such an individual or individuals...
...Here it is not a question of amending Marxism...
...Sartre actually ended his book by "proving" that Genet had no further need to express himself in writing...
...Certainly Sartre's selection of such an action as the taking of the Bastille loads the argument morally in his favor...
...Would we not think there was something wrong about a worker who did not behave or "Is "serialization" the same as what Marxists have called "alienation...
...Andagain: "A class as a collectivity becomes amaterial thing made up of men insofar asit is constituted as a negation of men andof their serial incapacity to negate thisnegation...
...The villain of the piece seems to be "contemporary Marxism," which has continued to "force individuals and facts into pre-fabri...
...Let no one think that there is any aspect of the individual, his childhood, for instance, which Sartre will admit to lie outside the scope of a Marxist social psychology...
...I find myself dialectically conditioned by the totalized and totalizing past of the human adventure...
...cording to Sartre, is the practice of "present-day Marxists"I These people no longer bother "to study facts in the general perspective of Marxism with a view of enriching knowledge or clarifying action: analysis consists merely in getting rid of details, in imposing meanings on certain events, in denaturing facts or even inventing some, so as to discover behind or beneath them, as their very substance, immutable and fetishized 'synthetic notions.' The open concepts of Marxism are closed...
...only three, and these I identify with the following famous names: there was the moment of Descartes and of Locke, that of Kant and of Hegel, finally that of Marx...
...The Primacy of Marxism In attempting to make a synthesis of Existentialism and Marxism, Sartre has undeniably given the primacy to Marxism...
...Let me add one detail, here which I think is not necessarily minor...
...hence, the mere fact that one is an individual means that one cannot but be an object of suspicion...
...but the contemporary Marxist takes them as eternally true...
...of "Being and Nothingness" role of the pour-soi (Nothingness), and the individual the role of the en-soi (Being...
...it was this mo...
...After all, the bad thing about buses is not that we have to wait for them...
...The political party has none at all...
...I do not say I know what his motives are...
...It was a physical objectwhich "serialized" Bloom...
...As a matter of fact, this bit of contrary arithmetic, might be equally true of such an action as the taking of the Bastille...
...Here individualitywill simply be identification with a particular function, and this kind of individuality, Sartre claims, is "more intelligible" and more desirable than the kindof individuality which arises from accidents of birth, character, personal his...
...torically most "advanced" and the one positive form of individuality...
...The French thinker seems not to have noticed Nietzsche's very pertinent warning that the reason we enjoy characters in fiction is precisely because they are so superficial...
...I think it was not, but if it was, as Sartre claims, then what need is there for him to resuscitate Existentialism...
...in any case the matter is too difficult to discuss here—he has succeeded in integrating the individual with history, and in adjudicating the conflicting claims of Kierkegaard and Marx...
...I would go even further: it could prove no better than the particular motive for employing it on a given occasion...
...For the latter, then, Marxism must do full justice to the psychology of the individual, or be characterized as lacking in concreteness and hence, false...
...loses himself by means of his oath so that a common individual can exist...
...My point is that in actions of this kind the moral responsibility of the individual is probably at a minimum...
...Under socialism, too, people will have to wait for buses...
...it is a consequence of serialization, which it presupposes...
...But it never shows the genesis of this reciprocity of perspective...
...The "organized" group comes into existence when the "group in fusion," the emergency it was formed to meet being over, tries to assure its permanence...
...What he dislikes in them is their neglect of, or positive disregard for, particulars, that is to say, for individual personalities and specific, concrete facts...
...his work on Tintoretto is a far more extended study, hence more complete...
...Yes, says Sartre...
...In one of his last statements to the Party he urged that the blood of party members not be spilled under any circumstances, and the ground he gave for opposing bloodshed within the Party was that Party members were, "brothers...
...An individual engaged with ninety-nine others in lynching a Negro is, morally speaking, not one person multiplied by a hundred, or one person making ninety-nine other persons into one hundred persons, but one person ninety-nine hundredths of whose conscience has been taken over by other persons, and who by adding his own hundredth of moral conscience to the ninety-nine one hundredths represented by the others, can bring the total sum up to the figure of only one conscience, which an individual is supposed to possess on his own, in the first place...
...New clean bed-linen, additional odours, the presence of a human form, female, hers, the imprint of a human form, male, not his, some crumbs, some flakes of potted meat, recooked, which he removed...
...In that case, the dream of a classless society is a Utopia, for no one, I imagine, besides Jean-Paul Sartre will ever be found ready to take up arms against society in order to put an end to his serialization by it...
...The typical Marxist "will highlight a certain analytical idea, mathematical in character and lightly marked with pessimism .. . the almost total vagueness of the ideology just described will enable him to form of it an abstract schema presiding over the perfection of contemporary works...
...Assuredly this is an idealization of the political group in its ultra-Stalinist form, though I do not imagine there are many Stalinists who would be pleased to find the Party so idealized...
...He has been serialized...
...it has already been repudiated by the Communists...
...Sartre also claims that the oath of allegiance gives no matter what "organized group" the right to visit the death penalty on any of its members: . . the fundamental statute of the group bound by oath is Terror...:' Now in the "freely" constituted group or party to which one joins oneself by an oath, one can no more be oneself than when waiting for a bus or listening to a broadcast...
...Sartre has also devoted an entire volume to the life and work of Jean Genet...
...Such is Sartre's new historical judgment of modern Existentialism, including, I assume, his own...
...this is a method for guessing...
...When did the Bolshevik Party begin to transform individuals, robbing them of their real selves, replacing these with Party personae...
...I do not suggest that Sartre has raised Stalinist practice to a metaphysical level in order to endear himself to Communist Party members...
...But has he not in fact gone back to Hegel's view of the individual, a view opposed—on different grounds, to be sure—by both Kierkegaard and Marx...
...Now is it the case that the Bolshevik Party, when a revolutionary organization under Lenin's leadership, transformed its members, destroying their individual personalities and replacing these by a common party identity...
...For the Sartre of Being and Nothingness, this was the individual's ontological project...
...But supposing the thing is impossible, and you just can't be yourself while you wait...
...Sartre writes: "Contemporary Marxists are only concerned with adults: one would think in reading them that we were born on our first pay day...
...His aim—as he insists—is to conceptualize the individual totally...
...Is it not the case that the presence of all the others in the action, while it may enhance the feeling of power of each person involved, will also have the effect of minimizing the individual responsibility of each participant...
...talk like one...
...ly understood, can do justice to such facts, events, and individual personalities...
...Marxism, then, can turn up a certain kind of datum about an individual, his class connections...
...If so, what is this aspect...
...while the work solves no problems, it does indicate that there are problems to be solved...
...In Questions of Method he was interested in subtlizing Marxism so that it could deal adequately with particular individuals...
...What I do not grant is that a person engaged in a lynching is necessarily himself or expressing personal aims...
...Such consent, according to the author, is precisely freedom...
...It never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with Marxist procedure in this regard...
...in the second section, his interest in the individual is sociological through and through...
...There is so much thought in Sartre's new work, so much brilliance, erudition, observation, but all to what end...
...tory...
...the question is, though, whether there is any specific datum which Sartre's Existentialist approach, addressed to finding out how an individual sees his own experience as a "whole," is suited to uncover...
...evidently the work is not without contradictions, and some of these are damaging...
...Is this such a drastic matter...
...psychoanalysis, a different kind of datum which I shall not for the moment try to specify...
...Now this is a metaphysic...
...According to Sartre, this would be noth ing less than treason...
...But what is an individual life that is bereft of its particular qualifications...
...Certainly there are some aspects of the life of an individual which would have to be treated in terms of individual psychology, and even in terms of one's wayward intuition...
...Now I do not believe that the "whole" of the individual can be conceptualized or known...
...similarly, it is afraid of classes—they, too, have Being of a sort...
...Let us suppose, though, that the group is securely organized...
...It is to be noted that Lenin opposed fraternity to terror and did not sum up both into the same dialectical unity...
...But as certainly, an individual psychology might have something to say about a child, and as certainly there may be alienations experienced by a child which have no relation whatever to the particular work of the parent...
...It will be recalledthat before he came to Marxism he accepted as an hypothesis explaining certainforms of human behavior, the notion that men feel inferior to things...
...Now by "alienation" I understand a situation in which a person thinks himself the victim of thingswhen he is really the victim of men...
...It takes luck for an individual, born by chance, to understand another individual similarly born, luck in addition to whatever methods of "understanding" are at the "understander's" disposal.* The analysis of Flaubert, made from a Marxist or Existentialist point of view, can be no better than the individual using either or both of these modes of analysis can make it...
...But this is not Sartre's objection...
...But what does he himself want to do...
...Sarfre's Sociology of the Individual The individual described in the sociological section of Sartre's Critique is never himself, always someone else...
...I shall restrict myself entirely to what I consider the main topics of the Critique, and which were the very topics Sartre treated in Questions of Method: the individual, his status and standing in society and in history...
...To this remark one cannot but respond sympathetically, but a moment later Sartre takes away all the joy of it...
...Can he become capable of action...
...The Critique of Dialectical I come now to the Critique itself...
...At that moment, the analysis stops and the Marxist thinks he has finished his work...
...Unhappily the conception of the in dividual Sartre outlines in the second and major part of his new work is very different from the one he set forth in Questions of Method, and ex pressed more fully in Being and Noth ingness...
...Conversely, both the in dividual and classes now are said by Sartre to possess an ontological struc ture, to possess Being...
...These three philosophies became, each in turn, the humus of any particular thought and the horizon of all culture...
...And more: the analysis of Flaubert can be no better than the peculiar motive for analyzing Flaubert which has stimulated an individual to make that analysis...
...I grant that each person in a lynch mob may feel his own power multiplied by the power of the others involved...
...The serialization of Bloom described above is surely of a far more drastic nature than could be imposed upon a person by having to wait for a bus or in any merely casual context of his life...
...Sartre's Judgment of Contemporary Marxism Sartre has taken the following position in his new work: "I consider Marxism to be the ultimate philosophy of our age...
...any datum can serve it...
...In Questions of Method he objected to the notions about historical individuals expressed by "contemporary Marxists...
...Let us for the moment suppose it to be just that...
...Is it the case that a bourgeois individual is the less individual for being bourgeois...
...Similarly with Flaubert: "Contemporary Marxism will show . . . that the realism of Flaubert is in a relationship of reciprocal symbolization with the social and political revolution of the petty bourgeoisie during the Second Empire...
...this was the moment when bourgeois thought first went on the defensive...
...I cannot treat all these matters in this paper...
...Between the 17th and 20th centuries I know of •To be precise: Questions of Method runs to 111 pages...
...One cannot imagine the first, second, or third Internationals being formed to fight against serialization...
...Insofar as Bloom is ready to forget aboutthe lover entirely, I should say that heis "alienated...
...it has a right to do evil, it is, in fact, evil by definition, good by its exertions, ex actly as the individual consciousness was seen to be in Being and Nothing ness...
...I am thinking of the experience of "serialization" described in James Joyce's Ulysses, and undergone by Leopold Bloom, when, having taken leave of Stephen Daedalus, he goes home, attends to himself in various ways, undresses, and enters the bed where his wife is sleeping: What did his limbs, when gradually extended encounter...
...but he wants his total conceptualization of the individual to be real, not superficial, he does not want to exaggerate the meaning of a single aspect of an individual so as to explain the whole man by it...
...I only know what Sartre has done...
...Of course, once there, a form of serialization may be awaiting you, and one of a much deeper kind than any Sartre has described...
...he thinks that serialization affects the deepest being of an individual, identifying him as the member of a class...
...He could not be more wrong, and I shall not hesitate to substitute for the word "ultra Bolshevik," which Merleau-Ponty used to designate his politics, the more exact term: ultra Stalinist...
...The individual himself has, to my thinking, something not present in any conceptualized data about him, namely, life...
...This fraternityis, by the way, the right of all througheach one over each one...
...Despite these difficulties, Questions of Method does leave one with a certain sympathy at least for Sartre's intentions...
...no one has ever criticized this work for being too brief and it, too, is the application of an Existentialist Marxism to the understanding of an artist...
...I showed before that his Questions of Method was not lacking in contradictions...
...I would still be of the opinion that this method, however perfect in theory, would, in application, prove no better than the particular individual employing it...
...But the burden of his Critique has been to show that in the contemporary world there are scarcely any individuals to deal with—by Marxism or any other discipline...
...I think it is sufficient to note thatwhat I think of as lack of personality inthe technician, Sartre advances as the his...
...Each one waiting is the same as the others waiting precisely because he has become other than himself...
...However, Joyce treated Bloom's "serialization" comically...
...Thus it will be seen that Joyce used the concept of "serialization" exactly as Sartre does...
...I submit that only an individual can understand another individual, or is likely to have any respect for another's individuality...
...As far as authentic Marxism is con cerned, I think it was perfectly pre pared to admit that there were some realities it was not especially designed to deal with...
...Sartre argues that in this kind of group, the individual can really express his own aims even though he is one of many...
...But he does not conceal the fact that he is dissatisfied with the intellectual performance of "contemporary Marxists...
...What interests Sartre now is not at all to see the individual as a "whole" but as a "totalizer," not as one who makes a totality of his own life, but as one who, failing to make a totality of his own life, totalizes the historical process, and contributes to making a "whole" of history...
...But I am struck by his objecting to the fact that Marxists leave to other disciplines—disciplines "without principle"—the establishment of the exact circumstances of a life or of a personality...
...Not at all, says Sartre, arguing that if the other ninetynine want to accomplish what you yourself are aiming at, then you are not one among a hundred, but one multiplied by a hundred...
...Fundamentally, it is an idea for making up individuals and has far more meaning when one can invent the individual to whom one applies it than when applied to an existing individual whose character was expressed in life...
...It will not please those whom it praises, for they insist on being praised in different terms...
...there is a sociology and the outline of an anthropology...
...It would seem natural, then, that under these circumstances, Existentialism, that idealist protest against idealism, should have lost all utility and been unable to survive the decline of Hegelianism...
...Why cannot one maintain one's individuality within an organized group or party...
...Precisely under Stalin, when the Party was no longer a revolutionary organization...
...I do not think so...
...The very same individual using the very 0 The psychoanalysts—when they are hon est—admit that they "prefer" some pa tients to others...
...Being was seen as replete in itself...
...From the latter one understood that Marxism was not without problems...
...His attempted synthesis of Existentialism and Marxism—or infusion of Existentialism into Marxism, to use his own terminology—has ended up by projecting onto the political group or party all those traits which in Being and Nothingness were reserved for the human individual and said to define his humanity...
...The Method and the Motive for Using It Sartre is completely confident that the method he has in mind, and which he sometimes even designates as "Marxist," is bound to throw a total light on the character and personality of any individual to whom it is applied...
...Marxism situates without doing anything more in the way of discovery: it leaves to other unprincipled disciplines the tasks of establishing the exact circumstances of the life and of the personality and then intervenes only to demonstrate that its schemas have again been verified: things being as they are, the class struggle having taken such and such a form, Flaubert, who belonged to the bourgeoisie, had to live as he lived and to write what he wrote...
...And since Marxists of the dogmatic variety are seldom fond of not being Marxists, they will try to reduce all questions about an individual to the one question which their mode of thinking enables them to answer...
...Here Sartre claims to oppose "contemporary Marxism" both theoretically and practically...
...Sartre writes...
...there is an economic theory of scarcity, which Aime Patri in Preuves has already shown—and I think with reason --to be heretical...
...I hold to be a parasitic system which lives on the margins of real science...
...The facts, as any scrutiny of the Bolshevik Party's history from 1917 until Lenin's death will show immediately, are quite the contrary: the Bolshevik Party was composed of great and often bizarre and eccentric individuals: Trotsky, Bukharin, Radek, Stalin, Smirnov, Muralov, Rakovsky, Zinoviev...
...Now the specific factwhich identified Bloom as the member of a series, was not the actual lover of his wife, but the imprint of that lover's bodyon Bloom's bed...
...Is it true, though, that classes presuppose serialization and render inert rather than vivify those individuals who belong to them...
...But how...
...They make this claim against Engels...
...for the Sartre of that work, the "whole man" is contained in the manner in which a particular individual tries to render his own experience into a "whole...
...Sartre's original approach to the individual was closer to that of the playwright or the novelist than to that of the biographer or the historian...
...After all, he asserts, Marxism is perfectly capable of dealing with the individual in his concrete reality...
...As he himself admits, serialization is not limited to capitalist society...
...It is to be noted here that Sartre is making the same theoretical claim as the very "contemporary Marxists," whom he says he despises and who in their turn have made it clear that they reject him, for they too claim that Marxism is able to deal adequately with the specific, the irreducibly contingent, the individual...
...in their own work first of all, when, as a matter of fact, one experiences it first, as a child, in the work of one's parents...
...For dogmatic Marxists this aspect of the individual is his class connections...
...Supposethere is some special function which canonly be carried out successfully by an individual having certain qualities, not possessed by other members...
...But is there any one aspect of an individual which can be said to be identical with the whole man...
...And again: "Class is the serialtotality of serializations...
...Now these propositions are utterly questionable...
...The first part of the Critique covers 644 pages...
...What has happened to him...
...Confronted with this type of Marxism, Sartre claims that it is "legitimate and necessary to resuscitate Existentialism...
...it should be properly designated: it is the metaphysic of Stalinism, for it places against the horizon of Being the historically limited form of the Commu nist Party of the period when Stalin was its leader...
...The reader may wonder how Sartrecould be so superficial...
...One extraordinary instance of this, to my mind, is the removal of the peculiar and almost Pascalian pathos with which the individual was invested in Being and Nothingness, and the bestowal of this very pathos on the political group or party...
...In this type of group, Sartre grants, the individual cannot be himself and is necessarily transformed into someone else...
...that he has in mind such an extension of social psychology is made clear by the following remark (again directed against "contemporary Marxist" thinking about the individual): "[Marxists assume] that men experience alienation...
...First of all, there are ways of being oneself even while waiting for a bus...
...To this procedure Sartre rightly objects...
...in the Critique, he deals exclusively with the manner in which society renders the individual into a part—of itself and of history...
...And he insists that its theory as well as its practice is contrary to the true spirit of Marx...
...And he defines the only organized human group which can offer the individual access to history and to action as that kind of group which is permanently threatened by the treason of its members...
...He adds: "If I want to understand Valery . . . it would be best not to go to the Marxists" for an explanation...
...I totalize myself in terms of a millennial history and, according to the depths of my culture, I totalize this experience...
...How different, ac * In speaking of "contemporary Marxists" Sartre makes it quite clear that he is referring to "Marxists" now associated with the French Communist Party and also to certain French Trotskyists and exTrotskyists whose Marxism he considers to be dogmatic...
...I take it then that by "contemporary Marxists" he means pres ent-day dogmatic Marxists...
...Sartre has praised the milieu of "Fraternity and Terror...
...Suppose we take as an instance the Bolshevik Party under Lenin, a political group which in Trotsky's phrase was military from top to toe, and was certainly the most effective "action" group in modern political history...
...For my own part, I can only say that a careful reading and rereading of this work has filled me with the kind of dismay I feel when I think of the extraordinary quantity and quality of thought now being expended on complex mechanisms that are designed for some inhuman end...
...The first kind of group Sartre describes which gives the individual access to action, is what he calls, the "group in fusion," that is to say, the group which is formed more or less spontaneously to deal with some particular emergency...
...But Sartre will not have it so...
...And he thinks, too, that if he has proved the above logically—which he may have, though I doubt it...
...also psychoanalysis...
...The only entity or character in Sartre's Critique which can be called human is thus the political group or party...
...On the contrary, he wants to extend the range of Marxist social psychology to cover childhood, too...
...In Questions of Method he explains: "It is clear that the periods of philosophical creation are rare...
...bad thing, I should say, is where they take us to...
...What I myself have found objectionable in the treatment of individuals by dogmatic Marxists, contemporary or otherwise, is the effort to answer all questions about an individual in terms of social psychology, and I do not believe that social psychology can answer all such questions...
...Why should members of the presentday Communist Party, who have consented to the Party's liquidation of their own personalities, be especially sensitive to the personalities of a Flaubert or Valery, or permit Sartre to lecture them on their lack of interest in particular individuals in the very same work which denies the very possibility of retaining one's individ uality in the contemporary world...
...Can't you resume your true identity when you get home...
...Yet Sartre's Genet is far inferior to his study of Tintoretto, though using the same methods...
...In fact, he calls his own renovated "Marxism" a "prolegomena to any future anthropology...
...Who will be sur * Sartre writes: "The group is producedin each one by each one as the individual birth of an individuality common to all, and at the same time, each one grasps hisown birth as a common individual in the feeling of fraternity...
...For surely, if Kierkegaard was right against Hegel, if Hegel was right against Kierkegaard, and if Marx was right both against Kierkegaard and Hegel, then how could Kierkegaard finally be right against Marx...
...he wants to single out that one aspect of an individual which is identical with the whole man and can render every fact about him intelligible...
...It did succeed in giving me the feeling which Being and Nothingness may have been intended to produce but never did, for that work was too tonic, too clear, and too forceful even in its most pessimistic passages to make me feel what it was presumably saying, and what the Critique of Dialectical Reason is presumably unsaying: "Man is a useless passion...
...Moreover, the serialization of Bloom can scarcely be said to have been brought upon him by society...
...Individuals are collected into classes by material entities, jobs, or property, in the same way that a bus collects a group of persons hoping to be taken home by it...
...Marx was right against both Kierkegaard and Hegel, since with the first he affirmed the specificity of human existence and since with the second he addressed himself to concrete man in his objective reality...
...Many topics are treated in the Critique: There is a defense of the socalled laws of dialectics, a defense I find both dazzling and dizzying...
...In Questions of Method, as was noted before, he was concerned with how the individual could be seen as a "whole...
...At this point it may become necessary for the group to invent differencesfor certain of its members, to invent rather than to destroy otherness...
...The weakness of Sartre's approach, like its strength and interest, comes from the fact that it is not related to any particular datum...
...as valid when applied to an individual as to a tendency...
...In other words, classes are composed of dead or inert individuals, and it is through serialization that individuals are rendered dead or inert...
...Now an individual is someone about whom many questions can be asked...
...same method or methods might very well say something more true about someone else whom, by chance, he had a deeper motive for wanting to describe truly...
...f Here, according to Sartre, is the structure of freedom as made possible bygroup action: "Obeying the Other insofar as he is Other, in the name of a common practice, each one makes himselfOther insofar as he is the Same...
...the heuristic principle: 'look for the whole in each part' has become for them this terroristic practice: 'liquidate the part.'" Sartre claims that he does not want to liquidate the part, the particular, the particular individual...
...Each new member may have it in mind to desert or betray the group...
...He calls his method the most complex instrument ever designed for understanding human beings...
...to these partial conceptualizations Marxism could certainly contribute something...
...In the Critique one is presented with a Marxism whose problems have presumably been resolved and for which Sartre claims the ultimacy of truth...
...If he had smiled why would he have smiled...
...Sartre makes the very same claim, but in behalf of Marx...
...To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone, whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity...
...Members of a class have no genuine feeling of solidarity...
...Unfortunately, he has also made the point—and attached a very great importance to this point—that the fighting political group must necessarily transform those individuals who join it into beings other than they are, and further that the means for bringing about this transformation is intra-group terror...
...As a matter of fact, the specific analysis of Flaubert Sartre makes in his Questions of Method, in order to show what can be accomplished by a Marxism informed by Existentialism seems to me far inferior to the analysis Sartre made recently, using the same methods, of Tintoretto, though that study, too, was done with a view of proving the value and fruitfulness of the method Sartre is arguing for in his new work...
...Since they are interested in the class connections of the individual, it is about such connections that they want to speak and have made themselves expert...
...He is someone else when he gets on a bus, reads a newspaper, listens to a radio or television broadcast...
...Of these singularized and fetishized general types, contemporary Marxism constructs, to speak the language of Kant, the constitutive concepts of experience...
...For him, Marxism must be equally valid when applied to a shorter period of time as to a longer period...
...The first, entitled Questions of Method, written in 1957, "in response to the request by a Polish review for a treatment of the situation of Existentialism in 1957," is the lesser work in length, though not in quality, and it has the virtue of being complete...
...In short, the fighting group is not incompatible with the maintenance of individuality...
...The book is monstrous in size and is certain to be brief in its effect...
...Biography is a literary discipline, and it must involve principles which hold equally for Marxists and non-Marxists...
...at the same time he wants the Party member, whom he approves of for being a member, to really understand and think there is some great "The Critique" in the Light It will be recalled that while in Questions of Method—as in Being and Nothingness—Sartre was concerned to view the individual as trying to render his experience into a whole, in his Critique his interest is to show that history is, or can be, rendered into a "whole," the individual being reduced to a part...
...He remarks in a note that the intellectual terror represented by the theoretical practice of "liquidating the part" went hand in hand, politically, with the liquidation of particular individuals...
...The question is, though: was the true, the authentic Marxism meant to be ap plied specifically to the particular, the concrete, the irreducibly individual...
...Engels, for instance, was ready to admit that the theory of Historical Determinism was more true with respect to a longer period of historical development than to a shorter period, thus having more truth when applied to tendencies than when applied to individuals...
...compared with it both individuals and classes have the inhumanity of Being as such...
...But I think the main lines of the work have been sketched in and I do not see what Sartre can add that will decisively change what he has already set down...
...Here, I think Sartre has falsely equated serialization with class membership, on the assumption that both negate individuality, and by further assuming that two things which negate the same thing are equal to each other.* What is worse, Sartre by reasoning in this way has destroyed, it seems to me, any validity in the idea of socialism...
...Dogmatic Marxists will partially conceptualize the individual and then ascribe to such partial conceptualization a total validity...
...Here there is an entirely different atmosphere from that of Questions of Method...
...The motives for his performance must be far deeper than that...
...class is...
...But while in the Critique, the individual is still seen as trying to render his experience into a "whole," the emphasis of the author is now on the failure of the individual to do so...
...Now Marxwould have thought that such a notionitself requires explanation...
...in other words, he [Marx] gives to each event, in addition to its particular meaning, a revealing role: since the principle governing inquiry is to find a synthetic totality, each fact, once established, is interrogated and deciphered as part of a whole...
...its principles and already established knowledge appear as merely regulative...
...These names call up different and distinct personalities, no two of these persons can be said to be alike in any other respect except that they belonged to the same party and accepted Lenin's leadership...
...it was the rigid bureaucracy of Stalin, as we know today from Khrushchev's arraignment of Stalin, that converted the Bolshevik Party from the thing it was into the thing Sartre now believes any organized fighting political group must be...
...Would it not be simpler to "resuscitate" the true and authentic Marxism in order to deal effectively with its contemporary counterfeit...
...He too wants to give the same answer to no matter what question asked about Flaubert...
...Let us goback to the "serialization" of LeopoldBloom cited above...
...Which means that my life itself is millennial, since the schemas which enable me to understand, modify, and to totalize my practical enterprises . . have entered into the present by way of the past...
...the second section of the book, the Critique, will require another volume, possibly one as big as this first, which runs to some 750-odd densely written pages.* In his preface, the author remarks: "I dislike talking about Existentialism...
...This necessitates an oath of allegiance by each member, and the oath of allegiance implies that each member is inessential to the group, and could be replaced by someone else...
...Cannot we conclude that serialization, in some form or other, is part of the human condition and has to be endured along with many other things we would rather not experience but must...
...It was after the publication of Sartre's book on him that Genet wrote the two plays for which he is likely to be remembered: The Balcony and The Blacks...
...The Stalinist enemies of Khrushchev can no more like it than can Khrushchev's anti-Stalinist supporters...
...If the political group uses terror against the individ ual, this is fundamentally because it is afraid of the individual...
...Sartre does envisage one possibility forthe realization of individuality withinorganized group structures...
...The Group in Fusion" As a "serialized" being the individual is inert, unable to act...
...Identity here is otherness, and this identity of otherness characterizes the contemporary individual in every casual context of life...
...All of which goes to show that traditional Marxists were not quite as superficial as Sartre evidently thinks they were, when instead of speaking of fighting against serialization, they talked about putting an end to exploitation, a very different matter...
...he himself recognizes that such groups are impermanent, unlasting, occasional...
...Engels, whatever his faults as a thinker (and Sartre has called attention to many of them), was not enamoured of the word "total...
...One does not see why...
...In describing an individual, we are, I think, limited to partial conceptualizations and should admit these to be merely such...
...Sartre's New View of Existentialism The first volume of Sartre's newly published Critique of Dialectical Reason contains two sections, and these, in the author's own phrase, are "unequal in importance and ambition...
...Anxiety at having to confront Being, this is now the experience of the po litical group...
...Many Questions, One Answer Dogmatic Marxists generally tend to give the same answer to no matter what question about an individual because their method of analyzing an individual is fundamentally to refer to a particular datum with respect to him...
...I am perfectly ready to grant this argument...
...If I may restate the claim he makes in his new work, Sartre envisages Marxism as the foundation for a psychology of the individual and a sociology of groups...
...Sartre on the Individual According to Jean-Paul Sartre, "contemporary Marxism," which he characterizes as "lazy," converts real men into the symbols of its myths and thus "transforms into a paranoaical dream the only philosophy which is really capable of grasping the complexity of the human being...
...Why then, one might ask, is it necessary to make a synthesis of the two doctrines if one of them, namely Marxism, without the aid of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, or Sartre, for that matter, is able to deal adequately with the individual...
...Because the fictionalistnovelist or playwright—having invented all the facts about the characters to start with, is able to present them as "wholes...
...Questions of Method" as an Independent Work This section can be read independently of the much bulkier and still unfinished section, The Critique of Dialectical Reason...
...The Dane was to reappear at the beginning fixFl of the twentieth century, when people began to think of fighting against the Marxist dialectic by opposing it with pluralisms, ambiguities, paradoxes...
...he is someone else on his job, on the street, waking or dreaming...
...Why is he not himself...
...According to Sartre, Marx's own approach was quite different: "In the works of Marx, this focus of perspective never claims to prevent or render useless the appreciation of a given process as a particular totality...
...The real content of these typical concepts is always of a past knowledge...
...Now it seems that in his new work Sartre still holds to his original doctrine, and he implies as much by the kind of attack he makes on the interpretation of individuals by "contemporary Marxists...
...For after all, it was the lover ofBloom's wife who had victimized Bloom, and not the imprint of the lover's body...
...Sartre here seems to have forgotten something rather important in his own Existentialism, namely, that in human affairs, the subject employing no matter what method, does not by using it become superior to his own fate, which involves subjection to chance...
...The * Sartre writes...
Vol. 8 • April 1961 • No. 2
