Notes On Sartre and Marx

Douglas Collins's Sartre As Biographer (HUP, 1980), though a monograph on JPS's relationship to the genre of biography is, at the same time, a lens through which Sartre's entire intellectual project may be comprehended. Indeed, I will be so bold as to say that JPS's relationship to this particular genre is the key to understanding his decisive contribution to modern thought.

Collins observes that "Sartre has an important place in the history of ideas, not because he developed a distinctive definition but rather because he broadened and applied the earlier ideas in new and unexpected ways. Only by reading Sartre in the context of his predecessors can one discover where the originality lies" (p. 32).

This sort of achievement is not unique to Sartre. Originality never involves creation ex nihilo--except in certain systems of theology (and theology is largely composed of what Wittgenstein termed "language on holiday").

Sartre, intent upon putting language to work, was no theologian. And the longer he labored with language, the more his attention shifted towards labor itself. His turn to Marx is therefore a source of embarrassment only to those who fail to appreciate the drift of his thinking over the course of his long and productive intellectual career.

Those who fail to appreciate the drift of Sartre's thinking are, by and large, intellectuals of the Liberal class: individuals who confuse freedom with license and, consequently, experience intense episodes of dyspepsia when confronted by Sartre's demands for moral responsibility and political commitment.

Liberals fawned over Sartre when they mistook him for the Philosopher of License. The love affair ended when Sartre began to point out that "men are free as well as determined, that they make their own history, though within an environment which conditions them. The seeds of such a method have always been contained within Marxism, and it is the historical task of existentialism, with its emphasis on the concrete man as the center of knowledge, to recall Marxism to its original interest in the specific human existence" (Collins, SAB, p. 27).

In other words, Existentialism was not conceived by JPS as a "stand alone" philosophical school but an adjuvent and corrective to what was, and remains, the most penetrating school of sociological analysis produced in the modern period: the school of Karl Marx.

Sartre and the Liberal Class

Writing after the "death of god," Sartre attempted to anchor personal responsibility in ontology (since theology was not an option for him as it had been for Dostoevsky).

His subsequent eclipse among Liberal Class intellectuals is due to their discovery that this ontological anchoring of responsibility placed strenuous moral and political claims upon them--not what they had initially expected from the man who had promoted a philosophy of freedom (a concept that they had interpreted to mean "license").

As Dostoevsky explained in an edition of A Writer's Diary:

In the present shape of the world people think of freedom as license, whereas genuine freedom consists only in overcoming the self and one's will so as in the end to achieve a moral state such that always, at every moment, one is the real master of oneself...

Real mastery of the self consists, for both Sartre and Dostoevsky, in negation (Sartre would say, "in nothingness"); in both cases, in the ability to say "No."

"Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre" is a form of askesis. A hard sell in the era of Neo-Liberal consumerism and capitalistic commodification.