Sartre: Romantic Rationalist

by Iris Murdoch

  It is impossible briefly to do justice to this huge ambitious book, full of very detailed exposition and excursions into anthropology and sociology as well as history, which was attacked by Marxist critics as abstract, idealist, Cartesian and a distraction from the realities of the political struggle. It is a less readable, and less felicitous or ‘lucky’ work than L’Être et le Néant whose spirit, I suggest, ineffectually animates it. The early book has a metaphysical unity and deeply felt and imagined central theme which this one lacks. L’Être et le Néant appeared as something new and appealed to an audience who were ready for it. The voluminous data which Sartre assembles in the Critique do not cohere together, the main argument is not comfortable with its numerous proofs and evidences, and the central ideas lack imaginative synthetic power. As a revision of Marxism it seems to me to be on the wrong road; the gallant attempt to join Marxism and existentialism fails, a passion inutile. Sartre was also, in the post-war period, very active in ad hoc day-to-day politics, in his journal Temps Modernes and in public political debate with critics such as Merleau-Ponty and Henri Lefebvre. He may not have been able to unite theory and practice, but he paid ardent attention to both. In spite of, or because of, his belief in the importance of the (or an ideal) Communist Party as a super-conscious consciousness, he was never on easy terms with the French Party. In the ‘revolution’ of 1968 Sartre was once more surrounded by the young people whom he so much hoped to influence, but the moment passed, no radical changes followed, and the Marxist idea of the ‘great transformation scene’ was beginning to fade. A question which divided, and still divides, European communism was that of the leading political role of the USSR, regarded by some as sacrosanct, by others as a chief obstacle to rational Marxism. Sartre’s ambivalent position on this matter caused bitter arguments. On the one hand, the remarkable, indeed extraordinary, success of Lenin’s party in 1917 could be taken as a perfect example of purposive humans making history. On the other hand, the USSR was not a good society and other societies had not followed suit. Many Marxists hesitated to criticise the Soviet Union because to do so was to lend comfort to the bourgeois enemy. Sartre may also have been influenced by a kind of Hobbesian theoretical realism which appears in the Critique in his views about the effect of scarcity upon the nature of power. Violence is (p. 221) ‘L’inhumanité constante des conduites humaines en tant que rareté interiorisée, bref ce qui fait que chacun voit en chacun l’Autre et le principe du Mal.’ Scarcity ‘interiorised’ leads every man to see his fellow as the Other, and as the principle of Evil. Homo homini lupus, l’enfer c’est les autres. Such a strongly expressed pessimism about human nature might promote a realistic tolerance of authoritarian government, in Russia, and, more plausibly, in China.

  A general criticsm of the Critique de la Raison Dialectique, and which applies to much Marxist writing, is that the factor of morality is, except in some extremely diminished and reduced form, absent. Morality is after all the great central arena of human life and the abode of freedom. Almost all our thoughts and actions are concerned with the infinitely heterogeneous business of evaluation, almost all our language is value language. The destruction or denial of this open texture is and has been (as we know) the aim of many theorists and many tyrannies. Moral (that is human) activity can be controlled if it is conceptually simplified. The idea that we inevitably regard other people not only as a nuisance but as prime founts of evil is certainly a simplification; and perhaps from a tyrant’s point of view not a very fruitful one, since a seed of individual will may be found within it. Sartre uses moral terminology in a vague way when, in his analyses, he speaks of ‘oppression’; but the positive moral idea in the Critique is, mutatis a few mutandis, the same as in L’Être et le Néant, that of a world-dominating will. Marxists who attacked the Soviet Union because of its offences against human rights were angry with Sartre’s ambivalence in this matter. Axiomatic ideas about human rights or natural rights are effective because they do not belong to any system. The Kantian idea of duty is individualised by conscience in particular contexts. General concepts such as Reason and Love are instantiated in the cognitive activities of infinitely various individuals. Morality is a very complicated matter. This complication is dangerous to the simplified unity and fascination of political metaphysics. Religion is, a fortiori, not mentioned by Sartre except as a sociological item. French anti-clericalism has always been fierce and pointed, as compared with the vague drift away from religion in other countries. Marxist theoretical morality has usually appeared to consist of (often reasonable) criticisms of bourgeois society, juxtaposed with Utopian pictures of a better society (without ‘alienation’, class division, division of labour etc.). Such a theory certainly has a moral content, but a controlled and restricted one. The ‘moral’ of the Phenomenology of Mind might be said to be ‘diligently seek truth’. Scientific socialism sets limits upon this appeal to the individual soul to enlarge itself. Marxist practice has of course been inspired by ideas of justice and utilitarian considerations which are not the exclusive property of Marxism. Even institutional Christianity, under the flag of the ‘new theology’, has, in South America, made friends with Marxism. The making of such alliances is an opportunistic tactic, but may also show that, in the field, the moral limitations of Marxism are not impenetrable. Officially however Marxists, pointing to the miseries of the world which Marxism will cure, tend to suggest or imply that while this general state of affairs exists all so-called (bourgeois) morality is self-indulgence and illusion. This is certainly a recognisable state of mind. Bourgeois value (morality) is something to be contrasted with (good) praxis and with the free blameless human relations which will exist in the époque lointaine when all contradictions are overcome and the burden of scarcity and necessary toil is laid down. Sartre offers his own theory of value along these lines in a footnote (p. 302) to the Critique. The ambiguity of all past and present morality is that it makes its appearance in a world of exploitation and oppression, a state of negation (of humanity) which morality then negates. Morality is thus a pseudo-positive, being a negation of a negation. In an oppressive society freedom can only assert itself through values but thereby is alienated. Every system of values rests on exploitation and oppression and confirms these, even the systems created by the oppressed do so in so far as they are systems. Value systems may be effective against this or that particular piece of oppression. But at the moment of revolution they cease to be systems and cease to be values, since their existence as such depended on structures which made them seem to be ultimate (indépassable) and which, being overthrown, reveal the values as otiose, as significations depassées. Freely developing praxis, as free creative consciousness, is then discovered as the only ethical relation between men as they proceed to dominate not each other but nature. (Presented with this version of the old old story the disenchanted may feel inclined to say that anyone who believes this will believe anything.) Sartre adds that Marxists tend to confuse value with talk about value. Value is produced at the level of basic praxis (that is, in Sartrian Marxism, purposive consciousness); and it is praxis itself, as relation of man to man and to worked matter, which is alienated, or not, and must be distinguished from the superstructures of value language and ‘moralities’ invented by intellectuals. Thus in the Soviet Union, moralistic talk, the utterance as values of moral generalities common to all, should not conceal or be confused with the collective praxis which is creating socialist society. This would seem to imply that the practice of, and inevitable talk about, bourgeois morality, that is ordinary morality, that is morality, is in some way false as contrasted with the silent real social relationships which are constitutive and creative of the good society. The notion that talk is false and only action is true (not unlike that of Wittgenstein in the Tractatus) can also be deduced from the psychology of L’Être et le Néant. Talk is mauvaise foi, choice reveals the man, and is the truth. This is of course another simplification. Moral activity involves the human activity of language-using,
even of theorising. ‘Moralism’ exists in the Soviet Union because, in spite of Marxism, ordinary morality exists there too, and would still do so even if the relations of production had been (which they have not been) radically altered and perfected.

  Sartre’s attempt to reform Marxism, and rid it of the naive deterministic dialectical materialism of Engels and Lenin, reads like a dream of history wherein scarcity, admitted to be a basis for unavoidable exploitation, disappears, and an enlightened proletariat leads mankind to a society where freedom itself will be the whole of value. Sartre retains, together with the familiar Marxist conceptual tools, the assumption that Marxism is (must be) a total systematic theory which explains and unifies everything. This quasi-religious claim, which has traditionally been made for Marxism, is tacitly or explicitly challenged now by many revisionists. Sartre had hoped to offer a synthesis which would not only explain the world (or explain how it could be explained), but would effect a revolution in Marxist thought which would gain popular support among intellectuals and activists. He hoped to influence les jeunes. He enjoyed the excitement of 1968, though disappointed by the failure of the French Communist Party to take charge of it. But his great work is now largely unread and revisionists look for inspiration elsewhere. The book which rallied the young was not the long one by Sartre but the short one by Marcuse. When one moves from the obsessive and over-wrought atmosphere of Sartre’s second synthesis to the heterogeneous and mutually dissonant writings of the Frankfurt School one feels (however much disagreeing) that there is more open space and fresh air, more moral concepts, more realistic reflection. Practically, Marxism is held together by de facto tyranny and because it enshrines a political hope (or illusion); theoretically it may now be in process of a disintegration wherein out of loyalty, or dislike of other labels, all sorts of thinkers call themselves Marxists, and to adopt the title is a symbolic gesture. Sartre, for all that he was a heretic, was an optimist who believed that Marxism, only, could save civilisation. The thoughts of Adorno, Horkheimer and Benjamin make a different impression, sometimes even one of despair. We are told to look for the truth, not in the literary work of Sartre and Brecht, but in that of Kafka and Beckett. Is this the desolation of the bourgeois individual, or the desolation of man? Against the reified determinism of orthodox Marxists Sartre summoned up a subject-object dialectic whose slogan was ‘all power to the subject’. Hegelianism lives so long as serious philosophical discussion can use its concepts. Adorno preaches the primacy of the object. Traditional Marxism pictures the strife of man with man as succeeded by a strife with nature, ultimately a domination of nature. Sartre’s version pictures the world outside the pour-soi of pure praxis as an alien en-soi to be conquered by creative will. One may look back here, past L’Être et le Néant, to a La Nausée, whose hero looks out on a desert not unlike that conjured up by Beckett. Adorno’s Hegelianism pictures knowledge as an attentive truthful patience with the contingent, where the latter is not a hostile Other to be overcome, but more like an ordinary world-round-about-us. ‘Approaching knowledge of the object is the act in which the subject rends the veil it is weaving around the object. It can do this only where, fearlessly passive, it entrusts itself to its own experience. In places where subjective reasons scents subjective contingency the primacy of the object is shimmering through – whatever in the object is not a subjective admixture. The subject is the object’s agent, not its constituent; this fact has consequences for the relation of theory and practice.’ Yes, and one wonders if such a view is not destructive of a Marxist, or even Hegelian viewpoint. Adorno constantly denies the claim of any ‘totality’. This picture of cognition which ‘favours the object’ also favours conceptions of truthfulness, of sacredness, of respect and duty and love which belong to ordinary traditional morality and might be more clearly expressed (as they are by Simone Weil) in ordinary-language reflections without the compulsory use of Hegelian-Marxist terminology. It suggests a philosophy better suited to a world in which respect for rights (human rights, rights of citizens, rights of blacks, rights of gays, rights of whales) has made innumerable places for the meeting of theory and practice.

  Sartre rightly identified determinism as a prime enemy; and paradoxically out of the philosophical background which supplied Sartre with the ‘structures’ of his ‘mediations’, the new quasi-scientism, known as structuralism (or deconstructionism), has arisen. Languages of science and technology, ‘deeper’ than ordinary language, supply models for explanatory codes, easily simplified and popularised. Of course Derrida’s structuralism exposes philosophical fallacies which were earlier the target of Wittgenstein, but its charms are those of determinism, pleasing to thinkers who exclude themselves from the fate of the codified. By contrast with a cosmos of archiécriture Sartre may appear as a spokesman for the indomitable human spirit. A philosophy cannot be a total system because the world is contingent and infinitely various, and systematic philosophy is often made more readable as well as more reasonable by the personal interests of the philosopher, by the way in which his analyses and examples stray toward particular matters which have amazed him or frightened him or pleased him; so that his book may have turned out to be more personal and accidental than he intended. This is true of L’Être et le Néant and even, to a lesser extent, of the Critique. Sartre, thinker and artist, so versatile, so committed, so serious, industrious, courageous, learned, talented, clever, certainly ‘lived’ his own time to the full, and, whatever the fate of his general theories, must survive as one of its most persistent and interesting critics.