The Limits of Sartre’s

Thought

The course of the Critique paralleled the trajectory of Sartre's political essays and plays: three great projects, attesting the awesome energies of their author, they all ultimately fell short of their goal. We have examined their strengths and weaknesses now, and can see them as aspects of a single unitary project. The playwright who never created fully concretized individuals in positive action in the historical world was the essayist who never developed a balanced sense of his responsibilities and limits as an intellectual in politics – and this was the individualist social philosopher of the unfinished Critique. In what lay the unity of these projects and their common frustration? It is obvious that Sartre's Marxism shared none of the deep optimism of a Marx, Engels, or Lenin. He was at his best when explaining negativity – say, the oppressive weight of the practico-inert. After a brief period of entertaining the most positive hopes – such as his visions of the City of Ends and of a society in permanent revolution – Sartre returned to the negative as his natural focus of attention and the natural tenor of his analysis. We are, it seems, fated to make side by side with one another a world which is forever beyond our control. For Sartre the 'Beginning of History' in Marx's sense would never come: the law of dialectical circularity and much else in the Critique are powerful arguments to the contrary. Designed as a philosophical basis for historical materialism, the Critique is also a forceful attack on Marxism's hope for humankind.

At the core of Sartre's mature as much as his early thought, we encounter a single dominant mood, his abiding pessimism. Present in his earliest studies, this pessimism was also his major conclusion. The Critique displayed a more profound insight into negativity, seeking to explain the social causes of what earlier had seemed a projection of per-

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sonal idiosyncrasy or cultural mood. In his effort to grasp the source of the negativity he had earlier built into his ontology, Sartre provided a remarkable analysis of the pratico-inert as a human condition. But in the end, his own peculiar intellectual optic cast this new-found sense of materiality in an overwhelmingly bleak light, showing needs only in the reified form of scarcity and not as vital springs of human development, and obscuring human progress towards abolishing scarcity and bringing the world under human control or learning to live at peace with it. Pessimism concerning any improvement in our relations with the material world remained at the core of Sartre's thought, even in its Marxist phase. For him, we remain forever this side of taking the universe into human hands, transforming it in our own image or breaking its control over us.

To return the world to its human source was Sartre's abiding project in the Critique, but in the end he grasped only the logic which made us, as in L'Etre et le Néant, in some way responsible for a world beyond our power. The rare moments of genuine human sovereignty were unstable eruptions doomed to relapse into more stable and alienated forms. In this sense, the Critique was an exhaustive demonstration of a logic of human entrapment. It is true, undeniably so, that no revolution yet has ended the reign of necessity over humans, except perhaps during the revolutionary moments themselves, and that today we remain enmeshed in 'pre-history'. But so determined was Sartre to elicit the logic of negativity that his imagination failed at the decisive point. What is 'scarcity' after all, if not a human fact, another term for backwardness? Our powers are limited, our skills scarce, and so oppression becomes possible, as does class society. A genuine assumption of control by humans over human life depends on increasing our powers through a slow and painful course of development and struggle. The revolutionary apocalypse must prove illusory until the day when humans are developed enough to assert power fully and collectively over a world that they have shaped.

What is missing in Sartre is any sense of our historical progress towards a real, an ultimate breakthrough: the historical turning point when a full assumption of control is possible because, finally, our product will have ceased to dominate us, and we will have acquired sufficient collective power to abolish domination by either humans or nature. As Mandel had pointed out, failing to situate itself in history from the outset – in the history of struggle towards this break-

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through – Sartre's approach remained only quasi-dialectical. The major premise of his early thought returned as his main mature conclusion. He failed to go beyond interiority-in-the-world and all it entailed, and one by one his mature projects ran aground on it. In his analyses, momentary breakthrough and inevitable relapse took the place of history, human labour, slow patient progress through struggle on the one hand, and the reality of human backwardness and efforts to perpetuate it, on the other. The non-realization of a breakthrough remained the unresolved issue for Sartre: unable to locate any trends towards it in the real historical world, he pondered it in the form of scattered and momentary insurrectionary flashes. Thus Sartre's Marxism became, in an odd sense, academic. We have already seen how, in his political essays, his penetrating Marxist analyses of the past coexisted with a peremptory emphasis on choice in the present. In the same way, in Volume Two of the Critique, he combined his necessitarian analyses of the Soviet past with hopeful comments on the prospects for de-Stalinization in the present. Deeply pessimistic about the long run, Sartre persisted in optimism concerning possible choices in the present. There was thus a striking disjuncture between his sense of action and his sense of understanding.

Marx saw thought as both internally rigorous and wedded indissolubly to political action. This was the basis of the imperative that governed all his theoretical projects: to ground study on the social bases of human activity in order to understand the prospects for social change. While not as centrally concerned to unify theory and practice, Sartre faithfully met his own demand for the intellectual's political engagement in play after play, essay after essay. In Question de méthode, however, he proposed a strikingly different objective: to explain the individual. He sought to 'reconquer man within Marxism'. But he conceived this as an intellectual, not a political project: his purpose was to 'see the original dialectical movement in the individual and in his enterprise of producing his life, of objectifying himself.'¹ After breaking off the Critique he became absorbed in the longest project of his life: his study of Gustave Flaubert.

On this scholarly level, Sartre was not at all pessimistic. Interviewed in 1971, he said that the 'most important project in the Flaubert is to show that fundamentally everything can be communicated, that

1. qm, p.101; sm, p.161.

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without being God, but simply as a man like any other, one can manage to understand another man perfectly, if one has access to all the necessary elements.'² A greater intellectual ambition is scarcely conceivable. This ambition sprang from what was perhaps Sartre's deepest belief: that reality could indeed be understood. Understood, momentarily combated perhaps, but not decisively changed – here was his optimism and here his immoveable pessimism.

Where did this pessimism stem from, finally? What was the source of his abiding sense that the world – even if we shape it – must remain beyond our control. Our basic analysis still holds good: alone, the isolated individual must forever be overwhelmed by his world. Certainly, the individual is split from his or her society virtually everywhere in the world today, and it is perhaps unjust to demand of Sartre that he join in thought what remains sundered in experience. His thought was decisively affected by the objective limitations of the history that he lived through in these years. But if Sartre cannot be taxed with failing to think the unthinkable, or being halted by history's blockages, he nevertheless remained within an unusually constricted individualism – so much so that he was unable to pose the problem explicitly, regarded sociality more as a threat than as a puzzle, and so mystified his own sense of the problem that the Critique lost its focus and broke off unfinished. Why did the problematic of his early thought persist, decisively, into his most ambitious work of Marxist theory? Part of the answer at least lay in his conditions of life, where the limits of his personal experience met the limits of social experience in bourgeois society. Living in a world where our social links are lived openly and positively, Sartre might have been impelled by others, by the general climate of experience, to see beyond his personal limitations. As it was, he only reflected the society's own pessimism about humans, its sense of individual isolation and its negativity concerning collective effort. More than this, he reflected its mystifications. Thus, in 1953, he bitterly attacked Claude Lefort's emphasis on the positive features of capitalist production and the contemporary division of labour.³ For Lefort, the positive features of social life under capitalism formed the basis both for social struggle and for a socialist society; for Sartre, in contrast, struggle remained a

2. 'Sur "L'Idiot de la famille" ', Situations, X, p.106; 'On The Idiot of the Family', Life/Situations, p.121.

3. See 'Réponse a Claude Lefort', Situations, VII; 'An Answer to Claude Lefort', cpa.

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violent rupture with an overwhelmingly negative daily life.

But Sartre experienced the world of daily life in his own specific ways. After his spectacular rise to fame in post-war France, his personal world of experience was changed dramatically: first, he never had to work in a job again; second, as the Critique's glaring weaknesses reveal, his writings would henceforth be published without question or correction. His unique arrangement with Gallimard gave him a fixed monthly stipend, which sheltered him from even the usual professional consciousness of sales figures and royalties. His material conditions of life were henceforth guaranteed: he could work when he wished on whatever he wished, without colleagues, without supervision, without criticism.

Enviable as it may have been, this position left Sartre permanently out of circuit in relation to the daily material pressures suffered not only by the oppressed and exploited, but also by virtually everyone else in the society. Without a wife or children or settled home life, living in residential hotels and eating in cafés, the Sartre who refused the normal trappings of bourgeois life was able now to reject any place in the social division of labour. Furthermore, the irritations of celebrity made him reclusive, led him to shut himself off from all but a few old and close friends. He seldom became absorbed in discussing ideas, and his new situation further restricted his experience and the intellectual currents passing through it. If Sartre was so fundamentally unable to see beyond the categories of bourgeois society, it had to be in part because the peculiar consequences of his celebrity made some of the most negative and mystifying features of capitalist society his own daily reality. Thus Sartre remained free into old age to live out the philosophy of L'Etre et le Néant, avoiding encumbrances to the perpetually renewed act of self-definition: 'it is the idea of carrying as many things with me as possible that defines my whole life – everything that represents my daily life at any given moment. The idea, therefore, of being entirely what I am at the present moment and of not depending on anyone, of not needing to ask anyone for anything, of having all my possessions at my immediate disposal....⁴

We have reached the point where biographical and conceptual explanations merge, where the limitations of Sartre's lived experience

4. 'Autoportrait à soixante-dix ans,' Situations, X; 'Self-Portrait at Seventy,' Life/Situations, p.69.

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ratified and reinforced the limitations of his thought. At the moment of his intellectual struggle with the unsituated freedom of a Mathieu, an Orestes or a Hugo, a society of privilege made Sartre one of its elite and conferred on him one of its greatest privileges, a life free of demands. Orestes complained of his unattached freedom, longed for any place, however oppressive, that would be his. The anti-social core of Sartre's thought could only have been confirmed in its reasons as he fulfilled his dream of being a writer, and took up a life which never demanded that he experience – as a teacher, for example – a concrete work regime, fixed daily movements, a dependency which, however galling, he would have been obliged to see as the contemporary social norm.

Thus, conceptually, the individual rooted in his interiority but trying to get to the world remained enmeshed in the pessimism of his initial isolation. It was for this reason that commitment and responsibility became key terms for Sartre, and for this reason that his entire theatre project and all of his political essays grappled with the issue of engagement. When he spoke of the writer's responsibility, he was speaking from his own position outside and above social conflict, speaking of what he as a free agent should do. As Merleau-Ponty saw already in the mid-1950s, Sartre's political essays reflected not a long-term political-intellectual project but a series of prises de position. Reading Burnier and de Beanvoir, we are again and again given the impression of his need to take a stand. We should contrast this sense of responsibility with the idea of solidarity, one of the key terms absent from Sartre's self-conception. Solidarity is engagement with, not on behalf of, the oppressed; it entails a sense of connectedness with their struggles, and abolishes distance where 'responsibility' confirms it. Solidarity involves recognizing that one is already enmeshed with others, in a way that Sartre never did – or was.