Preface

One of the greatest thinkers of our century? In his last years Sartre rejected even the question as coming from the oppressive world of the 'star system'. His own analyses of seriality showed how the elevation of the few implies the alienation of the many; and his politics of the 1970s, directed against any and all elites, called for and tried to initiate a transformation of the social relations that make elites possible.

Yet to appreciate his achievement fully, it remains important to try to measure Sartre's real stature. Like the other major thinkers of his time, Sartre gave himself over without reservation to the invention of a theme – a theme pursued with immense energy, elaborated with originality and yet in an unceasingly self-critical spirit, a compelling and coherent vision of the world.

The main theme of Freud's life and work was the unconscious, Einstein's was relativity, Lenin's the socialist revolution. Jean-Paul Sartre's entire life and work were focused on human freedom. At the outset, he affirmed against all opposition that this freedom was absolute, the source of ourselves and all our attitudes towards the world. Then, as a fledgling political activist, he discovered ways in which contemporary social reality, above all the reality of class society, severely limited human freedom. At the same time he first encountered and criticized orthodox Marxism for denying human freedom while claiming to struggle towards it, and laboured to develop more adequate ways of accounting for human activity. Later, in the service of an enriched and concretized revision of his early theme of freedom, he came to accept Marxism as the essential truth – freedom, no longer our original curse and condition as

individuals, was now to be achieved in collective struggle. He deepened his insistence on humans as the source of all things human, and created a remarkable series of works exploring how we make ourselves and our world and yet lose power over them. Sartre's revisions of Marx, then Freud, were decisive, as were the ways in which he tried to integrate them into each other. He sought to grasp the individual as the source of the society and its alienations, then the society as the source of individuals and their alienations.

As the margin of freedom narrowed in Sartre's argument, his sensitivity to its contours and his commitment to struggle for it only grew, as did his own direct participation in such struggles. Nearing the end of his career, Sartre both depicted Gustave Flaubert as a totally conditioned person and showed the latter absorbing these conditions into himself and re-exteriorizing them as his own self-creation. More deeply committed than ever to the struggle for a free society, Sartre, as he worked to complete his Flaubert, took the most radical turn of his political life, plunging into an unthinking activism.

Unlike Lenin, Freud or Einstein, however, Sartre did not dramatically change our world or our ordinary ways of thinking about it. His quality as a thinker must therefore be experienced directly. There are few Sartreans today: one must read Sartre himself. And even then, as the commentaries on Sartre amply demonstrate, serious misapprehensions are possible. My own history is probably not unrepresentative.

The stages I have passed through in comprehending Sartre reflect, although with a considerable time-lag, the development of his own thought. Before beginning this project, I had encountered Sartre as most American college students still do, as the high priest of existentialism. When for example, I read Huis Clos in a French class in the late 1950s, I had no inkling that this gloomy playwright had most recently written three plays of hope and struggle, Le Diable et le bon Dieu, Kean, and Nekrassov. La Nausée, L 'Etre et le Néant and the short stories of Le Mur were the best-known of his works in America, and what they conveyed to me had little appeal in 1957: an argument for freedom alongside repeated demonstrations of the futility of our acts and the absurdity of the world. To a young American looking for commitment and a clear picture of experience, that Sartre was of no help. And of course I had no idea that the warmed-over Sartre access-

Preface 9

ible to someone of little intellectual and political sophistication was light-years from the concerns of Sartre himself at that time. I encountered him again only a few years later in the form of his 1946 lecture, L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, but was no more attracted or enlightened. His arguments for freedom made no significant impression on a young teacher and novice writer who was now moving towards political commitment and graduate school. Searching for direction in 1961, I recall only being struck by Sartre's discussion of how someone seeking answers chooses his adviser according to the direction he himself wants to take. But which path was I to take? For Sartre to insist that I was free told me nothing about what mattered most to me. He at any rate would not be my chosen adviser.

Only after I had found my own direction did I encounter Sartre again, and begin the project which led to this book. Marxism – specifically the philosophically-anchored Marxism that I learned from Herbert Marcuse – had given me intellectual bearings. Personally and politically I identified closely with the Free Speech and Civil Rights movements, becoming active myself early in 1965. At the same time, I began to search for a dissertation topic. Through studying Kant and Hegel at Brandeis University, and reading Marcuse, I had come to see art as presenting the vision of a world whose contradictions had been overcome. Because it was in some sense unreal, art could aesthetically resolve the problems of the real world. Because of its unique reconciling and integrating power, art became an important force in the world. I decided that my dissertation would explore this 'secret' of aesthetics and, after several months of study, discovered it in Sartre.

Why Sartre, and not William Morris, for example, or John Dewey – important thinkers who, like him, emphasized art's unique integrative traits, regarded it as a force in the world and saw it as foreshadowing an integrative socialist society? First, more than either Dewey or Morris, Sartre belonged to the tradition of the great rationalist thinkers whom I had studied under Marcuse: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Husserl. Second, I had by now discovered the post-war stage of Sartre's career, as reflected in his theory of engaged literature. In Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, the gloomy Sartre was becoming optimistic, the theoretician of inevitable human conflict was writing of solidarity, the individualist becoming socialist. Above

all he was becoming politically active. His transformation fascinated me, as well as the question of whether it could be successfully completed, because I myself was in the midst of just such a transformation. I had written a novel, had been strongly influenced by the beat writers, and had myself now been drawn into political activism.

For several reasons, then, I undertook a dissertation entitled 'Art and Freedom in the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre'. In it I wrestled with his early ideas on freedom, and within my Marxist framework tried to make room for what seemed irrefutable in his argument. But beyond this, Sartre touched me little. I studied him but he was not my teacher. I carefully traced the insoluble problems posed by his early thought and their temporary and unreal resolution in his discussion of art, his rethinking of the conflicts after the Second World War, and the resultant activist conception of literature. I acknowledged that in his own way Sartre recapitulated the development from Hegel to Marx. But rather than follow the main lines of that process into the 1950s to evaluate him as a mature political playwright, essayist and philosopher, I chose to focus on the years of his conversion. While gesturing towards the later political essays, and especially Critique de la raison dialectique, the final section of the dissertation was a detailed analysis of Qu’est-ce que la littérature?. Undertaken in 1968, my close reading of Sartre had a major limitation: it stopped at 1948.

When I returned to Sartre, two years later, one of my major purposes was to bring my study up to date. Why should I have done this, especially after I had decided that Sartre was not important for either my thinking or my politics? Beyond establishing my academic credentials for what I already sensed would be a struggle for survival in my job at Wayne State University, I returned to Sartre because I must have dimly glimpsed that his problems were also my own. As an aspiring writer, lower-middle-class intellectual, and patient in psychotherapy, I had not found the passage to Marxism and political activism an easy one. It demanded a shift from personal preoccupations to social commitment and from methodic doubt to a point of view which confidently claimed to answer the key questions. The passage was made yet more troubled by my difficulty in operating effectively as an activist-intellectual in the increasingly hysterical state of the Movement in 1970, a non-working-class movement which Marxism was unable either to account for or to guide.

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After throwing myself into the Kent State-Cambodia upheaval in Detroit in May of 1970, I withdrew to the British Museum in London to work on Sartre. I returned to Sartre in order to find my bearings at a difficult time. Had he successfully made the passage to political thought and action? How had he functioned as a political intellectual? How did he come to grips with the glaring inadequacies of a Marxism whose fundamental truth he had nevertheless accepted? And how had he managed to function in a movement whose specific forms repelled him so?

I now set out to study Sartre's plays, some of his political essays, the Critique, and, as it appeared in 1971 and 1972, his biography of Gustave Flaubert. In conversations with a friend and student of mine, Bob Bailey, and with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the project began to find its present shape: a critical study of Sartre's development organized around the key terms and tensions of his thought. As it became clear that the central problems of Sartre's development were rooted in his inability to overcome his original terms, I returned to his early encounter with Husserl and Heidegger. There I showed him defining his basic stance towards reality, described the terms at the core of his thought and their interaction with each other.

This work laid the basis for a critical evaluation of Sartre's later development. My persistent question was, did Sartre move decisively beyond his individualist, dualist and aestheticist starting point? Helped by several illuminating discussions with my colleague, comrade and friend, Ernst Benjamin, I began to see how even Sartre's Marxist thought had been undermined by his continued dependence on his original premises.

This was the main underpinning of my project between 1970 and 1973. There were two others. As a New Left intellectual, I found great difficulty in justifying my writing and Sartre's – in a world in which the war in Vietnam was taking place. I questioned my intellectual work constantly as to its political value, and I had also become firmly anti-elitist and oriented towards the experiential. I was determined that my readers think with me, not merely observe my results; that they too encounter and wrestle with the dynamic of Sartre's thought. In this sense, the work was conceived less as an essay about Sartre than a presentation of Sartre – from my point of view, to be sure, but an effort less to bring readers to agree with my argument

than to present the actual itinerary and deep structure of Sartre's own thought. This is one reason why I am still less concerned, for example, to cite the vast secondary literature than to present Sartre himself; the other is that so few writers have struggled successfully to grasp and present his thought.

This goal of presenting Sartre himself, which I have tried to preserve as fully as possible through subsequent revisions, initially became intertwined with, and was confused by, another: my emphasis on the author's subjectivity. I was convinced that my own immediate reactions to Sartre would provide the keys to understanding him, and so the book was filled with such personal responses as excurses on the relevance of appealing to Kant, with reflections on my personal encounter with Sartre, complaints about the length of his books, letters I had written to him and conversation I had had about him. Useful from time to time as a writer's tactic, this approach began to affect the work itself. Like Sartre's study of Flaubert, my study of Sartre began to lose the distinction between the process of intellectual investigation and its socially communicable results.

One reason why such distinctions eluded me was that so much of this work seemed to be a race against time. I rushed to complete the book because I was now being considered for tenure – an avowed Marxist, a movement activist, a socially committed young faculty member who was supporting new programmes for workers, women and minorities.

In June 1973, I mailed off what I hoped was the completed manuscript, but within a few months it was read and severely criticized by my close friend and colleague, Steve Golin of Bloomfield College. He suggested that, when cutting out the distracting personal material, I should give greater attention to reporting Sartre's strengths. This led me to a new stage of comprehension. Freed of my earlier ambivalence about undertaking such a theoretical project in the first place, I cut nearly one-half of the manuscript. I was able for the first time to relax my combative stance and openly acknowledge the positive side of Sartre's career. I now began to appreciate how far Sartre had gone in grappling with the issue that so preoccupied me: what is the political role of the writer? Indeed, Sartre's efforts to answer this question began to emerge as the focus of my book.

Completed in the fall of 1974, this draft still judged Sartre too harshly, as if there were a 'true' Marxism apparent to all which he

Preface 13

had obstinately ignored. A discouraged activist, I had begun to take refuge in a rather abstract and orthodox Marxist stance as a result of the Movement's disintegration -- so much so that I strongly criticized in Sartre the very politics which had been the decisive shaping force in my own life. Still caught up in the insecurities of my career, I was no doubt hoping to make my mark by proving Sartre wrong. But as I completed this revised manuscript in Fall 1974, I knew quite well that I had not yet come to terms with a conversation I had a few years earlier with Doreen and Girard Horst (André Gorz). I could not reconcile Gorz's powerful optimism as a political thinker with the negativism I found at the heart of Sartre's thought. Similarly, I only dimly saw how central Sartre had been for R.D. Laing's brilliant analyses of schizophrenia as an intentional stance towards reality. It troubled me that thinkers whom I had so respected had found in Sartre much more than I had done.

Three events brought me to my present appreciation of the importance and value of Sartre's thought. First, I had become a tenured professor in late 1974. With my job secure now, I was free of any need to make my mark at Sartre's expense, and thus to see him so negatively. Having survived personally through what I experienced as an extreme situation, I was able to step back and appreciate Sartre's great triumph of the 1950s. Surviving and indeed growing in political and intellectual power during the Cold War, Sartre actually deepened his commitment to socialism at a time when one-time comrades were caving in under the strain. On his own and in the worst of times Sartre became one of a handful of intellectuals -- Deutscher, Mandel and Marcuse come to mind--who laboured against the mainstream to revive Marxism as a living tool for the analysis of contemporary events.

Second, I soon returned to political activity. Since 1970 I had remained an activist teacher and had participated in several study groups. But for a political intellectual direct involvement in organized activity is quite a different--and in my view necessary--step. I became one of the organizers of the Detroit chapter of the New American Movement, a small national organization which sought to contribute to building an American socialist movement. No longer subject to the intense pressure of the 1960s and able now to regard Marxism with a critical eye, I became aware how problematic was the rela-

tion between theory and practice, the intellectual and action. My experiences with NAM led me to admire Sartre's indefatigable efforts to find appropriate ways to intervene politically, and equipped me to evaluate him as someone engaged in a project akin to my own.

Most important, however, upon agreeing to have New Left Books publish this study, I gained the invaluable editorial guidance of Perry Anderson, whose criticism led me to see that the revised version of my study was both not Marxist enough and too Marxist at the same time, lacking social and historical grounding and somewhat doctrinaire in many of its judgments. Or, to recast the point in terms of my own discipline and training, the study was not yet a fully developed contribution to the history of ideas. Since my apprenticeship at Brandeis University under Herbert Marcuse and Peter Diamandopolous, it has slowly taken shape as a kind of study distinct from but including and integrating philosophy, biography and political history. I had first tried to understand the basic terms of Sartre's philosophy as they developed, then seen them articulated and explored in his non-philosophical writings, and later identified the faults that had inhibited his development. Now I took a decisive further step, and began to incorporate the world of biographical, intellectual and political experience within which these faults had – perhaps inevitably – become constant traits of Sartre's work.

It was, after all, an historical individual who had written the works that I had studied so closely. Certain ideas were available to him, not others; he experienced certain social relations and historical events, not others; and his was a very particular life and no other. By looking more closely at their source, I came to understand Sartre's limitations with greater sympathy and, at the same time, became better able to appreciate his towering strengths.

The tone of Marxist certainty, the suggestion that Sartre could be measured against a codified truth, was abandoned now. No longer judging his plays as an activist socialist theatre – as if we had available for comparison other fully developed and unambiguous examples of such a project – I began to appreciate their problematic in its own terms. I began to see that it was in the plays, above all, that Sartre explored the theme of effective political action and, most acutely, the issue of doing evil in order to do good. Understanding the difficulties and complexities of Sartre's efforts to become a critical fellow-traveller in the 1950s – understanding indeed, the inherent

Preface 15

impossibility of such a stance – enabled me for the first time to appreciate the courage and striking originality of his studies of French history, Hungary under the Red Army, and revolutionary Cuba. Acknowledging that no body of thought, be it bourgeois sociology or Marxism, had fully grasped the links between individual and society, I became far more sympathetic to Sartre's monumental attempt to do so, even when the attempt was thwarted by his peculiarly individualist social theory. As Sartre himself wrote in 1957, the Marxism he encountered as he became politicized had stopped developing, had become a set of doctrines and categories rather than a living body of thought capable of illuminating the most significant human questions. Sartre's self-appointed task as thinker was not to appropriate already existing and adequate tools, but to forge the necessary tools himself.

It would be illegitimate in every respect to stand outside Sartre's project and pronounce upon it as if from a superior position. One must appreciate, if not actually share, his goals and preoccupations in order truly to assess his accomplishments and his limitations. That is to say, an adequate critique of Sartre must be an immanent critique, one which tries to identify his purposes and to trace his own success and failure in advancing them.

What were Sartre's goals? They changed at each stage of his career, but he remained committed throughout to human freedom. How do we make ourselves and our world, and how can we abolish the hells that humans create for themselves and each other? With these questions in the forefront, Sartre tried to grasp human beings and human history as a whole, to understand the results of human action on the world and how humans are shaped by their world. Further he sought to transform thought and writing, originally his means of withdrawal, into effective political tools in the struggle for a humane world.

The student of Sartre will immediately respond that I have distorted or disregarded this or that major purpose. As I complete this study, I am convinced that I have grasped 'the' Sartre, but I am also only too aware of how partial and limited it is, how much I have had to omit, how many other books can, and must, be written on Jean-Paul Sartre. If I am satisfied that I am conveying Sartre as he should be conveyed, I am also aware that no study of a great thinker, however perceptive and subtle, can substitute for the richness and complexity of his works themselves, or should put an end to creative

study of them. I expect and welcome dispute, correction and revision.

I have been working on Sartre from 1966 to 1980. I have taken this study through my life, and sometimes on my travels. Work on it spanned my career from graduate student to tenured associate professor. I have already named a number of people who helped directly in its development towards its final form; certain others must also be mentioned, whose encouragement and support kept me going. This happily long list includes Phyllis Aronson, Ted Braude, Vicky Yelletz, Fred Lessing, Kent Baumkel, Larry Stettner, and Saul Wellman. If the main weakness I find in Sartre is that his peculiar individualism is blind to the social links at the heart of all human life, the main experience I have had in writing this book is how much it has depended on other people. I dedicate this book to all those, named and unnamed, who have become part of it and made it possible, and above all to the memory of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Wayne State University, Detroit

June 1980