SARTRE: Given that we’re about to go our separate ways, I think that the most useful thing to do now would be to pin down what points we have reached agreements on, and which other ones represented points of disagreement. And also, to note the problems that none of us could claim to provide any resolution to, but which were simply problems that we posed. I cannot myself say what the agreements and disagreements are – I would rather that all of us discussed them together. For example, right away I’ll address myself to Luporini, because I think that this is the starting point. I think that you above all addressed the problem of subjectivity in knowledge, and I elaborated more on subjectivity in praxis, or in the practical or affective relation with the people who surround us, but we would agree in saying that subjectivity is an indispensable moment in the passage to objectivation. Would you accept that much, in this form? I think that this is an essential point. I don’t think that we agree on what comes next, namely the way in which we ought to envisage this passage and this moment. But it seems to me that we have seen this – the real dialectical process passing from a material being to an objective being – because we cannot call a material being an objective being, seeing that the objective is always linked to the subjective. The passage from the material being – in its real but still not objective form – to its objective, social form, with all the contradictions that this will then imply, supposes the subjective moment, in the group as in the individual. I would like to know if you would accept this initial conclusion, in these terms, or perhaps with modifications.
LUPORINI: Thank you very much for posing the questions in this manner, that is, in giving us the opportunity to respond. To be frank, I have to say that I accept this answer only in part. I do accept the fact that there is a moment of objectivation, which evidently depends on subjectivity, and I accept the fact that subjectivity is absolutely ineliminable, always ineliminable. As concerns the other point, that is, the question of whether we can speak of objectivity only within this relation – in a relation of objectivation – I can’t agree. I know that there is a very difficult problem, here …
SARTRE: A problem of words and of …
LUPORINI: It’s not a question of words.
SARTRE: I mean, words in the sense that words are paired with concepts. I’ll quote you this phrase from Vigier,1 ‘If man disappeared, the internal relations between the nucleus of the atom and its elements would preserve their objective reality’. For me, such a sentence is meaningless. They would, naturally, preserve their real relations, but for whom would they be objects? They have to be objects for someone, or, in any case, for some organism, perhaps a different one to our own.
LUPORINI: I think that’s an excellent way of posing the question. In posing the question of an objectivity without man, we pose a theological question.
SARTRE: Absolutely. There’s nothing left but God!
LUPORINI: But if we shift from this position to the opposite one, there is still the danger of passing into idealist territory.
SARTRE: But that’s what we have to avoid.
LUPORINI: That’s what I see in you a little, I’ll say that very frankly. I think that here we have a problem of the medium, a medium situation. You yourself have used the word ‘real’; so let’s see what the ‘real’ is. We cannot think about what the ‘real’ is without referring to something that is in the background of objectivity. And I can’t say that I already have the answer to this problem …
SARTRE: No, but in any case I would say that reality is already something that is not idealist. The solar system’s existence doesn’t require man;2 it is a fact that in relation to the solar system, we are contingent. If you like, it is perhaps necessary that the development of life on planet Earth leads to us; but in relation to the entire system, our existence or disappearance does not count, at least from the viewpoint of astronomical studies. If you accept that, as you surely will, then there is no idealism. We have to conceive the world as not made for man – it is not made in expectation of man.3
LUPORINI: Agreed.
SARTRE: After all, that’s the reality.
LUPORINI: So in this situation, which you accept, there is a world before man and without man.
SARTRE: Evidently.
LUPORINI: And the objectivation that starts from consciousness, and which I proceed towards as a practical movement? There’s a relation that is not only a relation at the level of thought, at the level of theoretical reflection, but a relation that has established itself. I only know this a posteriori, but it has established itself in the very development of reality.
SARTRE: I agree entirely.
LUPORINI: There are intermediate levels, which have established themselves as intermediate levels …
SARTRE: But all the same, at a given moment they have to be taken back by interiority …
LUPORINI: … but which mean that my movement towards objectivation is always, at the same time, the conquest of a real objectivity, an objectivity that really exists …
SARTRE: Of a reality that exists, a reality that is part of objectivity, but not of an objectivity …
LUPORINI: We could simply say: there is an objectivity constituted for man; I believe that it is constituted for man already according to the order of magnitude of his existence. That is, it is more or less the same objectivity constituted for the biological being. This objectivity is not only constituted on the basis of the immediate reflection of the world in man’s interiority, but it is simultaneously constituted on the basis of this objectivity, which you call the real, which is man: we can call this objectivity no. one, as to avoid using the same word and causing confusion …
SARTRE: But why use the word ‘objectivity’ at this point at all? When the word ‘reality’ is more full …
LUPORINI: Because then there wouldn’t be this movement through which I objectivate a thing and from which I emerge as a biological being.
SARTRE: On that we completely agree. Yes – it’s just that this emergence takes place in the form of a retotalisation.
LUPORINI: I want to say something very serious, if I may. There is an in-itself [un en soi] of objectivity, an itself [un soi], an In-sich, of objectivity, an in-itself of the part of the object that I do not just acquire but conquer through this movement.
SARTRE: Merleau-Ponty would grant you that.
LUPORINI: You can’t forget that. Without that, you can’t explain, for example, that science is always an approximation. When we say that science is an approximation, we are posing a very serious question, and we cannot say that this is a scientific position. So there are realities that are still to be defined: a human reality, the movement of the unconscious …
SARTRE: Yes, but then, indeed, you are very much defining objectivity in relation to subjectivity in the sense that I understand it. You are saying, in sum, that there is something behind and something ahead, and, in each case you call that in-itself [en soi]. But precisely the point is that the in-itself isn’t for us: there is the in-itself, and then there is the for others [pour autrui], the for us [pour nous], or the for itself [pour soi].
LUPORINI: There is the passage, which is called …
SARTRE: Well, the passage, or the for us, is made by subjectivity; and when, at a given moment, you mark the limits of a science, in my view you are marking, if you will, the intersubjective limits of human knowledge.4 Why do we stop there, after all? Because we have such-and-such history that we have retotalised in a certain way with such-and-such instruments and principles. Hence our subjectivity relating to a reality that in every sense goes beyond it, but which will be conquered, I agree, little by little, through historical stages, which must always be considered subjective. To put it another way, there is a subjectivity of science, which is the fact that it is there and in this moment, and not somewhere else. This is not at all an idealist subjectivity, since it comes from the entire development of the organic being, the social being, the instruments created on the basis of our praxis, and the theory that enlightens it. But ultimately we are like that at each moment, and our successors, the people who will come after us will say ‘you know, our grandparents still believed that!’ And they will blame that on our subjectivity, indeed as we do in relation to the people of the Middle Ages. All the same, I believe that on this point we could …
LUPORINI: We could discuss that for hours, but there is still a difference, namely the objectivity of subjectivity – the original objectivity of subjectivity, to be precise. Evidently, there are things that I cannot see, except through reflection.
SARTRE: But by that do you mean that in its origin [originellement] subjectivity has some relation to the object? I am totally in agreement on that, you can’t conceive of it otherwise …
LUPORINI: That’s the idealist response.
SARTRE: Or do you mean that subjectivity is more than a moment of a reality through which the being-in-itself is then constituted as objective? To put that another way, do you mean that there is an objective in-itself ?
LUPORINI: I want to say that a real, objective relation between a being that subjectivises me and an inert being …
A VOICE: The discussion keeps identifying objectivity and reality, so what about the linguistic distinction that you’re calling for? Objectivity is not reality.
SARTRE: Do you associate – do you identify – objectivity and reality?
LUPORINI: No, I’m posing the question as to whether it is possible to speak of a reality without in some sense referring to subjectivity. That’s the question.
SARTRE: It’s impossible.
LUPORINI: So long as we haven’t defined reality, what we can say is that reality is one thing and objectivity is another …
SARTRE: It is impossible, practically, in the sense that everything that we know in a rigorous manner is determinate, is objective. But when you speak of something that is always beyond, beyond approximation, it is a reality that is still not objective, because it exists for us only as the objective and subjective limit to our experience. When we were talking about Michelson and Morley the other day, we said that we can interpret certain principles as we like, but at a certain point Michelson and Morley’s experiment must enter into consideration. And what is it that their experiment gives us? It gives us light moving at constant speed in all directions. It’s in complete contradiction with Newton’s system. That makes for a contradiction. Not a contradiction in reality, but a human contradiction, in knowledge. What does that show us? Either that science doesn’t exist, which is absurd, or else that there is something that we haven’t understood. Do you really think that we can call this reality – which escapes us, and manifests itself only through the contradiction in our knowledge – an objectivity? I call it a reality. In the same sense, today a subquantum mechanics is emerging in which we see that particles transform into each other in regions of high energy. But all the scholars occupied with this question agree: we don’t currently have any mathematical materials to deal with this question. That is, we use phrases and formulas somewhat haphazardly, leaving things a little to chance or to a bit of cleverness, in order to grasp the reality; we don’t completely succeed in doing so. This reality does totally exist as a reality, outside of us, and yet for us it has only a relative objectivity – this objectivity is not developed, it is not total. We know that these particles exist, but we don’t have the means really to know them. We will do so in ten or twenty years, and to know that they exist does mark progress in objectivity, but they are enormously troubling for science as a whole; it is one of the reasons why science is in crisis, because it doesn’t have the means to deal with this. When Vigier talks about it, for example, he discusses it in the form of a condition to be fulfilled. I would call that an objectivity in progress, in movement, an implicit objectivity that will be explicated, but not a true objectivity. That said, it is an absolute reality, it does exist, and if we did not exist it would still exist. It is in this sense that you can’t call this idealism, because idealism consists of saying that its being owes to it being perceived, in one way or another.
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1Jean-Pierre Vigier (1920–2004), a French physicist and political activist, and a member of the PCF from 1940 to 1969. Active in the anti-Nazi Resistance, he was a prominent opponent of the US intervention in Vietnam and general secretary of the Russell Tribunal, as well as actively participating in May ’68. As a physicist he worked at the CEA [Atomic Energy Commission] from its foundation together with Frédéric Joliot-Curie, before leaving for the CNRS [National Scientific Research Council], where he was Louis de Broglie’s assistant. He defended a materialist and determinist position. We could not find a reference for this quote, but other references allow us to confirm that it does respect the spirit of Vigier’s arguments.
2Sartre’s argument would be more consistent if he said ‘For the solar system to be, it doesn’t require man’. Up to this point, he practised a distinction whereby the real belongs to the order of being, and the objective to the order of existence.
3See Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Vérité et existence’, in Essais, Paris: Gallimard, 1948, p. 83: ‘… the word is human but not anthropomorphic’.
4For Antonio Gramsci, objectivity means intersubjectivity: ‘The point that must be made against [Nikolai Bukharin’s 1921] Popular Manual is that it has presented the subjectivist conception just as it appears from the point of view of common-sense criticism and that it has adopted the conception of the objective reality of the external world in its most trivial and uncritical sense without so much as a suspicion that it can run into objections on the grounds of mysticism, as indeed it has. However, if one analyses this idea it is not all that easy to justify a view of external objectivity understood in such a mechanical way. It might seem that there can exist an extra-historical and extrahuman objectivity. But who is the judge of such objectivity? … It can indeed be maintained that here we are dealing with a hangover of the concept of God, precisely in its mystic form of a conception of an unknown God…. Objective always means “humanly objective” which can be held to correspond exactly to “historically subjective”: in other words, objective would mean “universal subjective”. Man knows objectively in so far as knowledge is real for the whole human race historically unified in a single unitary cultural system. But this process of historical unification takes place through the disappearance of the internal contradictions which tear apart human society’. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, pp. 444–5.
The Italian Communist leader and thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) participated in the founding of the Communist Party of Italy (PCI) and became its general secretary in 1924. He was imprisoned under the Mussolini regime from 1926 until 1937, and died a few days after his release. During his eleven years of captivity he composed his Prison Notebooks. We could hardly hope to present Gramsci’s thought in a footnote, and thus we will limit ourselves to highlighting that he elaborated a philosophy of praxis, as against an objectivist or naturalist interpretation of materialism such as we find in Engels. This reference to the expression ‘philosophy of praxis’ itself shows the theoretical and political interest that there would be in propounding a systematic comparative analysis of Gramsci’s and Sartre’s reasoning.