Lombardo Radice argued that there is, indeed, an objective dialectic, which is not limited to the dialectic of nature alone. That does not, however, justify the dogmatic Marxism that claims to be able to enumerate the general laws of the dialectic. He emphasised that there is a dual crisis: the crisis of subjectivism, which marks the end of anthropomorphism in science – as even some representatives of subjectivism itself, such as Heisenberg, have pointed out; but also the crisis of objectivism. In his presentation Sartre specified that the subject’s self-knowledge implies a destruction or modification of the subject; but that is also true of knowledge operating at the microscopic level of ‘electrons, quanta, and very small particles’. And so Lombardo Radice asks: what role does the subject’s creative activity play in the knowledge of those natural phenomena that are not at the level of human sensibility? – hence questioning the validity of objectivism and of knowledge-as-reflection. Finally, Lombardo Radice commented that knowledge of oneself can very well be projected outside of the self, and then become a process of a collective character that does not entail the destruction of the subject.
SARTRE: First, I think that a misunderstanding may have arisen from the way in which I posed this question. The problem in question was subjectivity, and indeed I spoke of subjectivity. But I do not see how reality can relate to neither subjectivism nor objectivism. I am entirely working on the basis that the two notions – of subject and object – are senseless when taken in separation from one another. There is a Hegel text that is very clear on this point, where he says that the trouble with the expression ‘subject-object relation’ is that even when we speak of a relation between subject and object, ‘subject’ and ‘object’ take on meanings that they do not hold in common, and they instead tend towards isolation.2 So when you speak of subjectivism, I think that you are referring to a theory that has, in any case, never been my own. In truth, the question that interested me – and afterwards we will have all our discussions – was that, given that there is reality, and sectors of interiority within it, which we are (if you like, there are beings, organisms, which we are, and there are other realities that are inorganic beings, which we are not), in what measure is the passage to objective knowledge achieved by way of subjectivity? And subjectivity, moreover, is simply our proper being, that is, the obligation on us to have to be our being, and not simply passively to be. So from this point of view, I think that there is a very serious discussion that must be had, but it will certainly not bear on the cases where we would say, like some of the scholars whom you cite: ‘man knows only himself’. You referred to Heisenberg,3 but Eddington4 said the same thing; and all this represents an idealism that I believe has today been completely transcended. The true problem is, in fact, that of knowing how, through an objective knowledge of the real, we who exist subjectively can transcend ourselves in order to have a relationship with reality. That is the first problem that I wanted to pin down, and we will discuss it further, if you like; I only spoke of subjectivity when that was the matter in question.
Then you say: to know oneself is to destroy oneself; I did not say that, I said that to know oneself is to change oneself, and most importantly, it is to pass from one status to another. To you that seems astonishing, and you asked me if I wasn’t myself fundamentally the victim of my own subjectivity; well, I’ll agree on that much, precisely to the extent that I consider that we are all, from this point of view, subjectivities transcending ourselves towards the object. But I must remind you that what I said, most importantly, is that there is a change in status. The examples of scientific knowledge that you give can be summarised by Louis de Broglie’s line, according to which the experimenter is part of the experiment, and, as a consequence, for a certain number of scholars – I don’t know what you think; you’re more qualified than me to say – but for a certain number of scholars, doing an experiment in microphysics is already to change the thing – for example, in adding some particles of energy. So we certainly agree, at that level – but that does not mean changing its status; here, we are changing it practically, but we are changing it just like how I can change the place of this microphone, or we give it an energy it had not had, or we are incapable of calculating simultaneously both its speed and its position, in the same measure that we cannot say that we are doing anything with our movements other than intervening as a physical force in a physical world, or, if you like, as a material force in a material world.
On the contrary, when it comes to knowing ourselves, I did not at all say that we always in practice manage to change ourselves; far from it, since the anti-Semite who knows himself to be anti-Semitic will very often remain anti-Semitic. I said that we change in status, that is, that we pass from subjectivity to objectivity, and that the relation that we have with ourselves is changed. You will tell me, I know very well that I am not anti-Semitic; I am sure of it, too: I am not anti-Semitic, I am not racist. But you know no better than I do if you totally aren’t. Only through experience will you learn if your anti-racism is not a particular species of honest, violent reaction against racist tendencies that you still have, or if it truly means a complete absence of racism. It would be to believe in the purity of a drop of water (and again, not the scientific drop of water, but of the drop of water viewed as such) to imagine that we have a knowledge of ourselves that allows us to say in an absolutely rigorous fashion: ‘I am not racist.’ What we can say is, ‘I will make every effort to erase any racism within me. I will make every effort to fight the racism inside of me and outside of me.’ But it’s happened to more than one person – like, for example, the worker I spoke to you about this morning, who doesn’t believe himself to be anti-Semitic – that they suddenly discovered by chance that they were racist. And I could tell you stories of people in France who didn’t believe themselves to be anti-Semitic, and became so at a moment during certain episodes or affairs. They came to see that they were anti-Semitic, having believed that they were not.
But we ought to be very attentive to the fact that that is not at all what subjectivity is: at first it is not, ‘we are nothing’, and then, thanks to some complex situation that we reflect on, we see that we transcend, interiorise and objectivate it; at that moment we see the reality of what we are, which often surprises us, and the fact of knowing this reality sets us in a different relation with ourselves. Here I am alluding, for example, to analysis. Analysis, psychoanalysis, is a method often employed by charlatans, and its underlying metaphysics isn’t a good one. But as a technique for putting oneself in perspective by relation to an onlooker, there is something truly excellent about it, in the sense that it is a moment where we open up our thinking about what we are, and we see things that we did not know. Not because they were so sombre and horrible that we had neither the courage nor the will to know them, but simply because our mode of being means that we live what we are without such distance, in a state of absolute presence, and we discover what we are only by way of objects to which we refer in order to know ourselves. As a consequence, we absolutely must not think that we are returning to some mysterious foundation; this is not at all a matter of declaring that there is I-don’t-know-what deep and hidden source of existence. As we rightly said this morning, citing Marx, man cannot but be a natural being, he is also social, because he then distinguishes himself from nature, but if you try again to go beyond that, you have nothing. So there is no question of seeking some deep origin, an existence under the opening to being, as in Heidegger. There is nothing of the sort. This is just man, and simply man. The manner in which he is present to himself, at first, excludes knowledge.
Then there’s the last point that I would like to discuss. You say that the case of the hemianopic is of no great interest to you. But the hemianopic is the anti-Semite who does not know that he is anti-Semitic, or the honest man who becomes anti-Semitic even though he knows that he is not racist, because there is some political circumstance whereby the Jewish elements of a society suddenly become politically troubling for that society. At that moment, they are brought together and reconstituted as a totality that very much entails anti-Semitism, in a different form. It is impossible, as concerns our own fifty-six years of history – and maybe for you it will be more or less than for us – but it is impossible for us to say after the fact that we were clear a priori and to say that we really know that we are this or that thing. We know nothing at all. What we can try and do is to be clearer, by constantly exercising an objectivising control on ourselves. But it is utterly impossible to determine exactly what we are unless we have the proper circumstances to reveal it to us.
Again, on that last point, to which I would like to return, it seems to me that you are addressing a problem that does not come under the remit of what we decided that we would be talking about here – even though it is a very interesting question, which I discussed with my French Communist friends when I was up there a few days ago – namely, the problem of the dialectics of nature. I would just like to remark that here you are introducing a little subjectivity when you present the dialectics of nature as a certainty, though you only provide us with other certainties, scientific considerations – and that is not entirely the same thing. For example, if the theory of evolution were complete, if it were fully formed, then it would probably be a dialectical theory. I say ‘probably’ because it could be otherwise, given that we know just one thing, namely that there is evolution, but at the present moment – with the crisis of biological thinking – it is impossible to specify the manner in which this evolution has taken place, without this being a subjective choice. At this moment there is no coherent, proven theory of evolution. There is an irreducible, real fact, that there is evolution. We did not appear without there having been earlier links in the chain, among the first forms of the individual; but that is all that we can say. In the same manner, when you consider science today, it is true that the subjectivists are, fortunately, losing ground, but it is also true that this is taking place within the context of a considerable crisis of science. And, to get back to a very interesting aspect of what you said, this crisis itself comes from the limits – be they definitive or temporary – of our knowledge as limited organic beings; or, as many physicists think, it could perhaps simply come from the fact that the mathematical material that would allow us to deal with certain problems has not yet been produced. But, in any case, this crisis does not allow us to consider the dialectics of nature as anything other than something that you don’t like, that is, fundamentally, an anthropomorphic projection. There is a clear, intelligible dialectic in historical materialism. That is to say, I can understand not only the objective fact and the dialectical real, as you explained it to me, but also the dialectic itself, to the extent that it functions therein; I understand the dialectic starting from the totalisation that is history. So there, I understand the negative, the negation of the negation becoming affirmation, starting from the whole. After all, I can clearly see how in a whole, an isolation – which is a negation – can be suppressed through a fact that follows it, and we return to a positivity of the whole; to a superior differentiation, for example. There I understand what is taking place, internally to the whole that is the historical whole. Starting from the moment that I declare that the ensemble of physical-chemical knowledges today, for example, which are effectively knowledges in progress, in enormous progress, but which, precisely because they are in progress, are in crisis – so, starting from the moment that I declare that these knowledges are of a dialectical order, at that very moment I transpose what I know into the human order. Because as you say, this is the very crucible of Marxism: it is man, man in historical materialism, man defining himself within a society through his acts and through his objective reality as social man. So, then, that is a thought that is valuable for man. And I’ll pose the following question, entirely outside of our remit today: don’t you think that there’s a degree of anthropomorphism, in projecting this in time? I do not deny the possibility of a dialectic of nature; I say that it would be a different one. Here we have a difficulty.
Those are all the responses that I wanted to give.
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1Lucio Lombardo Radice (1916–1982), a mathematician and member of the Italian Communist Party’s central committee.
2‘Consciousness, we find, distinguishes from itself something, to which at the same time it relates itself; or, to use the current expression, there is something for consciousness; and the determinate form of this process of relating, or of there being something for a consciousness, is knowledge. But from this being for another we distinguish being in itself or per se; what is related to knowledge is likewise distinguished from it, and posited as also existing outside this relation; the aspect of being per se or in itself is called Truth … But the nature of the object which we are examining surmounts this separation, or semblance of separation, and presupposition. Consciousness furnishes its own criterion in itself, and the inquiry will thereby be a comparison of itself with its own self; for the distinction, just made, falls inside itself. In consciousness there is one element for an other, or, in general, consciousness implicates the specific character of the moment of knowledge. At the same time this “other” is to consciousness not merely for it, but also outside this relation, or has a being in itself, i.e. there is the moment of truth. Thus in what consciousness inside itself declares to be the essence or truth we have the standard which itself sets up, and by which we are to measure its knowledge’. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, Introduction, §§82, 84, text taken from www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phintro.htm.
3Werner Heisenberg (1901–1976), a German physicist, who was one of the founders of quantum physics. The question of subjectivism and its here-announced crisis crystallises around the famous principle of incertitude, or indeterminacy, according to which – to stick to a formulation given above – we cannot know simultaneously both the speed and the position of the electron around the nucleus, and this is not because of any imprecision in the measurements themselves. Heisenberg drew an anti-objectivist and anti-determinist lesson from this: ‘Natural science always presupposes man, and we must become aware of the fact that, as Bohr has expressed it, we are not only spectators but also always participants on the stage of life’: see his ‘The Representation of Nature in Contemporary Physics’, reproduced in Symbolism in Religion and Literature, ed. Rollo May, New York: G. Braziller, 1960, p. 221.
4Arthur Eddington (1882–1944), English astrophysicist, author of The Nature of the Physical World (1928).