VALENTINI:1 I want to venture a few remarks on your [Sartre’s] presentation this morning. I would kindly ask that you consider my observations as a series of questions, and not as objections.
You spoke of subjectivity, and in a certain sense your presentation also related to your book Critique of Dialectical Reason. But I got the impression that you were sticking to the first part of this book, and in particular to the practico-inert. You cited a few examples that don’t go beyond the level of what you call the practico-inert. And I would be keen to ask you whether you think that the theme of subjectivity is still useful from a research and analytical point of view, when we do go beyond the practico-inert? When you speak of the group and of history – and I’ll return to the problems posed by Lombardo-Radice and by those who intervened after him – when it comes to looking at and discussing what we call history, and even when it comes to what we call nature, the subjective appears to have lost its function. So I would be keen to know whether you believe that, even at this level of research, the heuristic category of ‘the subject’ can still fulfil a role?
I get the impression – and in saying this I don’t mean to criticise you – that your book as well as your presentation this morning have a Hegelian rhythm. You’ve presented us some examples, and Paci has told us, pretty clearly, indeed, that Robinson does not exist. That might remind us of what Hegel said, prior to the Phenomenology of Spirit proper, when he presented examples like those of master and slave, sensation, perception, etc. And I believe that the examples that you have given us have the same function as the dialectical figures that Hegel talked about in the first parts of Phenomenology of Spirit.
When Hegel spoke of the spirit as such, when he spoke of the French Revolution – analysing the Terror, which you have discussed at a number of points in your book, he was no longer speaking of subjectivity. When he gives his outline description of the Terror, he does not talk about Robespierre at all. It seems that, for Hegel, the problem of subjectivity was of no use in analysing dialectical levels, higher levels, that is, the levels that transcend what you have called individual praxis as well as the praxis of the practico-inert. The question that I would like to ask you – and I think this may also entail another question – is the following: how can you explain the relations between your position today, which you call Marxist, and the research that you undertook during what we might term the first phase of your thinking?
You offered us a brilliant theory of consciousness in your first article2 – I think that it was your first phenomenological piece regarding your philosophical research – in which you spoke to us about transcendence and the Ego. You also spoke of the structure of consciousness in your Being and Nothingness, where you distinguished between consciousness, as being for oneself, and the being of things, an inert being in oneself. Many of us have read your works and studied your thinking, and we thought that we could discern a certain idealist orientation in your theory of consciousness. I believe that we can also say that these critiques felt the influence of Hegel, that is, that the mind is not only perception, that the mind is not limited to the level of perception, but that there are also higher levels where consciousness, properly speaking, has no function. At this level, Hegel himself spoke of the great man, but that’s something else. That is the first question that I would like to pose to you.
I’ll specify that this perhaps also concerns the same question that we might pose when we think of Hegel’s assertions in his critique of the philosophy of reflection. And I, for my part, believe that existentialism – even your own, up till the most recent phase in your thought – is a philosophy of reflection; that is, that the mind is not only perception, not only consciousness. That poses what is evidently a very important problem, one that we could try and resolve (on this point, I think that we’ll have the opportunity to hear from other people who are here today, who are specialists in this regard), a question that concerns the relations between your position today, your dialectical position and phenomenology in the Husserlian sense, but also in the sense that you elaborated it in your earlier works.
I will make one further remark. Today you didn’t talk about a category which is – I believe – central to your Critique of Dialectical Reason, namely the category of scarcity, which you have elsewhere spoken about a number of times: you have even said that man is the historical product of scarcity. I believe that our thinking can draw great benefit from what you have said elsewhere. For example, the formula in Being and Nothingness that ‘Man is a useless passion’;3 or ‘man is an absolute’,4 as you put it in your Presentation of Les Temps modernes journal, if I am not mistaken; or lastly, ‘Man is a historical product’, that is to say, the product of scarcity. In this sense, it is evident that knowledge is not a pure consciousness, but it is itself historic, having undergone the effect of scarcity. If that is true at the elementary level, for example at the level of the individual and of the practico-inert, I believe that it is all the more true at higher levels.
Last question: this morning you cited a number of examples of dialectics, and Lombardo-Radice and Luporini have also continued citing them. You drew these examples above all from biology, ones related to biology, and you presented examples of dialectics. I remember that there was the example of hemianopia, that is, pathological damage to the vision. You also spoke of the organism – that is, of the totality that is, in sum, the organism. Your dialectic is above all this dialectic of totality; in this sense, it is Hegelian. I think that Della Volpe is completely right on this point: here we are dealing with the dialectic of totality, of the Hegelian totality. But for me that – perhaps it is not worth saying, but it is best to say it anyway – is not a criticism that I am directing against you. I repeat: I only want to pose you some questions.
We could take a lot of examples from the level of biology and biological research, where there is this structure, this configuration, that is totality. In his book Phenomenology of Perception [1945] Merleau-Ponty also elaborated at great length on examples where there was every sign of this dialectical structure and of totality. I remember his famous example of the amputee and his phantom arm, in which the amputee tries to reconstitute this totality.5
I would like to pose the same question to Luporini, by referring, in a certain sense, to what Colletti said:6 do you believe that there is something fruitful to be gained, at this level, from talking about dialectics and totality? For my part, I thought of the judgment-through-reflection in Kant, that is to say, the teleological judgement that does not add any new knowledge, and which is nothing but a kind of ideal and method for the scholar, but is not properly speaking a synthesis but only a reflection, a judgement. However, the true judgement that provides a new knowledge is not that one; it is a determining judgement. I think that we could cite numerous examples even in the biological sciences, within which the structure of totality does have its proper function. For example, when Luporini spoke of a real contradiction, I thought of the contradictions, so to speak, among the vegetative, sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, which all have an antagonistic function and all represent, so to speak, a contradiction in reality. But I ask myself: is this a true contradiction? Is there some use, something fruitful to be drawn from emphasising that? I think that it adds nothing, from the point of view of adding new knowledge.
I will moreover refer to what Luporini spoke about: the question of the unification of the sciences and the function of the dialectic. Personally, I think that the dialectic is a question that concerns the spirit – meaning, the Hegelian spirit. For example, I’ll mention that Father Fessard, who is a dialectician and a Hegelian, has mounted a very interesting study of St Ignatius’s spiritual exercises, basing himself on the Hegelian dialectic. That works very well.
That is not a criticism, but I believe that there do exist experiences – that is, what we call the experiences of the spirit (master and slave, and also the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius, which Father Fessard spoke about)7 – in which the schema of the dialectic proves its fruitfulness. However, I would struggle to believe that this schema also has this same fruitfulness when it comes to historical research; that is, I think that it is above all an anthropological question, expressing a certain anthropomorphism.
We can say that, if the Hegelian dialectic does not always operate, then it is not a law. Indeed, I don’t think that it is a law. In my view, it is a monist prejudice to believe that there is any one law under which all phenomena could be brought together. These are monist prejudices. There are no laws, there exists no law, as general as that. I believe that reality is much richer than that. If we thought that such a law could exist – claiming that there is this dialectic that can be found as a fundamental structure everywhere – then whoever replied that there are many more things in the world than our philosophy can even dream of would always be in the right.
SARTRE: I am going to reply to your points in reverse order – that is, starting from your last question, which moreover seems to me by far the most interesting and generally important one, because fundamentally it poses the very problem of the dialectic, and also extends some way beyond the question that we have come here to discuss. I should start by outlining the extent to which I am in agreement with you, since I do think that the projection of dialectical interpretations onto nature – when the scholar is not resorting to it as a method – has the status of a working hypothesis, or of a regulating principle, or of a Kantian idea, and I am not against that. It is for scholars to see whether that bears them some fruit; I will simply note that, in fact, scholars today do not make much use of it. The scholar, as a scholar, does not use the dialectic a lot, and I would even add that when we envisage these antagonistic forces not on the plane of positive and negative, but truly as an orientation in the universe, that still does not give us a dialectic. It simply gives us directions, orientations, or even oppositions, but not contradictions. So, you’ll find that I agree with you entirely, with regard to the limitations of the dialectic. That’s where the problem gets more difficult, it seems to me: when it comes to asking whether within history itself, at the level of historical materialism, we have some dialectical segments and others that are not – as you seem to indicate – or if we have to imagine it as an entirely dialectical ensemble. And I would like to reply on that point. I do not at all consider the dialectic either as a law or as a set of laws. We can devote ourselves to making laws, on the basis of dialectical movement; perhaps we can produce a logic of the dialectic – Lefebvre did. Why not? But that seems to me wholly secondary.
The true problem is to know whether history is a totalisation or not, and, if it is a totalisation, knowing what are the structures of a real ensemble that totalises itself. That is the level at which I speak of the dialectic. For me, the dialectic is simply that. It is not totality, but the ensemble of structures of a totalisation in process. And when I tried to write a critical work on the dialectic, I did so precisely because it seemed to me that in all the literature – not only the Marxist literature, but all the literature, because everyone is talking about dialectics – the dialectical fact was completely obscured; we don’t understand anything about it anymore. I also cited a quite unbelievable text of Lévi-Strauss’s in which he speaks of the dialectic as a dichotomy. Yet a dichotomy is anything but dialectical, since what it does is separate out its elements. So what I tried to do – and I believe that it’s one of the things that we can try to do – was to render some intelligibility to the dialectic; not a Hegelian intelligibility, not one that starts out from the self-forming Spirit, but a material intelligibility at the level where men are among themselves and where there is totalisation. So, if you will, the problem that needs discussing is a dual one; and if we did discuss it, then the question would be: is totalisation a fact in human society? I think that Marx himself responded to this when he said that production is a whole; that the production process is a whole. There you have it. Effectively, there he gave an answer. And why is the production process a whole? That takes us back to the biological individual, or rather, to the psychosomatic individual, because man, need-work-pleasure [besoin-travail-jouissance] is himself a whole. It is on that basis that the relations among men, in a binary form, in the form of asymmetrical or symmetrical relations, ordered by relations with nature, etc., can begin to constitute a totalisation, and it is starting from this totalisation that we can try to know – not a priori, but in history itself – the conditions for the loss of a totalisation. So it’s there that we have to find an intelligibility of the dialectic, because we are ourselves the beings who make the dialectic; it is not an individual fact, if you will, but an inter-subjective fact, a human fact. That is how I’d respond to your question.
As for the examples I used that are of a psychosomatic order, I used these – like that of the hemianopic – because they go beyond a simple organic reaction; because I think that we cannot truly establish a dialectic based on the organism, and we remain outside of it in order to observe its phenomena of self-regulation, synthesis, etc. But from the moment that there is a psychosomatic being like man, and once the elements of perception, reflection, knowledge and ignorance, and conduct are involved, then we have a totalisation. And that is what is happening in the case of the hemianopic, because this is not a matter of a non-human organism, in which we could observe more or less tendencies for the whole to maintain itself, as, for example, if we removed a frog’s brain. In reality this is the question of a man, integral in his personhood, who on account of facts that are not only somatic but also psychic, tries to recompose this whole that is heading towards disintegration. That is why I took this example, because it also plays out on a level that I would call the material plane, in the sense that here it is not a question of ideas or ideation or objectivation – here, we are on the plane of simple perception. And in perception we can see this attempt at retotalisation, which can give us the primary laws of the dialectic.
And in this respect, I will reply in particular to a criticism that you made of me, when you said that you hardly see why there should be an opposition, a contradiction, within a whole, a totalisation. I will reply by bringing you back to your own critique: I do not understand how there could be contradiction in an infinite nature. I cannot conceive of contradiction except within a unity where two opposed forces, whether they are conscious or not – that is of no importance – either destroy the unity or entirely take it over. I can understand the class struggle within a totalising society, within a unity like French or Italian society. I cannot understand the struggle or contradictory antagonism of two forces that belong to a universe made up of shattered fragments that surround us and are fixed around a particle. Here, we do not have the idea that the unity will be remade on the basis of the destruction of one of the two forces – as in the case of the destruction of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat – or on the basis of the other force – the bourgeois class, which presents itself as the universal class guaranteeing this unity. Here, we do not have the fact of each of the two being the bearer of the whole, and that is what is very important here. So that is my reply to your first question – fundamentally, I consider the materialist dialectic as the only way of envisaging the development of history. I see no other way, and when I tried to write a book on the materialist dialectic I did not do so in order to change it, but to try and see how we could free it of a too-common usage and restore its clarity, which is fundamentally translucency – not an always-given translucency, but a postulated translucency of man with man.
You asked me why I did not address the question of scarcity in this regard. But that was because, if you will, fundamentally the subject is insufficiently defined. For my part, I wanted only to indicate the extent to which subjectivity makes itself in creating objectivity. There is a reality: this reality is a field of interiorisation or an exterior field, and there is a synthetic relation between the two. I do not believe that there is any possibility of creating an objective without this objective being precisely a reality’s seizing-in-interiority of the ensemble of being; and this reality makes itself subjective in creating, capturing or discovering – as you will – the objective; the objective being simply the matter in front of this reality, insofar as it has a relation to it. And I had no need to place myself within the historical perspective of scarcity in order to indicate that. It would be different if you now asked me how this subjectivity is conditioned, how man – on the most indirect plane furthest from scarcity, as well as on the plane closest to it – is conditioned, how his subjectivity itself is entirely scarcity, how it is even scarcity itself that makes the individual’s activity. By that I mean that, when certain conditions create a society in which a man is necessary – not because it needs him, but because there are forces that are mutually paralysed and as such there needs to be a symbol, etc. – this man is himself a scarcity, since he either will or will not be found, and if he is found, he will never be the man that the situation would imply; and as such, we have a singularity in the situation that comes precisely from his scarcity.
So I’ll gladly let you have all that. It’s just that I did not want to address this perspective of a historical order, because for me the true problem is the following: what exactly is the synthetic object–subject relation? And you ask me then, to what extent will subjectivity intervene in the historical forms that transcend the practico-inert – that is, if we follow the hypothesis that there is a transcendence of this practico-inert, which is itself necessarily objective-subjective, and is an inert requirement, because there are men behind it who have real needs; it is men as inert requirement, it creates a system. So I will answer you first by saying that the total dissolution of the practico-inert is not a given, it is not ours. It is a problem that is posed even in a socialist country – the practico-inert does exist there – because it can be produced not only by oppression, but simply by the relation between man and machine, the demands that the machine and the economy place on man, that are retransmitted, etc. There is a practico-inert everywhere, and consequently there is, at this level, a subjectivity everywhere. But also, most importantly, in the socialist countries there is a group effort to break out of that. So at that level, we get to what I just told you, and I think that this is the important thing – that the class or the group or the party is all the more the agent of history the more that it is its own object. To put that another way, subjectivity does persist, but on the one hand it endures as a reality that is weakened in reflection and, on the other hand, it is an object that is at each instant malleable. That is one of its characteristics that we do not emphasise enough. There is a French historian, a right-wing one indeed, who has emphasised this in his analysis of the changing attitude towards the body, birth, death and the family over the last century. This historian, Philippe Ariès, wrote a work entitled Attitudes devant la vie et devant la mort du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, quelques aspects de leurs variations [1949], noting the extremely interesting fact that everything that was subjective with an ideology of the natural in the eighteenth century – for example, with regard to the birth rate – in the nineteenth century instead became a person’s operation on her own body, with all the bourgeois practices of birth control. In the eighteenth century, they had children without any birth control and relied on death to take them away, so they did arrive at a certain equilibrium; but this balance was constituted by a sort of laisser-faire. Children were born, they died; and they let one and the other thing happen. But in the nineteenth century, conversely, with all the bourgeois practices of birth control, the person captured her own body as an object, including in the domain of sexuality. Similarly, our own attitude towards death and the body to be cared for is entirely new: that is, a body is now for us simultaneously both the subjectivity that we are and the object that we are. We see this very clearly – for example, when we look at the difference between a man trying to climb the Annapurna massif fifty years ago and a man trying to do so today. Today this man treats himself as an object, he uses every opportunity to increase his capacities and his strengths, so he has nothing in common with the man who tried to do the climb in previous eras, and who was only an agent, but an agent overwhelmed by his own subjectivity. So we can say that starting from the moment that a group or a class really, truly becomes conscious of what it is, and at the same time, becomes class-conscious – for that is the same thing – it becomes conscious of itself as an object in order to be able to act, in taking account of its objective limits and in utilising them. Like the phrase – I am not sure that Lukács said it, but it more or less corresponds to his line of thinking – that the more you are an object for-yourself, the more you are a subject.
But the problem that you pose has a certain resonance – perhaps Piovene will talk more about it in a moment – that echoes the problem of art, on this level. If we imagined a society freed of subjectivity, not because subjectivity no longer existed, but because it was always kept in the state of an object, then could we conceive of an artist in such a domain – and what is the role of subjectivity in art? This is a whole other problem. At this level, you are right, then, to say that what I tried to do was at the level of what we call a philosophy of reflection. This is not a philosophy of reflection in the sense of the mind reflecting on itself, but a philosophy at the level where there is a distance to oneself – really created by reflection: a philosophy trying to define the social person and the group in its objectivity, starting from subjectivity. You saw today, for example, how I tried to describe a character to you, on the basis of what he had spoken about – ‘le grabuge’– and you see that this was not truly a matter of reflection in the ordinary sense of the word. After all, reflection in the ordinary sense of the word would not need to convey the whole of the person’s life starting from that basis. Rather, it was an analytical regression, which should, then, push towards a synthetic progression; and in what I say later I will describe this progression, how we pass to history, and, specifically, the role of subjectivity. So I think that’s the answer that I should give.
LUPORINI:8 If I understand you correctly, I think that you have posed a rather polemical question. That is, you presuppose the existence of a moment of transcendence in which subjectivity persists only in a state of objectivity. What decides that? Is that what’s at issue? Is that quite right? So I think that I’ll have to reject this question, as a matter of principle – in the sense that I think that there will never be such a moment, when subjectivity is maintained in social life only in a state of objectivity.
SARTRE: No, that’s not quite right. I said that reflected subjectivity – the subjectivity that is the object of reflection, if you will – would be maintained in the state of an object; but reflection itself is, in substance, subjectivity. Or an immediate, unreflected consciousness. We have seen how the fact of its existing without distance makes it subjective, but in certain cases of contradiction, as in, for example, the case of the worker who is simultaneously both Communist and anti-Semitic, there is cause for the emergence of a reflection that grasps this first consciousness, this first subjectivity, as a reflected subjectivity; it grasps it almost as if at a distance. It is this first consciousness, the consciousness that is reflected, that I think will be more and more objectified in the sense that we can increasingly grasp it in its objective motivations, like those men and women who are very much involved in their own psychoanalysis, and at the very moment that they see certain movements of anger, fear or anxiety arising within themselves, manage to grasp them in an objective form. Which does not prevent subjectivity from appearing, since in any case man is subjectivity, and cannot be anything else. That is all that I wanted to say, and there can be no question of eliminating subjectivity from nature.
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1Francesco Valentini (1924–), philosophy historian, and author, in 1958, of La filosofia francese contemporanea. He published Il pensiero politico contemporaneo in 1979, and Soluzioni hegeliane in 2001.
2‘La Transcendance de l’Ego: esquisse d’une description phénoménologique’, Recherches philosophiques, no. 6, 1936/37, pp. 85–123, republished by Sylvie Le Bon under the same title in 1966 (Paris: Vrin) and then by Vincent de Coorbyter, La Transcendance de l ‘Ego et autres textes phénoménologiques (Paris: Vrin, 2003).
3‘Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion’: Being and Nothingness, p. 615.
4‘No, a worker cannot live like a bourgeois. In today’s social organisation he is forced to undergo to the limit his condition as a wage-labourer. No escape is possible; there is no recourse against it. But man does not exit in the same way that a tree or a pebble does: he must make himself a worker. Though he is completely conditioned by his class, his salary, the nature of his work, conditioned even in his feelings and his thoughts, it is nevertheless up to him to decide on the meaning of his condition and that of his comrades. It is up to him, freely, to give the proletariat a future of constant humiliation or one of conquest and triumph, depending on whether he chooses to be resigned or a revolutionary. And this is the choice for which he is responsible. He is not at all free to choose: he is implicated, forced to wager; abstention is also a choice. But he is free to choose at the same time his destiny, the destiny of all men, and the value to be attributed to humanity. Thus does he choose himself simultaneously as a worker and a man, while at the same time conferring a meaning upon the proletariat. Such is man as we conceive him: integral man. Totally committed and totally free. And yet it is the free man who must be delivered, by enlarging his possibilities of choice. In certain situations there is room for only two alternatives, one of which is death. It is necessary to proceed in such a way that man, in every circumstance, can choose life’: Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Introducing Les Temps modernes’, in ‘What Is Literature?’ and Other Essays, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 265. Translation altered.
5Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 76ff.
6Valentini is referring to a prior intervention by Lucio Colletti, not included here.
7Gaston Fessard (1897–1978), Jesuit. The work here being referred to is La dialectique des exercices spirituels de Saint Ignace de Loyola (Paris: Aubier, 1956). This was the first volume out of three: the second was issued in 1964, and the third in 1984, by the same publisher.
8Cesare Luporini (1909–1993) taught the history of philosophy at the Universities of Cagliari, Pisa and Florence until 1984. Having initially been of an existentialist bent, he then turned to Marxism and was a member of the PCI from 1943 until 1991. He was an elected senator from 1958 to 1963 in the third legislature of the Italian Republic. He opposed the transformation of the PCI into the PDS (Partito Democratico della Sinistra) and instead sided with Rifondazione Comunista. His Marxism was founded on a critique of historicism, rejecting economistic Marxist dogmatism. Among his most important works was Dialettica e materialismo (1974).