SEMERARI:1 I get the feeling that in general this debate has not sufficiently taken into account the presupposition at the basis of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Probably Sartre himself, in his summary exposition of his position, did not do enough to emphasise this assumption. At bottom, the Critique of Dialectical Reason emerged at a particular moment: it had precedents that we can find even within Sartre’s own works, as well as in the cultural and political situation of our time. Everyone knows that the core around which he built the Critique of Dialectical Reason was the very long article ‘Search for a Method’ [otherwise known as ‘The Problem of Method’, first published in Les Temps modernes in 1957.2 And 1957 is a date of some significance, when it comes to our reflections on this question. This came just after the Twentieth Congress [of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union] and the [1956] events in Hungary. Sartre had already published Being and Nothingness [in 1943] some years previously. Between Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason there were works like L’Humanisme littéraire,3 Adventures of the Dialectic [1955] and even Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception [1945]. Merleau-Ponty is not discussed in Critique of Dialectical Reason, but I think that he is very much present in this work. That is not to deny the originality and novelty of Sartre’s method and the coherence of the method that he deployed in Critique of Dialectical Reason, with respect to his previous works.
But this morning I would like very briefly to draw the attention of all our friends in attendance to the question that is at the very beginning of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason – that is, to draw your attention to the introduction. Throughout what I say, here I am taking the position of a disinterested onlooker – relatively disinterested from the viewpoint of Marxist orthodoxy, as well as from a non-Marxist point of view. That is, the position of someone addressing the problem of the goal that Sartre set himself when he wrote the Critique of Dialectical Reason.
We find a formulation of this problem right at the start of the book. Sartre says: My goal is to pose the problem of our time, which interests us as philosophers, politicians, sociologists, ideologues and psychologists, as men of culture and also as common men, the problem of how we can construct an anthropology, that is, of a radically, integrally human conception of man. In order to arrive at such a vision, in order to enrich this perspective of a theoretical character – and it is, after all, a theoretical way of looking at things – we need to decide on certain steps and to make certain cultural choices.
Now, Marxism makes up part of our field of choices as a possible operational tool in putting together this structural and historical anthropology. In my view, this is a fundamental point. But when I was listening to the various interventions yesterday, I got the impression that this perspective was being somewhat sidelined, and that fundamentally we were discussing the alternative between a sort of absolute choice, or else a Marxism that wholly inserts itself within contemporary culture and yet does not recoil at the possibility of being radically revised.
Yesterday we heard the intervention of an illustrious colleague who disagreed, and who said, ‘Of course, we could do that, but if we did, we would have to be careful, because we would be putting everything into question’. And that is precisely the point: we have to be ready to discuss everything, as appropriate, as necessary. But, I thought, the problem lies somewhere else. The decisive choice is between a Marxism that presents itself as open to and prepared for even the most radical revision within the context of contemporary culture, and a Marxism closed in on itself, which becomes scholastic, and, even if it declares itself open to dialogue, nonetheless closes in on itself again as soon as dialogue starts to produce its effects – thus becoming, in a certain sense, a formula that is the answer to everything.
Besides, we know of earlier analogous cases in the history of Western culture. For example, at the level of Christianity, which has undergone fundamentally the same process. In certain aspects, Christianity has become a formula that claims to be able to contain all the cultural possibilities of our world, and all the more so in that it declares itself ready to accept determinate forms of post-Christian culture.
And following the various interventions of our Marxist and communist friends yesterday, I noted that this concern was very much present – the concern that the dialogue between Marxism and currents of non-Marxist origins could transform into a process of revising Marxism, into a radical questioning of certain fundamentals of Marxism, and especially when the debate brought into relief the points of contact or derivation between Marxism and Leninism. If we put Hegelianism into question, then Marx’s fidelity to Hegel becomes a fundamental question. If we outline the limits to Hegelianism, then we must also outline the limits to Marxism, and vice versa.
But it seems to me that the way in which Sartre posed the problem is aimed, on the one hand, at freeing Marxism of the pre-Marxist elements that continue to operate within it, and, on the other hand, at proposing an interpretation of Marxism that brings Marxism itself back to its original core, which we’ll term ‘existential’ in the broad sense, to use Sartre’s language. As a result, after ‘Search for a Method’ came out, Sartre’s work was interpreted as an eclectic attempt to fuse existentialism and Marxism. It has been said that the existentialism that became susceptible to Marxism at a certain moment is the existentialism that finally learned Lukács’s lesson on existentialism-Marxism and began to situate itself on the terrain of Marxism. It has been said that the Critique of Dialectical Reason, read literally, would itself ultimately authorise such an interpretation. Indeed, Sartre is explicit, categorical: he defines existentialism as a parasitical philosophy, a philosophy that lives on the margins of the philosophy of our time, namely Marxism.
However, at a certain moment Sartre attracts our attention to the fact that even though existentialism can and must be considered a philosophy that parasites on Marxism, it also has its own necessity and its own reason to make itself felt within Marxism: the need for existentialism within the dimension of Marxism itself, by which we mean existentialism’s own existential project. So the attentive reader will not have failed to note – on page 125 of the Critique, I think4 –Sartre’s statement according to which, as soon as Marxism accepts the existential method and makes it its own, that is to say, the method of the existential project, it will no longer be right to speak of existentialism and Marxism as just so many antagonistic and unilateral positions. On the contrary, existentialism will concretely have realised philosophy in the world, philosophy in its mundane becoming and, ultimately, the essential philosophical problem of Marxism itself.
If, initially, it may have seemed that Sartre had converted to Marxism, a more attentive reading suggests that this was more a question of an ‘existentialisation’ of Marxism, which implies, therefore, a profound transformation of the structures and categories of such an existentialism or such an interpretation of existentialism.
Now, when I refer to these motivations or these elements that contributed to the introduction to the Critique of Dialectical Reason, my intention is not that this will be of solely philological value, but rather that it is fundamentally important for appreciating the Critique of Dialectical Reason, its relation with Marxism, and Marxism itself, within their historical context and in a radically historical manner.
Today it is no longer possible to address the question of Marxism invoking only Marx’s own texts, that is, the texts written by a man who lived from 1818 to 1883. I remember hearing a number of interventions yesterday in which the speakers were keen to emphasise that Marx himself had recognised the existentialist foundation of praxis, in his Deutsche Ideologie and his Thesen über Feuerbach. In the Deutsche Ideologie he clearly says that the presupposition of the historical process is constituted by really existing individuals, individuals acting concretely.5
Some people have pointed out that the problematic of sensibility is present in the Theses on Feuerbach, in the 1844 Manuscripts, and later in Capital, etc. They cited these references in order to emphasise that everything that was later developed in the Critique of Dialectical Reason already existed in Marx. In a certain sense, that is true, but in another sense that’s not the case, since we have to occupy ourselves with Marxism today, in 1961, in the middle of the twentieth century; and twentieth-century Marxism can no longer be considered independently of its Leninist and Stalinist developments. This, too, is Marxism.
If we were to situate ourselves on the terrain of debating Marx’s texts, taken as such, then we would certainly be doing a very useful and very important job. But I am not sure that this can help us to develop the structural and historical anthropology that we spoke about earlier, and to define the philosophical-political work we need in order to make this anthropological project concretely realisable, and not limited to a simple rhetoric destined to run its course. In this sense, it seems to me that the discussions emerging on the political terrain, like, for example, the suspension of socialist legality6 – an important theme of contemporary debate – must appropriately be brought to the level of the problematic that we are discussing here, in order to verify to what degree Marxism, in its ideology, contributed or did not contribute to defining these positions, which are certainly not Marxist, nor democratic, and leave us extremely perplexed as to what a generically Marxist way of posing this problem would look like.
But before concluding my intervention – which, I repeat, did not propose to offer solutions, but only to call our conference’s attention back to these presuppositions, these foundations of Sartre’s discourse – I would like to mention two points in the introduction to the Critique of Dialectical Reason, that is to say, the ‘Search for a Method’.
1. Page 18, note 1:7 Sartre establishes a relation between Hegel, Kierkegaard and Marx, and recalls – using the language of contemporary semiology – that, from Hegel’s point of view, the signifier is always the Spirit, the absolute Spirit, absolute History, while the signified is the individual in his concrete aspect. Conversely, according to Dewey8 the signifier is always and only the individual, but the individual considered in his abstract character. But, for Marx – and we are perfectly in agreement here – the signifier is always the individual as a community acting historically and as a historical praxis.
That is precisely the point that we want to see the debate take a closer look at – the question of how to conceive this signifier-community and render it operational. If it is not structured in a certain manner, does it not run the risk of becoming substantialised and thus superposing itself on the individual in his concrete determination? Or could it be structured in such a way that it can always maintain the freedom and openness of the communication between the individual and itself ? It is clear that Marxism would truly be in the avant-garde of modern thought if it was able to provide a positive resolution of this problem.
2. The second point, with which I will conclude my intervention – and I’ll ask you to excuse me if I have gone on too long – regards what Sartre reminds us of in note 1 on pp. 30–319 with regard to epistemology, the epistemological interpretation that concerns the Marxist-materialist foundation of the problem of subjectivity: he brings into relief the bracketing of subjectivity between parentheses, from the Marxist and then Leninist point of view.
So even if this may seem paradoxical, he slips on the one hand towards a form that’s proper to constitutive idealism, and, on the other hand, to a form that’s proper to sceptical idealism. The point is this: subjectivity must be considered as immersed in a circularity, which, starting from subjectivity, results in the objectivity of the world, and vice versa. So, in this sense, subjectivity has to be considered a functional moment, as a critical-functional moment. From this point of view, it seems to me that here Marxism opens up, and decidedly so, to pragmatism in its most noble and classic form, namely Dewey’s form of concrete existentialism, which I don’t think we can define as a bourgeois philosophy in this regard.
So it is important to consider subjectivity as the critical moment, as the moment of critical suspension, as the moment of the reduction of the objective situation. In my very modest opinion, Marxism has bequeathed us two fundamental, absolutely positive teachings: the first is that of the human foundation of knowledge, of culture and of science; the second, the teleological perspective in which the construction of our knowledge must be inserted – a teleological perspective which, in its popular form in the 1848 Communist Manifesto, appears as the perspective of building a society where the freedom of each becomes the condition for the freedom of all. In Kantian terms, it can be conceived as the perspective in which man is an end for the other man. I think that we have to hold on very tight to these two points, if we want to have a discourse that is both critical and at the same time constructive, in light of the experience of twentieth-century Marxism and not that of the Marxism of the nineteenth century.
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1Giuseppe Semerari (1922–1996), specialist in contemporary philosophy from Husserl to Lukács, professor of philosophy at the University of Bari, director of Paradigmi, a journal of philosophical criticism. His many works include La filosofia come relazione (1961) and, with regard to Sartre, Vito Carofiglio and Giuseppe Semerari, eds, Jean-Paul Sartre: teoria, scrittura, impegno, Bari: Edizoni dal Sud, 1985.
2‘ “The Problem of Method” was an occasional piece – hence its somewhat hybrid character, and the fact that it seems to approach problems somewhat indirectly. A Polish journal decided to devote its Winter 1957 issue to French culture, intending to give its readers a panorama of what we still refer to as “nos familles d’esprit”. Many different writers were invited to participate, and I was asked to write on “The situation of Existentialsm in 1957”…. My article was subsequently republished in the review Les Temps modernes, but I altered it considerably to suit French readers. It is this version which is published here. The title has been changed from “Existentialisme et Marxisme” to “Questions de méthode” (“The Problem of Method”). Finally, my intention is to raise one question, and only one: do we now possess the materials for constituting a structural, historical anthropology?’ Critique of Dialectical Reason, pp. 821–2.
3An apparent conflation of Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946) and What Is Literature? (1947).
4Semerari is clearly citing the 1960 French edition. To see the basis for the argument he is here elaborating, it is worth looking at the whole first part of the introduction (pp. 115–35 in the 1960 edition, pp. 135–59 in the 1985 one) rather than just the page cited here.
5‘In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here it is a matter of ascending from earth to heaven. That is to say, not of setting out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh; but setting out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process demonstrating the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process’ (Marx/Engels Collected Works, vol. 5, p. 36).
6Here Semerari refers to Khrushchev’s 25 February 1956 ‘Secret Speech’ on ‘the cult of personality and its consequences’. He said that the expression ‘enemy of the people’, invented by Stalin, had ‘made possible the use of the cruellest repression, violating all norms of revolutionary legality, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin’.
7For the English edition, see The Problem of Method, London: Methuen, 1963, p. 9. Referring to Jean Hyppolite’s 1955 book Études sur Marx et Hegel, in this note Sartre emphasises that it is possible to ‘draw Hegel over to the side of existentialism’, with ‘his panlogicism complemented by a pantragicism’. Yet, he continues, that is not where the problem lies: what Kierkegaard opposes in Hegel is the fact that he neglected the ‘unsurpassable opacity of lived experience’. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, the man is the signifier, who himself produces significations, none of which target him from the outside: ‘he is never the signified (even by God)’.
8It would be impossible to present the oeuvre of John Dewey (1859–1952) in a footnote. So we will limit ourselves to saying that he was an eminent representative of pragmatic philosophy (not to be confused with pragmatism in the everyday sense), who was also an ‘activist’ (again to use the American vocabulary). His works include The Public and Its Problems (1927) and Art as Experience (1934).
9For the English edition, see The Problem of Method, p. 32n1. This very long note is a recap of the theory of consciousness (and not theory of the subject) that Sartre had advanced in Being and Nothingness, on the basis of which he constructed what we might call an a-naturalist materialism in Critique of Dialectical Reason. To cite the first few lines: ‘The methodological principle which holds that certitude begins with reflection in no way contradicts the anthropological principle which defines the concrete person by his materiality. For us, reflection is not reduced to the simple immanence of idealist subjectivism; it is a point of departure only if it throws us back immediately among things and men, in the world. The only theory of knowledge which can be valid today is one which is founded on that truth of microphysics: the experimenter is part of the experimental system. This is the only position which allows us to get rid of all idealist illusion, the only one which shows the real man in the midst of the real world’. This was a materialist perspective that he had already heralded in his 1936 Transcendence of the Ego.