As Paul Ricœur reminds us in
L’Idéologie et l’utopie,
the ascription of the characteristic of being ‘ideological’
to a set of ideas has traditionally always had pejorative implications.
One’s own ideas are not ideological, only those of one’s adversaries.
[1]
The philosophical and critical writings of the early Sartre do not offer
an explicit discussion of the concept of ideology. Even in
Cahiers pour
une morale, notable for the evidence they provide of Sartre’s
increasing rapprochement with Marxism, ideology
per se is never Sartre’s
centre of interest. This observation would perhaps seem unnoteworthy were
it not for the numerous and varied examples of ideology
[2]
at work to be found in Sartre’s critical and, in particular, literary
works. In these works ideological positions are presented almost exclusively
in a negative light. For this reason, and even more importantly because
of the intrinsic character of his existentialist philosophy, it seems likely
that the early Sartre did not consider his own position ideological in any
significant sense. The later Sartre of
Quéstions de méthode,
however, refers to existentialism itself as an ideology.
[3]
In this context it is not immediately clear whether Sartre considers the
label ‘ideological’ to be implicitly pejorative or whether he
means to employ the term in a neutrally descriptive way. Given his project
of formulating a synthesis of Marxism and existentialism in this work, the
latter interpretation would seem the most plausible. And yet in view of
the later Sartre’s tendency, in interviews notably, to be critical,
even reductive at times,
[4] of
his earlier philosophical positions, it is perhaps fair to infer an implicitly
pejorative tone to some extent.
[5]
Setting aside this matter for the time being, it is clear that an awareness
of the later Sartre’s characterisation of existentialism as ‘ideological’
is greatly beneficial to an analysis of his early philosophy in relation
to ideology. Such an awareness inevitably stimulates a profound questioning
of what the early Sartre’s texts themselves often seem to be impressing
on the reader with such force, namely that the theoretical underpinnings
of their arguments and positions are non-ideological. A valuable critical
distance between reader and text is thus introduced into the interpretative
process as we are brought to recognise that, with regard to the matter of
ideology, the truth may well lie at times not just in what the early Sartre
states explicitly but also in what he does not say.
1. The early Sartre’s aversion to ideology
Talk of ideology often suggests a concern with the political and this area
was of course not a preoccupation for Sartre in his theoretical work prior
to the latter part of the 1940s. Yet his literary texts, from
La Nausée
and
Le Mur onwards, are rich in political content. Although the
characterisations and settings in Sartre’s fiction are often contrasting,
one of the uniting features of the large majority of his works is the negative
portrayal of individual subjects who subscribe to any kind of ideological
belief-system. Moreover, given the close, almost symbiotic, relationship
between Sartre’s fictional representations and his theoretical positions,
there is reason to suppose that there might be interesting parallels to
this stance with regard to ideology to be found in his philosophical writings.
Sartre’s texts provide examples of various ideologies at work, such
as bourgeois, fascist, religious, racist, and Stalinist Marxist, and he
is clearly hostile to all of them. Whilst it is important to recognise fully
the particularity of the contexts in which these ideologies are situated,
and the specificity and genuineness of each of these aversions of Sartre’s,
establishing parallels with his theoretical postulates enables us to see
connections between these different representations of ideology which perhaps
point to underlying reasons for his dislike of ideology. Ultimately, we
are lead to ask whether it is ideology
per se which Sartre objected
to fundamentally, and not just particular ideologies in their specificity.
That is, it may be that the character of Sartre’s philosophical world
view was such that he found ideology in all its forms repellent.
In
Questions de méthode Sartre, whilst acknowledging his ambiguous
and ultimately uncomprehending attitude towards Marxism as a young man,
explains that a key preoccupation for him, in reaction to the idealist tendencies
of French philosophy at the time, had nevertheless been to attempt to grasp
the concrete.
[6] This point is
corroborated and developed by Simone de Beauvoir in various ways in
La
force de l’âge.
[7]
It is clear that Sartre’s interest in phenomenology in the 1930s was
motivated by his conviction that this philosophy would allow him to account
philosophically for things themselves. In the conclusion to
La Transcendance
de l’ego, Sartre argues that in contrast to the idealism of such
as Brunschvicg, that ‘[i]l y a des siècles...qu’on n’avait
senti dans la philosophie un courant aussi réaliste.’
[8]
Indeed, it is in the interests of attaining a greater philosophical realism
that Sartre insists, setting himself apart from Husserl, that the ego, unlike
consciousness, is not transcendental but transcendent, and hence ‘un
existant rigoureusement contemporain du monde et dont l’existence
a les mêmes caractéristiques essentielles que le monde.’
[9]
It is here in the nature of this distinction between consciousness and the
ego that the theoretical origins of the early Sartre’s libertarian
philosophy, arguably the most central and enduring characterisitic of his
thought, are to be found. In
L’Etre et le néant the
pour soi is presented as distinct from and irreducible to the transcendent
en soi and as consequently empty and constantly projecting itself
into the world. It hence enjoys an inalienable freedom. There are constraints
on this freedom such as facticity and the fact that it is necessarily in
situation, an issue which I will return to later, but ultimately consciousness
is able to transcend these limitations.
[10]
Concomitant with this is Sartre’s conviction that the subjective consciousness
is inassimilable to any notion of social collectivity or indeed any kind
of antecedent forces which could be considered to have a determining influence
on it. Indeed, he is critical of all cases in which individual subjects
appear to be identifying, as free subjectivities, with an antecedently defined
essence of whatever sort. The classic example of such behaviour presented
in
L’Etre et le néant is that of bad faith in which
the subject is guilty of voluntary self-alienation because he or she attempts
to over-identify with a pre-defined social role. Aside from the fact that
such social roles can themselves be seen as having an ideological dimension
in certain cases,
[11] there
is good reason to suppose that although Sartre does not discuss ideology
as such in
L’Etre et le néant, his aversion to any kind
of constraint on freedom brought about by antecedent determining forces
implies a dislike of any notion of ideological system. To accept that an
individual is under the influence of an ideology, and that his or her ideas
and opinions are perhaps formed in accordance with it, is surely to recognise
that his or her freedom of thought might be subject to certain important
limitations. It is precisely this idea which the early Sartre resists so
staunchly and which the numerous cases of subjective freedom alienated by
one particular ideology or another in his fictional and critical works exemplify.
In
La Nausée there are a number of immediately contiguous
passages starting from Roquentin’s visit to the Bouville museum which,
both individually and above all taken together, convey particularly well
Sartre’s dislike of ideology. In this case, bourgeois ideology is
Sartre’s principal target and it is personified, but also suitably
reified, in the portraits of the bourgeois leaders (‘chefs’
[12])
of Bouville. These leaders clearly symbolise a set of values which are inimical
to the Sartrean world view, as is summed up by Roquentin’s concluding
remark before leaving the museum, ‘adieu, Salauds.’
[13]
What immediately follows in the text is Roquentin’s decision to
abandon the Rollebon project, and then his subsequent resurfacing via a
series of existential discoveries. This succession of events suggests a
final bottoming out of bourgeois ideology on Roquentin’s part prior
to a kind of rebirth into a more authentic mode of existence. Indeed, not
only his distaste for the bourgeois ‘salauds’ but also his feeling
that the Rollebon project is now pointless is part of this bottoming out
process. For although it would be both an oversimplification and an overstatement
to suggest that the Rollebon project instantiates bourgeois ideology in
the text as the portraits do, nevertheless it seems far from merely coincidental
that Sartre should have portrayed Roquentin abandoning a
particularly
stuffy critical project of this sort immediately after his feelings of hatred
for the bourgeoisie have come to a head. There is clearly some sort of thematic
link in the text between these two events in Roquentin’s experience,
and the suggestion is that they are both important preliminaries to Roquentin’s
existential self-discovery.
Roquentin’s bottoming out of bourgeois ideology is also the moment
of transition in him from what Joseph Catalano identifies as a strong kind
of bad faith in him to bad faith of a weaker, and unavoidable, variety.
[14]
That is, there is a clear connection between Sartre’s portrayals of
ideology and inauthenticity such that Roquentin’s escape from bourgeois
ideology coincides with his transition to a less inauthentic mode of existence.
For example, he now realises that through his work on Rollebon he has been
hiding from the reality of his own existence: ‘il avait besoin de
moi pour être et j’avais besoin de lui pour ne pas sentir mon
être...Je ne m’apercevais plus que j’existait, je n’existait
plus en moi, mais en lui’.
[15]
Moreover, Roquentin’s escape from bourgeois ideology also coincides
with his coming to more acute awareness of the concreteness of his own existence
and that of the world around him. Hence, by the same stroke Sartre dispenses
with bougeois ideology
and affirms an anti-idealist philosophical
position. Whilst it is important not to assimilate bourgeois ideology and
idealist philosophy to one another, there is a clear coherence to this dual
rejection strongly suggested by Sartre at this point in
La Nausée.
From the Sartrean perspective, ideology and philosophical idealism have
in common a pronounced metaphysical dimension, which is to say that they
both involve abstraction from reality. Sartre is wary of any such abstraction
because, in the case of ideology, it allows for the possibility that the
individual subject’s free consciousness might be determined ‘from
above’ by an antecedently existing value-system and, in the case of
philosophical idealism, it implies a distancing from the concreteness of
existence. Given that, as Beauvoir remarks, the originality of Sartre’s
position was that he wanted
both to insist on the freedom and autonomy
of consciousness
and to accord to concrete reality its full weight,
[16]
these kinds of abstraction were unacceptable to him.
Sartre continues to pursue his attack on bourgeois ideology notably in
L’Enfance
d’un chef,
[17] here
blackening it further here by pointing to the ways in which it can be complicit
with fascist political tendencies. In many ways, Lucien Fleurier can be
seen as a kind of alter ego to Antoine Roquentin. Whereas the latter’s
rejection of bourgeois certainties leads him into existential questions,
a rejection of the metaphysical, and, ultimately, to the idea of salvation
through art, Lucien, by contrast, passes through a phase of existential
anguish and self-questioning only to re-emerge an even more confident and
resolute young bourgeois than he had been at the outset. This coming to
maturity is closely related to his finding his way politically through joining
a right-wing anti-semitic group. The connection between Lucien’s newfound
political affiliations and bourgeois ideology is articulated with considerable
subtlety in
L’Enfance d’un chef. His father, a bourgeois
factory owner, brushes over the objection that Lucien might get himself
into trouble, arguing that he should be allowed to continue and adds that
‘il faut en avoir passé par là.’
[18]
We also learn that Lucien entertains his political associates with ‘des
histoires juives qu’il tenait de son père’.
[19]
And he flatters himself that the effect his anti-semitic convictions have
on others is similar to the effect the news that his father was working
in his office used to produce on him.
[20]
Clearly, Sartre has incarnated in Lucien’s father many of the values
that he most dislikes and a parallel can be drawn with the bourgeois leaders
immortalised in the portrait gallery of the Bouville museum in
La Nausée.
Written during the same period as
L’Etre et le néant,
Les Mouches stages an opposition between the inalienably free subject
defined in that work and the influence of an oppressive ideology perhaps
more clearly than anywhere else in Sartre’s fiction. The implications
of the portrayal of Orestes’ as an allegorical representation of resistance
to the German occupation and to the Vichy regime are readily apparent.
[21]
In the face of a particulary powerful form of ideology in the pejorative
sense, to borrow from Raymond Geuss’ interpretative schema,
[22]
Orestes’ autonomy of thought and action prove to be irreducible because
he knows that he is free. He is immune to the noxious influence of the guilt
culture of Argos because, as Jupiter explains to Egisthe, ‘Quand une
fois la liberté a explosé dans une âme d’homme,
les Dieux ne peuvent plus rien contre cet homme-là.’
[23]
Subsequent to his murdering Egisthe, even the presence of the flies and
Jupiter’s intimidation tactics cannot bring Oreste to subordinate
himself to the dominant ideology and he hence proceeds to defeat it. The
portrayal of Oreste is perhaps the pinnacle of the early Sartre’s
heroic libertarianism. It is also where the clearest parallel is to be found
to his claim in
L’Existentialisme est un humanisme that existentialism
is ‘un effort pour tirer toutes les conséquences d’une
position athée cohérente’; whether God exists or not,
man must accept full responsibility for his actions.
[24]
Religious ideology is superfluous at best and can also be mystificatory
and insidious, as in this case.
Réflexions sur la question juive and
La Putain respectueuse
are perhaps the best expositions of the intrinsically anti-racist character
of Sartrean existentialism. There are many indications in these works that
the racism which Sartre is attacking, in these cases anti-semitic and anti-black
respectively, has a strong ideological dimension. Sartre remarks, with regard
to the anti-semite, that it is ‘
l’idée de Juif
qui paraît essentielle’, and that anti-semitism is ‘une
attitude globale’ and ‘une conception du monde’;
[25]
he also suggests that individuals become anti-semites by falling in with
a pre-existing social tendency.
[26]
In
La Putain respectueuse, Fred and his associates impress on Lizzie
in numerous ways that the strategy with which they wish her to be complicit
is in line with the values of the American nation as a whole.
[27]
Sartre’s hostility to racism in these works centres primarily on its
essentialist character. Early in
Réflexions he provides examples
of anti-semitic attitudes that he has encountered, all of which amount to
criticisms of Jews first and foremost because they are Jewish rather than
with regard to their actions;
[28]
the anti-semite’s conviction, both an assumed truth and an emotional
commitment, is impervious to either experience or reason.
[29]
In
La Putain respectueuse, instances abound in which the black character
is portrayed in a negative light by whites for no other reason than his
race. Above all, the fact that the innocence of this character with regard
to Lizzie and the events on the train is unambiguously established in the
first scene of the play means that the devious schemes of Fred’s clan
clearly appear as a manifestation of a time-ingrained and institutionalised
racism.
In
Réflexions, perhaps because it is a critical rather than
a fictional work, many clear parallels between the image of racist ideology
which Sartre presents and with his theoretical claims are presented, whereas
in
La Putain respectueuse a relationship with other kinds of ideology,
notably bourgeois and patriarchal ideologies, is suggested. Sartre’s
hostility to essentialism is of course a cornerstone of his early philosophy.
The irreconcilability of consciousness with being means that the individual
subject is inescapably free and hence cannot be defined in terms of any
fixed essence but only in terms of his actions: ‘l’homme n’est
rien d’autre que ce qu’il se fait.’
[30]
Consequently, any attempt to attribute such an essence to an individual
or group of individuals must be the work of the other rather as, in
L’Etre
et le néant, the reification of the subject’s freedom is
produced by the objectifying glance of the other. It is the anti-semite,
then, who creates the Jew and then proceeds to oppress him or her.
[31]
In
La Putain respectueuse, Sartre’s treatment of essentialism
concerns not only fallacious perceptions of the oppressed but also the self-perception
and self-representation of his oppressors, and it is here that Sartre’s
critique of racist ideology links up with his hostility to bourgeois and
patriarchal ideologies. For if Fred’s and his associates’ anti-black
racism is shored up by an essentialist conception of the black race, it
is also bolstered by an essentialist view of themselves not only as whites
but also as members of a politically and economically dominant class, and
as men. Attempting to persuade Lizzie not to testify against his cousin
Thomas, who had murdered an innocent black man on the train, Fred remarks
that Thomas is ‘un homme de bien’. Lizzie expresses surprise
at this, pointing out that he had been constantly pushing himself against
her and had tried to lift up her skirt, to which Fred replies:
Il a relevé tes jupes, il a tiré sur un sale nègre,
la belle affaire; ce sont les gestes qu’on a sans y penser, ça
ne compte pas. Thomas est un chef, voilà ce qui compte.[32]
The clear implication of this statement is that Thomas, as a white bourgeois
male, was perfectly justified in acting the way he had done; such an individual,
by his very nature, enjoys a position of superiority with respect to blacks
and women. At the end of the play, when Lizzie is theatening to shoot Fred
if he comes any closer, he employs the following argument to persuade her
to back down:
Mon père est sénateur, je serai sénateur après
lui... Nous avons fait ce pays et son histoire est la nôtre... Oserais-tu
tirer sur toute l’Amérique?
... Une fille comme toi ne peut pas tirer sur un homme comme moi...
Moi, j’ai le droit de vivre: il y a beaucoup de choses à
entreprendre et l’on m’attend.[33]
Here Sartre similarly stages the bourgeois spirit of seriousness and illusion
of immanence, and in a way reminiscent of the newly resolute Lucien Fleurier
at the end of
L’Enfance d’un chef. The essentialism of
the racist’s conception of race- both his own and that of other races-
is thereby intertwined with the essentialism of bourgeois and patriarchal
ideologies. Sartre sums up individuals who subscribe to these ideologies,
and who hence attempt to suppress their own freedom at an ontological level
in order to assert their socio-political power (surely another kind of freedom),
in a remark pertaining to the anti-semite: ‘il y a des gens qui sont
attirés par la permanence de la pierre.’
[34]
Sartre’s hostility to Stalinist Marxist ideology is expressed in a
number of his works, both critical and fictional. In
L’Age de raison,
when Mathieu hopes that his previously close friendship with Brunet might
be renewed, the latter replies: ‘Je tiens toujours à toi...Mais
ça ne change rien à l’affaire: mais seuls amis, à
présent, ce sont les camarades du parti, avec ceux-là, j’ai
tout un monde en commun.’
[35]
Brunet thereby suggests that he can see his social relationships now only
through the lens of the Stalinist communist ideological position he has
adopted. In
Matérialisme et révolution,
[36]
Sartre sets about dismantling the theoretical supports of this political
ideology, highlighting many of its considerable weaknesses. Although Stalinist
communists advocate a revolutionary politics, their insistence on a mechanistic
dialectical materialism reduces man to an object in a causal chain. For
Sartre, this clearly amounts to an essentialism of the most direct and obvious
kind and he suggests that, in so far as man is consequently stripped of
his freedom of thought, the revolutionary ideal is undermined.
[37]
Stalinist communists’ appeals to objectivity over subjectivity are
an expression of the spirit of seriousness and of the flight from one’s
freedom which is characteristic of bad faith.
[38]
Brunet’s ‘ça ne change rien à l’affaire’
is an instantiation of this notion of the priority of the objective over
the subjective; although he is still fond of Mathieu, objectively he thinks
he ought not consider him a friend any more because Mathieu will not actively
support communism. And if the Stalinist communists’ dialectical materialist
philosophy sidelines the issue of individual subjective freedom by prioritising
an objective conception of reality, it is not for all that a philosophy
of the concrete. The claim that all phenomena are inevitably determined
by dialectical material forces is metaphysical in nature, Sartre argues,
because it involves superimposing onto reality an a priori schema.
[39]
As such, it is ultimately only another form of philosophical idealism.
[40]
The ideologies which Sartre chooses to present in his fictional and critical
works, then, are shown almost exclusively in a negative light. One might
be tempted to view each negative portrayal as largely in isolation from
the others, that is as an expression of a particular aversion of the early
Sartre. Indeed, there would surely be some value in such an interpretation.
It would allow us to avoid entirely any suggestion that Sartre assimilated
these different kinds of ideologies to each other in some way, and to escape
the danger of appearing to claim that the positions to be found in his critical
and fictional writings were just expressions or instantiations of a pre-defined
philosophical world view. These are important caveats. And yet, it would
surely be a considerable oversight not to read significance into the fact
that, the majority of the time, Sartre objects to the different ideologies
he presents in his works for the same, or closely related, reasons. In view
of the fact that his early (and even later
[41])
theoretical writings do not contain an explicit account of ideology as such,
we are invariably led to seek explanations for the coherence in his representations
of ideology in his philosophical writings. In short, we are brought to enquire
as to whether Sartre’s conception of ideology can be accounted for,
to some extent, in the light of his ontology and general world view. The
Sartre of
L’Etre et le néant wanted, above all, to safeguard
the inalienable freedom of the individual subject and his conception of
this freedom, centering on the irreconcilability of the
pour soi and
the
en soi, led him to repel all forms of essentialism. As I have
shown, in all of the negative portrayals of ideology in Sartre’s critical
and fictional writings some form of essentialism is prominent. It is to
be found in the spirit of seriousness and strong bad faith of the bourgeois
in
La Nausée,
L’Enfance d’un chef, and
La Putain respectueuse, and is also central, in the latter two works
and in
Réflexions sur la question juive, to the fixed identities
which such power holders project onto those whom they oppress. Sartre objects
to the mechanistic dialectical materialism of the Stalinist Marxist similarly
because its reduction of all phenomena to matter implies an essentialist
denial of the freedom of consciousness. Moreover, there is a clear conceptual
correspondence, or parallel, between Sartre’s dislike of essentialism
and his consistently negative portrayal of any form of determination by
ideology. An individual’s essentialist identification with, for example,
a pre-defined social role with an ideological dimension, such as that of
being bourgeois or Stalinist, implies the burying of his ontological freedom
in the weight of precedent just as his being under the influence of an ideology
does.
A similar parallel can be drawn between Sartre’s negative portrayal
of all forms of ideology and his aversion to any kind of philosophical idealism
or metaphysics. What these phenomena have in common, for Sartre, is that
they involve abstraction from the individual subject’s concrete reality
and hence imply serious encroachment on his or her capacity for autonomous
thought and action in situation. The rejection of metaphysics is instantiated
in Roquentin’s discovery of a more concrete, authentic form of existence
subsequent to his bottoming out of bourgeois ideology, in Oreste’s
victory over the religious ideology of Argos through his assertion of subjective
freedom, and in Sartre’s debunking of the materialist doctrine as
a theory superimposed onto, rather than a genuine explanation of, concrete
reality. Sartre strongly implies an opposition between the mystifying falsity
of metaphysics and ideology on the one hand, and the greater truth that
a concrete philosophy of existence can yield on the other. This antinomy
ties in with the opposition which he makes between inauthenticity and authenticity.
The characters whom Sartre presents or discusses who are under the influence
of an ideology are almost without exception in bad faith and are hence inauthentic.
It would seem that inauthenticity, for Sartre, is a necessary precondition
for being ideologically mystified. It follows, then, that liberating oneself
from an ideology can lead to a greater degree of authenticity on the part
of the subject or, more precisely, to a lesser degree of inauthenticity.
[42]
The two principal underlying reasons for Sartre’s aversion to ideology
are, then, at one and the same time its capacity to seriously limit the
freedom of the subject and its metaphysical, and hence abstract, non-concrete,
character. In this regard, a parallel can be drawn between the passage in
La Nausée discussed above in which Roquentin departs from
bourgeois ideology, and Sartre’s critique of Stalinist Marxism in
Matérialisme et révolution. For Roquentin’s abandoning
of bourgeois ideology coincides directly with the implied rejection of metaphysics
which his discovery of the concreteness of his existence suggests. The Stalinist
Marxist, in Sartre’s view, is caught up in self-imposed unfreedom
(bad faith), due to submersion in an ideology, and in metaphysics in a way
that is somewhat reminiscent of Roquentin prior to his visit to the Bouville
museum portrait gallery. One senses that Sartre would like to see the Stalinist
Marxist follow Roquentin’s example in this regard, and indeed the
second part of
Matérialisme et révolution outlines
a philosophy of revolution based on such a prior rejection of ideology and
metaphysics. It is highly significant that in texts as contrasting as
La
Nausée and
Matérialisme et révolution, both
in genre and also in terms of the type of ideology which Sartre foregrounds,
there should be such a noticeable parallel. The conclusion which such a
correspondence would seem to point to is that it is to Sartre’s underlying
theoretical positions that we must turn, to some extent at least, if we
wish to understand his stance with regard to the specific ideologies which
he presents in his fictional and critical works. The absence of a theory
of ideology in Sartre’s theoretical works, combined with the considerable
degree of coherence between his philosophical vision and the individual
representations of ideology in his literary and critical works, suggests
that his positions on ideology are, to some degree, extrapolated from his
ontology, that his conception of ideology is a sort of conceptual epiphenomenon.
2. Sartrean existentialism—ideological?
If the early Sartre considered his existentialist philosophy to
be intrinsically hostile to ideology and hence, it would seem fair to presume,
non-ideological itself, then what are we to make of his later categorisation
of existentialism as ideological? How can this revised view of existentialism
with regard to ideology broaden and deepen our understanding of his earlier
work? In
Questions de méthode Sartre states that ‘on
comprendra que je le [l’existentialisme] tienne pour une
idéologie:
c’est un système parasitaire qui vit en marge du Savoir qui
s’y est opposé d’abord et qui, aujourd’hui, tente
de s’y intégrer.’
[43]
He also makes reference to ‘
idéologies de l’existence’
and to ‘
l’idéologie existentielle’.
[44]
Clearly, Sartre’s revised view of the status of existentialism, no
longer as the principal theoretical expression of philosophical truth but
only as an ideology which can play an important contributing role to such
a theoretical expression, accords with the Marxist character of
Critique
de la raison dialectique. In this regard, it is important to note that
ever since the initial vogue for existentialism in 1945, Sartre’s
Marxist critics had been labelling existentialism ideological. Henri Lefebvre
and Georg Lukacs, two of the most influential and notable thinkers amongst
Sartre’s Marxist contemporaries, had published studies of existentalism
in which they had pointed to the ideological implications of existentialism.
[45]
Both writers present existentialism, from Kiekegaard onwards, as a form
of philosophical irrationalism and see this latter tendency as politically
significant. Lefebvre argues that in ideological terms it translates into
an anti-Marxist reactionary politics.
[46]
Lukacs claims that it was and remains an expression of a crisis in bourgeois
philosophy which started when a breach developed between bourgeois thought
and social reality in the nineteenth century.
[47]
In spite of its rather abstract support of socialism, contemporary existentialism
‘reflète...sur le plan de l’idéologie, le chaos
spirituel et moral de l’intelligence bourgeoise actuelle’.
[48]
For both, only dialectical materialist philosophy offers a remedy to the
ills of philosophical irrationalism, and it is the only philosophy in which
philosophical problems ‘cessent d’être déterminés
“inconsciemment” par les catégories de la décadence
bourgeoise.’
[49] Lefebvre
goes on to argue that not only does dialectical materialism save reason
from irrationalism but that it can assimilate the irrational because ‘cet
irrationnel—l’action et la pratique, les contradictions multiples
de la vie et de la pensée—devient le
contenu, le
fondement
de la Raison concrète, au lieu d’en étre exclu.’
[50]
Although the Sartre of
Questions de méthode claims his allegiance
to Marxism, it is clear that his claim that existentialism is an ideology
is not to be conflated with the above argument regarding its ideological
implications. Indeed, a number of pages of the first chapter of this text
are given over to countering precisely this line of argument, Sartre explicitly
citing Lukacs on more than one occasion. Sartre nuances the claim that existentialism
is an expression of bourgeois ideology by making a distinction between certain
existentialist positions, notably that of Jaspers, which could be fairly
categorised in this way and ‘un autre existentialisme, qui s’est
développé en marge du marxisme et non pas contre lui’,
this latter being his own.
[51]
He goes on to explain that as a young man he had felt very much in sympathy
with the preoccupations of Marxism, and had been influenced in particular
by ‘la
réalité du marxisme, la lourde présence,
à mon horizon, des masses ouvrières, corps énorme et
sombre qui
vivait le marxisme, qui le
pratiquait’.
[52]
However, his existentialist philosophy had retained its independence from
a Marxist position because Marxist philosophy, subordinated to the political
objective of changing the world, had become stagnant and did not offer the
conceptual tools sufficient to explain reality in all its complexity: ‘après
avoir liquidé en nous les catégories de la pensée bourgeoise,
le marxisme, brusquement, nous laissait en plan; il ne satisfaisait pas
notre besoin de comprendre; sur le terrain particulier où nous étions
placés, il n’avait plus rien de neuf à nous enseigner
parce qu’il s’était arrêté.’
[53]
Sartre’s position vis a vis the ideological nature of his existentialist
philosophy, as set out in
Questions de méthode, appears somewhat
paradoxical in certain respects but ultimately proves coherent. On the one
hand, there is his rejection of the claim that his existentialism is an
expression of bourgeois ideology and Sartre presents it, rather, as an ideology
in sympathy with, although distinct from Marxism. And yet, at the same time
he accepts that his existentialism was a form of philosophical idealism,
referring at one point to ‘l’existentialisme, cette protestation
idéaliste contre l’idéalisme’.
[54]
He thereby voices his agreement to some extent with a criticism that had
also been advanced by Marxists in particular many years earlier, Henri Mougin’s
La Sainte famille existentialiste being the most thorough treatment
of the question.
[55] Sartre
had always been highly critical of all forms of philosophical idealism because,
like ideology, it involved metaphysical abstraction from concrete reality
and hence a distancing from truth. Moreover, he, like the Marxists of his
day, had tended to identify idealist philosophy, in its recent manifestations,
with bourgeois ideology. The concluding paragraph of
Questions de méthode,
however, centres on the following argument: ‘
l’autonomie
des recherches existentielles résulte nécessairement de la
négativité des marxistes (et non du
marxisme)...A partir
du jour où la recherche marxiste prendra la dimension humaine (c’est-à-dire
le projet existentiel) comme le fondement du Savoir anthropologique, l’existentialisme
n’aura plus de raison d’être: absorbé, dépassé
et conservé par le mouvement totalisant de la philosophie, il cessera
d’être une enquête particulière pour devenir le
fondement de toute enquête.’
[56]
The existentialist ideology, then, has a crucial role to play in helping
to ‘
éclairer les données du Savoir marxiste’,
[57]
as Sartre puts it, for as long as ‘vulgar’ Marxists continue
to support the abstract, metaphysical philosophy that he had earlier denounced
in
Matérialisme et révolution. At first sight, it would
seem that Sartre casts ideology in an unexpectedly positive light here.
Yet his reference to ‘
Savoir marxiste’ ultimately suggests
a similar kind of oppostion between truth and ideology to that he had subscribed
to in his earlier work. In reality, then, the Sartre of
Questions de
méthode still sees ideology ultimately in a negative light in
relation to philosophical truth. Now that his present theoretical position
is no longer the quasi-idealist existentialist position of his work of the
1930s and 1940s but a Marxist one, he permits himself to refer to existentialism
somewhat critically as an ideology.
3. Latent and explicit proto-Marxism in the existentialism
of the early Sartre
For the Sartre of
Questions de méthode, then, his earlier
existentialist philosophy was an ideology which developed on the margins
of Marxism. This suggests that it may well be illuminating to seek out points
of contact between his existentialism, from as early as the 1930s, and Marxism.
Moreover, should such points of contact be found, it would perhaps be fair
to conclude that early Sartrean existentialism was an ideological phenomenon
also in part for that very reason. Marxism is a political philosophy which
has long been held to have a pronounced ideological dimension. Terry Eagleton,
agreeing with Martin Seliger, suggests that a convincing concept of ideology
should be able to account not only for oppressive dominant ideologies but
also for left radicalism and feminism,
[58]
thereby indicating that these tendencies are in significant ways ideological
in nature. It is important to guard against the suggestion that the early
Sartre was Marxist with regard to works of his which clearly have give no
indication of being so; the specificity of Sartre’s existentialist
position until the latter half of the 1940s and even, though to a lesser
degree, until well into the 1950s should be respected. And yet, I wish to
argue that the relationship between his thought and Marxism was significant,
even if often left inexplicit, earlier, and in more fundamental and wider
ranging ways, than has often been acknowledged and that, at the very least,
conceptual affinities, as well as clear discrepancies, can be identified
between the two.
In
La Force de l’âge, Beauvoir relates that the
Sartre of the late 1920s was anti-capitalist without being Marxist, and
that he was sceptical of Marxism.
[59]
Yet, in numerous places her account centres on Sartre’s left political
tendencies and on his associations and interests of the period, many of
which suggest a certain sympathy and potential common ground with a Marxist
outlook and project. One of Sartre’s closest friends was Paul Nizan,
a committed Marxist, and Sartre shared Nizan’s hatred of the bourgeoisie
and his hopes for a proletarian revolution.
[60]
Although Sartre did not commit himself to any left political group, he considered
joining the French Communist Party many times during the 1930s. He was an
admirer in particular of Trotsky and felt drawn to the idea of ‘permanent
revolution’.
[61] Beauvoir
relates that she and Sartre became personal friends with Colette Audry,
an active member of a Trotskyist group.
[62]
And at one point, ‘le gauchisme de Sartre’ significantly exacerbated
tensions with their more liberal and bourgeois friend Pagniez.
[63]
Moreover, whilst on vacation, Sartre would insist on visiting working class
and industrial areas of cities, and was disapproving and disdainful of any
manifestations of class snobbery.
[64]
It is clear, then, that Sartre was no stranger to political radicalism and
that whatever his reservations were about the political left, they were
in no sense as considerable in extent as his aversions to bourgeois ideology,
fascism, and the forces of political reaction. In places, Beauvoir’s
account highlights the philosophical tendencies of the young Sartre, and
these bear, in certain cases, important areas of affinity with Marxism.
For instance, we learn that ‘[l]es “petits camarades”’,
amongst whom we must presume was not only Sartre but also Nizan, ‘éprouvaient
le plus grand dégoût pour ce qu’on appelle “la
vie intérieure”’.
[65]
This tendency, even if it would be expressed by Sartre, initially at least,
in the terms of a philosophy of the subject, harmonises with a philosophy
whose basis lies in articulating the political dimension of social life
and culture. The subjective consciousness, for Sartre, is by its very nature
in the world, as it is without interiority. Moreover, the early Sartre’s
desire for a philosophy of the concrete
[66]
clearly bears affinities, at least in intention even if not in philosophical
expression, with Marxism’s traditional rejection of philosophical
idealism. Nizan, in
Les Chiens de garde (1932), had taken to task,
amongst other things, the tendency of recent French philosophy to be divorced
from real, meaningful questions.
Perhaps the most significant of the early Sartre’s writings which
expresses his commitment to a radical left revolutionary politics is the
second part of
Matérialisme et révolution. Having rejected
the theoretical basis to Stalinist Marxism in part one, Sartre proceeds
to outline a philosophy of revolution which takes as its basis his own existentialist
philosophy. What is of particular interest in this text is the fact that
a number of the key claims which comprise this philosophy of revolution
can be linked, in certain important respects, not only to the theses of
L’Etre et le néant but also with the work of the early
Marx in particular and, indeed, arguably with Marxian thought in general.
Sartre’s reference to revolutionary thought as ‘
une pensée
en situation’
[67]
is clearly derived directly from his claim in
L’Etre et le néant
that freedom is always situated. And yet, as Thomas Flynn points out, ‘“situation”
proves to be a major bridge concept between existentialism and Marxism.’
Flynn argues that for all that the Sartre of
L’Etre et le néant
emphasises subjective freedom, in his account of the constraining facticity
of the situation ‘there does appear the glimmer of a concept of objective
possibility.’
Sartre’s move towards Marxism would
involve according an increasingly important role to this latter concept,
but it is already present in
L’Etre et le néant.
[68]
In the second part of
Matérialisme et révolution, however,
Sartre is still primarily concerned, as a follow-up to his rejection of
Stalinist determinism, with stressing that the subject can surmount the
constraints imposed by his situation: ‘Le révolutionnaire se
définit...par le
dépassement de la situation où
il est.’
[69] It is this
idea, and the conception of man which underpins it, which links up with
the conception of man advanced by the early Marx. Being able to ‘
décoller
d’une situation’ is, for Sartre, ‘précisément
ce qu’on appelle liberté’
[70]
and is closely connected to other key concepts derived from from the theses
of
L’Etre et le néant such as the revolutionary’s
recognition of his own (and also his oppressor’s) contingency
[71]
and that ‘la réalité de l’homme est l’action’.
[72]
The ontological freedom of the revolutionary means that his existence is
contingent and therefore cannot have a fixed, immutable essence but, rather,
must be defined through action. Marx, in the
Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844, had also suggested that free thought and agency
were the principal defining characteristics of man, and saw them as central
to man’s capacity for creative labour:
Productive life..is species-life...The whole character of a species- its
species-character- is contained in the character of its life activity; and
free conscious activity is the species-character of man.
[73]
Marx’s preoccupation with alienation in this work
is founded
on the conviction that in capitalist society, in which the worker must sell
his labour to produce goods which serve the economic interests of the capitalist,
man is alienated from his fundamental nature as a free, creative being.
Sartre seems keen to acknowledge Marx as a precursor to his insistence on
the freedom of the subject claiming that the latter gives a fine exposition
of the idea of men as ‘des libertés en possession de leur destin’.
[74]
Erich Fromm has referred to Marx’s philosophy as a kind of ‘existentialist
thinking’
[75] and goes
on to argue:
Marx’s philosophy is one of protest; it is a protest imbued with faith
in man, in his capacity to liberate himself, and to realise his potentialities.
[76]
This statement could just as easily be used to describe Sartre’s philosophy
of revolution as Marx’s thought. Moreover, in addition to highlighting
the two thinkers’ common ground on the matter of subjective freedom,
it also points to the humanist implications of the early Marx’s position
and this is another area of overlap between Sartre and Marx.
The matter of humanism in both Sartre and Marx is a complex one. Sartre’s
claim that ‘la pensée révolutionnaire est humaniste’
[77]
is closely linked with his conviction, as expressed for example in ‘A
Propos de l’existentialisme: Mise au point’,
[78]
that existentialism is ‘
une philosophie humaniste de l’action,
de l’effort, du combat’,
[79]
in that both stress the centrality of free subjective thought and action,
and hence make man the focal point around which all other issues turn. One
influential commentator has argued recently, however, that much of what
is most valuable in the existentialism of the early Sartre is in fact best
seen as a continuation of his ‘anti-humanist’ stance of the
pre-war years.
[80] Aside from
the fact that this reading involves dismissing Sartre’s valiant efforts
to convince his readers, from around 1944 onwards, that his brand of existentialism
was a humanist philosophy, the view that even the pre-war Sartre’s
positon was anti-humanist is in itself questionable. Beauvoir points out
that what had interested Sartre most was people and the attempt to arrive
at a concrete understanding of individuals.
[81]
Rather than being indifferent to humanity, ‘sa sévérité
visait seulement ceux qui font profession de l’aduler.’
[82]
Indeed, the apparent hostility of the pre-war Sartre to humanism is perhaps
better seen as a feeling of repulsion with regard to inauthentic humanism
than as a positively anti-humanist position. In a manner analogous to the
Stalinist Marxist’s flat assertion that everything is matter and obeys
dialectical materialist laws, the humanists which Roquentin scorns in
La
Nausée are guilty, for Sartre, of a metaphysical superimposition
onto reality of an a priori claim and their humanism is hence in bad faith.
The non-humanist position of the pre-war Sartre, then, can be valuably seen
as having a lot more in common with his explicitly humanist existentialism
of the postwar years than it may appear.
Different Marxist tendencies have interpreted the thought of Marx as humanist
and anti-humanist by turns and it is beyond the scope of this article to
attempt to offer an account of the various positions on the issue. I will
limit my remarks to a few relevant observations. Sartre’s critique
of scientistic, mechanistic Marxism, a tendency which can be traced back
essentially to the work of the later Engels, is nothing if not a rejection
of an anti-humanist philosophical position because, as Sartre points out,
it denies any creative role to man. The advocates of this brand of Marxism
claimed their fidelity to the thought of Marx, although the ascription of
such a position to him has long been largely discredited. In reaction to
Stalinist Marxism and in the light of the writings of the early Marx, a
humanist interpretation of Marx came into focus in the work of certain Western
Marxist theorists. This approach, of which Herbert Marcuse, Ernst Bloch,
Fromm and Henri Lefebvre were leading representatives amongst others, tended
to involve arguing for the continuity between the thought of the early and
the mature Marx, and emphasised the ethical dimension to Marx’s thought.
In the view of this tendency, the humanist dimension of the thought of the
early Marx which stressed the centrality of man was implicit in the later
works, rather than being discarded in the name of an objectivist conception
of historical change. Humanist Marxism was subsequently challenged by Althusser
and his followers who, as Lawrence Wilde puts it, ‘recast Marx as
a positive scientist and relegated the humanist and Hegelian elements to
the inferior status of ‘ideology’.’
[83]
Althusser insisted on a separation of the early and the mature Marx, divorcing
the latter from the humanist position.
Wilde appropriately categorises Sartre along with the humanist Marxists
[84]
and, indeed, it is by and large an uncontentious move to place him, certainly
from 1952 onwards, in this group and to see his work from around 1945 onwards
as tending increasingly in this direction. However, the compatibility, with
regard to certain crucial philosophical matters, of Sartre’s position
in
Matérialisme et révolution with, at one and the
same time, the early Marx
and the theses of
L’Etre et le
néant points to the conclusion that Sartre’s position harmonised,
or at least bore many affinities, with a humanist Marxist position much
earlier than has often been thought. The principal objection of both the
early Sartre and the humanist Marxists to scientistic, mechanistic Marxism
was that it suppressed the role of human agency. As early as 1936, in
La
Transcendance de l’ego, Sartre had written:
Il m’a toujours semblé qu’une hypothèse de travail
aussi féconde que le matérialisme historique n’exigeait
nullement pour fondement l’absurdité qu’est le matérialisme
métaphysique.
[85]
This statement suggests that, at a still early stage in the development
of his existentialist philosophy, Sartre’s objections to Marxism were
in reality directed at its more ‘vulgar’ varieties to a considerably
greater extent than at Marx’s work, although Sartre probably did not
fully realise this at the time.
[86]
Matérialisme et révolution is chronologically sandwiched
between, and of a piece with, two other texts of Sartre’s which similarly
reveal many areas of compatibility between his thought and Marxism, the
‘Présentation des Temps Modernes’ (1945) and
Qu’est-ce
que la littérature? (1947). In these pieces, Sartre’s support
for a future socialist revolution is accompanied by an insistence on the
commitment of the writer and on a ‘synthetic’ conception of
man in opposition to the ‘analytic’ conception which he argues
has historically bolstered up the bourgeoisie. What is particularly significant
about these texts, from the standpoint of identifying Sartre’s affinities
with Marxism, is how revealing they are of the fundamentally dialectical
nature of his thought. The intellectual vision which Sartre outlines is
thoroughly imbued with the notion that one’s engagement with ideas
and writing is inextricably bound up with socio-political tendencies and
that these fields interpenetrate. To take the ‘Présentation’
first, Sartre points out that the ‘esprit d’analyse’,
the analytic conception, consists in breaking things down into their component
elements and seeing them as distinct. With regard to the matter of man in
society, this conception had served as a weapon of the bourgeoisie in the
struggle against the ‘ancien régime’:
Ces principes ont présidé à la Déclaration des
Droits de l’Homme. Dans la société que conçoit
l’esprit d’analyse, l’individu, particule solide et indécomposable,
véhicule de la nature humaine, réside comme un petit pois
dans une boîte de petits pois : il est tout rond, fermé
sur soi, incommunicable. Tous les hommes sont
égaux...Tous
les hommes sont
frères...Tous les hommes sont
libres :
libres
d’être hommes...
[87]
However, the analytic conception, Sartre continues, has since become and
remains a defensive weapon of the bourgeoisie in its desire to ignore the
claim of the working class to obtain greater equality in society. Proclaiming
that all men are equal and enjoy equal rights in the form of civil liberties
allows the bourgeoisie to draw a veil over the ways in which differences
of social class ensure the continuation of basic inequalities at a socio-economic
level. Sartre concludes that the analytic conception serves today only to
‘troubler la conscience révolutionnaire et d’isoler les
hommes au profit des classes privilégiés.’
[88]
Stating that his intention is to ‘concourir à produire certains
changements dans la Société qui nous entoure’,
[89]
Sartre claims that the synthetic conception, by contrast, is one which conceives
of man as a totality. This involves acknowledging that he is conditioned,
and in the case of the proletariat, limited by his social class. Man’s
situation, then, is defined partly in terms of his socio-political condition.
In accordance with his aversion to metaphysics, Sartre suggests that the
synthetic conception is in no sense a conceptual superimposition onto reality
but is a theoretical formulation of the way things really are: ‘elle
[cette conception] court les rues et..nous ne prétendons pas la découvrir,
mais seulement à aider à la préciser.’
[90]
In
Réflexions sur la question juive, written during the previous
year, Sartre states the need for a ‘libéralisme concret’
with regard to the Jewish community in French society.
[91]
The ‘libéralisme abstrait’ of the democrat, which simply
affirms that the Jew has the same rights as any other citizen, is insufficient
as it does not take into account the concrete situation of the Jews.
[92]
Sartre’s assessment of the situation of the Jews clearly bears similarities
with his view of the condition of the working class. The suggestion is that
political liberalism, because shored up by the ‘esprit d’analyse’,
is in both cases inadequate to ensure that members of these groups enjoy
their full rights as citizens and that, moreover, bourgeois liberals have
an interest in seeing that they do not. Sartre offers only imprecise and
abstract indications in
Réflexions sur la question juive as
to what a ‘libéralisme concret’ would involve, but it
is of interest to enquire whether his criticisms of the analytic conception
of man, and advocacy of a synthetic conception in the ‘Présentation
des Temps Modernes’ suggest that the amelioration of the condition
of the working class similarly requires such a concrete liberalism. If indeed
Sartre is suggesting this, then it is worth noting, first, that this does
not necessarily distance him from the proto-Marxist position which he otherwise
appears to be advancing because Marxists’ objections to political
liberalism have long tended to centre not so much on liberal ideals themselves
as on the discrepancy between those ideals and their practical application.
Sartre writes that ‘il [le libéralisme concret] risque de devenir
un simple idéal si nous ne déterminons pas les moyens de l’atteindre’,
[93]
thereby suggesting that if liberal political ideals cannot be realised in
practice then they are ineffectual. And second, it is clear from
Matérialisme
et révolution and
Qu’est-ce que la littérature?,
where he pushes his political arguments further, that Sartre sees a political
revolution to be the most effective means to arriving at a more just society,
thereby lending his support to the project to overthrow the liberal political
order.
If Sartre is critical of political liberal ideology, everything seems to
point to the conclusion that he also has misgivings about intellectual liberalism.
His discussion of non-committed and hence, as he sees it, irresponsible
writers centres on their tendency to be linked, since the nineteenth century,
to the bourgeoisie and to their analytic view of man in society:
Cette légende de l’irresponsabilité...elle tire son
origine de l’esprit d’analyse. Puisque les auteurs bourgeois
se considèrent eux-mêmes comme des petits pois dans une boîte,
la solidarité qui les unit aux autres hommes leur paraît strictement
mécanique, c’est-à-dire de simple juxtaposition.
[94]
Sartre presents the non-commitment, social class, and analytic conception
of such writers as coherent and interdependent characteristics. In reality,
non-committed prose writing is an illusion, Sartre counters, because the
writer is ‘
en situation dans son époque’ and his
abstentions are themselves revealing.
[95]
The examples Sartre gives in the ‘Présentation’ often
centre on political events with regard to which a writer did or did not
commit himself,
[96] although
this is not exclusively so. His remark that ‘[c]elui qui consacrerait
sa vie à faire des romans sur les Hittites, son abstention serait
par elle-même une prise de position’
[97]
is reminiscent of Roquentin’s Rollebon project in
La Nausée.
Roquentin’s hiding behind Rollebon coincides, as I have suggested,
with his still being under the influence of bourgeois ideology and is complicit
with the latter in so far as it shelters him from having to face existential
uncertainties. Only the rejection of both bourgeois ideology and of such
a critical project can facilitate the passage to a more authentic form of
existence. In the ‘Présentation’, it is as if Sartre’s
concept of authenticity has taken on the added dimension of commitment:
where authenticity had previously involved recognising one’s fundamental
freedom, now that freedom also involves the imperative, at least in the
case of writers, to take action. Clearly, Sartre’s position here can
be linked with his ontology and with the idea, expressed in
L’Existentialisme
est un humanisme, that one is responsible, in the choices one makes
for committing humanity as a whole in a certain direction.
[98]
Sartre’s claim in the first chapter of
Qu’est-ce que la littérature?[99]
that prose writing is by its very nature committed because it necessarily
involves ‘dévoilement’ of reality should not, in itself,
be confused with this insistence that the writer has a responsibility to
commit himself politically. ‘Dévoilement’ implies action
and change, and hence responsibility, but Sartre’s idea that it thus
involves commitment is ultimately much more a statement about the nature
of language than it is political, although this is not the same as saying
that it is necessarily
unpolitical.
[100]
Elsewhere in this work, however, Sartre’s claims imply an insistence
on the interpenetration of writing, history and the socio-political field,
thereby building on and developing the argument advanced in the ‘Présentation’.
In particular, he links literature explicitly with the project of working
towards a socialist revolution and argues that only in a post-revolutionary
society can a literature flourish that is neither bourgeois nor prey to
the ills of a sclerotic political radicalism.
In
Marxist Literary Theory, Eagleton argues that, ‘[v]ery schematically,
it is possible to identify four broad kinds of Marxist criticism’,
which he categorises as ‘
anthropological, political, ideological,
and
economic’.
[101]
He places Sartre along with the other thinkers of the Western Marxist lineage
in the third category, that of ideological criticism, arguing that they
‘grant a remarkably high priority to culture and philosophy, and do
so in part as a substitute for a politics that has failed’ and he
adds that ‘[c]riticism, in other words, is now politics by other means’.
[102]
Whilst accepting that such a categorisation of Sartre is a fair one in broad
terms, I would like to suggest that Sartre’s position in
Qu’est-ce
que la littérature? specifically might also be profitably seen
as bearing certain affinities with the second kind of Marxist criticism
which Eagleton identifies, namely the ‘political’ kind. Of this
tendency, which came to prominence from the time of the Bolsheviks, Eagleton
writes: ‘now...criticism becomes a matter of polemic and intervention’,
and ‘where your stand on art reflects your position on the working
class, on bourgeois democracy’.
[103]
One of the major works of this tendency in Marxist criticism is Trotsky’s
Literature and Revolution, written in 1922-3. Wide-ranging in its
subject matter, certain clear parallels can be identified between, in particular,
the argument of the closing chapter of this book, entitled ‘Revolutionary
and socialist art’, and the final chapter of
Qu’est-ce que
la littérature?, which point to the conclusion that the thought
of Trotsky can be seen as an important precursor to Sartre’s with
regard to the matter of the relationship between literature and the political.
Sartre argues that there would ideally be a ‘littérature concrète
et libérée’ in constant dialogue with its readers.
[104]
Such a literature would be ‘le monde présent à lui-même’
and ‘la subjectivité d’une société en révolution
permanente’. In speaking about himself, the writer would also be speaking
about his readers and vice versa, because literature would encapsulate all
that was universally human. This degree of reciprocity could only be possible
in a classless society because a greater freedom of the public is a necessary
pre-requisite. Sartre acknowledges that this vision for literature is a
utopian one and goes on to ask what kind of role for literature can be envisaged
in contemporary France. Citing Camus and Malraux as possible models, Sartre
advocates a ‘littérature des grandes circonstances’,
adding that ‘[i]l ne s’agit pour nous ni de nous évader
dans l’éternel ni d’abdiquer devant...le « processus
historique ».’
[105]
In this last remark, Sartre expressses his desire to avoid both the traditionally
disengaged and uncommitted bourgeois approach to writing, and the ideologically-overladen
work of certain left radicals. As such, a parallel can be drawn with his
dual rejection of idealism and materialism- both of which he sees as metaphysical
rather than concrete- and his attempt to steer a course between the two.
As the kind of literature that Sartre dreams of, which he refers to as a
‘
littérature totale’ and ‘de la
praxis’
addressing ‘“l’universel concret”’, would,
he says, be possible only in a socialist collectivity,
[106]
in the meantime literature should tend towards encouraging a greater degree
of freedom and a political transformation of society: ‘nous devons
dans nos écrits militer en faveur de la liberté de la personne
et de la révolution socialiste.’
[107]
Trotsky’s
Literature and Revolution was of course written in
post-revolutionary Russia, but his belief that ‘[t]here is no revolutionary
art as yet’,
[108] in
conjunction with his clear desire to see it develop, makes comparison with
Sartre’s argument viable. The category of revolutionary art, for Trotsky,
covers art which directly touches on matters pertaining to the revolution
but it also includes ‘works which are not connected with the Revolution
in theme, but are thoroughly imbued with it’.
[109]
Like Sartre after him, Trotsky accords considerable importance to the role
that art can play in contributing to positive political change. His claim
that, ‘[a]t present, one has to carry out great aims by the means
of art’,
[110] is of
a piece with Sartre’s conviction that writers should work to raise
the reader’s awareness of the need for socialism: ‘Ainsi le
guidera-t-on..jusqu’à lui faire voir que ce qu’il veut
en effet c’est abolir l’exploitation de l’homme par l’homme...nous
devons transformer sa bonne volonté formelle en une volonté
concrète et matérielle de changer
ce monde-ci par des
moyens déterminés, pour contribuer à l’avènement
futur de la société concrète des fins.’
[111]
Trotsky makes a distinction between revolutionary art and socialist art,
the former being a temporary but necessary phase whilst a socialist society
is developing. Revolutionary literature, he argues, will necessarily involve
an expression of animosity towards the exploiters of the working class whereas,
‘[u]nder Socialism, solidarity will be the basis of society. Literature
and art will be tuned to a different key...Art then will become more general,
will mature, will become tempered, and will become the most perfect method
of the progressive building of life in every field.’
[112]
There is reason to suppose that Trotsky’s remarks concerning revolutionary
literature are relevant not only to an account of the role which Sartre
outlines for literature in
Qu’est-ce que la littérature?
but perhaps also to the interpretation of certain of his earlier literary
works, although to a more limited extent. The consistently negative images
of the bourgeoisie which Sartre presents in
La Nausée,
L’Age
de raison and, in particular,
L’Enfance d’un chef
certainly seem consistent with Trotsky’s conviction that revolutionary
literature must inevitably be ‘imbued with a spirit of social hatred’.
[113]
In
L’Enfance d’un chef, for instance, there are passages
in which Sartre directly, although subtly, links a negative image of the
bourgeoisie with the underprivileged condition of the working class. To
cite one such passage, when M. Fleurier explains to Lucien that a boss should
learn the names of his workers, ‘Lucien fut profondément remué,
et,
quand le fils du contremaître Morel vint à la maison
annoncer que son père avait eu deux doigts coupés, Lucien
lui parla sérieusement et doucement, en le regardant tout droit dans
les yeux et en l’appelant Morel.’
[114]
[My italics]. For the young bourgeois Lucien, then, the significance of
the foreman’s serious accident is that it provides an opportunity
to rehearse his future role as a boss, there being no indication that the
news stimulates any genuine emotional reaction in him. Admittedly, scenes
of this sort in which the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the working
class is articulated explicitly are not common in Sartre’s fiction.
Moreover, for Trotsky, revolutionary literature should encourage ‘the
consolidation of the workers in their struggle against the exploiters’,
[115]
which is a dimension that is largely absent in Sartre. A certain expression
of protest at the unjustified power and privilege of the bourgeoisie, however,
can be clearly indentified in Sartre’s texts and this suggests common
ground with a radical politics.
Rather as Trotsky sees revolutionary art and literature only as a phase
prior to the flowering of their socialist successors, Sartre’s remark
in
Qu’est-ce que la littérature? that literature should
‘contribuer à l’avènement futur de la société
concrète des fins’
[116]
points to a future socialist society in which the reader will accede to
the Kantian city of ends. Having suggested that aesthetic and political
freedom are interdependent during the struggle for socialism, Sartre implies
that they would be mutually complementing once it is realised. Trotsky’s
account focuses more on the ways in which socialist art and literature would
contribute vitally to the ever higher levels of coordination and internal
harmony that man would achieve under socialism. However, these achievements
rebound on the aesthetic in turn because they facilitate the development
‘of all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point.’
[117]
For Trotsky, as for Sartre, then, the aesthetic and the political are fundamentally
interactive and interpenetrating: a fully flourishing art requires an emancipated
political condition, and political emancipation involves a supporting enlightened
aesthetics.
Conclusion: The ideological ambiguity of the work of the early
Sartre
For all that affinities between the early Sartre’s various positions
and Marxist ones can be identified, the specificity of Sartre’s existentialist
outlook and preoccupations must always be accounted for and it is not my
intention to veil over their crucial importance. Rather, I would like to
suggest that in certain significant respects they contrast considerably
less with Marxism than has often been thought. I have argued in the last
section that the areas in which Sartrean existentialism and Marxism are
philosophically distinct are not paralleled by any important divergence
at the level of political ideology. Indeed, from as early as the 1930s,
Sartre’s disagreements with Marxism- and I am referring to its non-Stalinist
varieties and, above all, Marxian thought- were centred much more on theoretical
issues than on political ideals: Sartre rejected any notion of determination
by material forces, but supported the idea of a future proletarian revolution.
In the ‘Présentation des Temps Modernes’ Sartre, having
argued forcefully for a synthetic rather than analytic conception of reality,
states that man should be seen as ‘un centre d’indétermination
irréductible.’
[118]
Given that Marxism is the political ideology typically associated with the
doctrine of determinism, it might seem fair to infer from this that Sartre’s
political position ultimately remains that of a left liberal, that his insistence
on the autonomous self-determining subject suggests an implicit support
for an individualist political ideology. However, it is quite clear from
elsewhere in the passage, as I have argued, that he is highly critical of
political liberalism, and indeed only a year later he publishes nothing
less than a philosophy of revolution aimed at the overthrow of the liberal
political order. Any temptation, then, to see Sartre’s existentialist
philosophical convictions as translating, on the political plane, into a
liberal position should be resisted. Moreover, the issue of Sartre’s
disagreements with Marxism over questions pertaining to materialism, determination,
and freedom is a highly complex one, as Sartre was later to realise more
fully. Sartre’s statement, in
Questions de méthode,
that,‘
le marxisme de Marx, en marquant l’opposition dialectique
de la connaissance et de l’être, contenait à titre implicite
l’exigence d’un fondement existentiel de la théorie’,
[119]
in many ways only echoes what humanist Marxists had been saying for some
time. And if the early Sartre’s existentialist philosophy bears many
more affinities with Marxian thought with respect to the question of subjective
freedom than has often been suggested, what he also shares with Marx, as
of his first political writings and arguably much earlier, is a notably
dialectical conception of reality. By the time of the ‘Présentation
de Temps Modernes’
and
Matérialisme et révolution,
the concept of the ‘situation’ with which the subject’s
freedom constantly interacts has taken on a markedly socio-political dimension
in comparison to the account of it given in
L’Etre et le néant.
The underlying principle of subjective freedom being defined in relation
to the circumstances it finds itself in, however, remains the same. Ultimately,
if the early Sartre’s politically radical and then proto-Marxist position
is ideologically ambiguous, then it not because of a residual attachment
to political liberalism, but in so far as what he would later refer to as
existentialist ideology remains philosphically distinct from Marxism. This
ideological ambiguity, however, is one which is constituted by theoretically
distinct ideological relations, viz existentialism and Marxism, rather than
being located at the level of political divergences. It amounts to a philosophical
disagreement amongst left wing thinkers rather than a dispute between the
political left and centre.
