Sartre's Anthropology as a Hermeneutics of Praxis

Kristian Klockars

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429793424
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

First published in 1998, this volume deals with the legacy of Sartre and functions as a way of going beyond Sartre by means of Sartre, aiming to understand how we are to understand what we ourselves do and how we are to understand human being and human reality. Kristian Klockars' main aim is intended to communicate three questions: how close Sartre's later anthropology comes to hermeneutics, whether the idea of a hermeneutics of praxis could be seen as a possible solution to the internal tensions of Sartre's conception, thinking with Sartre beyond Sartre, and whether a hermeneutics of praxis can constitute a living challenge to contemporary thought.

1 Introduction

Outline of a Perspective

This work investigates the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre from the point of view of the question how we are to understand human beings and human reality. It focuses on the project of an anthropology set up by Sartre in his second major philosophical work Critique de la Raison dialectique (1960, hereafter abbreviated CRD). Within the perspective of this anthropology I mainly focus on the question of the intelligibility of human praxis, or how we are to understand what we ourselves do.

The primary purpose of my investigation is not, however, purely interpretative, but to investigate Sartre from the point of view of an interest to assess his contribution in a contemporary perspective. In order to do this, I reconstructively interpret the standpoint of Sartre as a hermeneutics of praxis. By ‘a hermeneutics of praxis’ I generally mean a standpoint on the possibilities, limits and extent of philosophical thought, and a conception of man, that are hermeneutical in character (in a broad sense), and which takes ‘praxis’ or ‘human action in a social context’ as its paradigm (see below in this chapter).

My investigation is not intended to claim that Sartre, who is not a self-declared hermeneutician, actually should be included within the class of ‘full-blown’ hermeneutical philosophers, such as Martin Heidegger, HansGeorg Gadamer, Paul Ricouer and Gianni Vattimo. Such an attempt would be futile, and could not succeed without doing considerable violence to the original material. For instance, such an interpretation is decisively prevented by the lack of at least one crucial hermeneutical theme in Sartre: a thorough treatment of the question of the consequences of historicity for the status, validity and hopes of philosophical thought. Sartre remains a thinker that vacillates between metaphysical and postmetaphysical thinking.

My use of ‘a hermeneutics of praxis’ is intended to communicate mainly three claims and questions. (1) There are many strongly hermeneutical traits in Sartre’s later anthropology. Sartre’s attempt to reconcile existentialism with Marxism drives him towards a standpoint that comes close to hermeneutics, although it is also different in important respects to those of, for example, Heidegger, Gadamer and Rorty. (2) I pose the question whether the idea of a hermeneutics of praxis could be seen as a possible solution to the internal tensions of Sartre’s conception, and thus whether it would be a good way of thinking ‘with Sartre beyond Sartre’. As I see it, in CRD Sartre is leaning towards a hermeneutical kind of solution, although he does not, in important aspects, take the full step out. A question is then whether it is possible to develop this conception in the direction of a more coherently hermeneutical standpoint, or whether for example the co-presence of a philosophy of praxis with hermeneutics remains an indissoluble tension. A ‘hermeneutisation’ of the later Sartre would have the benefits to enable one to emphasise the more fruitful and original parts of his social and historical thinking, while pushing, for example, the Utopian Marxist traits which today appear considerable dated, to the background. (3) I raise the issue whether a hermeneutics of praxis, as a standpoint inspired by Sartre, can constitute a living challenge to contemporary thought.

In this sense, my investigation is intended to be more systematic than historical in character. The combination of a broad formulation of thematic orientation (to understand human beings and human reality) with a more specific interpretative stance (a hermeneutics of praxis) is intended to communicate my intention to investigate what kind of answer Sartre’s anthropology gives to the question how we are to understand human beings and human reality.

The complete work of CRD consists of two volumes in the original French, and three in the English translation. The first volume includes the important prefatory essay Questions de méthode (QM), which has been published in English as a separate work (Search for a Method, SM). Sartre never completed the second volume. The unfinished manuscript, edited by Ariette Elkaïm-Sartre, was published posthumously in 1985 (CRD II).

Although I set up the perspective of CRD as main framework, the investigation is not limited to the scope of CRD alone. The ideas presented in that work are both a continuation, a modification and, in my opinion, a substantial improvement of the existential ontology developed by Sartre in his earlier work, the existentialist magnum opus L’être et le néant (EN). This implies that many central ideas of EN are integrated (although often in a modified manner) into the anthropology of CRD. Consequently I shall include many issues of EN within my interpretation of CRD.

Furthermore, the ideas expressed in CRD as such leaves one in a state of unease. The work is both unfinished in itself and unclear concerning its relation to certain other philosophical themes developed by Sartre, notably the psychology of the person and ethics. In the years following the publication of CRD Sartre returned to the problem of morality, almost wholly neglected in that work. In my investigation I shall include an account of Sartre’s views on ethics (see Chapter 9). In his existential biography on Gustave Flaubert, L’Idiot de la famille (IF), again, Sartre returns to the question how one is to understand an individual. This work throws considerable light on how Sartre’s idea of a method actually is to be understood, amongst other things, and I shall consequently include it within Sartre’s anthropology. In summary then, the full scope of Sartre’s anthropology, as presented in CRD, must not be limited to what is found in that work alone.

CRD was Sartre’s second major philosophical work. Many things are at stake in it: the legacy of existentialism, the problems of Marxism, the question of a unified foundation for the human sciences, rationality, etc. From the point of view of my investigation, the main thing is that Sartre presents it as an attempt to lay the foundations for an anthropology. It is not, however, altogether clear what Sartre actually means by ‘anthropology’: philosophical anthropology, a unified science of man or, since IF is described as “… the sequel to Search for a Method’ (FI 1, p. ix (1)), the writing of existential biography? I argue that the scope of Sartre’s anthropology cannot be limited to any of these perspectives as such, but that it constitutes a multidimensional research orientation. I shall differentiate between five main dimensions.

Although CRD clearly is philosophical in nature, the idea of anthropology expressed there cannot be limited to the idea of a philosophical anthropology in the sense of a general theory of human nature. As is well known, Sartre rejects the idea that human beings would share a universal nature, and therefore a theory of human nature cannot form the answer to the question how one is to understand human beings and human reality. However, this does not mean that Sartre would reject all forms of universalisation concerning human being. In the place of a theory of human nature Sartre develops an existential-phenomenological ontology of existence, or alternatively a theory of the intelligibility of the human condition. Since such an ontology, in so far as it is concerned with the human mode of existence as a whole, may be claimed to inherit the task of a philosophical anthropology, I shall call it a modified kind of philosophical anthropology (1).

The investigation in CRD is most concretely set up as a critical investigation of rationality (2). This investigation, again, is primarily oriented towards the development of a unified anthropological method (3). But the scope of Sartre’s work is not limited to these theoretical-philosophical tasks: in its extension in essays and works like IF, the anthropology also encompasses concretely carrying out a empirical-interpretative investigtions of real human beings (e.g. the biography of a person), real social events and practices (e.g. colonialism, the role of the intellectual) (4). Sartre’s anthropology also characteristically incorporates a normative dimension (5). This includes both a concerns to embrace the tasks of a critical social theory (e.g. Marxism) and to develop an ethics. These together constitute the five major dimensions of Sartre’s anthropology. An important aim of my investigation is to clarify what these consist of, and to make intelligible their co-presence in the singularity of a project.

At stake in such a clarification of what Sartre means by ‘anthropology’ is more than just a question how to label one’s research. Since ‘human being’ is one of the principal orientations of Sartre’s philosophy, the question is directly linked to the very foundations of Sartrean thought. In addition, a clarification of this issue touches on very general issues concerning the self-understanding of philosophy, and is therefore destined to reach beyond being just an interpretation of Sartre.

I thus pose the question of the self-understanding of Sartre’s anthropology with an interest to examine the status, relevance and limits of such a project in a contemporary perspective. I am of the opinion that the challenges raised by Sartre have not yet been sufficiently met. This does not mean that I would agree with Sartre, not even on his major points, nor that I posit a Sartrean anthropology as the solution to the contemporary problems in philosophy. My claims are more limited than that. For example, Sartre’s project today clearly appears dated. The interesting thing is to ask why and in what sense it is dated, and what, perhaps, deserves to be saved.

An attempt to assess Sartre’s contribution in a contemporary perspective is a very complex task, indeed. This is not only due to the fact that Sartre’s production is so vast. In addition, the issues discussed by Sartre span over almost the whole field of philosophy (from ontology to ethics) and reach into many central domains of human life (from personal existence to politics). I neither hope nor have the intention to present a final assessment aiming to ‘settle the issue of Sartre’ (which would violate my conception of philosophy), nor does my work cover all of the issues discussed by Sartre. Furthermore, my investigation is not based on some kind of a ‘total overview’ of the contemporary scene (which would be impossible).

The question of the contemporary relevance of Sartre’s position can naturally not be limited to the question of the relation between Sartre and hermeneutics. Although some, such as Gianni Vattimo (1997), indeed describe hermeneutics as the mood of the times, there are clearly other orientations and themes that claim and deserve equal weight in this context: critical social theory, postmodernism, etc. In order to discuss the issues triggered by these, I have picked out a certain thematic constellation intended to orient my investigation as a whole. Thus, I would like my investigation to be read as concerned particularly with the following four themes:

(1) how are we to understand and interpret our own and other’s actions and undertakings? (the intelligibility of praxis),

(2) how are the aims and impact of studies of human beings and human reality to be understood? (the discursive self-understanding of the human and social sciences),

(3) how is one to assess the social reality and times in which one lives? (the critique and diagnosis of society and ‘the present’),

(4) what is rationality? (the problem of rationality).

These may be said to express the thematic orientation that guides the systematic of my investigation. I shall not, however, study these issues in a direct way, but mainly restrict myself to discussing them in relation to Sartre. I shall end this part with a brief overview of how I see their interrelations.

The question how we are to understand human action is self-evidently linked to the self-understanding of the human and social sciences (1-2). The human and social sciences study (amongst other things) the domain of human behaviour and action. In addition, the research of these scientific disciplines itself constitutes a human undertaking: research is a particular kind of praxis, which (directly or indirectly) participates in culture. Furthermore, the question of the intelligibility of what we do is not reducible to a problem of the sciences alone: it has obvious relevance for the issues of everyday life.

On the contemporary scene, several currents (including Sartre) agree with the position that the human and social sciences are participatory in nature: hermeneutics, critical social theory, feminism, post-structuralism and postmodernism, Rorty’s neo-pragmatism, etc. (cf. Habermas 1978, Rorty 1980, Hollinger (ed.) 1985, Dews 1987. These naturally have different conception on how the relation between an intellectual enterprise (discursive praxis) and everyday (individual and social) praxis is to be understood. This raises the problem of the discursive self-understanding of the human and social sciences.

The idea of a critical social theory, in a particularly pregnant way, manifests the problem of the relation between the ‘scientific’ task of understanding and the normative dimensions of intellectual participation (2-3). Critical social theory, in its own self-understanding, embodies a normative-critical, or, as Habermas says (1978a, pp. 308-11), critical-emancipatory interest. This raises at least two issues. First, what are the normative foundations of social critique and diagnosis? Second, since critical social theory is also a kind of ‘scientific’ enterprise, based on the demand to develop a well-grounded understanding of the reality studied, it is not only founded on normative issues. This raises the problem of the relation between understanding and critique (1-3).

The problem of rationality, again, is common both to the search for knowledge and understanding (1-4), and to the normative foundation of critique (3-4). ‘Reason’ or ‘rationality’ encompasses both questions of the foundation of knowledge (theoretical reason), and questions of the normative justification of actions and critical evaluations (practical and moral reason). One may thus argue that understanding and critique are united in the problem of rationality. But such a thesis cannot, especially today, neglect the fact that this connection is often vigorously criticised, in particular through in the so-called discourse on modernity and postmodernity. Thus, many (self-declared or alleged) postmodernists question the very value and status of reason, in relation both to the ethical imperative to understand and to the idea of a well-grounded critique...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Sartre and Contemporary Thought: Understanding vs. Totalisation
• 3 The Project of Anthropology
• 4 On Hermeneutics
• 5 Sartre’s Conception of Human Being and Philosophical Standpoint
• 6 A Critical Investigation of Reason
• 7 Praxis and Social Theory
• 8 The Quest for Understanding: Epistemology and Interpretation Theory
• 9 The Normative Dimension of Sartre’s Anthropology
• 10 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index