A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles

Joseph S. Catalano

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226097022
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason ranks with Being and Nothingness as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the Critique to its deserved place among Sartre's works and within philosophical discourse as a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano asserts—the delivery of history into the hands of the average person. Sartre's concern in the Critique is with the historical significance of everyday life. Can we, he asks, as individuals or even collectively, direct the course of our history? A historical context for our lives is given to us at birth, but we sustain that context with even our most mundane actions—buying a newspaper, waiting in line, eating a meal. In looking at history, Sartre argues, reason can never separate the historical situation of the investigator from the investigation. Thus reason falls into a dialectic, always depending upon the past for guidance but always being reshaped by the present. Clearly showing the influence of Marx on Sartre's thought, the Critique adds the historical dimension lacking in Being and Nothingness. In placing the Critique within the corpus of Sartre's philosophical writings, Catalano argues that it represents a development rather than a break from Sartre's existentialist phase. Catalano has organized his commentary to follow the Critique and has supplied clear examples and concrete expositions of the most difficult ideas. He explicates the dialogue between Marx and Sartre that is internal to the text, and he also discusses Sartre's Search for Method, which is published separately from the Critique in English editions.

Background: Search for a Method

The French edition of the Critique is introduced by an occasional work, Question de méthode. In the preface, Sartre explains the publishing history of the smaller work and its relation to the Critique. Originally, this relatively short piece was written for a Polish magazine that requested Sartre to discuss the situation of existentialism in 1957.¹ Although reluctant to write about existentialism as though it were a closed enterprise, Sartre nevertheless accepted, because, as he says in the preface, he saw an opportunity “to explain to a country with a Marxist’s culture, the present contradictions in its philosophy.” Later the work was revised for a French audience, and its title changed from Existentialisme et Marxisme to the present Question de méthode. In this form, it was included as an introduction to the Critique de la raison dialectique.²

The appearance of the English translations paralleled the original separate publications of the two works: the Question de méthode was translated first by Hazel Barnes, and the work appeared in America under the title Search for a Method and in England under the title Problem of Method.³ Afterward, the Critique of Dialectical Reason appeared in English translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, who did not include the earlier translation of the shorter work, Question de méthode.⁴

In relation to the Critique, the Method is both an introduction and a summary. Logically, it is the larger work that establishes the claims of the smaller. Sartre nevertheless agrees that the Method should be placed first, not only because it is shorter and simpler, but also because “in the dialectical method the chronological order is the most important.”⁵ But much of that is discussed in the Method, and what will be said about it in this background chapter will be clarified only as the details of the Critique’s main argument are examined.

The three major divisions of this background chapter follow Sartre’s divisions in the Method; the subdivisions are here my own but are not here put in parentheses. Although I have tried to at least touch upon all the major issues examined in the Method, I consider my introductory remarks an occasion not so much to comment on the text but to discuss the relation of some of the Critique’s central themes to Sartre’s earlier philosophy.

1. MARXISM AND EXISTENTIALISM

i. Sartre and Marx

After World War II, Sartre’s practical relation to Marxist thinking was conditioned, on the one hand, by his popularity as an existentialist thinker and, on the other hand, by the complex milieu of intellectual excitement and political movement, which in France were not easily separable. After the Liberation, the spectrum of thinkers and political activists from the Left became popular because the Left alone had consistently fought against the Germans and the Vichy government. Although Sartre probably never fired a gun, he had been in the army and was captured by the Germans. He taught his fellow prisoners Heidegger, the only philosopher the Germans allowed.⁶ He managed to talk the Germans into letting him go, claiming that he was never really a soldier because of his poor eyesight. He joined the Resistance, in which, he says, he was little more than an errand boy. If this is not exactly the picture of a hero, Sartre had at least placed his body on the side of the Resistance and, of course, he was always writing. Nausea and Being and Nothingness were published before the Liberation, and Sartre had produced The Flies, a thinly disguised attack on the Germans.⁷

The French Communist party (FCP) had also fought on the side of the Resistance. The FCP was close to Moscow with its Stalinist political platform and its imposition of a rigorous dialectical materialism. But many Marxist thinkers rejected the FCP’s theoretical limitations and were rethinking not only the Marx of Capital but the early Marx, particularly the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts that were just being introduced and translated. Here, the emphasis was not on dialectical laws but on alienation. This backward introduction of the early Marx was paralleled by the late introduction of Hegel. The scene was further complicated by the fact that Hegel was now being read through both Marxist and existentialist eyes. Alexandre Kojève, who began lecturing on Hegel, had first come in contact with Kierkegaard and Heidegger; Jean Hyppolite translated Hegel’s Phenomenology and even used exact phrases from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.⁸ What emerged from this new look at Hegel and Marx was the centrality of the theme of alienation and the indebtedness of Marx to Hegel, not only for the dialectic, but for the analysis of the master-slave relation in the Phenomenology.

There was another consistency in the French rediscovery of German nineteenth-century thought: a gradual transition from a Cartesian, atemporal approach to reality to a realization of the need to consider both the historical placing of thought and the historical moment of the thinker. Thus, Sartre takes a new look at the notion of “ideology,” namely that what an age takes as “universal reason” is basically a notion of reason defined by a rising class to fit its needs. In the Critique, the notion of ideology becomes an aspect of a more complex distinction between analytic and dialectical reason.

On the practical level of political activity, there was, of course, the constancy of the FCP; as diverse as was the intellectual spectrum of the Left, the political reality after the war was that the Party represented the masses of the French workers. The tensions in choosing between joining the one party that had effective political strength and retaining intellectual integrity could be agonizing for the French intellectual. In order to stay within the Party, Lukács was made to recant his History and Class Consciousness, with its emphasis on alienation rather than the dialectic.⁹ Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were to quarrel, first because Sartre did not join the Party, then because he did.¹⁰

Within this intellectual and political context, it is not always easy to retrace Sartre’s own philosophic development. In order to teach philosophy, Sartre had taken the formal training for the agregé, and he had read Capital as early as 1927; he had also spent a year in Berlin reading Husserl in German, and he read Heidegger soon after. He must have read Hegel in the original at least prior to writing his Being and Nothingness, because in that work Sartre frequently arrives at his own position by first examining the views of Hegel and Heidegger. But, for Sartre, there was the important distinction between academic reading and the reading that changed his thinking and his life. In the case of his early reading of phenomenology, he had been searching for a philosophy of the concrete himself. In this early period, however, it is clear that not only Marx but also Hegel occupied a secondary role. In Being and Nothingness, despite the use of the Hegelian terms “for-itself” and “in-itself,” there is no real use of a dialectic, truncated or otherwise, nor is there a meaningful confrontation with Hegel or Marx.¹¹ After the war, spurred by the changing intellectual climate and the political tensions, Sartre began a complete reading of Hegel, Marx, and Freud. He also began reading Kierkegaard in depth.

But now Sartre’s approach was not academic. He saw that his earlier existentialism had not provided a bridge between theory and political practice, and also that he had not considered the status of the intellectual within culture. Implicitly, he had accepted from the early Husserl the conviction that the genetic components of a phenomenon, its diachronic depth, could be discounted for the purpose of philosophic analysis: the nature of human relations was philosophically important, but their historical reasons and roots were not. The tie between the historical depth of human relations and these relations as a presence before us was to become an integral aspect of the Critique, with its progressive-regressive movement. Through this method, the Critique aims at revealing what in analytic terms can be called “the condition for the possibility” of human relations. That is, Sartre attempts to show us the large-scale, objective conditions that allow these human relations, rather than others, to be possible. He has in mind the objective possibility of such phenomena as colonialization, racism, and revolutionary action.

By the time Sartre wrote the Method in 1957, Marxism had become for him the philosophy that weds theory and action. He was experiencing the proletariat, those “‘sub-men conscious of their sub-humanity,’” (Method, 19, F 23, NF 29) not merely as a tragic problem that had not yet been resolved, but as a historical phenomenon that was being maintained in existence by present practices. But, unlike many of the Stalinist Marxists of his time, Sartre had a firsthand knowledge of the texts of Hegel and Marx. There were also Kierkegaard’s and Sartre’s own existentialism. And most importantly, Sartre was not a historian but a philosopher; everything would be rethought. This was to become clear when Sartre, in the Method, interpreted Marx as bringing together Hegel and Kierkegaard; while Marx and Kierkegaard each developed his philosophy in relation to Hegel, neither was aware of the other’s thought. In the Method, Sartre’s situating of existentialism within Marxism is a philosophic interpretation with ambiguities that I will soon consider. But I would first like to examine some of the background that preceded the writing of the Critique.

At first, Sartre’s position was that of an intellectual of the Left who could not join the Party. In “Materialism and Revolution,” he distanced himself from the Party by insisting that humans make history and not laws. “The revolutionary, on the other hand, is defined by his going beyond the situation in which he is placed.”¹² He was, of course, proposing that the FCP incorporate existentialism within its intellectual program. But one aspect of the argument was to become crucial for the Critique, namely, that one dialectic cannot apply to both nature and history. How important such a unified dialectical materialism was to Marx is debatable.¹³ In general, Sartre plays Engels and Lenin against the “true Marx.” Regardless of Marx’s own view, Sartre explicitly denies that we have a neutral perspective from which we can see both history and nature. On the other hand, he accepts on a commonsense level our obvious ties with animals and minerals, but he rejects the idea that we have the philosophic tools to elaborate these connections. This position is not a rejection of science but a perspective on science as a set of intellectual tools constituted by praxis for the purpose of controlling nature. Sartre’s insistence that the dialectic be located only within history has led some commentators to speak of an implicit Cartesian dichotomy between human praxis and nature. But the question that must be addressed is the implicit idealism in an a prioritranscendent perspective that delineates nature and humans as objects of a unified study.¹⁴

The claim of many Marxists that dialectical materialism is valid in the realms of both nature and history leads Sartre to reject materialism in the Method, because, in this context, it is equivalent to an idealism. “There are two ways to fall into idealism: The one consists of dissolving the real in subjectivity; the other in denying all real subjectivity in the interests of objectivity” (Method, 33 n. 1; F, 31 n. 1; NF, 39 n. 1). This type of materialism does not question the relation of the materialist to materialism; it assumes that the movement from the human organism to nature is the same as the movement from nature to the human organism. This assumption is itself the result of praxis, a series of historical activities that constitute materialism as a positivism with its reverse side of “spiritualism.” Indirectly, we here encounter the distinction between “dialectical” and “analytic” reason. Reason can constitute itself as a tool. In this sense, analytic reason can be an instrument in two senses: it can recognize that it is molding and limiting itself as an analytic tool, in which case it is dialectical reason operating, as it were, in good faith; or it can present itself as the universal reason of a neutral observer, in which case it is the tool of an ideology that, for Sartre, masks its goal of limiting humanity. This will be discussed at some length as we proceed with our study of the Critique.

With “Materialism and Revolution” in 1947, Sartre felt that he had indirectly given aid to American capitalism. Further, the political situation was changing. The strength of the FCP was diminishing, and the cold war was intensifying. Sartre feared the presence of Washington in Paris more than the presence of Moscow. A final stupidity on the part of the French government tilted the scale: there was a general crackdown on socialist groups. Sartre defended the Party as a protest, and, between 1952 and 1953, wrote a series of articles for Les Temps Modernes, which were to become The Communists and Peace.¹⁵

The Communists and Peace is an occasional work, loosely argued. The main problem was still the union of theory and practice. Sartre writes on two levels: On an empirical level, there are the arrests of dissidents in the Soviet Union and the arrests of Communists in France. But, on a broader, more historically significant level, there are the series of praxes in both countries that made the arrests possible. The present philosophic situation is not a mere epiphenomenon. There is a class struggle, but it is not between ideal categories. “I don’t concern myself with what would be desirable nor with ideal relations which the Party-in-itself (Parti-en-soi) sustains with the Eternal Proletariat; I seek to understand what is happening in France today, before our very eyes” (CP, 120). There are two issues: the FCP as a political organ under persecution, which Sartre still sees as viable despite all its faults, and the distinctive history of the French worker, a particular oppression that did not exist in American capitalism, namely “Malthusianism.” An enlightened capitalism would be content with exploitation and with buying off a section of the middle class by raising its standard of living at the expense of the lower classes. But the French had added oppression to exploitation. Consequently, each class struggle has its own “truth.” It is impossible to know critically and a priori that a single class struggle exists throughout the world. Sartre credits Marx for this emphasis on the need for separate historical analysis of class struggles.

In the last third of The Communists and Peace, Sartre also investigates the notion of class, which was later refined in the Critique. The reality of a class is not that of a superentity that unites individuals into some quasi-organic whole. On the other hand, a class has more reality than the sum total of individuals who are concerned about each other. One of the main purposes of the Critique is to elucidate the ambiguous reality of a class, and Sartre clarifies in The Communists and Peace that he is attempting to evaluate classes from the perspective of the most disadvantaged.

The United States and the USSR could debate an elitist notion of freedom. As for the French worker, “she too wants liberation. But her freedom doesn’t resemble yours; and I think that she would gladly do without the freedom of expression of which such fine use is made in the Salle Gaveau if she were freed from the throbbing rhythm of the machine” (CP, 228). Sartre, of course, always defended freedom of expression, even when the Communists had tried to censor their own members. The issue here, however, is that the goal of freedom of expression is being used as an excuse for tolerating injustices that could be eliminated. On their part, the Communists held that the future liberation of the worker is a justification for tolerating present oppression. The liberation promised by capitalism is less oppressive, but, in the long run, it is also more alienating and inhuman: “At the end of the last century, Taylor said to the workers, ‘Don’t try to think; others will do that for you.’ Thirty years later, Ford said of the workers, ‘They don’t like to think for themselves’” (CP, 193).

When the USSR invaded Hungary in 1956, Sartre broke with the Party and again wrote three artic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prefatory Remarks
• Background: Search for a Method
• Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume I
• Introduction
• 1. The Dogmatic Dialectic and the Critical Dialectic
• 2. Critique of Critical Investigation
• Book I. From Individual Praxis to the Practico-Inert
• 1. Individual Praxis as Totalization
• 2. Human Relations as a Mediation between Different Sectors of Materiality
• 3. Matter as Totalized Totality: A First Encounter with Necessity
• 4. Collectives
• Book II. From Groups to History
• Part 1. The group—the equivalence of freedom as necessity and of necessity as freedom—the scope and limit of any realist dialectic
• (1. The Group-in-Fusion)
• (2. The Statutory Group)
• (3. The Organization)
• (4. The Constituted Dialectic)
• (5. The Unity of the Group as Other: The Militant)
• (6. The Institution)
• Part 2. Dialectical investigation as totalization: The level of the concrete, the place of history
• (7. The Place of History)
• (8. Class Struggle and Dialectical Reason)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index