Sartre Studies International

When published, Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason appeared to be a major intellectual and political event, no less than a Kantian effort to found Marxism, with far-reaching theoretical and political consequences. Claude Levi-Strauss devoted a course to studying it, and debated Sartre's main points in The Savage Mind; Andre Gorz devoted a major article to explaining its importance and key concepts in New Left Review. Many analysts of the May, 1968 events in Paris claimed that they were anticipated by the Critique. But the book has had a very quiet 50th anniversary: it is now clear that the project has had little lasting effect beyond a narrow band of specialists. It has not entered the wider culture, has not been picked up beyond Sartre scholars except by one or two philosophically interested social scientists and feminist thinkers; and after the energy of 1968 wore off the Critique faded as well from the radar of political activists. This article asks and attempts to answer the perplexing question: Why? What became of the great promise of Sartre's project?

“Dialectical” stands in parentheses because I wish to discuss both authors in terms of a critique of reason as such in addition to specifying the issue in terms of their respective assessments of the dialectic. But I shall first consider how each employs the term “critique.” So my remarks will focus on Critique, Reason and Dialectic in that order. Of course, each topic understandably bleeds into the others. In view of the occasion, I shall conclude with a brief sketch of four milestones along Sartre's way from Being and Nothingness to the Critique.

Frantz Fanon was an enthusiastic reader of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason and in this essay I focus on what can be gleaned from The Wretched of the Earth about how he read it. I argue that the reputation among Sartre's critics of the Critique as a failure on the grounds that it was left incomplete should take into account its presence in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. Their shared perspectives on the systemic character of racism and colonialism, on the genesis and fragility of groups, and on parties indicates the vitality of the ideas set out in the Critique. However, these similarities between the two thinkers are offset by their differences on national consciousness and on the rural masses. I end by speculating about a certain defence on Sartre's part toward Fanon's concrete experience.

This essay revisits the question of Sartre's method with particular emphasis on the posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics, Critique of Dialectical Reason (Volume II), and “Morale et histoire.” I argue that Sartre's method—an ever-evolving though never seamless blend of phenomenological description, dialectical analysis, and logical inference—is at once the seed and fruit of his mature ontology of praxis. Free organic praxis, what Sartre more than once calls “the human act,” is neither closed nor integral, but is rather intrinsically open-ended and integrative. Thus a philosophical method that seeks at once to illuminate human experience and human history must itself be both a reflection and inflection of the essential openness and integrativity of praxis itself. In the conclusion, I argue that the openness and integrativity of Sartre's method are its core strengths and the sources of its continued philosophical worth.

While reading Ron Aronson’s illuminating guide to the secular life, it struck me that, given the context, an exploration of the topic of Sartre and atheism was very much in order.

Before addressing Ronald Aronson’s Living Without God, I wish, first, to make a brief remark or two about the perspective from which I come, and secondly, to offer a few summary comments about “Sartre and Atheism,” a theme that underlies much of Aron- son’s analysis and represents a kind of subtitle for this panel-discus- sion and exchange.

Given the powerful autobiographical bearing witness in Ronald Aronson’s Living Without God (hereafter LWG), a personal story seems in order. I first heard Ron’s voice in 1996 at Dennison University and this experience left the following indelible impression. Not knowing which concurrent session to attend at my first NASS meeting, I more or less arbitrarily selected a panel on the early Sartre. About half way through the session and from well down the hall a fierce dialectical battle exploded. Our session came to a momentary standstill. While the content of the debate was unclear, the audible energy and disagreement was unmistakable. So too was my conclusion: I was attending the wrong panel!

Not believing in God is, on the one hand, a very simple matter. As most Danes and Swedes know, it is increasingly possible to grow up in a wholly secular environment, where questions about sin, grace, and an afterlife never get posed, where well-being is taken for granted, where people feel protected and reassured not by churches but by societal institutions. But on the other hand, as Sartre said, “becoming an atheist is a long a difficult undertaking.” Becoming an atheist in a religious culture entails sorting through a series of profound issues. To think through what this means and how to live one’s entire life in a world without God requires addressing, as Sartre knew, life’s ultimate questions about “man and the universe.” It is, in short, one thing to live as if God does not exist, but quite another to provide secular answers to Kant’s three great philosophical questions: “What can I know?”, “What may I hope?”, “What should I do?” This is what my book, Living without God, sets out to do.

David Detmer, Sartre Explained Review by Nicholas J. Wernicki

Christine Daigle and Jacob Golomb, eds., Beauvoir & Sartre: The Riddle of Influence Review by Shannon M. Mussett

John Foley, Albert Camus: From the Absurd to Revolt Review by Adrian van den Hoven

Sebastian Gardner, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness: A Reader’s Guide Review by Matthew C. Eshleman

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