Subject: Sartre/
From: Stuart Elden <stuart.elden-AT-clara.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2001 00:29:08 +0100


Clifford and others

In relation to previous posts about Sartre, I've been doing some 
thinking and a little reading about this.

Sartre's own Questions de methode [Search for a Method in English 
translation], which was originally called Marxism and Existentialism, 
and was then published in Critique de la raison dialectique is 
invaluable. The Laing and Cooper book Clifford mentioned is also useful.


Laing and Cooper suggest:

'The key positions of the earlier work are conserved in the later, but 
conserved through a dialectic transformation as one moment in the later 
synthesis' (p16)

In Questions de methode, Sartre declares 

'Je considere le marxisme comme l'indepassable philosophie de notre 
temps' (p. 14)

'I consider Marxism as the insurpassable philosophy of our time' (my 
translation, pxxiv in Search, but this misses the point)

'insurpassable' is barely adequate: Sartre's translation of the 
Hegelian Aufheben is depasser.

then on p30/p21 he says he is:

"convinced _at one and the same time_ that historical materialism was 
the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism 
remained the only concrete approach to reality. I do not pretend to 
deny the contradictions in this attitude. I simply assert that Lukacs 
does not even suspect it"

I'm not convinced that this is adequate to explain the transition in 
Sartre's thought, but it makes a little more sense of the ways in which 
his thought can be understood.

One question: Sartre quotes a letter from Engels, which he says was to 
Marx, the French editor corrects to say it was to Hans Starkenberg, 25 
Jan 1894 [p. 37 n], in a few places. The key phrase is 'Men themselves 
make their own history but in a given environment which conditions them'
. Sartre says he accepts this without reservation. He wants to stress 
the phrase before the 'but' which he claims determinists miss, whilst 
recognises constraints. But why does Sartre quote this letter, and not 
the very similar, and yet much more detailed and explicit, phrase in 
The Eighteenth Brumaire?

By the way, Sartre's relation to Lefebvre is very evident - sometimes 
explicit - in this work. Interesting stuff.

Stuart

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