The Search for a Method part 2:

Before we pick up from where we left off, let’s briefly run through a couple of critical remarks on Sartre’s trajectory and the outline of his theory and method. He holds that we need not adapt philosophy to the course of the world—it adapts itself—if so, does this not run counter to his dialectical sensibility in the seeming contradiction between concrete materiality and reflection? Ie. is there not missing from this adaptation what can be called “the converse movement” of concrete materiality adapting to philosophy (this seems to gain further impetus by Sartre’s “relocation” of knowing to the real world)? Or will he grant the locus of the operation to a “given world of facts”? Perhaps it is in the already totalised knowledge, the unity-become-passive, that we see “the world” or “the horizon” to which philosophy subsequently adapts (if so what about the given world of facts?), but then in contradistinction we must see this world in its relation to an active, totalizing effort of philosophy itself, so that the world as totalised knowledge is mediated by something not yet totalised, but essentially totalizing. In both instances we end up paradoxically with the problem of where and whence the content of the world cometh—never mind the movement itself. We seem to be far from a synthesis of concrete materiality and reflection (although we must grant that Sartre’s real investigation has not yet begun, and being dialectical in nature it only appears when “working the matter out”).

In other words, all the work is still ahead of us; the method, its constitution etc. Situating historical events by way of some already established material conditions for their existence, is deemed by Sartre, a priori. It is precisely these conditions in their whole conceptual movement and truth that we wish to investigate. Then there is the business of subsuming other philosophical movements in the total development of which Marxism, we understand, is the avant-garde. Here Sartre directs an attack on those Marxists, for whom the dialectic from Brentano to Husserl to Heidegger is brushed off as mere “epiphenomenon”: this criticism applies equally today in my opinion where people of that ilk have simply not read the texts of the respective authors. Moreover this schematizing of particular instances to a predetermined universal is carried over into real history; we see for example in the analyses of Guerin a perverse vulgarization of differences between the “intellectual petite bourgeoisie” and age-honed shipowners and merchants (in this domain there exists an interesting dialectic between the “aroused” and the “imparted” reminiscent of Max Stirner—Sartre must have read The Ego and His Own). We are thus warned not to treat “signification” as “intention”; we must be careful in grasping all the evidence of a totalisation if our objective is to capture the real (effectively noise and randomness is introduced into history). An example of this important difference is manifest in the actor performing for example Hamlet: when he crosses the scene he is immersed in the play but also in earning a living—these modes of being even inform and interpenetrate each other. His acting out of Hamlet mediates his knowledge of himself as actor just as the lines and scenes of the play are permeated by his reality (the intricacies of this relationship is precisely what is denied in the current aporicity of Marxist theory); the parable thus reintroduces the imaginary into the real as a point of reference for its interpretation of itself. Further, this makes clear how intention and signification can overlap establishing the possibility of bad faith (the use-mention distinction seems implicit as well). Marxism distorts this complex synthetic unity by introducing 2 concepts at the same time; that of teleology and that of unconscious knowledge. In combination they transform human reason into surface effects in a mechanistic system while simultaneously eschewing necessity to unforeseen results of human action (there is an important place for randomness, but it must be thought in conjunction with human knowing’s placement in the world). What is not apprehended in this “scintillation of ideas” is the dialectical interplay—the contradiction—that exists concretely in the particular situation we wish to investigate. This sort of formalization then amounts to suppression rather than an integration of real phenomena, thus it is a false totalisation. Under this schema it is impossible to see how superstructure has any influence on substructure; how the imaginary holds a place in reality and vice versa.

What we are dealing with is ultimately the intricate interplay of universal, particular and individual (we shall compare Sartre’s examination to Hegel’s in the Science of Logic later). Sartre is adamant that the ‘idea’ must be found in reality—though not as a ‘thing’—and never a priori; it has “historical depth” and “actual presence” as an “objective culture”. So we grasp everything a posteriori, even matters of relation to class and environment: we could say that for Sartre every “a priori” is materially mediated in some way.

A very important aspect of this displacement is the consequence it is has for the concrete individual, the particular life: for Engels and Marx the particular is born of chance, always subsumed under a somehow predetermined abstract universal movement—Fx. If Napoleon had not risen, someone else would have instead (cf. my remarks earlier on the scintillation of ideas). But this is really an arbitrary limitation of dialectical movement (one which has huge consequences for human freedom and choice) amounting to idealism. We must extend our investigation to how the universal is lived by the particular and the discipline enabling the study of this process today is psychoanalysis. This also amounts to a refusal of the dogmatism of presenting man only in his present determinations (compare Hegel: Who thinks abstractly?)—that is, analytically—and seeking instead to discover his whole history from childhood till now: ie. the moments of internalized externality.

A further example of “disguised idealism” is seen in a lot of modern sociology, where “the real movement of history” is hypostasized and posited positivistically as an already given totality: here the object is “ontologically autonomous” (autonomous meaning un-dialectical). Likewise the methodology is autonomous, describing only functions of the already given and ultimately, combining these 2 autonomies in a “reciprocal autonomy”, the experimenter and the experimental group are completely disengaged.

            It is easy to see that the kind of investigation Sartre promises us in the Critique is of a completely different nature than “un-situated”; “pre-given”; “objective”; “autonomous” etc. investigations, reality is much more dramatic. It is a lazy thinking that which does not work dialectically, a thinking that is satisfied with and complete in a severe reduction of reality. I think this suffices for an introduction to Sartre’s project and I will instead move on to the real text ending with this quote:

“We have just shown that dialectical materialism is reduced to its own skeleton if it does not integrate into itself certain Western disciplines; but this is only a negative demonstration. Our examples have revealed at the heart of this philosophy a lack of any concrete anthropology. But, without a movement, without a real effort at totalisation, the givens of sociology and of psychoanalysis will sleep side by side and will not be integrated into “knowledge.” The default of Marxism has led us to attempt this integration ourselves, with the means at our disposal; that is, by definite operations and according to principles which give to our ideology its unique character, principles which we are now going to set forth.”

The Search for a Method part 1:

I have decided to read Jean-Paul Sartre’s last major work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason, this summer and I will on this blog put down my thoughts about the work, its trajectory, its meaning etc.

The search for method:

I base my reading, among others things, on Sartre’s introductory work: The search for a method, in which a reconciliation between Marxism and existentialism is pursued.

First off, Sartre wants to define philosophy as what gives expression to the general movement of society (naturally in all kinds of distinct ways, but always on its way towards unification); more specifically it is the totalisation of contemporary knowledge. A philosophy at the height of its power, however, is never presented as a passive, already terminated unity of knowledge. Since philosophy is bound up with the movement of society and the praxis which supports it, it is always practical. Further, when it “impregnates” the masses it is transformed. Sartre gives as example Cartesianism, which at the height of its power serves as inspiration for Holbach, Diderot and Rousseau and their abstract revolt and later, having passed into general consciousness, serving as the spontaneous condition for the outbreak of the French Revolution.

Sartre recognizes only three periods of philosophical creation or as he beautifully phrases it: “instruments for fermenting a rotten society”—defined by these traits: a totalisation of knowledge; a method; a regulative Idea; an offensive weapon; a community of language—from the 17^th to the 20^th century: Locke and Descartes; Kant and Hegel; Marx. In so far that man has not gone beyond the historical moment these philosophies express, they remain the horizon of thought (the conclusion being that there must be a necessary symmetry between the diachronic and the synchronic development of thought, if we wish to be truthful to reality. Of course it is possible to observe an asynchrony between these 2 poles, more on that later). For Sartre the anarchist, since philosophy is bound up with the movement of society: “there is no need to readapt a living philosophy to the course of the world; it adapts itself.”

If philosophy’s movement is missing, it is either 1. dead or 2. going through a crisis. If the former, we leave it, if the latter it reflects a contradiction in society; a real crisis.

The adaptation of philosophy to the world is represented by totalisation, and taking into account Sartre’s proposition, that a philosophy at the height of its power cannot be presented as a passive unity of knowledge, the most formidable totalisation is Hegelianism. Here Being (understood as the entire noematic-noetic spectrum of consciousness) is completely dissolved in knowledge through a process of self-objectification and self-recovery and so in making totalisation as such the object of knowledge, ie. reflecting on the synthetic formation of consciousness itself, we secure our philosophy against passivity. This implies, according to Sartre but we may disagree, that contradictions are mediations between us as knowers and us as known and further that lived experience in all its tragedy and suffering is merely an “abstract determination”, which will be sublated in the absolute knowing (strangely posited as a state of docility and solipsism). Now, against this form of knowledge Sartre pits Kierkegaard as representative of lived subjective life, immune to objectification in the form of knowledge, and existing only “inwardly”. Sartre even acknowledges that this subjectivism can be seen as the height of idealism, but that it also “marks a progress towards realism”, since to Kierkegaard, the real can never be reduced to thought.

These reflections on Kierkegaard lead to the introduction of Marx, since he directs a similar criticism towards Hegel. A very important distinction must be mentioned here: that between “the externalisation of man in the universe” and “alienation, which turns his (man’s) externalisation back on himself.” The first part expounds man as producer and the world as his creation; man is essentially in control of himself, he “makes” himself by working on the world. The second part expounds man himself as an externalization, as through and through conditioned by something else than his own will such that he himself is the product of a political, legal and economic superstructure (which in turn may or may not be his own production).

This schism is particularly present today and can never be overcome by “consciousness thinking itself” (here Sartre is unusually indelicate in his interpretation of Hegel, in particular in his cavalier reading of external reflection in The Science of Logic), we must instead act and work towards a revolutionary praxis. Alienation as the particular actuality is thus transformative of “the structure of knowledge” to such a degree that theory is abandoned. And so, inherent in this schism, there lies a danger of separating theory and practise, which will transform the former into “pure, fixed knowledge”, and the latter into “empiricism without principles”. These lines are meant to build up to a discussion of the superiority of Marx’ mereology and the failure of the USSR. It is worth mentioning Adorno’s thoughts on the actuality of philosophy at this point, since they come very close to Sartre’s analysis. Adorno claims that it is impossible for reason to rediscover itself in a reality that suppresses all attempts at reasonable thought; or in other words we cannot think our way out of the contradictions of reality. In my opinion Adorno and Sartre suggest and mark an expansion of dialectics (which is already present in Hegel, even though they both might deny it) into contingency via the liquidation of eschatology (this might present some problems for Sartre’s concept of totality later on) which is the reason I embrace libertarianism, in spite of its ahistorical flaws (more on this point later).

Marxism considers facts that appear simultaneously to be internally related to such a degree that they condition each other; in its approach to experience it thus proceeds synthetically, trying to discover totalities via the facts, which in turn are considered by themselves in their revelatory nature (which of course, because of universalization, runs the risk of aggregate subordination). It is in the whole that the facts shed their lack and “recover their truth”. These totalities are living qua the becoming of facts and thus they can never be “constitutive concepts of experience”, merely interpretative heuristics. This runs completely counter to where Marxism stands today as the attempt at self-constitution a priori as absolute knowledge. According to Sartre it is this inertia that keeps existentialism alive; we have a need to understand man in his concrete synthesis, which in turn is only conceivable in a “moving, dialectical totalisation”, ie. history. For Sartre “truth is something which becomes, it has and will have become. It is a totalisation, which is forever being totalised. Particular facts do not signify anything; they are neither true nor false so long as they are not related, through the mediation of various partial totalities, to the totalisation in process.”

What we have failed to appreciate so far is the role of the subject in this undertaking; or in other words, who or what is the locus of this experience of movement? What is important is that the locus itself is determinately conditioned by “the mode of production of material life”, even though these conditions themselves are not static—this point has to be compared to the overall aim of the Critique, ie. “…to think history without a totalizer”. Sartre maintains that a philosophy of freedom is unthinkable—we simply have no concrete experience to base it on—until man has resolved the problem of scarcity at which point of course Marxism will have outlived its span.

In a footnote, Sartre tackles the problematic difference between and disagreement over reflection and immediacy and how these concepts link to methodology, epistemology and a theory of consciousness. This brings us back to the aim in the critique: to reconcile Marxism and existentialism—this also means to reconcile concrete materiality and reflection. Sartre maintains that reflection can only give us certitude if it “throws us back immediately among things and men, in the world”; or in the words of natural science, the experimenter is a part of the experimental system. To the fundamental question of how to start a philosophical investigation properly, we cannot surrender to subjective idealism but must answer with realism; one which includes in it “a reflective point of departure”. So the way we become conscious of a situation, ie. the way we come to know something, must account both for the praxis of coming to know (reflection) and the concrete, situated awareness of man (materiality), without decaying into either/or schemata.

Sartre provides 2 examples of deficient theories of knowledge: Marx’ non-situated observing and Lenin’s simple passivity. For Marx: “The materialist conception of the world signifies simply the conception of nature as it is without any foreign addition.”—in this guise, man is stripped of lived subjectivity, and becomes object only. For Lenin: “Consciousness is only the reflection of being, at best an approximately accurate reflection.”—which situates us in a bad scepticism. These theories correspond to the two sides of the schism mentioned earlier, and situate man either outside the experimental system or stops experimenting altogether. Both of them are anti-dialectical.

This is then what we must demand of a proper philosophical method: it must situate knowing in the world and determine it in its negativity (bear with me, if you find the concept of negativity rather opaque—we shall return to it in the course of this conversation). But then: ”…what are we to call this situated negativity, as a moment of praxis and as a pure relation to things themselves, if not exactly “consciousness”?

Finally, the locus, subjectivity, if it is to incorporate—indeed “be”—both reflection and concrete materiality can only be thought of as a moment in a process whereby externality is internalized.

Sommerskæv

Jeg er fuldstændig sommerskæv og beruset af hendes overlegne dans og nærværs storsind. Verden passerer forbi mens jeg vælter i mit sind; mine forræderiske ord er perverse replikker, mens mine tanker er alt, alt for rene. Sylespidse insisterer de på at præsentere hele min virkelighed; rungende fylder de mit kranies forsøg på benægtelse med rødglødende sandhed. Jeg vender på tæerne igen og igen, det er som om min krop forsøger at gå sygdommen væk. Med ét er jeg tilbage i min fæstning, gennemsyret af maskulin ro og overblik, men når mine øjne møder hendes afklædes hele min sjæl og alt mit væsen. Hun frarøver mig søvnen, de små skiver død, og alle ender bindes sammen i cirklens uendelige frembringelse af tilstedevær. Jeg er komplet og aldeles skæv af sommeren.