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.