Sartre's second century

Autobiography, Ontology and Responsibility 27
philosophical language of the state of mind of the German people since the
war [...] all he did was to follow, as a philosopher, a path parallel to that of
the petty bourgeois masses." Our reference below to Heidegger's
relationship to the "war-ideology" prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s
confirms how insightful this early analysis was. It also points out just how
much the product of his age Heidegger in fact was. Audry also calls
attention to the close connection between Heidegger's notion of historical
destiny and the Nazi Party's doctrine of Germany's national destiny.
Finally, in the concluding paragraphs of her article she chides the Marxists
for restricting their analyses to political and economic factors, leaving the
opponents of Marx, such as Heidegger, free rein to engage in a "monopoly
of intellectual audacity in everything that goes beyond the scope of the
purely economic and political". 24 Sartre's writings after Being and
Nothingness (a work heavily influenced by his reading of Heidegger in the
early 1940s) extend Marx's view of the dialectics of the historicaleconomic
world to include the analysis of culture, not as a derivative
superstructure, but as a domain interwoven with the material conditions of
human existence and as a legitimate dimension of human freedom.
Sartre's rejection of fascism brought him closer to the communism
Heidegger found totally unacceptable. Between the years 1952 and 1956,
Sartre formed a loose rapprochement with the French Communist Party
(PCF) and defended Stalin's Russia as providing the sole possibility for a
truly revolutionary social order. It was understood that the French
Communist Party was under Moscow's control. Given this context,
Sartre's urging individuals to join the party was tantamount to publicly
endorsing Stalinist policies and Stalin's notorious work camps. Sartre
visited Russia for the first time in 1954.
By 1957, Sartre had publicly withdrawn from his loose alliance with
the PCF. The crushing of the Hungarian Revolt in 1957 now saw Sartre
condemning Russian communism. His political writings argued that
Stalin's Russia had become a class society, with a class of exploited
labourers on the one hand and a political dictatorship that called itself
socialist, while clearly oppressing the Soviet worker, on the other. Sartre's
political Marxism is complemented by his "critique of dialectical reason".
His form of dialectical analysis rejects the existence of an external point of
view from which knowledge of history is to be attained: "A materialist
dialectic will be meaningless if it cannot establish, within human history,
the primacy of material conditions as they are discovered by the praxis of
particular men and as they impose themselves on it. In short, if there is to
Ibid., 21.