JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Sartre in the world3determined, both mental and physical, social and individual, subjective andobjective, and so on; not one to the exclusion of the other. ‘Synthetic’ or‘totalising’ philosophy shows seemingly mutually exclusive views to be notonly compatible but mutually necessary. 2Sartre’s Marxism is a ‘humanistic’ Marxism. His faith in Marxism as themost advanced philosophy of human liberation is tempered by hisawareness of the crushing of the aspirations of the human individual byactual Marxism in, for example, the Soviet collectivisation of the farms andpurges of the 1930s and 1940s, the supression of the Hungarian uprisingof 1956, the decades of atrocities in the Soviet Gulag, the ending of thePrague Spring in 1968. Like the Austrian philosopher Karl Popper, Sartredoes not think the oppression of the individual by communism is only aproblem of political practice. 3 He thinks Marxist political theory is flawed.Unlike Popper however, he seeks to humanise Marxist theory rather thanreject it utterly. Also unlike Popper, he thinks the neglected resources for atheory of the freedom of the individual can be found within the early writingsof Marx himself. The young Marx is to be construed as a kind of protoexistentialist.The putative synthesis of existentialism and Marxism is extraordinarilyambitious. Some of the most fundamental and intractable problems ofmetaphysics and the philosophy of mind are obstacles to that synthesis.Classical Marxism is determinist and materialist. Sartre’s existentialism islibertarian and phenomenological. Marxism includes a theory of history withprescriptive prognoses for the future. Existentialism explores agency in aspontaneous present which bestows only a derivative existence on pastand future. Marxism is a social theory in which the class is the subject andobject of change. In existentialism individuals do things and things aredone to individuals. Marxism has pretensions to be a science. Existentialismregards science as part of the very problem of dehumanisation andalienation.Despite the fact that Sartre’s overt anarchism emerges only at the end ofhis life – it is mainly professed in a series of interviews with his then secretaryBenny Lévy for the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur – Sartre also claimedin the 1970s that he had always been an anarchist.Anarchism is the theory that the abolition of the state is both possible anddesirable. It is true that Sartre was a figure who increasingly challengedauthority, especially the authority of the state; from the mocking of bourgeoisvalues in the 1938 novel Nausea (La Nausée), through the support for theAlgerian and Cuban rebels in the 1950s and early 1960s, and a host ofother left-wing or anti-colonial causes, to his hawking of Maoist newsheetson the streets of Paris in the early 1970s. Sartre never wrote a philosophical