JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

4Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingssynthesis of anarchism and the other philosophies he espoused. Rather,his anarchism is in his behaviour.Sartre lost patience with communism after the failure of the May 1968riots to develop into a revolutionary overthrow of French capitalism. He pennedthe tract Les Communistes ont peur de la révolution (The Communists areAfraid of Revolution) to condemn what he saw as the betrayal of the revolutionby the PCF. His acceptance of the editorship of La Cause du Peuple (ThePeople’s Cause) and other Maoist papers was his last significant Marxistgesture. In the 1970s he struggled to learn the political stance of his youngrevolutionary colleagues who sometimes viewed the ageing writer with mirthor contempt.Despite these complexities, there is something profoundly apposite aboutRybalka’s use of liberty, equality, fraternity to denote Sartre’s existentialism,Marxism and anarchism. The doctrine that human beings have anineliminable freedom to choose, no matter how constrained they may be, isessential to Sartre’s existentialism. We are the beings who choose what weare. In Marxism, equality is not only a value, it is the core political value: thevalue upon which other values depend. In anarchism, fraternity makes socialharmony in the absence of the power of the state possible. Ordinary humanfriendships do not need to be sustained by police, army, courts or taxationand this is a clue to the fact that society without the state is possible.It could be that existentialism, Marxism and anarchism are not mutuallyconsistent. If philosophical problems need to be solved to show theircompatibility, then this applies equally to the slogan of the French revolutionof 1789. Arguably the history of the Westernised world since the 1790s hasconspicuously included the attempt to reconcile the competing claims ofliberty, equality and fraternity. If that is right, the avid reception of Sartre’sworks worldwide becomes more comprehensible.Sartre, then, is a synthesiser. It is not unusual for the greatness of aphilosopher to consist in being a synthesiser. Plato reconciled the static,rationalist, monist world-picture of Parmenides with the pluralistic, empirical,process ontology of Heraclitus. Descartes, wrote his dualist philosophy toreconcile the medieval theological world picture he had inherited, with thefindings of the new physical science. 4 Kant, consciously if messily,synthesised the continental rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinozawith the British empiricism of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Marxism,as Lenin pointed out, is a meeting of French socialism, British economics,and German philosophy. Sartre’s syntheses of phenomenology andexistentialism in the 1940s and existentialism with Marxism from the late1950s take their place with these others in the history of philosophy. Theyare at least as philosophically significant as the synthesis of psychoanalysisand Marxism of his German-American contemporary, the Frankfurt School