JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

306 Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsthat the educator himself is a product of circumstances and of education—whichwould render the sentence useless and absurd; or else it is the decisive affirmation ofthe irreducibility of human praxis. The educator must be educated; this means thateducation must be an enterprise. 1If one wants to grant to Marxist thought its fall complexity, one would have to saythat man in a period of exploitation is at once both the product of his own product anda historical agent who can under no circumstances be taken as a product. Thiscontradiction is not fixed; it must be grasped in the very movement of praxis. Then itwill clarify Engels’s statement: men make their history on the basis of real, priorconditions (among which we would include acquired characteristics, distortions imposedby the mode of work and of life, alienation, etc.), but it is the men who make it and notthe prior conditions. Otherwise men would be merely the vehieles of inhuman forceswhich through them would govern the social world. To be sure these conditions exist,and it is they, they alone, which can furnish a direction and a material reality to thechanges which are in preparation; but the movement of human praxis goes beyondthem while conserving them.Certainly men do not grasp the real measure of what they do—at least its fullimport must escape them so long as the Proletariat, the subject of History, will not ina single movement realize its unity and become conscious of its historical role. But ifHistory escapes me, this is not because I do not make it; it is because the other ismaking it as well. Engels—who has left us many hardly compatible statements on thissubject—has shown in The War of the Peasants, at any rate, the meaning which heattached to this contradiction. After emphasizing the courage and passion of theGerman peasants, the justice of their demands, the genius of certain of their leaders(especially Münzer), the intelligence and competence of the revolutionary elite, heconcludes: “In the War of the Peasants, only the princes had anything to gain; thereforethis was its result. They won not only relatively, since their rivals (the clergy, thenobility, the city) found themselves weakened, but also absolutely, since they carriedoff the best spoils from the other orders.” What was it then which stole the praxis ofthe rebels? Simply their separation, which had as its source a definite historicalcondition—the division of Germany. The existence of numerous provincial movementswhich never succeeded in uniting with one another, where each one, other than theothers, acted differently—this was enough to make each group lose the real meaning ofits enterprise. This does not mean that the enterprise as a real action of man uponhistory does not exist, but only that the result achieved, when it is placed in thetotalizing movement, is radically different from the way it appears locally—evenwhen the result conforms with the objective proposed. Finally, the division of the