JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Politics311country demands, for the time being, individual acts. Thus the unique particularity ofthis person is the internalization of a double future—that of the whites and that of hisbrothers; the contradiction is cloaked and surmounted in a project which launches ittoward a brief, dazzling future, his future, shattered immediately by prison or byaccidental death.What makes American culturism and Kardiner’s theory appear mechanistic andoutmoded is the fact they never conceive of cultural behavior and basic attitudes (orroles, etc.) within the true, living perspective, which is temporal, but rather conceiveof them as past determinations ruling men in the way that a cause rules its effects.Everything changes if one considers that society is presented to each man as aperspective of the future and that this future penetrates to the heart of each one as amotivation for his behavior. That the Marxists allow themselves to be duped bymechanistic materialism is inexcusable. since they know and approve of large-scalesocialist planning. For a man in China the future is more true than the present. So longas one has not studied the structures of the future in a defined society, one necessarilyruns the risk of not understanding anything whatsoever about the social.I cannot describe here the true dialectic of the subjective and the objective. Onewould have to demonstrate the joint necessity of “the internalization of the external”and “the externalization of the internal.” Praxis, indeed, is a passage from objective toobjective through internalization. The project, as the subjective surpassing of objectivitytoward objectivity, and stretched between the objective conditions of the environmentand the objective structures of the field of possibles, represents in itself the movingunity of subjectivity and objectivity, those cardinal determinants of activity. Thesubjective appears then as a necessary moment in the objective process. If the materialconditions which govern human relations are to become real conditions of praxis, theymust be lived in the particularity of particular situations. The diminution of buyingpower would never provoke the workers to make economic demands if they did notfeel the diminution in their flesh in the form of a need or of a fear based on bitterexperiences. The practice of union action can increase the importance and the efficacyof objective significations among the experienced party militants; the wage scale andthe price index can by themselves clarify or motivate their action. But all this objectivityrefers ultimately to a lived reality. The worker knows what he has resented and whatothers will resent. Now, to resent is already to go beyond, to move toward thepossibility of an objective transformation. In the lived experience, the subjectivityturns back upon itself and wrenches itself from despair by means of objectification.Thus the subjective contains within itself the objective, which it denies and which itsurpasses toward a new objectivity; and this new objectivity by virtue of objectification