JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing
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JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

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13.07.2015 Views

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

312 Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsexternalizes the internality of the project as an objectified subjectivity. This meansboth that the lived as such finds its place in the result and that the projected meaningof the action appears in the reality of the world that it may get its truth in the processof totalization. 4Only the project, as a mediation between two moments of objectivity, can accountfor history; that is, for human creativity. It is necessary to choose. In effect: either wereduce everything to identity (which amounts to substituting a mechanistic materialismfor dialectical materialism)— or we make of dialectic a celestial law which imposesitself on the Universe, a metaphysical force which, by itself engenders the historicalprocess (and this is to fall back into Hegelian idealism)—or we restore to the individualman his power to go beyond his situation by means of work and action. This solutionalone enables us to base the movement of totalization upon the real. We must look fordialectic in the relation of men with nature, with “the starting conditions,” and in therelation of men with one another. There is where it gets its start, resulting from theconfrontation of projects. The characteristics of the human project alone enable us tounderstand that this result is a new reality provided with its own signification insteadof remaining simply a statistical mean. 5 It is impossible to develop these considerationshere. They will be the subject of Part Two of Critique of Dialectical Reason.CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON, VOL. ICollectivesSeries: the queueLet us illustrate these notions by a superficial everyday example. Take a grouping ofpeople in the Place Saint-Germain. They are waiting for a bus at a bus stop in front ofthe church. I use the word “grouping” here in a neutral sense: we do not yet knowwhether this gathering is, as such, the inert effect of separate activities, or whether itis a common reality, regulating everyone’s actions, or whether it is a conventional orcontractual organisation. These people—who may differ greatly in age, sex, class, andsocial milieu—realise, within the ordinariness of everyday life, the relation of isolation,of reciprocity and of unification (and massification) from outside which is characteristicof, for example, the residents of a big city in so far as they are united though notintegrated through work, through struggle or through any other activity in an organisedgroup common to them all. To begin with, it should be noted that we are concernedhere with a plurality of isolations: these people do not care about or speak to each

312 Jean-Paul <strong>Sartre</strong>: <strong>Basic</strong> <strong>Writing</strong>sexternalizes the internality of the project as an objectified subjectivity. This meansboth that the lived as such finds its place in the result and that the projected meaningof the action appears in the reality of the world that it may get its truth in the processof totalization. 4Only the project, as a mediation between two moments of objectivity, can accountfor history; that is, for human creativity. It is necessary to choose. In effect: either wereduce everything to identity (which amounts to substituting a mechanistic materialismfor dialectical materialism)— or we make of dialectic a celestial law which imposesitself on the Universe, a metaphysical force which, by itself engenders the historicalprocess (and this is to fall back into Hegelian idealism)—or we restore to the individualman his power to go beyond his situation by means of work and action. This solutionalone enables us to base the movement of totalization upon the real. We must look fordialectic in the relation of men with nature, with “the starting conditions,” and in therelation of men with one another. There is where it gets its start, resulting from theconfrontation of projects. The characteristics of the human project alone enable us tounderstand that this result is a new reality provided with its own signification insteadof remaining simply a statistical mean. 5 It is impossible to develop these considerationshere. They will be the subject of Part Two of Critique of Dialectical Reason.CRITIQUE OF DIALECTICAL REASON, VOL. ICollectivesSeries: the queueLet us illustrate these notions by a superficial everyday example. Take a grouping ofpeople in the Place Saint-Germain. They are waiting for a bus at a bus stop in front ofthe church. I use the word “grouping” here in a neutral sense: we do not yet knowwhether this gathering is, as such, the inert effect of separate activities, or whether itis a common reality, regulating everyone’s actions, or whether it is a conventional orcontractual organisation. These people—who may differ greatly in age, sex, class, andsocial milieu—realise, within the ordinariness of everyday life, the relation of isolation,of reciprocity and of unification (and massification) from outside which is characteristicof, for example, the residents of a big city in so far as they are united though notintegrated through work, through struggle or through any other activity in an organisedgroup common to them all. To begin with, it should be noted that we are concernedhere with a plurality of isolations: these people do not care about or speak to each

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