JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

52Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsbase everything else. From an image of beings existing in discontinuity, you form apicture of a discontinuous world of objects, in which there is no causality, exceptingthat strange variety of causal relatedness which is that of utility—passive,incomprehensible and contemptible. Existential man stumbles about in a world ofimplements, of untidy obstacles, entangled and piled up one upon another in a fantasticdesire to make them serve one another, but all branded with the stigma, so frightful inthe eyes of idealists, of their so-called pure exteriority. This implemental mode ofdeterminism is, however, acausal. For where is the beginning or the end of such aworld, the definition of which, moreover, is wholly arbitrary and in no way agreeswith the data of modern science? For us it neither begins nor ends anywhere, for theseparation which the existentialist inflicts upon it— separation from nature, or ratherfrom the condition of man—makes it unreal. There is one world and only one, in ourview, and the whole of this world—both men and things, if you must make thatdistinction— may be seen, in certain variable conditions, under the sign of objectivity.The utility of stars, of anger, of a flower? I will not argue about such things: but Imaintain that your freedom, your idealism, is made out of an arbitrary contempt forthings. And yet things are very different from the description that you give of them.You admit their existence in their own right, and so far so good. But it is a purelyprivative existence, one of permanent hostility. The physical and biological universe isnever, in your eyes, a condition or a source of conditioning—that word, in its full andpractical sense, has no more meaning for you than has the word “cause.” That is whythe objective universe is, for existential man, nothing but an occasion of vexation, athing elusive, fundamentally indifferent, a continual mere probability—in short, thevery opposite of what it is to the Marxist materialist.For all these reasons and for some others, you can only conceive the commitmentof philosophy as an arbitrary decision which you describe as free. You denaturehistory, even that of Marx, when you say that he has outlined a philosophy becausehe was committed to it. On the contrary; the commitment, or rather the social andpolitical action, was a determinant of his thinking in a more general sense. It was outof a multiplicity of experiences that he distilled his doctrines. It appears evident to methat the development of philosophic thinking in Marx took place in consciousconnection with the development of politics and society. That is more or less the case,moreover, with all previous philosophers. Kant is a systematic philosopher who isknown to have refrained from all political activity, but that does not mean that hisphilosophy did not play a certain political rôle—Kant, the German Robespierre, asHeine called him. And, even to the extent that one might admit, of the epoch ofDescartes for example, that the development of philosophy played no direct part in