JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

54Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic WritingsM. SartreIt is rather difficult to give you a complete answer. You have said so many things. ButI will try to reply to a few points that I have noted down. First, I must say that youtake up a dogmatic position. You say that we take up a position anterior to Marxism,that we are advancing towards the rear. I consider that what you have to prove is thatthe position we are seeking to establish is not post-Marxian. As to that I will notargue, but I would like to ask you how you come by your conception of ‘the truth.’You think there are some things that are absolutely true, for you present your objectionsin the name of a certitude. But if all men are objects as you say, whence have you sucha certitude? You say it is in the name of human dignity that man refuses to regard manas an object. That is false: it is for a reason of a philosophic and logical order: if youpostulate a universe of objects, truth disappears. The objective world is the world ofthe probable. You ought to recognise that every theory, whether scientific orphilosophic, is one of probability. The proof of this is that scientific and historicaltheses vary, and that they are made in the form of hypotheses. If we admit that theobjective world, the world of the probable, is one, we have still no more than a worldof probabilities; and in that case since the probability depends upon our havingacquired some truths, whence comes the certitude? Our subjectivism allows us somecertitudes, and we are thus enabled to rejoin you upon the plane of the probable. Wecan thus justify the dogmatism which you have demonstrated throughout yourdiscourse, though it is incomprehensible from the position that you take. If you do notdefine the truth, how can you conceive the theory of Marx otherwise than as adoctrine which appears, disappears, is modified and has no more than theoreticalvalue? How can one make a dialectic of history unless one begins by postulating acertain number of rules? We deduce these from the Cartesian cogito: we can only findthem by placing ourselves firmly upon the ground of subjectivity. We have neverdisputed the fact that, continually, man is an object to man. But reciprocally, in orderto grasp the object as it is, there must be a subject which attains to itself as subject.Then, you speak of a condition of man, which you sometimes call a pre-condition,and you speak of pre-determination. What has escaped your notice here, is that weadhere to much that is in the Marxian descriptions. You cannot criticise me as youwould criticise the men of the eighteenth century, who were ignorant of the wholequestion. We have known for a long time all that you have been telling us aboutdeterminism. For us the real problem is to define conditions in which there can beuniversality. Since there is no human nature, how can one preserve, throughout thecontinual changes of history, universal principles sufficient to interpret, for instance,the phenomenon of Spartacus, which presupposes a minimum understanding of that