by Liam Kloef

Created on: January 31, 2009

Although I had heard of Sartre in high school and college, I was only remotely familiar with his "philosophy of existence," existentialism. I began reading him in earnest long after he had died and because his name appeared in the bibliographies of other people I was reading.

In 1964, two psychiatrists working in London, David Cooper and Ronald Laing, published "Reason and Violence," a compendium of three Sartre works from the preceding decade: Question of Method, Saint Genet, and Critique of Dialectical Reason (CDR). None of those had been translated into English at the time; Sartre wrote a foreword to their book.

Question of Method, later translated by Hazel Barnes (the translator of Sartre's major tome of existentialism, Being and Nothingness) as Search for a Method, had been written originally for a Polish journal: although supposedly commentary on existentialism, Sartre wrote Search as a critique of Marxism; at the time (1958), Poland was of course a Soviet satellite nation and ostensibly a practicing Marxist state. Sartre, however, criticized state Marxism as "arrested" and for deviating from his axiom that "cultural order is irreducible to natural order" (drawn presumably from a careful reading of Marx). The tendency was for Soviet nations to blame their failures on the pathologies of seditionists: the Hungarian leader Rakosi had gone so far as to blame failed crops on the "anti-revolutionary" nature of the soil. We've known through the writer Solzhenitsyn that political dissidents were classified as psychiatric cases and hospitalized accordingly.

Sartre insisted that the reason for this "reification" was that, in the cause of unity in the Soviet Union, practice and theory were split: practice (or praxis; a Greek word meaning, more or less, deliberate action) had no principles; theory became a system of rigid knowledge. Marxist theorists like Georg Lukacs dealt with fixed entities: the Hungarian insurrection of 1956 was reduced a struggle between a Soviet bureaucracy and a direct democracy. These simple abstractions were further reduced to a struggle between their respective powers. The people disappeared.

Twentieth-century Marxists attached a good deal of importance to analysis of a situation; Sartre insisted that this analysis alone was insufficient. Marxist analysis consisted of eliminating details and forcing meaning into certain events: particularities of events were ignored or suppressed; the particular replaced with the universal. Marx himself was

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