Marxism and the Critique of Rationalism

As we have seen, Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason supplemented rather than superseded Being and Nothingness . If the Critique laid bare the genesis of a transcendent social order, sustaining morality and stable social roles, Being and Nothingness equally denounced this order as a false prop for the individual's own choice of a way of life. Only the group-in-fusion, a collective incarnation of perpetual transcendence (which is what Being and Nothingness demanded anyhow), could accommodate the authentic individual, consciously exercising his ontological freedom.

When applied to Marxism, such concerns implied a theory of genuine individuation, linked to a critique of repressive (serial and practico-inert) social forms. Not just an image of autonomy in judgment and freedom in self-expression, authentic individuation required a person's active and ongoing self-definition, the subject's creative pursuit of possibilities. Under the conditions of advanced industrial society, however, individuation, while professed in principle, evaporated in practice, the victim of routinized patterns of thinking and acting; here human possibilities dissolved in a one-dimensional way of life, endured without any sense of alternatives.

To have confronted the attraction of such one-dimensionality is one of Sartre's great merits. In a world of routinized order, freedom may appear as a troubling source of insecurity, threatening to disrupt familiar modes of existence. Any program for social change thus finds itself beset not only by institutions of domination but also dominated individuals, fearful of the very freedom to change the world that might dispel their suffering. Sartre here disavowed Enlightenment rationalism as a tenable basis for Marxist theory. But, as he explained in Search for a Method , "Our intention is not to 'give the irrational its due,' but on the contrary, to reduce the part of indetermination and non-knowledge, not to reject Marxism in the name of a third path or of idealist humanism, but to reconquer man within Marxism."^[67]

Ironically, Sartre's most illuminating contributions to this end came not in the Critique but rather in his earlier essays and his biographies. Even Being and Nothingness offered an effective indictment of rationalism, despite initially proceeding from rationalist premises. Through such notions as bad faith and authenticity, he

attempted to grasp the individual's flight from freedom into the arms of previously established social values and roles. By reassessing the significance of passion, anxiety, and inertia in human affairs, Sartre implicitly reassessed the subjective grounds of ideological beliefs.

To be sure, these insights were not free of problems. As we have seen, Sartre's concept of authenticity lacked any discernible content, while his doctrine of absolute ontological freedom threatened to undermine critical applications of the concept. Indeed, as his philosophy progressed, the doctrine of ontological freedom increasingly became a hindrance complicating his main intention. By abandoning the notion of innate individual freedom and advocating instead something akin to Merleau-Ponty's concept of situated transcendence, he might have accomplished his primary purpose—"to give man both his autonomy and his reality among real objects"— without maintaining the Cartesian dualism haunting his outlook on human existence, "the Other," and social forms.^[68]

Fortunately, since he avoided making reason an ontological given, his discussion of the struggle for individual rationality escaped the difficulties surrounding his analogous inquiry into the struggle for individual freedom. In his essay on anti-Semitism, he formulated the problem of rationality with unusual clarity.

How can one choose to reason falsely? It is because of a longing for impenetrability. The rational man groans as he gropes for the truth; he knows that his reasoning is no more than tentative, that other considerations may supervene to cast doubt on it. He never sees very clearly where he is going; he is "open"; he may even appear to be hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of a stone. They wish to be massive and impenetrable; they wish not to change. Where indeed would change take them?

This recognition of a subjective fright before change struck a new and pessimistic chord in radical social thought.

We have here a basic fear of oneself and of truth. What frightens them is not the content of truth, of which they have no conception, but the form itself of truth, that thing of indefinite approximation. It is as if their own existence were in continual suspension. But they wish to exist all at once and right away. They do not want any acquired opinions; they want them

to be innate. Since they are afraid of reasoning, they wish to lead the kind of life wherein reasoning and research play only a subordinate role, wherein one seeks only what he has already found, wherein one becomes only what he already was. This is nothing but passion.

But passion itself fueled the individual's acts; it nurtured a surrogate strength. "Only a strong emotional bias can give a lightning-like certainty; it alone can hold reason in leash; it alone can remain impervious to experience and last a whole lifetime."^[69]

This "arationalist" perspective illuminated much of Sartre's later writing. Its implications for Marxism first emerged in The Communists and Peace . There Sartre defended a Leninist strategic position by arguing against the inherent rationality of the proletariat. Reason was never guaranteed anyone, not even the worker; "resignation" and "revolution" equally shed light on any situation, and the worker's response simply could not be prejudged. "Is this idealism, irrationalism?" he asked rhetorically. "Not at all. Everything will be clear, rational, everything is real"—but only "beginning with that resistance" to a rational "deciphering" of the situation disclosed in Sartre's approach. "Active experience begins in receptivity"—or inertia.

Passion had a role to play in dissolving this inertia, as surely as enlightened reason itself. Rejecting the sufficiency of orthodox Marxism, and the movement it anticipated from objective class interest to subjective class consciousness, Sartre asserted that passionate engagement comprised a crucial component in the passage beyond objective circumstances toward revolutionary goals; passion alone might overcome social inertia. "In short, the proletariat has not only a relationship with its own activity, it has to deal as well with its own inertia and, through it, with the activity of the Other class. For it is also through our passion that we have the painful and ambiguous experience of the real."^[70]

On this account, only a frail thread of commitment sustained the meaningful telos of rational Marxian practice. The revolutionary endeavor ultimately fell back on its own human resources: an engaged practice, more than mere "objective possibilities," sustained the revolutionary image of a better world—although this practice was itself based on "objective possibilities." Sartre posed the problem succinctly: subjectivity, even faced with a transcendent image of a better social order, one that might plausibly be insti-

tuted, usually continued to equate the tried with the true. But this routinization of practical transcendence spelled its eclipse—another meaning of the practico-inert. Radical practice could ill afford such an occlusion of creative subjective initiative; after all, the future of communism resided with the rational intentions of militant proletarians. The acquisition of a committed and "passionate" rationality thus became as much an issue for social theory as the elaboration of a cogent science of political economy.

As Sartre developed his position in the Critique , need rather than reason became the central factor in all human action. Lack— whether of food, shelter, or implicitly also transcendental values—comprised the ineliminable motor of history; still the mere force of such needs in no way guaranteed that rationality would play a part in satisfying them. Although the Critique focused on the need for material necessities, Being and Nothingness also disclosed a metaphysical need for substantial identity. Both types could hinder as well as encourage a radical political practice; with the possible exception of material needs, neither type could be definitively met. "The dialectical totalization must include acts, passions, work, and need as well as economic categories; it must at once place the agent or the event back into the historical setting, define him in relation to the orientation of becoming, and determine exactly the meaning of the present as such."^[71]

While the Critique hardly amplified the point, Sartre implied in Search for a Method that Marx's notion of an objective social struggle against exploitation had to be supplemented by an understanding of the subjective psychological struggle against inertia. The enlightened knowledge of objective exploitation could not, by itself, overcome an individual's passivity and reluctance to act decisively; dismantling routine practical responses therefore necessarily preceded any sustained commitment to a revolutionary movement. In this context, Sartre's remarks on Kierkegaard assumed an added measure of significance. "Kierkegaardian existence is the work of our inner life—resistances overcome and perpetually reborn, efforts perpetually renewed, despairs surmounted, provisional failures and precarious victories—and this work is directly opposed to intellectual knowing. . . . Ideas do not change men. Knowing the cause of a passion is not enough to overcome it; one must live it, one must oppose other passions to it, one must combat it tenaciously, in short one must 'work oneself through.'"^[72]