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5.0 out of 5 stars
The best of Jean Paul Sartre's Mind, September 27, 2008
This review is from: Between Existentialism and Marxism (Radical Thinkers) (Paperback)
Always lucid, profound and ever irreverent, this is a delicious collections of reprints and interviews on the "whys" and "why nots" of Sartre's century of intellectual and political ideas. Here is a once in a life time "head session" that covers the waterfront - from Existentialism to Marxism, from Genet and Tintoretto to Flaubert, from politics to the Arts, to Sartre's attitude towards his own writings, and on to Freud and back -- giving those who do not yet know him well an unobstructed window into some of his most valuable intellectual insights. And for those who do know him well, this book becomes a summary of many of Sartre's core ideas and further confirmation of why he will remain one of the towering intellects of our times.
In this short collection, Jean Paul Sartre covers so much intellectual ground with so much ease and clarity, and with so much intellectual depth and facility that it literally takes the breath away. As a result, these pages must be read slowly and savored, for there are only a handful of intellectuals in history who can match Sartre's rich and deep insights, or who can shock our minds into complete attention for such a long span of time: For our troubled times, his prodigious intellect, his wit, his literary skills, his clarity and his iconoclastic irreverence, are an iron tonic that is as much an existential and literary, as a political, necessity.
Most refreshingly here is the fact that Sartre and the first interviewer, Madam Madeleine Chapsal, engage in a compellingly "scrappy" intellectual repartee designed to draw Sartre into revealing the "motive forces" behind his intellectual insights. Madeleine Chapsal's "in your face" discussion of why some of Sartre's most fundamental views have changed over time makes for interesting repartee. Un-awed by Sartre, and like a hunter who has cornered her prey, Madam Chapsal is relentless in pushing Sartre over the horizon pass "the expected and ordinary" to "the-meat-and bones" of his ideas, all done in a freewheeling, almost didactic dialogue between intellectual equals. Intellectual repartee does not get much better than this.
We discover here that there are two formative experiences that drive most European intellectuals: First and foremost, is the trauma of two world wars fought back-to-back on European soil -- the greater being WW-II where Hitler embarrassed and humiliated Europe, and most especially the "uber-proud" French: Hitler's occupation was an abyss from which it seems the French have yet to completely recover, and from which they had nowhere to hide between their choice of the "false experience" of imagined French heroism, and the brutal reality of Nazi power. It is no longer a secret that much too often, this choice was resolved in the cruelest of ways: to die, be imprisoned and tortured, or become a ignominious traitor to France.
For Sartre -- captured, imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis, Hitler's occupation ceased to be a theoretical abstraction, but became the "lived archetype" of absolute power corrupted absolutely. Nazi reality was a powerful existential crucible into which the French were quickly sucked into and crushed. It became the defining "lived experience" for European philosophy: Perhaps for the first time, the German occupation was where the typical European was trapped by "lived circumstances" beyond his control and against his will. Hitler's occupation thus became the archetype of lost control dictated completely by circumstances and conditioning. And yet, it is here, from the very bottom of the abyss that, Sartre, and the French, were forced to "stay in the game" and be totally responsible "for what society had made of them." From there, they had to refashion themselves into a quiet, solitary, self-respecting, and self-defined, hero.
The existentialist problem for "European Man" was also true for man more generally: to be able to "take responsibility for making something out of what society has already fashioned us to be." The highest level of existential honor is to be found in how we "act" as we reject the conditioning that has been imposed on our freedoms from above, and in how we "go about" refashioning what society has tried to make of us. Existential heroism thus by definition is to "continue along the road to freedom" while fashioning a new self from the very ashes of slavery - whether self-imposed or otherwise. The ultimate nobility of "existential man" is to be found in this solitary project, within whose goal, lay the very definition of freedom.
In addition to two world wars, what was also formative for the European intellectual experience was the tense and troubled relationship between the individual's private struggles for independence from the worldview of his bourgeois (and usually) Catholic parents: a worldview that Sartre claims was inherited through social osmosis, but then, was just as quickly and resoundingly rejected and abandoned. In Sartre's case, Christianity was not a total lost. For he successfully "transposed [it] into literary terms" and it became the unconscious driving force of his writings.
On Marx and Freud
One of the things that comes through more clearly here than elsewhere among Sartre's many writings, takes place as Sartre attempts to answer the question posed to him by Madeleine Chapsal as to: Why he became such a late, if not an entirely reluctant, convert to Freud? His answer was surprisingly terse but killed two birds with one stone: "The thought of both Marx and Freud is a theory of conditioning in exteriority. When Marx says `It matters little what the bourgeoisie thinks it does, the important thing is what it [actually] does,' one could replace bourgeoisie by `a hysteric,' and the formula would be Freud."
Thus Marxism for him was always a two-pronged tool: First it was a whetstone for honing ones ability to reason about the meaning of the social forces that have shaped history, and then only secondarily it was a tool of methodology, of praxis: for engaging in the necessary committed social and political actions "called up" by the times. Freud's preoccupation, on the other hand, was somewhat less noble: He was preoccupied with the machinations of the unconscious, the mechanics of which turned out to be a mere artifact of his own theoretical imaginings; imaginings that proved to be true and powerful only when they were correct: But, according to Sartre, they were correct only at the intersection, or confluent, of their many intuited forces. Yet, these "intuited mechanisms," appearing at the intersection, were at no point "primary" or even necessarily centered in "lived experience" as Freud's theories erroneously assumed and claimed. Freud's mechanisms were in fact not the "real" independent variables" that he thought them to be. It is Sartre's belief that Freud himself failed to recognize the fact that it was the "confluence itself," rather than the "intuited mechanisms" that was the irreducible unit of consciousness, and of psychoanalysis. Thus, through an obsession to make psychoanalysis into a reductive science, Freud may have missed his own deepest insight: that only the confluence of his mechanisms were real. This single oversight ensured that Freudian psychoanalysis would forever remain suspended in what Sartre describes as a "mechanistic cramp," and indeed in the backwaters of intellectual solipsism, devoid of its most important irreducible content: independently "lived experience."
On Vietnam
In this essay, entitled Imperialism and Genocide, Sartre explains the imperatives of Colonialism about as well as they can be explained, and then demonstrates that in general it is a form of slow-motion, cautionary, conditional, cultural genocide: implemented by blackmailing, terrorizing and intimidating colonial subjects into giving up their aspirations for freedom and independence. The U.S. version, occurring in Vietnam, broke the old post-war mold in that it was no longer driven by economic imperatives (i.e. by greed) but by racism and a pure pursuit of cultural hegemony.
On Czechoslovakia
He summaries the experience of the thirteen Czech interviewees living under Soviet style socialism as "that long night of the [modern] Middle Ages."
100 Stars
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