Did Jean-Paul Sartre Fuse Existentialism and Marxism?

Up until fairly recently, many commentators believed that when Jean-Paul Sartre became a Marxist he fully disregarded his earlier existentialism. In fact he once said that his earlier existentialist views were a “disgrace”. However, many other commenters do believe that Sartre never completely lost his existentialist vision and that he even attempted to fuse it with his Marxism.

The problem is, as with most philosophers and with most of the subjects they cover, you can find passages in the late Sartre which do indeed cast aspersions on his own earlier existentialism. The argument here is that this is fully understandable.

An initial hunch is that Marxism and existentialism are thoroughly at odds with each other.

Early Sartre and His Relation to Marxism

Facticity & Transcendence

One way in which early Sartre is radically at odds with Marxism is in his notions of “facticity” and “transcendence”. More specifically (in terms of Marxist theory), Sartre believed that one’s “facticity” — such as your given class, race, religion, nationality, etc. — could be “transcended”. To a Marxist, on the other hand, one’s class — and every other person’s class for that matter — is paramount.

Yet, in actual fact, Marxists have also always believed in Sartrean transcendence. They believed that revolutionary Marxists (the “vanguard” — which was nearly always the bourgeoisie) could indeed transcend their class . Similarly today, they believe that (Marxist) white people can transcend their race and so on.

Sartre, qua existentialist, also managed to do something which Marxists have done — transcend his facticity (class, etc.). For the existentialist Sartre, only existentialists could transcend their facticity. For the Marxist Sartre and other Marxists, only Marxists can transcend their facticity. Thus Sartre moved effortlessly from being an existentialist transcender to being a Marxist transcender.

Facticity, then, doesn’t apply to existentialists and Marxists — it only applies to everyone else. In fact Marxists didn’t even believe that existentialists really transcended their own facticity (class, etc.) either. And Sartre himself also came to believe that existentialists didn’t truly transcend their facticity.

Hell is Other People

The radical nature of Sartre’s break with his early existentialism is best shown by the well-known fact that he once said that “hell is other people”. Or, at the very least, a character said that in Sartre’s No Exit. However, these words weren’t just an expression of a character in a play. Sartre also wrote that Martin Heidegger was wrong to say that “the essence of the relations between consciousnesses” is his Mitsein (or “being-with”). In fact, according to Sartre, the essence of the relations between consciousnesses “is conflict”.

Now a Marxist will argued that “capitalist society” makes conflict between persons the norm. But Sartre, at this stage of his career, wasn’t making a Marxist point about “class conflict”, “alienation” or any kind of capitalism-caused interpersonal conflict. He was referring to a type of conflict that is common to all societies and cultures because it is of the nature of all “consciousnesses” when they come into contact with each other. This is an existentialist — and even phenomenological — point about consciousness (personhood?) itself — it’s not at all about a capitalist or any other specific type of society.

The Marxist Sartre

Sartre’s Critique of His Existentialism

Once Sartre embraced Marxism, it was entirely understandable that he’d see his former existentialism — and even his phenomenology — as “idealistic and subjectivist”. This is an ironic choice of words. Existentialism can indeed be classed as “idealistic” and “subjectivist” in the strictly philosophical senses. However, in the everyday sense of those words, it is Marxism that is truly idealistic (as in ideals rather than ideas). And in order to accept the critique of existentialism as being idealistic and subjectivist, you need to be, well, a Marxist; otherwise it has no purchase. That’s partly because the existentialist can happily reply: “Yes, I’m subjectivist. And? So what?”

In fact there’s nothing to stop an existentialist (or any other non-Marxist) from being a “materialist” — just not a Marxist materialist. An acceptance of philosophical materialism doesn’t go against all forms of existentialism (or indeed any). That is, a “subjectivist” can be a materialist.

It’s counterintuitive that certain (many?) commentators have claimed that even when Sartre became a strong Marxist in the 1960s (perhaps a little before that), his Marxism was still a subsidiary to his existentialism. We can be prepared to accept that Sartrean existentialism can run in tandem with Sartrean Marxism; though not that existentialism can have the upper hand if you’re also a Marxist. That just doesn’t seem possible at all — even without studying Sartre’s precise fusion (if there ever was one) of Marxism and existentialism.

“Society makes you free”

It’s ironic that Sartre came to believe that only Marxist collectivism could fully bring about the “authenticity” and freedom of his earlier existentialist vision. (His actually words were that only a “socialism of abundance” could do that trick.) His point is well made. Or, rather, no doubt Marxists made the point to Sartre himself when he was a full existentialist. That point being that one can’t be free or authentic when you’re poor and all your energy is expended on finding the next meal or on feeding your family. (Or, if you work in a factory, when you simply haven’t any time to be authentic or free.) Not only that: what’s the point of authenticity or even existential (rather than political/social) freedom if you’re in a literal prison or in the “prison” that is a factory?

Nonetheless, it doesn’t automatically follow that embracing Marxist collectivism is the solution to all this. Yet because people get so frustrated with poverty and “oppression” (especially younger people), they grab out at the first thing that promises a complete and absolute solution — and that solution is invariably Marxism. And Marxism, for an existentialist like Sartre, was arguably the worst thing that he could have grabbed as a solution… to every problem.

Sartre specifically set out, in his own words, to “reconquer man within Marxism”. That is, to discover the human within Marx. Interesting, many people did this in the 1960s onwards by focusing on Marx’s “early works” — i.e., the stuff before The Communist Manifesto and Das Capital. However, what Sartre himself embraced was the hard-core revolutionary and materialist stuff of the later Marx. These were the works which fired the communists and the Trotskyists; rather than the early stuff which appealed to effete philosophers and suchlike.

In order to achieve this task of discovering the human in Marx (without relying on “early Marx”), Sartre needed to focus on something specifically Marxist and tie it to something specifically existentialist.

The existentialist Sartre, of course, focussed on such things as individual freedom, responsibility, autonomy and authenticity. Marxists, on the other hand, had focussed on (amongst many other things) “praxis”, “alienation”, impersonal social forces and economic/political “laws”.

Here’s the clever (?) fusion. Sartre now argues (as a Marxist and not as an existentialist) that it’s of the nature of society (or “social reality”) to enable — and even make possible — human responsibility and freedom. This clearly has a Hegelian tinge to it and, of course Sartre, like all French philosophers of his time, imbibed Hegel.

Hegel basically said that the (in his case Prussian) state makes you free. Sartre was now saying that society, instead, makes you free. (The jump from society making you free to the state making you free is an easy one; as 20th century history shows us.) This means that the subjectivist or idealistic existentialist isn’t free even if he thinks he’s free. Only society, or the state (communist or Nazi) can truly make you free. Thus we appear to be moving from existentialism to what must surely be, to many, its exact antithesis. Yet this is what Sartre attempted to do.

Sartre explicitly makes this fusion of Marxism and existentialism when he says that

“a man can always make something out of what is made of him” (1974).

Society makes man this and that. However, a man (who’s already made by society) can still “make something” of what is made of him. Nonetheless, it’s society itself which guarantees freedom and responsibility. So now we have the Sartrean argument:

i) Society makes you into something.

ii) And then society again enables you to make something else of yourself.

Because Sartre has now adopted Marxism, it can’t be the case of an existential(ist) being making something of himself (who’s an already made by society): it’s a case of a social being making something of an already socialised being — not of a fully free existential(ist) being.

This seems to be the gist of Sartrean Marxism and it’s still supposed to be (according to certain commentators) humanist/existentialist; as well as Marxist.

Sartre Today

Just a note on Sartre’s position in philosophy today.

It’s fair to say that Sartre-as-Marxist, rather than Sartre-as-existentialist (forget the possible fusion), appears not to be at home anymore. At least you would expect that many postmodernists, and, earlier, many post-structuralists, have been against Sartre’s (Marxist) historical “totalisations” and his Marxist/Hegelian belief in “organic wholes”.They have been.

Whereas the existentialist Sartre can be seen as a proselytiser on behalf of “multiplicities” and “particularism” (both so much stressed by both post-structuralism and postmodernism); Marxism, on the other hand, is by nature an essentially totalising and Hegelian philosophy of politics. Having said all that: it’s often the case (it can be argued) that if you scrape various post-structuralists and postmodernists hard enough, you’ll find that they still work within a largely Marxist paradigm (or within a Marxist épistémè, as Michel Foucault described it). That is, they still talk about “liberation”, “oppression”, “consumerism”, “class”, the “capitalist media”, the “capitalist” this, that and the other, hatred of the Other and numerous other Marxist and quasi-Marxist “tropes”.