I. The Question of Sartre's Radicalism

A continental sensation in the 1940s and 1950s, existentialism was advertised by Sartre as a new form of humanism actually more progressive than Marxism.  Most commentators have not agreed with Sartre's self-interpretation.  They have seen in Sartre's thought subjectivism, nihilism, and, most commonly, a reliance on Descartes that precluded any association with socialist politics or radical social theory.  In this interpretation, Sartre is no more than an extreme individualist, trapped in a morose world-view in which "bell is other people" and "man is a useless passion." An irrationalist who flirted with the "absurd," Sartre could not represent the oppressed masses in their plight.  To these anti-Sartreans there is something almost obscene in the self-absorption of the existentialist.  Nothing could be further from the struggles of the proletariat and from the social determinism of the Marxist view of history than Sartre's narcissistic philosophy of anxiety.

In the face of these attacks, Sartre acknowledged regret over the lecture that popularized existentialism as a form of humanism.  Yet be did not retract his radical posture.  Instead, be spent much of his time after the 1940s trying to articulate the radical implications be saw in Being and Nothingness.  In this chapter, I will take Sartre at his word and test the possibilities of his early philosophy as a radical social theory.

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I shall argue both that Being and Nothingness does provide a concept of freedom adequate for a renewed Marxism, one that portended a new stage of consciousness with radically democratic needs and desires very much like those of the New Left of the 1960s, and yet that it remained, at specific points, still rooted in the individualist problematic.

In the evaluation of Being and Nothingness matters are often raised that in other cases would be considered extraneous.  Sartre's concepts are made to bear the burden of his life and of the public response to his thought.  It is therefore necessary to point out some ambiguities in certain widespread convictions about him.  The vogue that Sartre's thought stirred up in the Paris of the 1940s is often held against him.  He is asked to explain the appeal of his thought to groups not known for their moral purity or philosophical acumen.  Ex-Vichyites, youngsters from the bourgeoisie, the fast crowd who spent their time idly in cabarets, the outcasts of society-these motley followers of existentialism found in the new doctrine justifications for their despair, for their capricious and disreputable lives.  Those without hope felt encouraged by existentialism to assert that there was nothing to hope for anyway.  To raise the eyebrows of philosophers further, there was the uncritical naivete', the unseriousness with which many Parisians adopted existentialism.  An intellectual vulgarity characterized the spread of existentialism; Sartre became fashionable in the worst sense of the word.

One could just as easily look at the same facts from an opposite point of view.  Sartre's thought, offering a new picture of what it meant "to be," stimulated discussion well beyond the confines of the academic classroom and philosophical journals.  Existentialism challenged ordinary people to reexamine their lives and their commitments.  Sartre was successful at bridging the gap between philosophy and society.  His concepts were argued in cafes, parties, at breakfast tables, and in subways, not only in Paris, but in New York, in London, indeed, throughout advanced industrial

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society.[1] Here was a thinker who captured the concerns of ordinary people, a feat which can be totally discounted only at the risk of elitism.  People wanted to know about existentialism.  Signs of existentialism were sought everywhere--in movies, in styles of dress, in manners of speech.[2] Some important thinkers did find value in the new craze.  In the words of the Catholic theologian, Etienne Gilson, during the height of Sartre's fame,

It is often said that contemporary existentialism owes its success to the whim of a passing fashion.  I do not think so.  For the first time in quite a while, philosophy has decided to speak of serious matters and, to tell the truth, there would be good reason to despair if the general public had not noticed.[3]

1. Sartre, of course, was not the first existentialist and not the first to create a stir with his books.  Heidegger's Being and Time of 1927 had a similar if not as widespread response.

Sartre's dependence on previous existentialists, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, especially, cannot be discussed here.  There are countless books which have done this already.  Nor can I discuss the other major French existentialist, Gabriel Marcel.  Since I am concerned with one theme in French intellectual history-the relationship of Marxism and existentialism-I must, of necessity, present a somewhat truncated view of French existentialism.  I will try to indicate, in footnotes, points of contact between Sartre and Marcel where they are relevant.

In addition to reasons of space, I feel confident in limiting the discussion to Sartre because his view of freedom was the most extensive of all, and, of course, because it was be who has attempted most rigorously to reconcile existentialism with Marxism.

In addition, it is my opinion that Being and Nothingness is the best and most comprehensive single presentation of the existentialist position, more so than Heidegger's Being and Time, or Marcel's Mystery of Being.  I do not pretend, however, that this essay on Sartre is in any sense a complete treatment of existentialism.
2. Simone de Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstance, trans.  R. Howard (N.Y., 1964) 141-142.
3. L'Etre et 1'essence (Paris, 1948) 297-298.

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Nausea.  Yet the same could be said of Capital and of the Summa Theologica.  The fact is that interest in existentialism went beyond the reactionary bourgeoisie and the fashion-followers.

The other commonplace of Sartre lore concerns his life.  Reasoning ad hominem, conventional wisdom holds that the existentialist vision is blurred by the smoke and whiskey of the cafe', that his imagination never departed from the limitations of his petty-bourgeois background and life-style.  It is true that during the 1930s, when Being and Nothingness was worked out, [4]  Sartre was an apolitical littérateur: he did not vote; he attended demonstrations only infrequently and then never sang or shouted slogans; he considered the political tracts of others as "pointless propaganda." [5] He was convinced that literary work was an end in itself, more than enough to fill a life with dignity.  The image of the young Sartre in Simone de Beauvoir's autobiography tends to confirm the worst:

 . . . we were convinced that we had a thorough grip on reality. . . . And  yet our life, like that of all petit bourgeois intellectuals, was in fact mainly characterized by its lack of reality. . . . Like every bourgeois, we were sheltered
from want; like every civil servant, we were guaranteed against insecurity. Furthermore, we had no children, no families, no responsibilities: we were like elves.  There was no intelligible connection between the work we did
(which was on whole enjoyable and not in the least exhausting) and the money we got for it, which seemed to lack all proper substance.  Since we bad no position to keep up, we spent it in a capricious fashion. . . . [this was] the
truth about our economic position, which we contrived to ignore; we flourished, in fact, like lilies in the field, and circumstances fostered our illusions.[6]

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This description was written in 1960 when Sartre and De Beauvoir were Leftists, struggling with the Algerian crisis.  It was colored by a sense of guilt toward its author's own past.  Yet the social and economic circumstances of the existentialists could be viewed as part of the emerging service sector of advanced society, of the new working class.  They experimented with their social relations in a manner foreign to the petty bourgeoisie.  Never marrying, they further challenged the bourgeois sexual code: they took in a third person, Olga Kosakiewicz.  In De Beauvoir's words, "we thought that human relations are to be perpetually invented, that a priori no form is privileged, none impossible?" [7] Although these arrangements cannot be identified with socialist politics, at least they indicate a self-conscious refusal of conventional mores.

Sartre's intellectual life was also not simply that of a bourgeois literary figure.  Through his friend Paul Nizan, Sartre was acquainted with Communist politics as far back as the late 1920s.  He also had contact with Trotskyists in the 1930s through Colette Audry who was a high-school friend and confidant of Simone de Beauvoir.  Furthermore, as a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, he was dissatisfied with the leading philosophers, Brunschvicg and Alain, who were steeped in the idealism of Descartes and Kant.  To Sartre and De Beauvoir, their professors' thought was part of the liberal Weltanschauung and it had to be rejected:

At the Sorbonne, my professors systematically ignored Hegel and Marx; in a big book on "the progress of consciousness in the Occident, " Brunschvicg had devoted a bare three pages to Marx, whom he placed
on the same level as one of the obscurest reactionary thinkers.  He was teaching us about the history of scientific thought, but no one was

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teaching us about the adventure of humanity.  The incomprehensible uproar going on in the world . . . was not worthy of the philosopher's attention . .  [8]

During his initiation into existentialism, Sartre was growing more and more concerned about politics and society.  At first, during his school years, he and his circle romantically mocked "bourgeois law and order." [9] In 1929, he described himself as in total opposition to "society as then constituted," convinced that the "secret truth of History" was nothing but the concept of "radical freedom" that he was developing." [10] Recalling the mid-1930s, De Beauvoir wrote: "According to us there was only one way of preventing general madness, and that was by the overthrow of the ruling class. . . . our most passionately held conviction [was] that freedom is an inexhaustible source of discovery, and every time we give it room to develop, mankind is enriched as a result."[11]

It was during the war, however, while he was writing Being and Nothingness, that Sartre's political commitment hardened.  Around 1940, in De Beauvoir's account,

Sartre was thinking a good deal about the postwar period; be had firmly made up his mind to hold aloof from politics no longer.  His new morality was based on the notion of "authenticity," and he was determined to make a practical application of it to himself.  It

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required every man to shoulder the responsibility of his situation in life; and the only way in which he could do so was to transcend that situation by engaging upon some course of action.  Any other attitude was mere bad faith, a masquerade based upon insincerity. It will be clear that a radical change had taken place in him . . . . [12]

During the war, Sartre's politics moved steadily leftward.  As early as 1941, in the aborted revolutionary group Sartre organized to resist the Nazis, he encapsulated his position as socialisme et liberté," [13] a non-authoritarian socialism that advocated a deeper freedom for the individual than that offered in either bourgeois or Soviet society.  Twenty years later the metamorphosis of his political philosophy still did not lose the original seed: liberté became existentialism by 1943, and socialisme became Marxism by 1957.  Eliding the conjunction, the final transformation might read, by 1968, existential Marxism.  As we follow Sartre's writings through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the central theme will be his effort to synthesize philosophy and politics, existential freedom and Marxist community.  This digression into his life supports rather than refutes a reading of Being and Nothingness that looks to it for a radical social theory.

Thus Sartre's freedom in the 1930s was not simply the privatized individualism of the petty bourgeois, nor the glamorous estheticism of the bohemian intellectual, nor the masochistic despairing Weltschmerz of the romantic rebel.  It might more aptly be characterized as the slowly developing freedom of a new kind of radicalism typical of the New Left, The habitue' of the Café de Flore and the Café des Deux Magots was the same man who signed the Letter of the 121 in opposition to the Algerian War, who later
 
12. Ibid., 342.
13. Ibid., 396-397.

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refused the Nobel Literature Prize, and who offered the cover of his worldwide prestige to editors of a Maoist periodical.  Sartre's isolated quest for freedom in the 1930s might best be viewed as anticipating the experience of a future generation that would take shape only in the 1960s, rejecting the manners and methods both of romantic individualists and of Communist Party militants, in search of a theory of the self and a theory of politics appropriate to humanize advanced technological society.  In this sense, the concept of freedom in Being and Nothingness can take its place in the history of the New Left.

2. Freedom to Create One's Self

Ironically, Sartre presented his doctrine of radical freedom precisely at the worst moment of Europe's time of troubles.  The capitalist world had endured two world wars, the depression, and fascism.  An Enlightenment faith in the harmony of science and morality, of technology and freedom had worn very thin.  Social theorists were ready to dismiss the heroic notion that men could shape their destiny, that freedom was possible.  But here was Sartre in the occupied Paris of 1943: "Human freedom precedes essence in man and makes it possible; the essence of human being is suspended in his freedom.  What we call freedom is impossible to distinguish from the being of 'human reality.' Man does not exist first in order to be free subsequently; there is no difference between the being of man and his being-free."[14] Sartre placed freedom at the center of human existence, not as a special, privileged state of being that one earned or developed through arduous self-discipline or lacerating self-control.  It was not something characteristic of men rather than women, of the mature rather than the young, of the sober rather than the whimsical.  It was not an "essence" of man in the

14. Being and Nothingness, trans. H. Barnes (N.Y., 1966) 30.

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sense that it could be distinguished from his appearance, from his normal, everyday existence.  Freedom was not an essence [15] hiding behind the manifest structure of human reality, a primary quality that must be unveiled beneath more perceptible secondary qualities.  Freedom was not available only to an elite because it possessed some special quality, whether it was reason or the prerogatives of birth.

For Sartre, freedom was radically democratic since it enveloped every human being at every moment of existence.  In Being and Nothingness the everydayness of freedom manifested itself in Sartre's compelling, almost novelistic examples.  A person goes to a café expecting to meet his friend; an affianced woman looks through a window and is frightened because the man she sees arouses her; a man looking through a keyhole is seen by someone else and feels shame; a woman on a date responds to sexual overtures by her escort; a man hiking up a mountain decides to rest.  In the most ordinary experiences of life, the ultimate question of the human condition, man's freedom, is posed.  Later, in 1952, in his book on Jean Genet, Sartre applied traditional philosophical categories to the examination of Genet's life, demonstrating even more graphically that the profound questions of freedom and of one's identity are not the exclusive problems of the professor of philosophy but characteristic of man at each moment of his life."[16] The commonality of freedom in Sartre's thought suggested a new historical subject, a subject that was not content to be free in signing a labor contract but unfree in his work, but one who on the contrary might demand self-determination in experiences where liberal society prohibited it.

Sartre derived his doctrine of freedom from a phenomenological description of being.[17] Treating reality as a phenomenon, as something that appears, the phenomen-

15. For Sartre's discussion of his anti-essentialism, see The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans.  F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (N.Y., 1957).
16. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, 14.
17. In Being and Nothingness Sartre carefully traces his ideas in relation to Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.  I have excluded these filiations from my exposition because they would

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ologist describes the structures of appearance.[18] Thereby the subjective reality of consciousness is accorded objective status, unlike the scientist's epistemology, where only the exterior world is regarded as real.  Sartre's phenomenology accepted the reality of the human subject and moved within it without losing its grip on the exterior world.  His attraction to Husserl's phenomenology came also from its tendency to pursue the reality of the everyday and the ordinary.  Raymond Aron, a liberal social philosopher and companion of Sartre, introduced him to phenomenology over an apricot cocktail in a nightclub:" 'You see, my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!' Sartre turned pale with emotion at this.  Here was just the thing he had been longing to achieve for years. . . ."[19]

take it too far away from the problem of existentialism and Marxism.  A purely philosophical treatment of this would require an elaborate discussion of Husserl's phenomenology and Heidegger's existentialism as compared with Sartre. In addition, Sartre's debts and differences with Hegel might serve to clarify his relation to Marx, as two divergent Hegelianisms.  Perhaps less justifiably, I have chosen to avoid this path also.  As a study in intellectual history, as opposed to one in the history of philosophy, this work would become too complex if the Hegel problem were placed in prominence. On the relation of Sartre to Hegel's Phenomenology, cf. George Kline, "The Existentialist Rediscovery of Hegel and Marx," in Mary Warnock, ed., Sartre (N.Y., 1971) 284-314.  As for phenomenology, it was an autonomous movement of no little importance in France after 1945.  But, again, to investigate the French phenomenologists, or to treat Sartre in terms of that current, would obscure the line I am trying to trace and extend the length of this study far too much.  Merleau-Ponty is treated in Chapter 5 and Paul Ricoeur enters the discussion in relation to structuralism.  But that is as far as I take it.  For Sartre's relation to Hegel see, Klaus Hartmann, Sartre's Ontology: A Study of Being and Nothingness in the Light of Hegel's Logic, trans. from German (Evanston, 1966) and Georg Lasson, "Introduction to Hegel," Phenomenology of Spirit (Leipzig, 1921) LXXXI-CXVI for Hegel's use of the term "phenomenology."
18. Being and Nothingness, liii-lvii.
19. Simone de Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 112.

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From a phenomenological examination of being, Sartre discovered two qualities of reality: being and nothingness, the in-itself and the for-itself.  Being was full, complete, opaque; nothingness was empty, a lack.  Being-in-itself was it is; [20] being-for-itself was not what it is.  Being-for-itself was consciousness.  Things appeared to the phenomenologist as full, complete, as being just what it is; but consciousness was not like things.  "Consciousness is consciousness of something.  This means that transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness; that is, that consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself." [21] Sartre made use of Husserl's insight that consciousness is always intending, or pointing toward something else, always connected with something else that is "outside" itself.  Looking back at this consciousness while it is intending, Sartre found that the structure of consciousness itself was a lack, a flight toward what it was not.  Thus, Sartre's definition of consciousness or human reality was this: "consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself." [22] The consequences for Sartre of this difficult axiom were immense.

Human reality was comprehensible only as freedom.  Since consciousness was a "nothing" it was not determined in any way by its being.  Consciousness was in the world, like everything else, except that its content, its concrete existence, was not defined by its structure.  Consciousness always went beyond what it was, always transcended what it was, fixing and positioning itself in the world. [23] Consciousness existed, therefore, before it had any particular attributes--before, that is, it had an essence.  It was openness itself, a kind of infinity.  Furthermore, value or meaning emerged out of the concrete, specific relationships of this consciousness with this world. [24] As a man threw his consciousness into the world, meanings appeared for him,

20. Being and Nothingness, lxxxix.
21. Ibid., lxxiii.
22. Ibid., 1xxiv.
23. Ibid., 1xi.
24. Ibid., 115.

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and it was out of his freedom to relate himself to this or to that that his values took shape.

. . . my freedom is the unique foundation of values and . . . nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values.  As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable.  My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while itself without foundation. [25]

Freedom, for Sartre, was as complete as it could possibly be: we were free to constitute our own selves.  ". . . freedom, which manifests itself through anxiety, is characterized by a constantly renewed obligation to remake the Self which designates free being. . . ." [26] The emphasis in Sartre's concept of man fell on the enormous openness to make our own self.  What was specific to man, as distinct from the animals, was this freedom to shape and to construct human being.  Sartre's lesson seemed to be that the evolution of man, individually and collective]', was in the bands of man himself, and was not the determination of a fortuitous, blind law of nature.  This concept of freedom might enable Marxism to account for the possibility of communism as defined in the 1844 Manuscripts, although it was not yet adequate for a radical social theory.

Yet under the cover of the phenomenological method Sartre erased the specificity and historicity of freedom, universalizing it as a natural aspect of the human condition.  For every individual and in every social circumstance anxiety accompanied freedom.  Showing the influence of Hegel's unhappy consciousness, Sartrean man suffered a final

25. Ibid., 46.
26. Ibid., 42.

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rupture between himself and the world.  However, the unhappy consciousness in Hegel was one moment and stage, logical and historical, of the development of spirit, while in Sartre anxiety was a fixed attribute of human freedom.  Sartre's notion of anxiety hypostasized the truth that the freedom of self-determination was a troubled freedom in a world which knew everyday the sickening fact of torture, where murder was as common as the daily newspaper, where the colonial wars of capitalism and the barbarism of Nazism were vulnerable only to the weak sting of Sartre's words.  In 1947, making a dramatic about-face barely five years after the appearance of Being and Nothingness, Sartre had second thoughts about the universality of anxiety, viewing it instead as a specific experience of his social class.  "Ourselves bourgeois, we have known bourgeois anxiety." [27]

Although Sartre's notion of anxiety may have universalized his class experience, it also captured a truth about contemporary society.  There was a correspondence between Sartre' s feeling of anxiety in freedom and the hostility toward authentic freedom in bourgeois social structures.  The individual was not encouraged to question completely his own possibilities for self-transformation.  Capitalist morality urged him to calculate his self-interest according to the external standards of property accumulation.  And furthermore, the lack of community in capitalist societies, the atomization of individual experience, and the competitive nature of social relations presented added obstacles to Sartrean freedom.  To be free toward oneself meant to present oneself fully to the other person; but relations in modern society discouraged the treatment of the other as an end in himself.  Because Sartre in 1943 did not present his own concept of freedom in relation to an historical situation, much of the specificity of his ideas was lost and anxiety was paired with freedom for eternity, as in a morality play.

27. What Is Literature?,  trans.  B. Frechtman (N.Y., 1966) 174.

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The coupling of freedom and anxiety associated and synthesized two antagonistic intellectual traditions in an unusual and difficult blend that was typical of Sartre's thought.  The first was the sanguine, Promethean tradition of the eighteenth-century philosophes and the nineteenth-century utopian communists, which was radically humanistic.  The other was the tragic, conservative view of man's fate going back to Pascal that evoked the inherent contradictions of the human condition, man's flaws and his weaknesses.  Sartre's concept of freedom fit into and even extended the first position; in defiance of all superior authorities, of all official wisdoms, man was a radical negativity whose business it was to make himself totally and without limitation.  Always a threat to the status quo, human freedom was, however, never an easy resolution of man's difficulties, never an untroubled heaven, never a utopia, without conflict and strife.  Particularly in his freedom, man was confronted by the freakishness of his existences thinking reed in Pascal, half angel and half beast in Pope, a "useless passion" in Sartre.  By the Promethean extension of man's freedom to the furthest limit, Sartre discovered the Pascalian absurd.  Without a superior reality, a myth, to license and legitimize freedom, it floated in anxiety, a scandal to itself and to all things.  "Man is a being who is what be is not and is not what be is." The dizzying dialectic of Sartre's argumentation proceeded from his wanting to hold onto both ends of his insight; to keep his concept of freedom without becoming a simplistic optimist who dissolved all human travail in a single sweep; to preserve the ambivalence and anxiety of the human condition without a skeptical conservatism which required the great lie of the, Grand Inquisitor, of God.

In this way, Sartre's concept of freedom troubled both camps: the dogmatic Marxists whose humanism required the acceptance of Stalin's trials and labor camps; the modest Catholics and liberals whose pluralism justified the existence of imperialism, poverty, and exploitation.  In adopting the extreme positions of both intellectual traditions Sartre

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attempted to find a "third way," a path that would maintain man's powers of self-determination, and keep open the possibilities inherent in advanced technology, but that would not overlook the embarrassing and unpleasant contradictions of the human condition.  Sartre sought to humanize anxiety, to comprehend anxiety as the necessary awareness of our own illegitimacy, our own nothingness amidst being.  Intentional consciousness, flinging itself at being, foisting value into the world, could not escape from the "scissiparity" of its existence, from the truth that it and it alone brought forth value and could bring forth completely different value.  What Sartre's notion of freedom did not account for, however, was the absence of authentic freedom in the world around him, the lack of the explicit project of freedom by actual subjects.  In short, a confusion exists between Sartre's phenomenological description of human reality as free and the "unfree" mode in which human reality inhabited its freedom.  This contradiction is at the heart of the inadequacies of Being and Nothingness as a social theory.  We will examine its shortcomings through Sartre's concepts of bad faith, the Other, and the Situation.

3. Bad Faith: Freedom in Relations with Oneself

It is necessary to put Sartre's concept of bad faith in historical perspective.  At least since the Enlightenment, major intellectual movements have given answers to the question of the origin and nature of the distortion of human reality.  Some account has invariably been presented of man's imperfection, normally with a view toward overcoming it.  In broad outline, the history of the concepts of imperfection has moved toward fundamental levels of human experience, both individual and social.  At war against priests and despots, the philosophes, in the eighteenth century, traced the source of human distortion to the altar of God's ministers and to the arbitrary power of magistrates and princes.  Opposed to irrationality in any form, the radical wing of En-

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lightenment found its enemies in the mystification of religious experience and in the lack of social equality.  To Voltaire, Diderot, d'Holbach, and Helvétius, unreason was the ultimate cause of man's discontents.  In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and other socialists analyzed modes of social interaction, concluding that alienation and exploitation were at the bottom of man's suffering.  Finally, the family, the sacrosanct agent of civilization, was revealed by Freud in the early twentieth century as the nest of yet another human woe, neurosis or a fixating form of emotional repression.  These doctrines were indices of society's self-consciousness from which heuristic comparisons could be made.  They all--for example, irrationality, alienation and neurosis--have a common characteristic of unconsciousness, each deflecting man, in its distinct way, from full self-knowledge.  In addition, they all imply that man, unlike the animals, is not fully developed, is not totally human.  Sartre's concept of bad faith falls directly into this line of inquiry.

Sartre outlined a notion of man's imperfection in terms of the failure to be free, the failure to be authentic.  Bad faith, the opposite of authenticity, "posits not merely an ideal of knowing but an ideal of being; it proposes for us an absolute equivalence of being with itself as a prototype of being.  In this sense it is necessary that we make ourselves what we are." [28] Bad faith was a refusal of being and thereby an attempt "to constitute myself as being what I am not." [29]

Like a waiter in a cafe', whose ritualistic movements reveal that be is a waiter in the way a table is a table, a person in bad faith is in flight from his own freedom, in flight from his ability to choose not to be a "waiter." Bad faith consists in the ontological sin of consciousness making itself into a thing"?the ambiguity necessary for bad faith comes

28. Being and Nothingness, 7.
29. Ibid., 81.

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from the fact that I affirm here that I am my transcendence in the mode of being a thing." [30] Much like alienation it confounds the different realms of human reality and thing reality.  In a second graphic example, Sartre describes a bourgeois woman on a date who places herself in bad faith when she refuses to make a choice, when she refuses to exercise her freedom.  Her escort places his hand on hers, pointing to his desire to make love to her.  Unwilling to commit herself to this possibility or even to deny it, she dissociates herself from her hand, reducing it to a thing, without removing it, while at the same time etherealizing the situation through talk of sublime matters. [31] When faced with the exigency of making a choice, a person in bad faith refuses to choose.  Still, of course, there is a choice because human reality can never completely be thing-reality, although it is a mutilated choice since it denies the possibility of choice while making one.

As it was presented in Being and Nothingness, the concept of bad faith contained many ambiguities.  It allowed Sartre to reduce imperfection to the subject; it was always the individual who placed himself in bad faith.  One could argue that the waiter could not be human or respond freely to his customers since that would risk the operation of the cafe or, more pragmatically, his job or his tip.  Or again, that the woman was reduced to a sex object by her companion, a fact that prevented her from making an authentic choice in relation to his intentions.  However, Sartre was not convinced by these proofs of the efficacy of external compulsions.  His argument was rather that regardless of outside constraints the individual must still choose and it was possible that he choose authentically.

The skeptic might grant Sartre's conclusion that we are the source of our own imperfection but still argue that throughout the hundreds of pages in Being and Nothingness there were no examples of authentic freedom.  In the countless situations Sartre presented, in the rich variety of experience he examined, it was always a matter of

30. Ibid., 69.
31. Ibid., 67.

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Bad faith.  Only once in seven hundred and fifty pages did be even mention authenticity, and even then only in a footnote:

If it is indifferent whether one is in good or in bad faith, because bad faith reapprehends good faith and slides to the very origin of the project of good faith, that does not mean that we can not radically escape bad faith.  But this supposes a self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted.  This self-recovery we shall call authenticity,
the description of which has no place here. [32]

We shall see that Sartre came to reconcile his concept of freedom with the pervasive reality of bad faith only through long bitter years of debate with French Marxists.  In Being and Nothingness the reconciliation was prevented by his overemphasis on the individual as the field of analysis, by his residual commitment to the cogito,[33] by his intense concern to refute determinism, and finally by his underemphasis of the Situation, of the mediations between the individual and the world.  It could be said that the entire intellectual journey of Sartre between 1943 and 1968 concerned his desire to preserve the concept of freedom, and still account for the actual distortion of man in society.

4. The Situation

With the concept of bad faith, Sartre indicated that individuals took flight from their freedom in relations with themselves.  With the concept of the situation, Sartre went on

32. Ibid., 86.
33. Ibid., 536.

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to maintain that freedom in relations with others and with things appeared to be limited but in fact remained absolute.
Recalling that man is a being rooted in the world, Sartre affirmed that the "world" was part of freedom, that freedom existed and was possible only in the world.  The individual was not isolated but was outside, in the street, in direct contact with the world and open to it.[34] The existentialist's rejection of the dualism of self and world was radical:

 . . . the resistance which freedom reveals in [brute things], far from being a danger to freedom, results only in enabling it to arise as freedom. There can be a free for-itself only as engaged in a resisting world. Outside of this engagement the notions of freedom, of determinism, of necessity lose all meaning. [35]

It is necessary to contrast Sartre's position with Descartes' in order to grasp its full implications.  By celebrating the ego of the individual as the privileged realm of reality, the Cartesian cogito was admirably suited to the needs of the rising bourgeois, heroically building a world market, competing against other men, and conquering nature, all the

34. Jean Wahl, A Short History of Existentialism, trans.  F. Williams and S. Maron (N.Y., 1949) 16.
35. Being and Nothingness, 591.

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while accumulating vital resources for the first phase of "the industrial revolution." Philosophical and moral doctrines that legitimized "individualism" in effect validated and confirmed acquisitive man in his Promethean effort to separate himself from the rest of the world, from its temptations and pleasures, only to manipulate it better for his own ends.  Existentialism, on the other hand, proclaimed a non-instrumental concept of the world in which the situation was considered not something to control, not a technical problem, but an arena in which to be.  Hence Sartre denied totally the "common-sense" view, "the formula" that "to be free . . . means 'to obtain what one wished' but rather 'by oneself to determine oneself to wish' (in the broad sense of choosing).  In other words, success is not important to freedom."[36] In some ways similar to its conception in the culture of the young of the 1960s, freedom for Sartre was not a victory over others and over things, a tribute to self-discipline and cunning.  On the contrary, it was the realization of authenticity, the emergence of men as men and things as things.

The situation, facticity, the given, as it was alternately termed by Sartre, could never "determine," "coerce," 'erase," the freedom of the individual.  "No factual state whatever it may be (the political and economic structure of society, the psychological 'state,' etc.) is capable by itself of motivating any act whatsoever. . . . No factual state can determine consciousness to apprehend it as a négatité or as a lack." [37] Determinism in any form, whether as the "economic base" of official Marxism or as the libido of orthodox Freudians, was not an explanation of action to Sartre, because it was always the individual who had to choose the course of action and prior to that the meaning of the situation.  Reality must first be interpreted, must be given value, must be organized into

36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 532.

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an intelligible totality, must be made the object of an intention, before action was possible.  Since "freedom is originally a relation to the given"[38] both the given and freedom, the outside and the inside, society and the individual were in a reciprocal, mutually reinforcing, dialectical tension, in which neither could overcome or "determine" the other.  Yet Sartre's concept of the situation did not fully overcome a dualism of self and world.

     a.  Freedom in Relations with Others

In 1943., with Being and Nothingness, Sartre did not develop a concept of interpersonal relations that fit in with his broader notions of freedom and the situation. [39] Relations with others in a given situation remained peripheral to the individual's consciousness.  Full of unresolved difficulties, the treatment of the Other in Being and Nothingness was a mirror of Sartre's incomplete emergence from the dualistic world of the cogito.  Beginning his analysis well enough in a new direction, Sartre dismissed solipsism: the existence of "other minds," was not problematic.  He asserted decisively the importance of the other for consciousness; "the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me." [40] Before long, however, Sartre was back on "the reef of solipsism" himself.

In "the look" of the other, the individual was revealed to himself as fundamentally a "being-for-others."[41] Hence the question of the existence of other minds was false.  "At

38. Ibid., 595.
39. See, for example, Jean Wahl's opinion in Philosophies of Existence, trans. F. Lory (N.Y., 1969) 80.  "Sartre seems to imply, when he speaks of love and communication in Being and Nothingness, that communication is always awkward or abortive.... The reason for this, according to Sartre, is that what we really want is to possess the other in his freedom, and this is something of a contradiction. ... The question may be asked whether Sartre considers satisfactory communication impossible also in the world of authenticity or whether he confines it to the world of unauthenticity."
40. Being and Nothingness, 272.
41. Ibid., 310ff.

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the origin of the problem of the existence of others, there is a fundamental presupposition: others are the Other, that is the self which is not myself." [42] Far from being this remote Other whose existence could be placed in question, the other person, for Sartre, was ontologically bound to my consciousness.  Yet the examples Sartre gave of being-for-others were all taken from bourgeois experience [43] where the individual encountered the other as a threat to himself-the feeling of shame, the person caught looking through a keyhole in embarrassment, the person seen by another idly strolling in a public park:  "I am in a public park.  Not far away there is a lawn and along the edge of that lawn there are benches.  A man passes by those benches.  I see this man; I apprehend him as an object and at the same time as a man.  What does this signify?  What do I mean when I assert that this object is a man?" [44] Like that of two merchants trading in a marketplace, Sartre's meeting with the other in the park was cold, inhibited, restrained, and uncomfortable.  He was open enough to the other to know and recognize him as a subject, with an intentional consciousness of his own, not simply as another object like the bench.  Yet the meeting was strained, formal and arms-length distance was preserved.  Still Sartre did not view these relations as instrumental, in which the other was a thing to be controlled and manipulated, precisely because the other was free to reduce him to an object.

. . . the person is presented to consciousness in so far as the person is an object for the Other.  This meant that all of a sudden I am conscious of myself as escaping myself, not in that I am the foundation of my own nothingness but in that I have my foundation outside myself.  I am for myself only as I am a pure reference to the Other. [45]

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Hobbesian aggressiveness colored relations with others in Being and Nothingness in the same icy shades found on the canvas of bourgeois society.  The fact that the other was also free translated itself into a threat rather than into an occasion for mutual recognition.  "In short, in order to maintain before me the Other's freedom which is looking at me, I identify myself totally with my being-looked-at.  To be other to oneself . . . is the primary value of my relations with the Other."[46] All relations with others, just because each was totally free, became, for Sartre, relations of conflict.  Love itself was no more than a sado-masochistic combat with each lover hoping to possess the other, stripping him or her of freedom.[47] That love could be a common affirmation of freedom was inconceivable to Sartre.  The lover inevitably sought to prevent the loved one from not loving him, from freely rejecting him.  Yet these "concrete relations with others" described by Sartre could be interpreted as expressions of alienated interactions in which love could not set the tone because all relations derived from the competitive marketplace.  The most he could affirm in his dispute with solipsism was that being-for-others was a fundamental (ontological) structure of consciousness in a social field where actual interactions, being-with-others, were threatening conflicts.  The freedom of the individual was safeguarded in relations with others only at this cost.

When Sartre came to consider the actual interactions of "being-with-others," of "being-with-others," of Mitsein,[48] he could only grant them a "psychological," epiphenomenal mode of existence.  Although "being-for-others," a structure of consciousness of each individual, was accorded the full dignity of "ontological" status, real relations with others, the actual interactions between two or more human beings was considered by Sartre decisively less real.  Here the cogito was operant again, limit-

46. Ibid., 446.
47. Ibid., 447.
48. The concept of Mitsein was developed by Heidegger in Being and Time, where it is regarded as a structure of Dasein.

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ing the existential description of the situation to a pullulation of atoms, to a peg-board where the pegs were real but the relations of each peg to another were not.  Reality was drawn back into each individual peg as the society of peg relations, full intersubjectivity, was refused.

Elaborating his concept of being-with-other, Sartre distinguished between the "Us-object" and the "We-subject," in which the former represented thing-like interactions and the latter represented reciprocal interactions.  Being-for-others, our sense of being an object in front of the other's gaze, remained the "foundation" of being-with-others in both cases. [49] Descending to the proletariat to find his major example of being-with-others in the mode of the Us-object, Sartre depicted the class consciousness of factory workers as the solidarity of the oppressed.[50] In addition to two workers, a third individual, the boss, was needed to establish this relationship; he reduced all the workers to objects with his "look." The capitalist dehumanized the workers and made it likely that each would find his own oppression mirrored in the other worker.  And, since the "third" was always needed to allow mutual recognition by two individuals, humanity could not unify itself without a god, the ultimate "third."[51]

In the second case, the "We-subject," which resembled Marx's notion of Communist social relations, the unity of the group was experienced more as the product of the group than from the third.  It was "the experience of a common transcendence [i.e., a project] directed toward a unique end" but "of which I am only an ephemeral particularization; I insert myself into the great human stream . . ." [52]--for example, by entering a subway station.  Sartre insisted that the unity of projects in the We-subject did not constitute a human community.  "It in no way corresponds to a real unification

49. Being and Nothingness, 507.
50. Ibid., 513-517.
51. Ibid., 517
52, Ibid., 519.

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of the for-itselfs under consideration." [53] Repeating himself several times for emphasis, he maintained that the We-subject is "psychological," not ontological:

. . . whereas in the experience of being-for-others the upsurge of a dimension of real and concrete being is the condition of the very experience, the experience of the We-subject is a pure psychological, subjective event in a single consciousness; it corresponds to an inner modification of the structure of this consciousness but does not appear as the foundation of a concrete ontological relation with others and does not realize any Mitsein.
It is a question only of feeling myself in the midst of others.[54]

53. Ibid.
54. Ibid., 520.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid., 518.

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the significance of those interactions because the reality of the individual connected to others through organizations depended on something outside himself.  To preserve the total freedom of the individual Sartre diminished the significance of his relations with others.  The internal contradiction in Sartre's position here is blatant because he had already pronounced that the individual was a "being-in-the-world." He simply could not hold together the dyad individual-world when be wrote Being and Nothingness.

Sartre's second argument against the "ontological" status of the We-subject was that it was anonymous and impersonal since it was mediated by objects and institutions: the subway, the exit sign, the hammer. Just as it was transient and unstable, the We-subject fell short of a full, personal interaction through its mass character.  The rigidity of the "rules for using" things eliminated "free inventiveness." [57] The hammer indicated in its size and shape the way it was to be used; the exit sign determined the meaning of passing through the doorway.  Since the historicity of these relationships was absent from Sartre's analysis the question could not arise whether they were an inexorable, fixed correlate of technology or only a requirement of the capitalist and bureaucratic organization of society.

Throughout the discussion of the We-subject, which was often vague and confused, the strongest reason Sartre gave for the devaluation of this experience was that We-subject relations were social.  He adamantly refused to lend significance to the historical structure of social relations, perhaps from an undefined fear that this would impinge on the total freedom of the individual:

The [Us-object] is the revelation of a dimension of real existence and corresponds to a simple enrichment of the original proof of the for-others. The [We-subject] is a psychological experience realized by an historical man immersed in a working universe and in a society of definite economic type.  It reveals nothing particular; it is a purely subjective Erlebnis. [58]

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In this passage, reason and history were antithetical.  "Historical man" in a society of a "definite economic type" could signify "nothing particular" and was "purely subjective." This astonishing judgment by a man who endured the agony of war and who thought himself suddenly most free in a German detention camp [59] became the dominant question in Sartre's thought after 1945, climaxed by the monumental study of historical and social relations in Critique de la raison dialectique in 1960 as well as in studies of Jean Genet (1952) and Gustave Flaubert (1966-1972).  In Being and Nothingness, the cavalier exorcising of history and society distorted the concrete nature of the Situation, rendering it remote, indeterminate, and impersonal.  In his effort to delimit the new structure of the self in terms of authentic freedom, Sartre regressed to a Cartesian individualism in which the Situation, although dubbed necessary, appeared inessential and gratuitous.  Ultimately, the Other presented itself as a "dilemma": . . one must either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be transcended by him.  The essence of the relations between consciousnesses is not the Mitsein: it is conflict." [60]

b. Freedom in Relations with Things

Similar difficulties beset Sartre's account of authentic freedom in relations with things.  The second aspect of the Situation, "things" could be either possessed or played with.  In each case Sartre presented the "appropriation of things" ideologically, leaving the impression that the contemporary manner of relating to things was natural to man.

Sartre began the discussion of man's relations with things with a concept of desire, in some ways like Hegel's, which rejected all determinist explanations in favor of radical freedom.[61] Man chose his modes of existing in relation to things, expressing his

59. Situations, III (Paris, 1949) 11-13.
60. Being and Nothingness, 525.
61. Ibid., 692.

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desire to be and his lack of being. Shorn of the mediations of society and history, Sartre's concept of desire, unlike Marx's concept of need, located the individual in his relations with things in terms of a totally free project of being-in-the-world. [62] There was no objective, external limitation to desire, which shows once more the one-sidedness of Sartre's grasp of freedom.

Desire led to three general modes of relationships with things: doing (faire, also making), having, and being. [63] "Sartre quickly conflated doing with having, leaving a complex dialectic of having and being, in which be wanted to show the primacy of being, itself founded on freedom.  Yet the concrete descriptions upon which he rested his case led him to present having as primary.  Since men were for the most part in bad faith they chose to possess and to lose themselves in their possessions.

To begin with, Sartre's understanding of the possession of things was fetishistic, confusing ownership with a proximate, sensory relation with things.  "If I desire this picture, it means that I desire to buy it, to appropriate it for myself." [6]4 The desire for the picture was not a desire for seeing it or enjoying it, but for making it one's property.  Possession turned into bad faith for Sartre when the individual, once owning the object, attained an intimacy with it that allowed him to lose himself in it, to take on himself the qualities of the in-itself, of the things, and flee from the "negativity" of consciousness.  Thus the person was possessed by the thing as much as the thing was possessed by the person.

Moreover, for Sartre, this relationship of possession was not specific to a certain society in a certain period of its development.  Society did not affect our relations to things in the least: "Of course we could try to define ownership as a social function.  But first of all, although society confers in fact the right to possess according to certain
 
62. Ibid., 693.
63. Ibid., 706.
64. Ibid.

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rules, it does not follow that it creates the relation of appropriation.  At the very most it makes it legal."[65] Recalling the enormous value placed on private property in bourgeois society, Sartre continued, "If ownership is to be elevated to the rank of the sacred, it must first of all exist as a relation spontaneously established between the for-itself and the concrete in-itself." [66] The "spontaneous relation" was a deep "internal bond" between the individual and the object which rested on the existential structure "mine." This relation was not open to modification by men; thus there could be no significant alteration in the structures of possession under a future Communist society in which private ownership would be abolished.

If we can imagine the future existence of a more just collective organization, where individual possession will cease to be protected and sanctified at least within certain limits-this does not mean that the appropriative tie will cease to exist; it can remain indeed by virtue of a private relation of men to things.[67]

If the possessor and the possessed are united by an internal relation based on the insufficiency of being in the for-itself, we must try to determine the nature and the meaning of the dyad which they form.  In fact the internal relation is synthetic and effects the unification of the possessor and the possessed.  This means that the possessor and the possessed constitute ideally a unique reality . . . the desire of a particular object is not the simple desire of this object; it is the desire to be united with the object in an internal relation, in the mode of constituting with it the unity "possessor-possessed." The desire to have is at bottom reducible to the desire to be related to a certain object in a certain relation of being."[68]

65. Ibid., 718.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid., 718-719.
68. Ibid., 721.

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the authentic one in which the thing remains the thing and the man, the man; and the alienated one, the relation in bad faith, where the deep interpenetration of men and things becomes a confusion of the two, where the boundary becomes lost and the thing appears to be the creator, the active agent in the relation and the man becomes the object, the passive consumer of the thing.

This confusion became marked in Sartre's discussion of money.  Money mediated the relation of men and things, affording the individual the power to have:

Money represents my strength. . . . But to me it appears as a creative force: to buy an object is a symbolic act which amounts to creating the object.  That is why money is synonymous with power, not only because it is in fact capable of procuring for us what we desire, but especially because it represents the effectiveness of my desire as
such. . . . Money suppresses the technical connection of subject and object and renders the desire immediately operative, like the magic wishes of fairy tales.[69]

69. Ibid., 722-723.
70. Ibid., 724.

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value to exchange value and being to having corresponds to Sartre's description of man as being what be has, except that for Marx it was indicative of alienation.  Surely, to be what one has, in relation to Sartre's concept of freedom, must indicate bad faith, but since this was not stated in Being and Nothingness, it appeared that "I am what I have" denoted an authentic relation of men and things.

The relation of having did, nevertheless, constitute a project of being, affecting the entire relation of the individual to the world.  At bottom, the desire to have was the desire to be-in-the-world through having the world.  "To appropriate this object is then to appropriate the world symbolically." [71] And in Sartre's universalizing formulation, the consumer of bourgeois society becomes Man.  "To-be-in-the-world is to form the project of possessing the world," [72] clearly a fantasy of acquisitive man, but one that Sartre ascribed to every person.  Losing oneself in the capitalist's dream of owning the entire world was not, for Sartre, the sole way of relating to things.  One could also play with things.

In the activity of play, Sartre described a relation between men and things in which things were allowed to remain things and men maintained their ontological status as free projects of being.  "As soon as a man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom, a freedom, by the way, which could just as well be his anguish, then his activity is play."[73] The "serious attitude" of bad faith, giving priority to the object over the subject, vanished in play as the individual granted his subjectivity its appropriate power, whimsically and lightly experiencing his relations to things (for example, on the ski slope) as internal bonds projected by his consciousness.  Without losing himself in the object, without regarding the object as the creative source of enjoyment, the player glided authentically through objects, permitting them to emerge as they were while re-

71. Ibid., 730.
72. Ibid., 732.
73. Ibid., 711.

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lishing the bonds with things he had created.  In addition to play, art and science were activities of appropriation in Being and Nothingness, in which the world of things was related to by consciousness as an in-itself.[74] Of course, play, art, and science required release from the necessities of production and consumption; they required time beyond the struggle with nature and the subsistence of the body.  In order for play, art, and science to be the general modes of relations with things, a social order beyond scarcity was necessary.  But in Being and Nothingness, Sartre did not yet confront this problem.  His concept of play uncovered the world as a creation of the subject and outlined a relation between men and things in which men were not alienated and things were not fetishes.  But this authentic freedom in relations with things was presented as a project of an individual, not of a society.

The examination of the concept of freedom in Being and Nothingness disclosed the ambivalence and hesitation of Sartre's position.  His emphasis on anxiety as the tone of freedom typified the despair of living in bourgeois civilization at the time of its "crisis." In many ways, too, the existentialist concept of freedom remained rooted in the Cartesian cogito.  And Sartre's description of the Situation, regarding the relation both of men and other men and of men and things, severely attenuated the significance of the world in relation to the individual.  On the other hand, his concept of freedom suggested the possibility of a new post-bourgeois structure of consciousness that called on each individual authentically to construct his self, expressing systematically the central assertion of Hegel, that substance is subject. [75] The existentialist's concept of freedom precluded any attempt to find an external support for human freedom in a superior reality, as well as any attempt to prejudice freedom in favor of one aspect of

74. Ibid., 717.
75. G. F. W. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans.  J. B. Baillie (N.Y., 1967) 80.

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human reality. The thesis that man was free to construct himself and his world would become, for Sartre, the basis for his contribution to Marxism: human reality understood as freedom was the condition for the possibility of Communism or the end of alienated labor.  Finally, although Sartre undervalued the influence of society on the individual and failed to lay the basis for comprehending society, he did bind the individual to the world ontologically.

Yet the actual convergence of Marxism and existentialism was a product of two decades of acrimonious debates, the twenty years following the appearance of Being and Nothingness.  In these first three chapters, I have deliberately avoided any attempt systematically to compare Marx and Sartre, allowing Marxism and existentialism to emerge as separate doctrines in the years after 1945, which is the way things happened.  Instead, I have emphasized the intellectual rupture with previous social theory brought about by Hegel's concept of reason in history, Marx's concept of alienation, and Sartre's concept of freedom.  Nevertheless, some affinities between Marxism and existentialism may tentatively be abstracted as guideposts for the narrative of the actual debate, if only so that we do not lose our way in the free-swinging polemic which often sharpened oppositions and obscured similarities.

Both Marxism and existentialism began by rethinking the early Hegel of the Phenomenology, and both minimized the idealist Hegel of the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia.  Both accepted Hegel's early attempt to define human reality as unfolding in time, as an essentially temporal phenomenon.  Consequently, Marxism and existentialism posit the primacy of life over thought.  In Sartre, "existence precedes essence," and in Marx, "consciousness does not determine life, but life determines consciousness."[76]

Furthermore, both asserted the interdependence of thought and action; in Marx the

76. Easton and Guddat, op. cit., 415.

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The Early Sartre

concept of praxis united theory and action, and in Sartre "doing" and "being" were interrelated.  Both rejected the ideal of the autonomy of the individual by going back to Hegel's concept of recognition; Marx defined man as his social interactions, and for Sartre "being-for-others," and the "look" constituted primary dimensions of the self, although Sartre did not go far enough in this direction.  Also, both defined freedom as a positive self-realization and as the primary telos of human reality, unlike liberalism and idealism, which saw freedom either as an absence of restrictions on the self or as the mere exercise of pure reason.  Finally, both viewed reality as a dialectical totality in which all parts were interconnected.  The priority of one sector over another was relative for both; the economy or labor for Marx and intentional consciousness for Sartre.  Thereby, both refused to privilege any aspect of reality, to use isolating, analytical reason as the primary manner of thinking, and turned instead to a dialectical description of the structures of the real.  In sum, there was a very large basis of agreement about fundamental principles that could be the starting point for fruitful discussions.

There were also deep antagonisms between Being and Nothingness and the 1844 Manuscripts.  The concept of freedom in Sartre was profoundly subjectivist and appeared to lead to the very un-Marxist direction of an ethical theory.  By the same token, the concept of alienation in Marx was strongly objectivist, totally subordinating the manner in which an individual experienced his alienating activity to the comprehension of the alienating relations in themselves.  The strongest affinity between the two positions, as they were seen in France during the 1940s and 1950s, came also from their similar claims as humanisms.  On this vague, extremely general level, both Marx and Sartre appeared to many as parallel if not complementary.  Nevertheless, a synthetic existential Marxism was in no sense obvious in the post-war years.  It remained something to be achieved.

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