Stalinism and the Existentialists: 1944-1957
 
 
 

Four
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The Attack on Sartre: 1944-1948
 
 

1. The Attack Begins

Contacts between Marxism and existentialism began when Sartre joined the Resistance.  In direct touch with Marxists as a member of the Comité National des Ecrivains during the Occupation, he discussed his philosophy with them on many occasions.  Shortly after the Liberation, he was asked by the Communist paper Action to respond to criticisms of his existentialism that began appearing in Action and other Leftist journals.  In his reply Sartre tendered the first overtures to a reconciliation of his ideas with Marxism.  He stressed two points: first, that both philosophies espoused freedom, claiming that man was "master of his own destiny," and, second, that both were philosophies of action in which thought was "a project and a commitment." [1] Existentialism was not a quietistic pessimism of anxiety and despair, as many misconstrued it, but an "optimism," "a humanist philosophy of action, of effort, of combat, of solidarity. . . . Far from being a "delight in the morose," it presented man in a de virile anxiety[2] that did not bide the grandeur, the infinitude, the Prometheanism of the human situation.  In his brief defense, Sartre pointed to the revolutionary climate of the Occupation as the cradle of existentialism in contravention to the widespread belief that it arose from the anomie of a petty-bourgeois intellectual.

1. "A Propos de l'existentialisme, mise au point," Action, 17 (Dec. 29, 1944) 11.
2. Ibid.

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     In an abrupt departure from the Resistance spirit of unity, Communist intellectuals in late 1944 began viciously attacking Sartre.  Everything and everyone associated with Sartre was open for criticism: existentialism, Les Temps Modernes, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and, to a lesser degree, Maurice Merleau-Ponty who had close Communist friends (Courtade, Hervé, and Desanti).  Henri Lefebvre began with a stinging rebuke of Sartre's article in Action.  To Lefebvre, Sartre's existentialism had nothing to do with Marxism, but was part of the "war machine" against Communism, an effort to enchant and mystify the youth of France, like old Socrates, with its "pathological narcissistic consciousness." [3]

For a short time, however, the CP remained strangely ambivalent toward Sartre.  A few years later Sartre recalled his relations with the CP in the mid-1940s with some bitterness.[4 ]After he was rebuked by Lefebvre and others, another Communist and ex-student of his, Jean Kanapa, told him that Being and Nothingness was indeed  compatible with Marxism.[5]  Thinking now that the Communists were not against him, Sartre accepted an invitation to visit with Maublanc, a Communist, only to find himself attacked again, this time by Mougin.  One month Sartre was writing for the Communist papers Action and Les Lettres Françaises; the next month he was their chief object of scorn.  Sartre was bewildered: the Communists kept making overtures to him but with the first contact they would recoil and spring at him, the way a cat sadistically plays with an insect.  Privately they were friendly; publicly, bellicose.  In the next few years, the same scenario was repeated twice, once after Sartre had criticized both De Gaulle's RPF and the CP during a radio broadcast.  He was then visited by a Communist who asked him

3. "Existentialisme et Marxisme: réponse à une mise au point," Action, 40 (June 8, 1945) 8.
4. For an account of this episode, see De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 44.
5. Entretiens sur la politique (Paris, 1949) 71-72.

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to "initiate a unification on the Left," a pet idea of Hervé, the editor of Action.  No sooner was this said than Action blasted Sartre's radio speech as "traitorous." [6] Though Sartre viewed the behavior of the Communists as unmerciful and bizarre, they might well have been hoping that he join the Party.  The counterpoint of initiative and attack in fact may have followed Sartre's refusals to become one of them.  At any rate, Sartre's first posture as a Marxist outside the Party was unsuccessful.  After 1944 he moved away from the Communists until 1950 when he tried once again, this time with more success, to maintain a position of both allegiance and independence.

The attitude of the CP had political motives.  Sartre's thought was not simply at odds with Marxism; it was dangerous to the Party.  After the Liberation, the Communists were reformulating their political strategy and the loose unity on the Left had to be tightened.  All doubtful elements in the broad coalition would have to be eliminated.  Also, existentialism was associated with religious belief in Jaspers and Marcel, and, far worse, with fascism itself through Heidegger.  Bedfellows of this reactionary stripe could not be welcomed in the Communist camp.  Furthermore, Sartre's broad following among the youth of France was disturbing to the Communists.  Youth seemed more enamored of existentialism than of the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin. [7] Finally, the Communists had a more compelling reason to rebuke existentialism so strenuously.  Many of the younger Party intellectuals were attracted to Sartre's thought, especially to his concept of engagement. [8] The existentialist had breathed life into the Marxist concept of the relation of theory and practice, highlighting the dramatic, personal qualities of engagement in a manner that corresponded to the experience of those who participated in the Resistance.  Existentialism actually provoked a sharp split within the Party which

6. Ibid., 75-76.
7. De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 43, 130.
8. Edgar Morin, Autocritique (Paris, 1959) 83-86.

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made the public condemnation of Sartre particularly exigent.

Hervé, Courtade, Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Dominique Desanti, and many other young intellectuals who had joined the Party during the Resistance were open to Sartre's argument that existentialism and Marxism were compatible. [9] These new Communists had come from the same bourgeois background as Sartre and had never worked in a factory; they attended the same schools and rebelled against an education that included neither Marx nor Nietzsche nor Freud.  During the Resistance their anti-fascist heroism fit in well with communist strategy.  With the enemy now defeated, the joyous if arduous fraternity of war was suppressed by the Party in favor of rigid hierarchy and intellectual conformism.  And with this the emerging association of existentialism and Marxism was abruptly cut short.  The birth of existential Marxism was delayed by the exigencies of Stalinist politics.

2. Being and Nothingness under Fire

For these tactical reasons France's leading Marxists would join a united front against Sartre's existentialism from 1945 to 1950.  There would be no intellectual dialogue between Marxism and existentialism on the Communists' side, only unrelenting warfare against the latest form of bourgeois ideology.  Communists wrote full studies of Being and Nothingness to show its anti-progressive, idealist nature: Henri Lefebvre, L'Existentialisme in 1946; Henri Mougin, La Sainte famille existentialiste in 1947; Jean Kanapa, L'Existentialisme n'est pas un humanisme in 1947; and Georges Lukacs, Existentialisme ou marxisme? in 1948, a book that was important in the French debate.[10]

9. Dominique Desanti, Les Staliniens: une experience politique, 1944-1956 (Paris, 1975) 5, 22.
10. For additional critiques of Being and Nothingness by CP intellectuals, see: G. Mounin, "Position de l'existentialisme," Les Cahiers

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While the existentialists of Sartre's circle were feverishly learning Marxism and hesitantly making syntheses of their thought with that of the Communists, the latter were condemning existentialism outright.

a. A Double Idealism

When Henri Mougin died in 1946, his comrade Jean Kanapa polished up his manuscript on existentialism, some of which had appeared in journals, and published it in 1947.  Mougin traced the history of twentieth-century French idealism through Bergson, Blondel, Hamelin, Brunschvicg, and Alain, showing that Sartre's existentialism was merely an effort to resolve its contradictions.  With analytic rigor and in great detail Mougin unstitched Sartre's ontology in Being and Nothingness, shaking out a tawdry, idealist garment.  Unlike the other Communist critics of Being and Nothingness, Mougin's tone was sober and restrained.  Although his picture of existentialism as bourgeois idealism matched with the others, he went to some pains to penetrate the text of Being and Nothingness to prove his assertions.

In Mougin's view, French idealism had reached an impasse; it could not account philosophically for the phenomena of time, history, and action, but shifted back and forth between an objective and a subjective metaphysics of mind.[11] The "maneuvers" of existentialism overcame this difficulty only by haphazardly confusing the two positions.  A phenomenologist, Sartre wished to do away with the dualism of reality and appearance by positing a monism of appearance.  The object was fully there in its appearance, but it could be grasped only sequentially, never all at once.  To Mougin this was where Sartre fell into another dualism, this time a dualism of the infinite fullness of

d'action, 2 (May, 1946); Pierre Hervé, "Conscience et connaissance," Les Cahiers d'action, 2 (May, 1946); V. Leduc, Les Marxisme est-il dépasse? (Paris, 1946); R. Garaudy, Le Communisme et la morale (Paris, 1947).
11. La Sainte famille existentialiste (Paris, 1947) 40.

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the appearance and the finite perception of consciousness.[12] When Sartre asserted the total presence of the object, objective idealism was stressed over the subjective idealism of perceiving consciousness.

Much worse for Mougin was Sartre's ontological grounding of this one-dimensional reality.  He divided reality into pour-soi (human reality) and en-soi (being), defining pour-soi from the point of view of subjective idealism as intentional consciousness and en-soi from that of objective idealism where essence preceded existence, where objects, unlike men, were given in their essence.  Against other commentaries on Being and Nothingness, Mougin argued that Sartre did not, with his ontology, resolve the dualism of idealism and materialism because his ontology never grasped materialism at all.  In the ontology of existentialism, the pour-soi came first so that the definition of being never allowed it an independent existence apart from man. [13] Being, for example as nature, only appeared to man in its essences; by itself it had no real status.

The situation for consciousness was one of anxiety and ennui.[14] In a "double idealism" the subject was lost, moving from its own nothingness to the solidity of being which in turn was only established by himself.  No wonder then, Mougin commented, that Sartre ended in religious reaction: the subject strove, although in vain, to become simultaneously a pour-soi and an en-soi, a synthetic God who alone could resolve the contradictions of double idealism.[15] For Mougin, there could be no rapprochement between Marxism and this latest version of idealism.  In his polemic, however, Mougin forgot the Marxist need for a theory of consciousness and subjectivity.  His rejection of Sartre's existentialism left Marxism with the travesty of the Stalinist reflex theory of mind.  On the other hand, Sartre would later take up Mougin's criticism, modifying the

12. Ibid., 123ff.
13. Ibid., 118.
14. Ibid., 131.
15. Ibid., 139 and 147.

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duality of in-itself and for-itself and taking matter more seriously into account.

b. An Excremental Philosophy

Lefebvre's critique of Being and Nothingness was the earliest and the most interesting.  In rigorous Marxist fashion, Lefebvre set out to unveil the social roots of existentialism, to prove its unacceptable liaisons with a decadent bourgeoisie.  Only "the moral decomposition of the so-called higher classes" explained how a "tiny group of stars and snobs" could evoke such a fuss.[16] Moreover, this fashionable literary-philosophical fad was not even original.  To dampen the enthusiasm over existentialism, Lefebvre wrote an extended history of the Philosophies group of the mid-1920s, of which he was a member, demonstrating that the group's move toward Marxism began with an unhealthy, adolescent It existentialism." When he was only a youth of twenty, Lefebvre wrote a "philosophy of consciousness," which appeared in a short-lived journal, Philosophies, in 1924 badly abridged by the leader of the group, Pierre Morhange. [17] The "boring," "abstract," "esoteric" existentialism of the 1940s was only a repetition of the original existentialism of Henri Lefebvre.[18]  In one stroke Lefebvre gave himself credit as the first existentialist, relegating Sartre to the position of a mere latecomer, and presented a self-criticism in which existentialism was exposed as juvenile.

At that time Lefebvre was studying under Leon Brunschvicg and was bent, with youthful passion, on destroying the established philosophy of rationalist idealism.  Lefebvre remembered his rebellion as an impotent but partly correct effort toward a concrete philosophy of the subject.  He was deflected from coming around to the scientific way of thinking to dialectical materialism, because of his "neurotic' situation as

16. L'Existentialisme (Paris, 1946) 13.
17. Ibid., 26.
18. E. Mounier reminded Lefebvre of his own mixture of Marxism and existentialism in a review of L'Existentialisme in Esprit.  "De l'existentialisme à nos conditions d'existence," Esprit 16:141 (Jan., 1948) 144-145.

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a bourgeois intellectual.  His existentialism, like Sartre's, could be understood as a "neurosis of interiority, a schizophrenia," caused by "the bourgeois intellectual's world with its privatized consciousness, its abstract culture, its isolation, its disdain for the practical, its separation from life, its mediocre and vague social position."[19] After psychologizing existentialism, Lefebvre painted a picture of the bohemian youth of romantic intellectuals.  George Politzer, Norbert Gutermann, Paul Nizan, [20] himself, and others who later became the first important group of Marxist theorists in France, lived in poorly lit, overcrowded flats, voraciously assimilating French thought and culture.  Rebellious, iconoclastic, with a passion for life, they were determined to rid themselves of an obsolete rationalist past and strike out in new directions.  Indiscriminately exploring all forms of "irrationalism," they made alliances with André Breton's surrealists around "the project of a unified revolutionary center.  " [21]

Looking back from 1945, Lefebvre could see only the futility of his youth, not its truth in the Hegelian sense of Bildung.  Existentialism past and present was no more than a mental regression and a psychological infantilism.  Only reason is virile."[22]  Wearing the mask of a rational, mature intellectual who convinced himself that his work was "virile" and masculine, like that of a proletarian, Lefebvre dismissed all existentialism, especially Sartre's, as "magical." The individualist existentialist indulged in subjectivity, projecting himself onto the world in the manner of primitives.  The basic concepts of existentialism were not rational ideas that demarcated regions of internal and external reality, but magical, evocative images:

19. L'Existentialisme, 20-21.
20. W.  F. Redfern, Paul Nizan (Princeton, 1972) 12-20 depicts the life of this group.
21. L'Existentialisme, 33.
22. Ibid., 81.
23. Le Marxisme, op. cit., 11.

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Complex and higher relations with the world-implying objective knowledge and effective power-are eliminated to the profit of immediate relations, simplified and transposed anthropomorphically into a pseudo-knowledge.  This is magic. Magical thought regresses to the level of spontaneous magic; but for the "modern" thinker, who is no longer "spontaneous" in this sense, there is a morbidity, a neurotic element in it with infantile regression.  Thus Sartre tells his tales. It is the magic and metaphysics of shit.[24]

With Sartre appearing as a hero of the Resistance, with his claim that existentialism was a humanism, with his overtures toward Marxism, Lefebvre felt that it was necessary to render existentialism repulsive in the eyes of the progressive elements of France.  No tactics were too low to be used in this struggle.  Lefebvre unintentionally revealed his male chauvinism by characterizing Sartre's thought as feminine, repeatedly damning it as passive and emotional.  Hence far from being a statement of "humanism, Nausea became a manifesto of the pederast. [26] Existentialist writings depicted exceptional and inhuman situations: points of rupture of the monad, paroxysms of consciousness. Hu-

24. L'Existentialisme, 82.  Garaudy, for his part, was not less offensive.  "Every class has the literature it deserves.  The upper bourgeoisie in decay delights in the erotic obsessions of a Henry Miller or the intellectual fornications of Jean-Paul Sartre." Literature of the Graveyard, trans., J. Bernstein (N.Y., 1948) 61.  Garaudy's puritanism, blushing modestly at existentialist literature, was part of his effort to associate Communism with morality. (Cf. Le Communisme et la morale (Paris, 1947).
25. L'Existentialisme, 227-228.
26. Ibid., 221.

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man life is reduced to such morbid states." [27]

When Lefebvre did treat the philosophical content of existentialism, his statements were more balanced; indeed, a certain ambivalence broke through his aggressive armor.  As with Marxism, Sartre strove to overcome the dualism of idealism and materialism, although he achieved only a "bastard compromise." His intentions were admirable, only he did not go far enough.

It is not a matter of reproaching Sartre for his evolution toward humanism; far from it.  His error is at bottom an inadequacy of philosophical rigor.  Sartre wants to position himself within a bastard compromise between the philosophy of inhumanism and the new affirmation of the human. . . . For those who propose to liquidate on all levels the gang of Hitlerites, it appears inadmissible to live on a bastard compromise between the Heideggerian "style" and that of total humanism.[28]

The essential difference between dialectical materialism and existentialism resides in the attitude toward science. . . . Dialectical materialism saves reason because it makes it concrete without suppressing it and reestablished its double dignity as a means and an end, instrument and truth.  It integrates the irrational with

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Reason. . . . The irrational-action and practice, the multiple contradictions of life and thought-become the content, the ground of concrete Reason . . . . [29]

Lefebvre was willing to recognize the important contribution of existentialism in defining "certain internal, spiritual conflicts" of the individual in bourgeois society.  The rub was that it was now necessary for Marxism to present a theory of consciousness, and the unmentionable difficulty was that Stalinism prevented it.   Lefebvre  understood  that  society  would  not be changed the time  had come when
 
29. Ibid., 249.

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except by a self-conscious revolutionary class.  The inhibitions and blocks to this self-consciousness were central to the problems of Marxism and in this area the existentialists had stolen the Marxist thunder.  The problem of the consciousness of the proletariat had arisen and existentialists were developing a method to study consciousness while Marxists languished in the study of external social structures.  It was necessary to present clearly the human side of historical becoming-precisely how man was to change himself in the process of liberation.  A modified Sartreanism might grasp the structures of man's self-negation, when viewed as part of the revolution.  In fact, Lefebvre clearly stated the question in these terms:

Dialectical materialism "transcends" all theories that tend to identify consciousness and being, by showing how, why and to what extent conscious being (man) is not conscious Of his being, of nature and of his nature, of his social products, of his possibilities . . . . when one studies the humble beginnings of "conscious being" one must put the emphasis on being.  Through the wanderings of thought and history, a dialectical reversal slowly occurs and the emphasis must be put on consciousness . . . Marxism represents the critical and decisive point of this reversal.[30]

All Lefebvre could do was show how the existentialists' concepts of despair and anxiety were correct descriptions of internal conflicts under capitalism but were falsely

30. Ibid., 252.

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understood as part of a fictional human condition.

When the individual discovers in himself insoluble Contradictions and when he does not know them (by situating them in a knowledge of human reality) he falls into anxiety and despair.  But certain "visible" contradictions can appear insoluble because history advances slowly, very slowly, from the perspective of the individual.  Then the individual, who wants a solution for and against everything, and an immediate one, "hic et nunc"-this is his drama-
he then creates a pseudo-solution.[31]

c. A Philosophy of Fetishes

A third critique of Sartre's Being and Nothingness came from Georg Lukacs, dean of European Marxists.  Shortly after returning from his exile in Moscow to his native Hungary, Lukacs wrote Existentialisme ou marxisme? (1948), his first book to appear in French.  It was written for the Hungarian CP, as proof of his orthodoxy.  Sartre's writings had become important and dangerous enough to the Communists for them to have their foremost theorist write against them.  And that Lukacs did.  The bulk of Existentialisme

31. Ibid., 255.
32. In La Conscience malheureuse Lefebvre gives an interesting account of an earlier existential Marxist, Benjamin Fondane, who never resolved the contradictions between Heidegger and Marx.  Ibid., 248.
33. D. Zaslavaski, "On Existentialism," reprinted in Les Temps Moderne,s, 2:20 (May, 1957) 1531-1536 and Lefebvre, op. cit., 72, 84.
 

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ou marxisme? was directed against Sartre, with shorter sections on Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir.  In a final chapter, Lukacs moved on to some of the theoretical problems of Leninism.  With the important voice of Lukacs bellowing out against existentialism, many young CP intellectuals, like J.-T. Desanti, who had strong interests in the new philosophy, were persuaded to follow obediently the Stalinist line and put aside their copies of Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

In this book Lukacs placed existentialism in the history of bourgeois thought and society.  Faced with the crisis of bourgeois society in its imperialist stage, non-Marxist philosophers groped to represent this crisis as a critique of bourgeois culture. [34] Without a revolutionary perspective they necessarily fell into irrationalism since they described the discontents of bourgeois society as universal dilemmas of man.  For Lukacs, existentialism typified "bourgeois intelligence" in its attempt to define the freedom of the individual in a purely formal and empty way, a trait that he claimed went back to Descartes and Kant.  Hence the existentialist search for a "third way," beyond a rationalist idealism which no longer made sense and a revolutionary materialism which was inimical to bourgeois philosophy.  In fact, Lukacs complained, there was no "third way": either there is the primacy of existence (materialism) or the primacy of consciousness (idealism).  Because idealism could be maintained only in "untroubled times," intellectuals were led beyond it without being able to resolve its difficulties.

Existentialisme ou marxisme?, one of Lukacs' worst books, was a document of the cold war.  Beginning in 1948, the Communist parties of Europe had Zhdanovism foisted upon them by mother Russia.  The political theory of two camps locked in mortal combat, with no middle ground, no neutral space, was echoed intellectually in the position that

34. Existentialisme ou marxisme? trans. by E. Kelemen (Paris, 1948) 2nd ed. 1961.  In the second edition, Lukacs reaffirmed his position against existentialism without any modification, 18-19.

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all thought was either idealism or materialism, either a pack of bourgeois lies or a revolutionary weapon.  Crudely opportunist, reducing thought to politics, Zhdanovism limited philosophy to pigeon-holing ideas in either one or the other category.  Regardless of Lukacs' sympathy for any of Sartre's ideas, existentialism would have to be condemned to the "ash can" of history.

Lukacs did not, however, completely dismiss Sartre's existentialism.  Like his own History and Class Consciousness, as well as his efforts at a Marxist aesthetic, Sartre's concept of freedom had the merit of revealing

the importance of the individual's decision, which bourgeois determinism and vulgar Marxism habitually underestimate.  All social activity is composed of individual acts-and the influence exercised by material conditions,
however important they may be, are only realized as Engels said "in the last instance." This means that at the moment of making a decision the individual always finds himself confronted by a certain degree of freedom . . . . [36]

Sartre's absolute freedom was the "abstract, undifferentiated freedom of intellectuals" who wanted simply to say no to fascism." Hence his popularity with liberals who had carried out an internal protest against Hitler or who took part in the Resistance without really becoming Marxists.  To Lukacs, only within Marxism could the concept of freedom become concrete since the daily struggles against capitalism in all its forms engendered an awareness of historical possibilities.  Conversely, for Sartre, man was always free to choose but his choice was "arbitrary, irrational, and uncontrollable."  Be-

35. Henri Lefebvre, "Le Marxisme et la pensée française," 13:137-138 Les Temps Modernes (July-Aug., 1957)  117.
36. Existentialisme ou marxisme? 105.

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cause the direction of choice was without historical and social context, the choice had to be nihilistic.  The meaning of the choice returned only to the individual and was without impact on others.  Slipping dangerously close to solipsism, Sartre

denies the necessity of historical change as well as history itself, both on the social and on the individual levels.  Having asserted that the choice is divorced from the past, he denies the real relations that unite the individual
to society; he envisions a world separate from the objective relations that surround man and the human relations lie does see are those of isolated individuals.  The fatalist and mechanical notion of freedom built on this base must lose all its meaning.[37]

37. Ibid., 106.
38. Ibid., 108.  For a similar critique, cf.  H. Marcuse, "Remarks on J. P. Sartre's Being and Nothingness," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 8:3 (March, 1948).
39. Ibid.,  129.

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Unlike the intellectual hatchet men of the French Communist Party, Garaudy and Kanapa, Lukacs did not resort to damning Sartre as a fascist.  He did maintain that Sartre had misunderstood Marxism and that his existentialism was without value for Marxists, assuming of course that by Marxism one meant Lukacs' Marxism and the Marxism which included the idea of alienation and not the Marxism of Stalin.  In the years that followed this early exchange between Sartre and Lukacs, the latter remained convinced that existentialism made "fetishes" of the structures of consciousness. [40] Sartre, on the contrary, was to incorporate many of the criticisms made by Lukacs so that by 1960 one could speak of his thought as an "existential Marxism."  In 1948, however, Sartre responded to Lukacs' book with furious polemical hostility; he did not yet see the weaknesses of his position in Being and Nothingness.

3.  Sartre Responds

a. Existentialist Humanism against Materialist Marxism

With the unrestrained polemics against Sartre from the Communists multiplying day by day, Sartre felt called upon to defend himself and his ideas.  His response came in a lecture in 1945 called "Existentialism is a Humanism,"' and in an article in Les Temps Modernes of 1946 entitled "Materialism and Revolution."[41] In these ripostes Sartre advertised his own existentialism as a true humanism, the only suitable philosophy for a liberating politics, over against the -Marxism of the French Communist Party, which was

40. Ibid., 9. See also Lukacs, et al., "Deux philosophies de 1'europe, La Nef, 3:24 (Nov., 1946) 87-98 for his critique of Jaspers.
41. For another interesting document of the debate in these years see Colette Audry, ed., Pour et contre l'existentialisme: grand débat avec ... (Paris, 1948).  The defenders of existentialism were three young writers for Les Temps Modernes, F. Jeanson, J. B. Pontalis, and J. Pouillon.  Sartre was criticized from a rationalist position by J. Benda, a Left Christian position by E. Mounier, and a Marxist position by R. Vailland.  Audry defended Sartre's plays against attacks from the Right-wing press.

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a dehumanizing materialism.  He proposed naively that the CP substitute existentialism for its own diamat.  It was at this point in the controversy between Marxism and existentialism that the two camps were most sharply opposed and that the Communist criticisms of Being and Nothingness were most poignant.  It was also at this point that Sartre was attacked by the Trotskyists because his lecture attacked Naville.  Sartre's response to the Communists was based, in general, on a defense of his concept of radical freedom as a needed ingredient in revolutionary theory: ". . . the basic idea of existentialism is that even in the most crushing situations, the most difficult circumstances, man is free.  Man is never powerless except when he is persuaded that he is and the responsibility of man is immense because he becomes what he decides to be. " [42] Time and again, through the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Sartre returned to his basic theme that Marxism lacked a doctrine of revolutionary subjectivity.  In 1950, for example, Sartre praised Tito and berated Marxism on this count: the force of objective circumstances and the contradictions of objectivism itself had led the leaders of Yugoslavia in spite of themselves to revalorize subjectivity: but this revaluation in its turn demands a theoretical revision: Marxism must be rethought; man must be rethought." [43]  Existential Marxism would be just such a rethinking.

In the popularizing lecture of 1945 (later repudiated), Sartre took up in turn the assaults on his thought from Catholics and from Marxists, arguing in each case that his existentialism alone was a humanistic doctrine.  Against the Marxist contention that Being and Nothingness failed to account for the relation of the individual to others, to society and to history, Sartre replied only by regressing to Cartesianism.  Sartre would not join a revolutionary group unless it did not impinge on his freedom and this was pos-

42. J. P. Sartre, in C. Audry, ed., Pour et contre 1'existentialisme (Paris, 1948) 188.
43. J. P.  Sartre, Préface to Louis Dalmas, Le Communisme Yougoslave (Paris, 1950) xvii.

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sible only "in the unity of a party or group which I can more or less control. . . ."[44] He could not "count on men whom I do not know. . . ." Even after the experience of the Resistance and the German POW camps Sartre was still the atomized bourgeois who regarded dependence on others as a loss of freedom.  The Communist critiques of his concept of the situation were all too true: the existential individual, for all his being-in-the-world, was still a petty bourgeois with no understanding of comradely solidarity.  Sartre had shrunk from renouncing intellectual independence, a price the CP demanded of its thinkers.

Sartre nevertheless insisted that thought proceeded from action, that commitment came first for the existentialist.  Even so, it was a stoical commitment that was taken "without hope." He was convinced of the primacy of acting in the world only with the undertone that the world was still a Fall, albeit a necessary one, from the purity of the Self.  His existentialism was lost in the murky ground somewhere between the rejection of idealism and the full acceptance of man as a being-in-the-world.  What was worse, he justified his reluctant espousal of action on Cartesian grounds.  To establish a "humanism" it was necessary to take "subjectivity" as the "point of departure," and the most self-evident "truth" for the subject was still Descartes' "I think, therefore, l am." The cogito was an "absolute truth" for the individual, one that was democratically open to everyone and that alone was "compatible with the dignity of man." Any other position-and Sartre meant the materialism of the CP-implied a "determinism" that reduced man to an object." Sartre had regressed badly into the old dualism: "Our aim is precisely to establish the human kingdom as a pattern of values in distinction from the material world."[45]

44. Sartre, "Existentialism Is a Humanism," trans. Mairet in W. Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre (N.Y., 1966) 299.
45. Ibid., 303.

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Sartre did not, of course, adhere to Cartesianism systematically; if he had, the whole purpose of Being and Nothingness, placing life before thought, would be abandoned.  But his method of extricating himself from idealism consisted of sophistries that avoided the real questions.  His "I think," as opposed to that of Descartes and Kant, was somehow "in the presence of the other" and self-discovery was magically "also the discovery of all others." Yet it would be difficult to concede, as Sartre claimed, that this cogito as being-for-others was in fact a world of "inter-subjectivity." And when Sartre answered the Communist charge that the existentialist choice was empty and amoral with the slippery proposition that "in committing myself, I also commit the whole of humanity" [45] he satisfied no one.  After all, Nazis and Marxists both made commitments.  The Communists raised their eyebrows still higher when he gave "the construction of a work of art" as his example of "the moral choice." Picasso created Guernica for the revolution; but what of Céline?

In "Existentialism is a Humanism" Sartre repeated the themes of Being and Nothingness, but they somehow sounded different in the post-Resistance political context.  The repetition: "What is at the very heart and center of existentialism, is the absolute character of the free commitment, by which every man realizes himself in realizing a type of humanity?" [47] Then the added note that altered the connotation: "We cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done, which left the reader with a sense of
confusion and a lack of direction.  While the CP was organizing the workers, with a busy program for revolution, the existentialist's openness of possibilities emerged as irresolute incoherence.  And while Frenchmen gathered around programs for social renovation, the existentialist's call to action resounded as a dissonant cry of despair.  Sartre's answer to Lenin's "what is to be done?" was lame. The Communists gloated over

46. Ibid., 305.  For attempts at an existential morality cf. F. Jeanson, Le Problème moral et la pensée de Sartre (Paris, 1965) 1st ed., 1948.
47. Ibid., 304.
48. Ibid., 306.

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"Existentialism is a Humanism," which was so weak that even Jean Kanapa's polemical tract had little difficulty in showing that "existentialism is not a humanism." [49]

In 1946, with "Materialism and Revolution," Sartre switched from a posture of defense to one of attack, showing, first, the philosophical errors of Stalinism and, second, the postulates of a philosophy that would be truly revolutionary, like his own existentialism.  He regarded Marxism as the philosophy of Stalin in Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism.[50]  As a philosophy, materialism stripped man of his subjectivity, presented the natural and human worlds as a single world of objects, argued the causal and metaphysical priority of matter over mind, and depicted a determinist view of man in history.  With these metaphysical and "positivist" principles, materialism falsely based itself on a dialectic of nature that transcribed the laws of inert matter onto human reality.  Paradoxically, this dogmatic philosophy of materialism became a "naive idealism" since the materialist's principles were for him certain, absolute truths.

With great subtlety Sartre exposed all the vicious circles of Stalinist reasoning.  Taking materialism finally as a "human attitude" he deftly characterized its bad faith: "I should define it as the subjectivity of those who are ashamed of their subjectivity." [51] The materialists-Lefebvre, Garaudy and the Trotskyist Naville-expected a person to "choose freely and lucidly" a "doctrine that destroys thought." Regarding thought as determined

49. L'Existentialisme n'est pas un humanisme (Paris, 1947).  Kanapa's trumpeting was the loudest, most jarring, and least interesting of the official Marxist's.  Merely repeating the arguments of Mougin and Lefebvre, he had the most damaging stories to tell of the degeneracy of existentialists.  His little book on the "cafe revolutionaries" was so ferocious in tone that one wonders what in the world was going on among the CP leadership to encourage Kanapa.
50. J.  P. Sartre, "Materialism and Revolution, in Literary and Philosophical Essays (N.Y., 1967) 212.
51. Ibid., 315.

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by matter, they nevertheless required the voluntary adoption of their ideas.  This materialism was "a monster, an elusive Proteus, a large, vague contradictory semblance." [52] Though Sartre's barbs were on target, he defended himself on the basis of a principle the Communists would not accept: the independence of thought.

Materialism, a barbarous doctrine, still attracted Sartre, for it was, after all, the doctrine of what he thought was the only liberating force in France.

I know that man has no salvation other than the liberation of the working class; I know this before being a materialist and from a plain inspection of the facts. I know that our intellectual interest lies with the proletariat.  Is that a reason for me to demand of my thinking, which has led me to this point, that it destroy itself? Is that a reason for me to force it henceforth to abandon its criteria, to think in contradictions, to be torn between incompatible theses, to lose even the clear consciousness of itself, to launch forth blindly in a giddy flight that leads to faith? [53]

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In this passage, Sartre adopted a position that he was to position that he was to hold for two decades: Communist philosophy is a travesty; Communist politics are progressive.  Although these premises are debatable, the conclusion is unavoidable: the Communist Party must adopt Sartre's existentialism.  In the futility of this hope lay all of the ambiguities of Sartre's thought and action.  The variations on the theme of Sartre's attraction-repulsion toward the FCP constitute the leitmotiv running through his thought.

The second part of "Materialism and Revolution" called upon Marxists to accept the primacy of subjectivity: "We shall call revolutionary the party or the person in the party whose acts intentionally to prepare such a revolution." [54]  Men are free in their situation and "anyone can become a revolutionary," even a capitalist like Engels.  Sartre was now willing to define the "situation" more specifically than in Being and Nothingness, much in the way the Marxist did: society was capitalist and it divided men and women into bourgeois and proletarian classes; capitalism was oppressive and it called for revolutionary action.  The radical freedom of 1943 was not withdrawn one inch: "This possibility of rising above a situation in order to get a perspective on it . . . is precisely that which we call freedom.  No materialism of any kind can ever explain it." [55], Sartre demanded that revolutionary thought stress man's transcendence, since it alone brought "man's fate into question," demanding "a total explanation of the human condition," just as Sartre outlined it in Being and Nothingness.  By intending to make a revolution man pointed toward the future as possibility and confronted himself authentically as a free being.

By 1946 a rival image of Marx was present in France, the Marx of the 1844 Manuscripts, a Marx whom the Communist Party ignored.  Sartre proclaimed the compatibility of his thought with that of the young Marx, though be regretted his "unfortunate meeting with Engels," 56 and could not understand why this Marx labeled

54. Ibid., 224.
55. Ibid., 235-236.
56. Ibid. 248n and 245n.
 
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his philosophy a materialism." The existentialist accepted the bifurcation of Marx into a young, "good" Marx and an old, "bad" Marx without seeking the unity of his thought, and manifested a certain reluctance to come to grips with capitalism as an economic system.  In this way, Sartre left himself open to the charge, probably correct in 1946, that he was not well versed in Marxism.  He also avoided the ticklish problem that capitalism behaved as an external movement of things, as an autonomous system.

Sartre wanted the Communists to accept his philosophy of consciousness because it alone did not distort the basic " contingency" of existence.  The materialists, on the other hand, fell into a determinist concept of society that mirrored American Taylorism and behaviorism which was in essence a conservative legitimation of the given social order.  At bottom, the materialists were in bad faith, like Roger Garaudy when staunchly proclaimed, "I am a Communist without anxiety." [57] And Sartre's reply,

. . . our Garaudys are afraid.  What they seek in Communism is not liberation, but a re-enforcement of discipline; there is nothing they fear so much as freedom; if they have renounced the a priori values of the class from which they come, it is in order to find a priori elements in scientific knowledge and paths already marked out in history.  There are no risks and no anxiety; everything is sure and certain; the results are guaranteed.[58]

57. Literature of the Graveyard, op. cit., 56.
58. "Materialism and Revolution," op. cit., 249.

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and 1950s because of his attempt to revitalize Marxism should not lead us to overlook his wisdom.  Indeed, by the 1960s the most official of official Marxists were taking up Sartre's advice from 1946.  In a review of Lucien Sève's book of 1969, Marxisme et théorie de la personnalité, the Marxist Maurice Caveing noted the truth of Sartre's criticism.  "On the most general level the lacunae that Sartre found in Marxism, the lack of a theory of the person, remains a fact of fundamental importance.  Even if it is necessary to reject the subjectivist terms in which Sartre formulates the question, one must recognize that it is pertinent. . . ." [59]

"Materialism and Revolution," written in a milieu of the Cold War, could easily be taken as support for the capitalist enemy.  After 1948, Sartre would not again raise such a strident voice against the CP for fear of aiding the other camp.  Faced with the exigencies of the political situation he would curb his own thought.  Yet in 1946 he accused the materialists of just this contradiction.  They gave up "truth" for politics, something he would not countenance.  Sartre was to learn, the hard way, that there was no easy assumption of the harmony of truth and revolution when thought was immersed in the world, when it was in a "situation," when a dialectic of reason and history prevailed.
 
In his 1946 article, the most penetrating criticism the CP received in these years, Sartre presented many arguments that the materialists could not answer.  But he had in no sense provided them with an alternative.  His own existentialism went only part of the distance toward integrating a concept of "free" consciousness with a concept of social interactions, and even more, a dialectic of consciousness with a concept of nature.  What "Materialism and Revolution" did achieve, however, was the recognition that Being and Nothingness was in many respects inadequate and his direction for the future was mapped out.  In the following passage, Sartre sketched positions that he himself had not

59. Maurice Caveing, "Le Marxisme et la personnalité humaine," in Psychologie et marxisme (Paris, 1971) 198.

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yet worked out:

A revolutionary philosophy ought to account for the plurality of freedoms and show how each one can be an object for the other while being, at the same time, a freedom for itself.  Only this double character of freedom and objectivity can explain the complex notions of oppression, conflict, failure and violence.  For one never oppresses
anything but a freedom, but one cannot oppress it unless it lends itself in some way to this oppression, unless, that is, it presents the appearance of a thing to the Other.  The revolutionary movement and its plan- which is to make society pass through the violence of one state in which liberties are alienated to another state based on their mutual
recognition-is to be understood in these terms.[60]

b. Literature and Marxism

Until World War II, Sartre identified himself primarily as a writer.  The value of literature was absolute, an end in itself, a calling that raised one above time, a way of perceiving human affairs that was outside history.  Now history had intruded itself upon the writer; Sartre had fought, been captured, and interned; he had joined the Resistance.  With the war over, the question of resuming an old life or beginning a new one had to be faced.  He opted for change.

His first step was to originate, with his friends, a journal, Les Temps Modernes, that would speak to the new situation of the writer who could no longer write in eternity, who had decided on action, who was "engaged." [61] In the introductory article of Les

60. "Materialism and Revolution," op. cit., 251.
61. For a review of the founding of Les Temps Modernes see E. Mounier, "Le message des 'Temps Modemes' et le néo-stoicisme," Esprit, 13 (Dec., 1945) 957-963. The original editorial

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Temps Modernes and in a series of pieces in 1947 (which was in answer to the criticism of the first article) collected as What Is Literature?  Sartre began the process of deconstructing his identity, of finding a new way of writing within history.  He sought a Hegelian "concrete universal" that would embody the absolute in the relative.  "But what makes our position original, I believe, is that the war and the occupation, by precipitating us into a world in a state of tension, perforce made us rediscover the absolute at the heart of relativity itself." [62]  Acknowledging his past as a preoccupation with "literary idealism," as a writer who had espoused a "privileged subjectivity," Sartre made a painful leap in the direction of active commitment in the world.  But how far could he go?  What could literature do in an age of revolution?

Sartre perceived the tasks of the writer to be the confrontation of the reader with his world, as "the reconciliation of the author and the reader. . . ." [63] Writers had to be "Jansenists" who dwell upon "extreme situations," like Pascal, revealing "the density of being" in the reality of everyday life.  The writer, in other words, sharpened the conflicts of the lived world, manifesting the ordinary as the metaphysical, as the drama of absolute freedom.  Literature could evoke the "human condition" in its "concrete totality": it forced back upon the experienced world the ultimate possibilities of man to "make history." In the process, literature became a model of man's capacity to create,

group of Les Temps Modernes was an unstable compound: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, De Beauvoir, R. Aron, M. Leiris, A. Ollivier, J. Paulhan, among others.  The only point of unity among these writers was the Resistance and anti-fascism.  Splits and hostilities developed very soon, with Aron, for example, going to Le Figaro, a very conservative anti-Communist paper, in 1946.  Ollivier in the same year went over to the Gaullist R.P.F.
62. What Is Literature? op. cit., 148.  For an excellent study of Sartre's theater cf. Pierre Verstraeten, Violence et éthique (Paris, 1972).
63. Ibid., 159.

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drawing into question and "challenging the alienation of work," presenting man as "creative action." From the interior world of Roquentin in Nausea Sartre moved to the historical world of Mathieu Delarue in The Age of Reason.  The contemplative anxiety of the former became the freedom in action of the latter." . . . . the literature of exis [passivity] must be abandoned to inaugurate that of praxis." [64]

The question of an audience, a constituency for this literature of praxis, remained and Sartre's answers to it only underscored the ambiguities of his situation in post-war France.  The proletariat would not read novels, a bourgeois literary form, and the anxiety of the existentialist writer was, Sartre admitted, completely bourgeois.  He weakly suggested that his audience was the petty bourgeoisie, the group from which he came, whose situation he knew and could capture.  This European bourgeoisie was in crisis, its power lost to "non-European" and "non-bourgeois" giants, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Sartre's discomfort stemmed from the limitation of his audience to the petty bourgeoisie while he adopted the Marxist position and granted "without hesitation that the fate of literature is bound up with that of the working class. " [65]

The "situation of the writer in 1947" was not bright.  Out of a vague, inchoate melange of "bourgeois, intellectuals, teachers, and non-communist workers," the non-revolutionary, despised classes, Sartre would, using the new media, forge a weapon of change.  At the same time, the stranglehold of the CP over the workers had to be challenged without aiding the capitalists.  For the writer, the situation was this:

 . . . we must at the same time teach one group [the bourgeoisie] that the reign of ends cannot be realized without revolution and the other group [the CP] that revolution is conceivable only if it prepares the reign of ends. It is this perpetual tension-if we can keep it up which will realize the unity of our public.  In short, we must militate in our writings, in favor of the freedom of the person and the socialist revolution.  It has often been claimed

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that they are not reconcilable.  It is our job to show tirelessly that they imply each other.[66]

If Sartre took upon himself the heavy task of mediating between two groups neither of which satisfied him in their present form, he had by no means arrived at an adequate synthesis of the opposites.  He was still, after all, a writer who thought literature was "an absolute end." He advocated "the freedom of the person" along with a poorly defined "socialist revolution." Did the socialist revolution mean Stalinism?  There had never been a socialist revolution in a bourgeois society; why should one occur now in France?  Because Sartre would create a "unity" of his public?  Was literature to become an organizing force by itself?  If he could not magically invoke a unified public on his own, who would help him: what organizations would work with him?  None had come forward.  Sartre, the isolated bourgeois litterateur, was assuming for himself the role of revolutionary leader, and, more significantly, assuming for literature, for the individualist, atomized activity of reading, the mantle of social change.

And yet there was something to it, something that echoed a century of hesitant alliances between romanticism and socialism, something that foreshadowed the unstable synthesis in 1968 of a cultural revolution and a New Left socialism, a new consciousness and a new social structure.  The end of alienation, the destruction of the realm of means for a kingdom of ends had to be an integral part of the dismantling of
 
66. Ibid., 191.

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private property. There were many precursors going back to Rousseau, to Shelley's poet as legislator, to Goethe's utopia of free workers at the end of Faust, and down to the surrealists.  One might even say that no revolution in the West would be possible until romanticism and socialism were unified in theory and in practice.

Sartre's effort to combine art and politics in What Is Literature? paralleled to some extent the surrealists' project of a previous generation.  In the 1920s, assorted painters, poets, novelists, and intellectuals gathered around André Breton, discovering the revolutionary culture of "automatic writing," a dream-like imagination that spontaneously generated art.  Fervently hostile to the bourgeoisie, the surrealists offered a new revolutionary culture that would harass the bourgeois psyche, with its cadavers and its boisterous épater le bourgeois, with its strident irreverence and adolescent jokes. [67] In the series of Manifestos of Surrealism, Breton offered a revolutionary sensibility to the Communists and was dismayed when he applied for membership in the CP only to be questioned about steel production in Italy.  Interestingly enough, many of those associated with the surrealist group-Aragon, Naville, Eluard, Friedmann-later became leading Marxist intellectuals, even Communists or Trotskyists, who had nothing but scorn for the "follies" of their youth.  Breton was also for a time aligned with Trotsky.  Much of Sartre's hostility to surrealism [68] came perhaps as much from an emotional distaste as from philosophical differences.  Yet like the earlier literary movement, Sartre aspired to synthesize a revolutionary culture and sensibility with the workers' movement.  In 1947, Naville and Friedmann could see more of their own past in Sartre's

67. The "philosophies" group (Politzer, Lefebvre, Nizan, et al.) in the 1920s was close to the surrealists.  Nizan's critique of idealist philosophy, The Watchdogs, trans. by Fittingoff (N.Y., 1971), could be viewed equally as a Marxist or vaguely surrealist-existentialist critique of the established philosophical order.
68. What Is Literature? op. cit., 118-136.

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existentialism than Sartre was comfortable in admitting.

In sum, Sartre had great difficulty translating the philosophical affinities of existentialism with Marxism into a revolutionary literary practice.  Tellingly, he did not return to this theme very often after 1947, switching rather to direct political action or to the philosophical knots of an existential social philosophy.  Although he continued to write plays and stories, he deemphasized the problem of a revolutionary aesthetic at least until his study of Flaubert.

c. Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire

Brusquely rejected by the Communist Party, Sartre was without political direction just when he had decided on the necessity of political action.  Les Temps Modernes, which published anti-imperalist and anti-capitalist articles in the post-war years, was not enough.  During the war he wet his political feet in the abortive Socialisme et liberté, with Merleau-Ponty and De Beauvoir.  Their lack of experience and the Communists' non-cooperation ended the organization after it had barely begun.[69] From 1943 until the Liberation, Sartre participated in the Comité National des Ecrivains, a resistance group led by Communists.  Now in 1948 Sartre entered the world of politics once again by joining, as a founding member, the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire.  The R.D.R., immediately spurned by the CP as an agent of Wall Street, was led by writers and activists of the non-Communist Left.[70] Its most prominent figure, David Rousset, was a Jewish ex-Trotskyist who had been in Nazi camps.  In the beat of the Cold War, when the Communists had been ousted from the French government, the R.D.R., with its organ La Gauche, sought to activate both the non-committed middle-class Left and as many

69. M. Burnier, Choice of Action, trans.  Murchland (N.Y., 1969) 10-11.
70. See ibid., 54-66 for a good account of the RDR.

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workers as possible around a program of democracy, anti-Stalinism, and peace.[71] The goals of the R.D.R. were to de-bureaucratize the CP, regenerating its revolutionary will, and to shift French politics in general away from both camps, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., toward a "third way." Neutralism would save France, and all Europe, from a secondary role in world politics as a satellite of either major power.  It would also stimulate revolutionary change within France toward a genuine, non-Stalinist socialism.

Sartre had at last discovered a political vehicle that he thought could resolve his contradictory positions: existentialism and Marxism, the writer and the activist, philosophical idealism and political materialism, isolated petty bourgeois and philosopher of engagement.  Merleau-Ponty also joined but with less sanguine expectations than Sartre.[72] In the end, Merleau-Ponty's lack of enthusiasm was vindicated as the R.D.R. moved more and more toward a purely anti-Communist position, inimical to both existentialists, finally collapsing without achieving any of its goals in June, 1949.

Sartre's flirtation with politics in the R.D.R. marked an important phase in his effort to unite his thought with his action.  With the disbanding of the R.D.R. he would not attain this degree of synthetic identity until the events of May, 1968.  For twenty years he would be at the mercy of the CP, the only significant force on the Left.  Since the CP would never fulfill Sartre's hopes for it, his posture during these years as a sympathetic outsider was at best awkward and at worst comical.  He was in desperate need of a non-Communist left that could in some sense pass as an existential subject of history, as an agent of change toward socialism that did not refute his radical concept of freedom.

71. Sartre, Rousset, and Rosenthal, Entretiens sur la politique (Paris, 1949) 19-20.  Printed first in Les Temps Modernes in 1948.
72. Albert Rabil, Merleau-Ponty: Existentialist of the Social World (N.Y., 1967) 105.  See also Sartre, "Merleau-Ponty," Situations (N.Y., 1969) 180-181, where Sartre recounted his experience with the RDR; R. Toulement, L'Essence de la société selon Husserl (Paris, 1962) and Dick Howard "Ambiguous Radicalism," in G. Gillan, ed., Horizons of the Flesh (Carbondale, 1973) 143-159.

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Only then could Sartre's philosophy have some reference to the "situation," to the actual social world.  With the demise of the R.D.R., and with his refusal to consider the Trotskyists or the Socialists, Sartre's politics consisted of an increasingly byzantine effort to locate some feeble trace of existentialism in the Marxist-Leninism of the French CP, some hint of an authentic, liberating vanguard in a repressively Stalinist political apparatus.  The revelations of the Moscow Trials of 1938-1939 and the Soviet Labor Camps in the late 1940s, the Korean War in the early 1950s, the waning of proletarian militancy in the aborted strikes of 1952, the invasion of Hungary in 1956 --- with each of these events proving that the revolution had been betrayed or was at best faltering in the Soviet Union, Sartre felt compelled either to renew his allegiance to the Marxism of the CP or retreat into his prewar literary isolation.  Thus, the 1948-1949 R.D.R. was the one time that he could commit himself to a political action in Europe that appeared to resemble his own views.

In 1948 Sartre engaged in dialogues with David Rousset and Gerard Rosenthal, published as Entretiens sur la politique, which went through at least twenty editions by 1949.  In this book, a manifesto for the R.D.R., Sartre reversed his anti-Marxism of "Materialism and Revolution" and set out to synthesize Marxism and existentialism in relation to a living political movement.  Now he could assert that the old conflict between the individual and society was dépassé, that idealism and materialism were reconciled at last in a movement that embodied a "third way": ". . . the old conflict between individualism and society is one that RDR members take as transcended . . . our aim is the integration of the free individual in a society conceived as the unity of the free activities of individuals." [73] Unlike the CP, the political direction of the R.D.R. would be determined from below, in the local cells, where everyone would actively participate in decision-making.  R.D.R. chapters would be laboratories in which workers would exper-

73. Entretiens sur la politique,, op. cit., 40.

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ience and develop leadership capacities, thereby generating the new, free subjects of history.  The R.D.R. would be a true Marxist organization because the class struggle would be accompanied concretely by the "emancipation of the proletariat." The distant goals of socialism, of worker control and management of the enterprise, would be fostered by the democracy within R.D.R. groups, so that the external overthrow of capitalist ownership would be harmonized with internal, revolutionary consciousness.

A t last a humanist Marxism was being joined with an organization of existential subjects.  Sartre appropriated the new Marxism, with its concept of alienation, as the central focus of the R.D.R.'s critique of capitalism.  The aim of the R.D.R. was "liberation" from alienation, or true communism.
 

 . . . man, as Marx said, is in a state of alienation; that is, he does not possess his own destiny, his own life, his own work; the ideas he has are not formed directly by him. . . . We desire concurrently to deliver him on the ideological level of his mystifications that prejudice the democratic exercise of his freedom and on the social level, of all forms of exploitation that make him an alienated man.[74]

For Sartre the R.D.R. had to destroy not only the social structures of capitalism, but

74. Ibid., 39.

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also, as Lukacs and Gramsci had understood, the bourgeois ideology internalized by the working class.  Real democracy, real anti-authoritarianism, had to include a critique of Cartesian idealism along the lines of existentialism.  The "culture" of capitalism, in the broadest sense, its "education," had to be conquered by a new revolutionary culture that would be assimilated by the revolutionary groups in the movement itself.  Here Sartre was anticipating the themes of the New Left of the 1960s; his existentialism was becoming political: "It is evident that the rejection of the principle of authority by the masses themselves and the exercise of a constant auto-critique as well as a critique directed against institutions and politics, implies that greater and greater social groups have access to culture. . . ." [75] In a state of intellectual rapture, with all the antinomies of his life apparently being vaporized, Sartre expansively ushered in the reign of "concrete liberty." Every aspect of the practice of the R.D.R. members overcame the dualisms of liberalism and idealism.  Talk and debate lost its abstract character; real needs were expressed in the activity of the R.D.R. groups, needs that were not fashioned in isolated thought, but in active political groups that pointed toward their realization.  The needs of R.D.R. members were not "blind and empty," not rational propositions unrelated to action; rather they emerged from within political action:  "In a word, concrete thought is the thought of a group of producers or consumers, who start from the necessities and demands of production in the firm of which they are a part and of consumption in the area of their needs and of their purchasing power. Such thought cannot be false."[76] Remarkably Hegelian, Sartre here witnessed the birth of a new subject, a thinker engaged in politics, bringing forth a new relation of subject and object, a dialectical relationship that was the basis of a new epistemology in which all thought was true!  The flaw in idealism was not philosophical but practical: in the new democratic and socialist practice, intellectual questions became questions about changing the world. Ab-

75. Ibid., 139-140.
76. Ibid., 106.

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stract criteria of the true and the false were transcended.  Finally, the theory of the R.D.R. would be nothing less than existential Marxism.

Sartre must have watched his dreams evaporate with heavy sadness: the Communists attacked; membership climbed only slowly; the leadership became anti-Communist, not neutralist.  He was reduced to silence; worse, he presented no adequate critique of his adventure in the R.D.R. and at a later date he attributed the fiasco to his political inexperience.  He complained bitterly that he had been used by Rousset for anti-Communist ends which he had never approved.  From the historian's perspective, the weakness of R.D.R. politics stemmed more from French social and economic conditions than from the weakness of its leadership, from Sartre's ideas about it, or from the Cold War international context.  Sartre's hopes for a politics of existential Marxism required the development of a more technological society, a post-scarcity economy and a new working class whose alienation was worse than its material misery or exploitation.  Such a social base would emerge or at least begin to emerge only in the 1960s, after De Gaulle instituted a partial dirigisme, a technocratic politics that favored advanced, third industrial-revolution sectors over the Malthusian, conservative capitalists and the petty bourgeoisie with its inefficiently small-scale enterprises.  Only then might a new working class become the vanguard of revolution, unlocking the traditional working class from the immobilist politics of the CP.

4. Merleau-Ponty's Existential Marxism

Sartre was cognizant of his political naiveté.  If he could not learn from CP intellectuals, he might listen to his own political editor and friend, Maurice Merleau-Ponty.  He generously acknowledged his deep indebtedness to Merleau-Ponty for

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showing him how politics and metaphysics were not antithetical but interrelated.[77] In Les Temps Modernes it was Merleau-Ponty, well to the left of Sartre through the 1940s, who wrote the political articles, and it was Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception and Humanism and Terror who wrestled with the social and historical soft spots of existentialism.  In pursuing the debate between the existentialists and the Marxists, we must follow the thinking of Merleau-Ponty through the 1940s and then watch Sartre painfully redirect his thought during the early 1950s.  The movement of the existentialists toward Marxism is best illuminated from within the dialogue between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.

Enigmatic and withdrawn, Merleau-Ponty was not personally close to Sartre even through their war-time associations and their long years together at Les Temps Modernes.  Nevertheless, the biographies of the two men were remarkably parallel: both were petty bourgeois, both attended the Ecole Normale, both joined Socialisme et liberté, both were existentialists, both heard Kojève's lectures on Hegel, both stood on the Left.  Within these mutual commitments, however, they moved in opposite directions.  From the Liberation until 1950, Merleau-Ponty was close to the Communists, while Sartre was not.  In 1950, their positions intersected and diverged, with Merleau-Ponty moving away from Marxism and Sartre closer to it.  By 1955 Merleau-Ponty was no longer engaged in Marxist politics and thought, while Sartre was just preparing for a period of almost exclusive concern with Marxist theory.  In fact, after 1955, with Merleau-Ponty totally removed from the debate between existentialism and Marxism, Sartre took up where his friend left off, drastically recasting his earlier existentialism.  At the moment of Merleau-Ponty's untimely death in 1961, Sartre had just completed the most extensive study of Marxism' by an existentialist, the Critique de la raison dialectique.  But during the earlier period, in the 1940s, it was Merleau-Ponty who most clearly saw the need for a revision

77. "Merleau-Ponty," Situations, op. cit., 176.

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of existentialism.  His thought at that time was a two-pronged effort to reshape existentialism in accordance with Marxist doctrine and to loosen the rigidities of French Marxism in line with existentialist thought.  His hope was to build a new intellectual edifice somewhere between the two.  Hence, we must examine first Merleau-Ponty's revision of existentialism, then his critique of Marxism.  After that, we will follow, in another chapter, Sartre's tortured wanderings to find the position abandoned by Merleau-Ponty and build the synthetic structure of existential Marxism barely begun by his friend.

a. Merleau-Ponty's Concept of Freedom

Merleau-Ponty's effort to move between Sartre's existentialism and the Stalinist Marxism of the CP may be examined first in his concept of existential freedom in The Phenomenology of Perception of 1945.  Appearing two years after Being and Nothingness, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology, his major work, was a contribution to existentialism very much in the spirit of Sartre's book, diverging from it, however, at crucial points where Sartre's dualist ontology of in-itself and for-itself rendered a social philosophy impossible.  In his review of Being and Nothingness for Les Temps Modernes, Merleau-Ponty complained that "the antithesis of my view of myself and another's view of myself and the antithesis of the for-itself and the in-itself often seem to be alternatives instead of being described as the living bond and communication between one term and the other." [78] In general, he applauded Sartre's book[79] and was loyally a Sartrean at least until Les

78. Sense and Non-Sense, op. cit., 72.
79. Merleau-Ponty at this time ascribed to the basic positions of Sartre's existentialism in Being and Nothingness.  In no sense could his chapter on freedom in The Phenomenology of Perception be construed as a rejection of Sartre.  As evidence we can mention Merleau-Ponty's defense of existentialism during an international conference in 1945 at which Lukacs began to berate all existentialists as a reflection of l'Homme privé.  Merleau-Ponty, et al., "Deux philosophies de Europe: Marxisme-existentialisme," La Nef, 3:24 (Nov., 1946) 87-98.

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Aventures de la dialectique of 1955.  Nevertheless, he deplored the absence of a social philosophy in Sartre and strove to remedy the lack with new existentialist categories.  In a spirit of critical sympathy be outlined the tasks remaining for existentialism:

We must analyze involvement, the moment when the subjective and objective conditions of history become bound together, how class exists before becoming aware of itself-in short, the status of the social and the phenomenon of co-existence.  L'Etre et le néant does not yet offer this social theory, but it does pose the problem of the reciprocal relations between consciousness and the social world as vigorously as possible by refusing to admit of freedom outside of a situation and by making the subject in no sense a reflection . . . but a "reflecting reflection" in accordance with Marxism.[80]

To complete the project of existentialism, The Phenomenology of Perception shifted the weight of analysis from the extremes of being and nothingness, the self and the world, subject and object, to the space in between: the intersubjective space of perception and the body.  Returning to Husserl's concept of intentionality, in which a bond connected the perceiving subject and the intended object, Merleau-Ponty positioned himself within this bond, this ambiguous space, this inter-world.  Instead of focusing his thought on the two ends of the dyad, to show their interrelation, as Sartre did, he began from the middle of the bond itself.  For Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology in this sense had been practiced not only by Husserl, the founder of the phenomenological school, but also by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud.[81] Most importantly, it could unite and transcend idealism and materialism.

Before Merleau-Ponty, Sartre had treated the question of the body in a long section

80. Sense and Non-Sense, op. cit., 81.
81. Phenomenology of Perception, trans.  C. Smith (London, 1962) viii.

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of Being and Nothingness where he denied the Cartesian dualism of body and mind, the empiricists' "sense data" theory which reduced the body to a passive machine for processing information, and the ubiquitous tendency in the social sciences, especially psychology, of regarding the body as an inert thing.  Granting the similar intentions of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, we can say that it was the latter, in his Phenomenology, who went further in presenting the active side of the body in experience, boldly affirming the carnality of the body, and, above all, verifying the presence of the body to others as a positive aspect of interactions and not, as in Sartre's account, as an embarrassing encroachment on the privacy of the Self.  More than Sartre, Merleau-Ponty held up the body as the fulcrum of being-in-the-world, facilitating a reconciliation with Marx's concept of the "sensuousness" of human action.

Merleau-Ponty sought to clarify precisely the ambiguity of the subject situated in an intersubjective world, whose being was equally defined by himself and by the world.  Not only did the individual inject meaning into the world, but the world injected meaning into the individual, so that the individual was immediately social.  Defined both by others and by himself, he was out there in the world, perceiving and being perceived through his body.

There are two senses, and two only, of the word "exiseî: one exists as a thing or else one exists as a consciousness.  The experience of our own body, on the other hand, reveals to us an ambiguous mode of existing. . . . The experience of one's own body runs counter to the reflective procedure which detaches subject and object from each other . . . . [82]

82. Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., 198.

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self and others." Hegel's Phenomenology resonated again in French thought.[83]

The ambiguity of the perceiving-perceived body was dialectical and not dualist.  My view of myself was no more real than the other's view of me, but both together, the unity of the differences, constitute my self.  The individual was not a simple unity but a synthetic unity that included the world as much as it did the ego.  The Phenomenology of Perception accounted especially well for the miscomprehension of this ambiguous reality: it was easy to see how the self could detach itself, privilege itself, seek autonomy within itself, but thereby reify itself as a thinking thing.  To capture the ambiguity of the intersubjective self one had to allow for uncertainty and relativity in one's identity.

The final chapter of The Phenomenology of Perception summarized and revised Sartre's concept of freedom in light of Merleau-Ponty's concept of ambiguity.  Like Sartre, he rejected all concepts of freedom that derived from both idealist freedom and materialist determinism. [84] However, Sartre's concept of freedom did not go nearly far enough in situating the subject, because it did not place it in the ambiguous space between the intention and the intended object " . . . if the slave displays freedom as much by living in fear as by breaking his chains, then it cannot be held that there is such a thing as free action. . . . " [85] Merleau Ponty thus confirmed the Marxists' criticism that Sartre was a nihilist.  The situation had to be specified more than Sartre had done by adding weight to historical and social reality.  Being-with-others had to become the central structure of freedom, not a mere psychological epiphenomenon as in Being and Nothingness.

83. Ibid., 185.
84. Ibid., 434-435.  Merleau-Ponty diverged most from Sartre in his posthumous, L'Visible et l'invisible, ed. C. Lefort (Paris, 1964) 75-141. This was mostly written in 1959 and only a single reference (p. 312) refers to Sartre's Critique, where, as we shall see, many of the weaknesses of Being and Nothingness are overcome.
85. Ibid., 437.

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Before an adequate account of freedom could be given: Merleau-Ponty felt it necessary to refute the Stalinists.  Elaborating on hints in Sartre's thought and following Lukacs closely, Merleau-Ponty reminded the Stalinists that revolutionary class consciousness was a matter of subjectivity, not of objective conditions:

 . . . I am never in my heart of hearts a worker or a bourgeois, but a consciousness which freely evaluates itself as a middle class or proletarian consciousness.  And, indeed, it is never the case that my objective position in the production process is sufficient to awaken class consciousness. . . . Revolt is, then, not the outcome of objective conditions, but it is rather the decision taken by the worker to will revolution that makes a proletarian of him.  The evaluation of the present operates through one's free project for the future.[86]

In this revision of Lukacs' concept of ascribed consciousness, existential Marxism asserted that the worker was first human and only secondly a proletarian, adding to the concept of the objective structure of the working class the human, subjective component.

If dialectical materialism did not provide an understanding of history neither did Sartre.  His concept of freedom comprehended only individual decisions, not group decisions: ". . . we must therefore find a phenomenological basis for statistical thought." [87] The way in which groups coalesced through the mutuality and intersubjectivity of projects; the way in which "social space begins to acquire a magnetic field . . . ," [88] drawing people together around common aims-these were the central tasks of existential Marxism and these became Sartre's purposes in 1960 with his Critique.  Merleau-Ponty's attempted existential Marxism in 1945 opened the path.  Existentially, revolution looked like this:

86. Ibid., 442-443.
87. Ibid., 442.
88. Ibid., 445.

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At every pressure felt from any quarter of the social horizon, the process of regrouping becomes clearly discernible beyond ideologies and various occupations.  Class is coming into being, and we say that a situation is revolutionary when the connection objectively existing between the sections of the proletariat . . . is finally experienced in perception as a common obstacle to the existence of each and every one.[89]

Being and Nothingness left the reader with the impression that history, collective time, was nothing but the sum of individual projects.  Strictly speaking, for Sartre, there was a direction to the life of the individual, but no meaning, no pattern, to the life of society.  In short, there was no history.  Merleau-Ponty essayed to alter this lack, affirming that there was meaning in history.  Again it was the middle ground that Merleau-Ponty

89. Ibid.
90. Sense and Non-Sense, op. cit., 81.
91. Phenomenology of Perception, op. cit., 447.

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sought, a place where the individual's freedom was realized in terms of the overall movement of society and where history took on meaning through subjective decisions: there was no "truth of history independent of our projects and evaluations, which are always free . . ." but there was "an average and statistical significance of these projects." [92] Or, in another formulation of the same position: " . . . freedom modifies history only by taking up the meaning which history was offering at the moment in question. . . . "[93] The problem was to specify the valence of the second part of Marx's formula-man makes history, but only according to the conditions in which he finds himself.  It was not a matter of curtailing Sartre's concept of freedom, but of filling out its context: "What then becomes of the freedom we spoke about at the outset, if this point of view is taken?  I can no longer pretend to be a cipher, and to choose myself continually from the starting point of nothingness at all." 94 Merleau-Ponty wished to add a second level to Sartre's absolute freedom without detracting from its radical quality: "We choose our world and the world chooses us." By adding the second dimension, freedom was "buttressed in being," and what emerged was the full ambiguity of the perceiving-perceived body.  Nor was there a question of determining which had more influence, the individual or the world: "The generality of the 'role' and of the situation comes to the aid of decision, and in this exchange between the situation and the person who takes it up, it is impossible to determine precisely the 'share contributed by the situation' and 'the share contributed by freedom.'" [95] Since "we are involved in the world and with others in an inextricable tangle" [96] we make choices with full existential freedom in and through the world.

In sum, The Phenomenology of Perception pioneered the directions existentialism would have to travel if it sought a social-historical philosophy and a reconciliation with Marx-

92. Ibid., 450.
93. Ibid.
95. Ibid., 453.
96. Ibid., 454.
94. Ibid., 452.

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ism.  Merleau-Ponty prepared Sartre's existentialism for confrontation with Marxism by removing the vestiges of Cartesianism.  Armed now with definite positions about society and history, the existentialists could at least demand from the Marxists a bearing for their concept of freedom.  By venturing to rethink the strong sections of Marxism (its critique of capitalist social structures) and by merging the existentialist idea of consciousness with Marxism, a give and take between the two doctrines would be possible.  After educating Sartre, Merleau-Ponty's next task was to speak directly to the Marxists, to force the problematics of existentialism upon them, to encourage them to see where they had strayed from Marx and where Marx needed revision.

b. Merleau-Ponty and Marxism: the Search for a Proletariat

After The Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty published articles, mostly in Les Temps Modernes, on philosophy, politics, and culture which tentatively probed the possibility of an existential Marxism.  Appearing in 1947 (Humanisme et terreur) and in 1948 (Sens et non-sens), these essays developed Sartre's existentialism and argued a humanist Marxism at once critical of the CP and sympathetic to it.  In sharpening the, concepts of his double philosophical commitment, Merleau-Ponty was in quest of an existential proletariat that would give to Marxism a sense of subjectivity commensurate with its goal of a free society and to existentialism a sense of historical and social reality.

In Humanism and Terror Merleau-Ponty developed an existential Marxist concept of history that could estimate the living hopes of revolution when Soviet society no longer seemed the vanguard of liberation.  Arthur Koestler's books on Soviet Communism, Le Zéro et l'infini (translated as Darkness at Noon) and Le yogi et le commissaire, which were anti-Communist tracts, served Merleau-Ponty as a point of departure.  The Soviet bureaucrats' sense of history, seen through Koestler's novel, was one of complete fatal-

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ism and determinism.  Man was no more than a cog in a huge engine of time, irreversibly moving toward the "highest stage of communism." Such a view of the Marxist concept of history was held not only by Koestler the liberal, but also by the intellectuals of the French CP.  "But," Merleau-Pontv countered, "who said that history is a clock-work and the individual a wheel?  It was not Marx, it was Koestler." [97] History seen as a totally objective determinism, with iron laws that were to be studied scientifically, was a distortion of Marxism.

Koestler had raised the question of the fate of the individual in history, showing that Soviet society was amoral because its Marxism left no space for autonomous, moral decisions.  In one stroke Koestler supported the bourgeois democracies and condemned socialism, while publicizing the hideous consequences of Marxism.  The Moscow Trials, fictionalized in Darkness at Noon, displayed an essential barbarism of socialist society.  The spectacle of the revolutionary leader (Rubashov-Bukharin) condemned by the revolution, with the monstrous psychological perversions it revealed, was in itself enough to place a verdict of deep immorality on all socialism.  If the verisimilitude of Koestler's novel were sustained, Russia would stand condemned with Nazi Germany while capitalist society would seem the -beacon of freedom.

Merleau-Ponty, like Sartre, had witnessed history directly during the Resistance.  From the anxiety of this extreme situation, be would interpolate a different view from Koestler's of the Moscow Trials and of history in general.  Again, reason and history needed to be interrelated and not juxtaposed as antinomics in Koestler's fashion.  The moments of historical action, in the heat of the battle, were marked for Merleau-Ponty by contingency and risk.  The individual in an actual historical situation did not find him-

97. Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. J. O'Neill (Boston, 1969) 23.

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self confronted by fate or determinism, but rather by open possibilities, by uncertainty, by the need for action without any clear, objective sense of what was right.  History was the total opposite of the scientist's laboratory.  There was no determinism during the occupation, only the situated perspective of the implicated individual.  Freedom and anxiety, as Sartre had stated, characterized historical action, not smug, clinical certainty.

In the midst of history, liberal moralities, which judged action as autonomous, individual decisions matched against an eternal standard of justice, seemed abstract and empty.  Making a decision to fight Hitler or collaborate with him, to join the revolution or oppose it, or, in Bukharin's case, to advocate forced collectivism or capitalism in the countryside --- in these situations the individual acted on the basis of a future that he could not know: "For we too have lived through one of those moments where history is suspended and institutions that are threatened with extinction demand fundamental decisions from men, where the risk is total because their final outcome depends upon a conjuncture not entirely foreseeable."[98] Merleau-Ponty's conclusion, which scandalized the liberal public, was that in these extreme situations there is no clear distinction between violence and morality, between terror and humanism.  Koestler's moral world, "the happy universe of liberalism where one knows what one is doing and where, at least, one always keeps his conscience," [99] was a bourgeois heaven that forgot the brutal colonialism of capitalism.  On the contrary, terror and humanism went hand in hand.  The liberal, conveniently blind to the violence of his own society, blamed the revolutionary for introducing violence into the world.  For Merleau-Ponty, such self-righteousness was outrageous: violence was always there-"all law is violence." But not all forms of violence were beneficent.  The premise of Marxism was that violence was justified only if it brought about the conditions that would do away with violence.  "If

98. Ibid., xvii.
99. Ibid., xxxvii.

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Marxism is a theory of violence and a justification of Terror, it brings reason out of unreason, and the violence which it legitimates should bear a sign which distinguishes it from regressive forms of violence." [100] The whole question of violence and morality in history turned, for Merleau-Ponty, on the humanism of the proletariat.  Would their violence in establishing a classless society be the end of violence?

In search of an answer, Merleau-Ponty took Marxism back to Hegel's master-slave relation as the "description of the fundamental relations between men." [101] History was then seen as "essentially a struggle" in which men were basically implicated with each other, affecting each other "beyond . . . deliberate thoughts and decisions down to the very manner of . . . being in the world." [102] In Merleau-Ponty's concept of history, men became human through acts of violence.  Hopefully, the violence of the proletariat would further the process of man's becoming human.  Everything depended on the truth or falsity of the following hypothesis: "In the name of the proletariat, Marx describes a situation such that those in it, and they alone, have the full experience of the freedom and universality which Marx considered the defining characteristics of man." [103] If history was to contain the possibility of human realization, the proletariat had to live a universal situation such that the violence it endured could be abolished only through the creation of a new society.  Merleau-Ponty acknowledged, as Marx did, that the bourgeoisie had aided the process by creating this situation: it had universalized the means of production.  But this oppressive dependence had to be felt subjectively as alienation before it could be translated into progressive political action.  Only the subjective class consciousness of alienated workers could transform a virtual proletariat into an actual one: ". . . there is an objective premise underlying the Revolution, namely the existence of universal dependence, and a subjective premise, which is the conscious-
 
100. Ibid., 98.
101. Ibid., 102.
102. Ibid., 104.
103. Ibid., 113.

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ness of such dependency as alienation." [104] Like Lukacs in 1923, Merleau-Ponty unified the Marxist concept of alienation with the existentialist concept of freedom: the workers must interiorize their "authentic subjectivity," make it their project, and transform their action accordingly.  They "must be able to live simultaneously the separation [actual alienated labor] and union [potentially free labor] of individuals." [105]  The violent mission of the proletariat was thus the only hope of humanism: "the proletarian by his mode of existence, and as a 'man of universal history' was the inheritor of liberal humanism." [106]

Merleau-Ponty's existential Marxism exacerbated the dilemma of his position because he would not identify Soviet socialism as the bearer of the Marxist revolution.  Nor, however, could he deny it.  With news of the condemnation of Tito and the Czech trials emanating daily from Russia, the Stalinist bureaucracy could in no sense be applauded.  But, given the success of the five-year plans, the prospects for Russia were not totally bleak.  In the last analysis, Merleau-Ponty could not judge with assurance either for or against.  The posture of the intellectual was one of grim stoicism: "Now that the liberating revolution has become problematic, it is imperative to maintain the habit of discussion, criticism, research, and the apparatus of social and political culture.  We must preserve liberty while waiting for a fresh historical impulse which may allow us to engage in a popular movement without ambiguity."[107] To official Marxists, like Garaudy, Merleau-Ponty had missed "the objective content and real direction of history," which naturally was a vindication of Stalinism.[108] He was accused by the liberals and the non-Communist Left of contributing to a Russian takeover of France.[109] In fact, he had done neither.  Rather, he had begun to develop a theory of the meaning of history

104. Ibid., 115.
105. Ibid., 117.'or, Ibid., 12
106. Ibid., 125.
107. Ibid., xxiii.
108. Mesaventures de I'anti-niarxisme (Paris, 1956) 12.
109. Martinet, "Les Intellectuels et le goût du pouvoir," La Révolution prolétarienne, 303 (May, 1947) 43.

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that stressed the ambiguity of historical direction, the contingency of historical outcomes.  The sens of history came not from Stalinist science but from the meanings men implanted through their action.  Historical action was filled with existential qualities of anxiety just because nothing was certain; it also contained the existential quality of freedom because it was to be made by men.  The scandalous inadequacy of Marxism in accounting for regressions in history was the Pandora's Box that Merleau-Ponty had jarred open: men were free not to build socialism.

Just as Merleau-Ponty transformed mechanical Marxist history into the subjective drama of man's self-creation, he also modified Sartre's empty project of freedom into the intersubjective freedom of the proletariat.  Bukharin, for example, opposed Stalin's policy of collectivization with equally revolutionary intentions.  But since historical action implicated the Other, from the perspective of Stalin, Bukharin's intention had a different, anti-revolutionary meaning.  Only the future could decide who was right, who the true revolutionary was.  Yet in the present, one had to act; someone's policy had to be followed before all the results were in.  At the Trials, Bukharin accepted Stalin's policy as "objectively" revolutionary, finding himself guilty.  Both had "good" intentions of furthering the revolution; both were in absolute opposition; one had to be sacrificed.  What Merleau-Ponty surmised from the tragedy of Bukharin was that actions had double meanings-those of our own and those of the world-and that both are equally real:

. . . the true nature of tragedy appears once the same man has understood both that he cannot disavow the objective pattern of his actions, that he is what he is for others in the context of history, and yet that the motive of
his actions constitutes a man's worth as he himself experiences it.  In this case we no longer have a series of alternations between the inward and the external, subjectivity and objectivity, or judgment and its means but
a dialectical relation, that is to say, a contradiction founded in truth, in which

The Attack on Sartre

the same man tries to realize himself on the two levels.[110]

Through the 1940s Merleau-Ponty presented these positions to France, especially to the leaders of the proletarian movement, hoping to influence their thinking and, through that, their praxis.  His focus on intersubjectivity called for a decreased certainty of the coming of the revolution: it became one possibility and one way of making the past and future intelligible.  During this time he accepted the proletarian perspective as uniquely valuable, finding through it some meaning and some non-meaning in history.  As the mood in France changed and the chances of social regeneration abated, and as the CP lost its appearance of revolutionary purpose and Soviet Russia lost much of its halo, Merleau-Ponty's proletariat lost its presence on the stage of history.111 He turned increasingly away from Hegel and Marx toward Husserl and the late Heidegger, picturing the inter-world more as a multiplicity of meanings than as a unity.  Ambiguity of meaning became more prominent.  Contingency, which implied in the 1940s that the revolution might not happen or might take circuitous detours, came to resemble lack of direction, or even the absurdity of historical events.  In 1947 his belief in the universality

110. Humanism and Terror, op. cit., 62-63.
111. Rabil, op. cit., 86.

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of the proletariat was won by separating it from the Soviet proletariat.  In 1948 the proletariat's conquest of alienation was a mission it had forgotten.  In 1949 the universality of the proletariat had simply failed to emerge.  By 1955 Merleau-Ponty came to feel that the proletariat was incapable of a socialist revolution and all hopes vanished.[112] In sum, although he was crucial in bringing existentialism closer to Marxism, his last years saw him retreat from this problematic situation and move toward a phenomenology concerned more with the ambiguity of social significations than with revolutionary practice.

112. Ibid., 113.

160