From: lau kam to <ktlau127@netvigator.com>
To: Andy Blunden <andy@werple.mira.net.au>
Subject: Re: Essence, and Sartre
Hi, Andy.  Thanks for your e-mail.

Yes, reading Sartre is sometimes even worse than reading Hegel.
As with Marx and Hegel, background knowledge and intensive reading
are required to understand him.  While I am no expert on Sartre, and I
barely finished browsing through half of the "Critique",
(besides readability, my job has first priority in time allocation!),
briefly speaking, to me, I found following points worth the effort:

1) Mediation - Marxist analysis used to pay attention on the macro
level, forces of production, relations of production, and
class structure, but often resorts to reductionism when it comes
to the micro level, so that for example, Freud's psychoanalysis is
bourgeoise ideology because of his middle class family background
and the political-economic development of Germany in 19th century etc.
while the same background is equally applicable to Marx himself.
The fact is we are not simply born a bourgeoise/proletariat, we are
born in a family already constituted with a definite structure,
raised/educated by parents/teachers who imbue us with their norms and
values which we may accept/reject, subject to influence by peer group,
set out for a career determined by economic development and our aspiration.
Our relation with society is mediated through family, school, office,
mass media etc., it is a complex dialect/interactive process between
individuals and different levels of social group.  Sartre's Critique is an
attempt at an integrated methodology that would allow a comprehensive
understanding of the process so that an individual could be understood
through his social milieu and his social milieu through the individual
himself.  This is a huge project and it is unlikely Sartre can solve all
the problems involved, his theory stands or falls depends on its heuristic
value in explaining social phenomena, but I think his direction is
correct - if Marxism is to remain a viable force in changing the world,
it needs a more comprehensive theory to account for modern
industrial/post-industrial societies.

2) Material Dialectic - according to Sartre, history is dialectical because
human praxis is dialectical and we can understand the dialectical character
of social phenomena, the dialectic of experience, because we practice it.
I cannot comment on your disagreement that his dialectic is incompatible
with Marx because I still couldn't figure out the rather difficult Hegel-Marx
relationship and opinion from someone who have studied Hegel so well like you is 
appreciated:

a) in what sense is Hegel's philosophy idealism? or in Marx's interpretation
idealism?
b) what exactly does Marx mean when he inverted Hegel's dialectic? Does he
mean the transformative method he found in Feuerbach?

Marx's Preface to Capital is too brief to me: "For Hegel, the
process of thinking, which he even transforms into an independent subject,
under the name of "the Idea", is the creator of the real world, and the
real world is only the external appearance of the idea ".

It seems unlikely Hegel means Absolute Idea in a religious sense like
God and the world is his appearance as some commentators had said.
In "Phenomenology", religion is one stage before the Absolute which is to
be transcended according to the dialectic of experience. It seems Spirit
in "Phenomenology" means human mind or cognitive ability taken in
the abstract and the Absolute Idea, the culminating point, is the conscious
recognition that everything is interconnected.  "Logic" is, from the Absolute
perspective, the retracing of the steps that consciousness has taken and
now expressed in scientific/conceptual form.

If compare Capital with Logic, commodity, exchange value, etc., are as
abstract catergories as Being, Nothing and Becoming. If Marx means
materialism in the sense of "real individuals, their activity and the material
conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and
those produced by their activity " (German Ideology) then
Sartre has his point in grounding his dialectic in human praxis.

3) China - finally, with more and more materials by Red Guards and offical
documents made available since the 80s, to me, Sartre's phenomenology of
group formation and of the role of groups in human history, his practico-inert,
counter-finality, seriality etc., rendered the possibility of a new perspective
in understanding China during Mao's era: land reform, Great Leap Forward, and
the Cultural Revolution - a long, tortuous, and bloody attempt toward
modernization.

Sartre didn't enjoy much acaedemic interest after his death.  So far I've
seen only one book length commentary on the Critique by J Catalino.
On the practical side, there are some articles collected in the book
"Sartre Alive" which may be of interest to you.


With regards.

Alex Lau