Jean-Paul Sartre and Marxist Criticism

In order to locate Sartre's position in the Marxian tradition of criticism, it is necessary to identify Sartre's position in the tradition of critical and philosophical discourse more generally. Sartre is most famously associated with the philosophy of existentialism, and his arguments elucidating it, developed in such texts as Being and Nothingness and Existentialism and Human Emotions, are dense and complex. However, two concepts permeate existential thought: (1) that the reality of the universe is universally unknowable and continually eludes understanding; and (2) that the individual creates his or her own reality and the reality of the world with every projection of self into the world. That makes every next decision or choice a matter of utmost ethical importance and of utmost uncertainty since the contingency of experience canot be conquered. The existentialist standpoint posits both radical human freedom and an inchoate cosmos in which it is enacted.

Existentialism and Human Emotions elaborates an intensely subjective human ontology, or conception of the nature of human being-ness

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is explicated in terms of social theory. Art, like other artifacts of social experience, is subject to the forces of social evolution. Only in its formative and developmental stage does it exhibit authentic creativity; Marx cites the example of ancient Greece and the Shakespearean age as contexts of "unripe social conditions." But once social conditions have indeed ripened, they are "specified" and "clarified" (Marx, Grundrisse 771). Once clarified, they begin to stratify along class lines. Knowing that, the Marxist critic is well positioned to make a whole range of aesthetic judgments and interpret an aesthetic artifact in terms of social history and social theory. Although Marx and Sartre share a bleak view of found experience and engage in criticism of the established order, the bases on which they make their judgments are quite different. Whereas Sartre sees the abyss and radical contingency as the condition of the human subject, Marx sees historically, objectively, materially determined and socially constructed evils that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can cure. Sartre's assertion of the radical subjectivity of experience meant that his focus was on "the isolated subject or 'man alone' (l'homme seul)" (Porter 148)
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Approximate Word count = 2150
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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