On Sat, 25 Dec 1999 13:19:46 -0500 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
writes:
>George Pennefather wrote:
><<<James: That was certainly Max Weber's thesis in his *Protestant
>Ethic
>and the Spirit of Capitalism*. For Weber it was precisely this anxiety
>that
>he believed drove Calvinists and other Protestants into becoming
>accumulators of capital. Although Calvin had taught that there were no
>signs available to us in this life that could assure us whether we are
>part
>of the Elect or not, believers would nevertheless still strive to find
>such
>signs and in Weber's view the ones they hit upon were those of
>material
>success achieved through hard work and ascetic self-denial. Thus
>Puritanism
>was seen by Weber as a means for coping with this anxiety.
>
>George: Some of your comments in this posting of yours were quite
>interesting. If there is an intellectual connection between the
>European
>Reformation and post-war existentialism perhaps we can sus out the
>conditions that led to such a convergence of conceptions in two very
>different periods.>>>
>
>Sartre turned against the Hegelian conception of history (for
>dialectical
>reason, he thought, leaves little room for human agency and individual
>morality). As with most modern Western moralists, Sartre, too, used
>Kant
>-- whose philosophy was developed within the Protestant tradition --
>against Hegel.
>
>While Sartre was attracted to an account of the Master-Slave relation
>in
>_The Phenomenology of Spirit_ (which exerted the strongest influence
>on
>French intellectuals among all the texts by Hegel), he held that
>self-consciousness confronting another consciousness is not to lead
>dialectically to the social being of man. Instead, Sartre insisted
>upon
>the isolation and freedom of the abstract individual:
Sartre in other words returned to one of the most basic premises of bourgeois ideology, abastract individualism.
>
>"In fact, if...the being of my consciousness is strictly irreducible
>to
>knowledge, then I can not transcend my being toward a reciprocal and
>universal relation in which I could see my being and that of others as
>equivalent. On the contrary, I must establish myself in my being and
>posit
>the problem of the Other in terms of my being. In a word the sole
>point of
>departure is the interiority of the _cogito_" (Sartre, _Being and
>Nothingness_).
>
>Sartre's work is a good example of how and why starting with the
>consciousness of the abstract individual leads to a dead end (for
>Marxists), for the abstract individual as a point of departure already
>implies the negation of history. The same goes for postmodern
>circular
>reasonings about "the subject."
I have never quite understood how Sartre could think it possible to reconcile his existentialism with its premise of the isolated abstract individual with Marxism for whom this abstract individual is a bourgeois fiction and where real, concrete individuals are seen as products of the ensembles of social relations in which they find themselves to be embedded.
Jim
>
>Yoshie
>
>
________________________________________________________________ YOU'RE PAYING TOO MUCH FOR THE INTERNET! Juno now offers FREE Internet Access! Try it today - there's no risk! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj.