Scarcity

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Tue Apr 10 23:55:50 PDT 2001


Dennis Robert Redmond writes:


>On Mon, 9 Apr 2001, Michael Pugliese wrote:
>
>> Did Sartre's argument in Critique of Dialectical Reason over the
>> practico-inert and the descent into Stalinism have a side argument
>> about scarcity?
>
>Yes, he diagnosed scarcity as the historical category of violence.

***** Jean-Paul Sartre: Solitary Man in a Hostile Universe

...Sartre, as we shall see, has a different theory of alienation from that of Marx. Whereas Marx saw alienation as the result of the exploitation of one man by another, Sartre sees alienation as a universal feature of the human predicament. Indeed Sartre's notion of alienation cannot be understood in purely Marxist terms. The words Sartre shares with Marx are words they have both rifled from Hegel. Sartre's theory of alienation is an existentialized Hegelian concept, not an existentialized Marxist concept. His alienation, already explained in L'Etre et Ie Néant, is metaphysical. Nevertheless he does not forget that his subject here is I'anthropologie as opposed to l'ontologie; and that a fresh and, so to speak, specifically sociological reason has to be given for what he has always regarded as the fundamental characteristic of human relations of mutual antagonism.

The principle Sartre introduces at this point is that of shortage, or scarcity. He says that all human history -- at any rate, all human history hitherto -- has been a history of shortage and of a bitter struggle against shortage. There is not enough in this world to go around, and there never has been. And it is this scarcity according to the Critique [de la raison dialèctique], which makes human relationships intelligible. Scarcity is the key to understanding the attitude of men to one another and to understanding the social structures men have built up during their lives on earth. Scarcity, says Sartre, both unites and divides us. It unites us because it is only by united efforts that we are able to struggle at all successfully against scarcity; it divides us because each one of us knows that it is only the existence of others which prevents there being abundance for oneself.

Scarcity then is "the motor of history." Men cannot eliminate scarcity altogether. In this sense, they are powerless or impotent. The best they can do is to try to overcome scarcity by collaboration with others. But such collaboration is itself paradoxical, for each of the collaborators knows that it is only the existence of the world of others that makes scarcity. I am a rival to you, and you are a rival to me. When I work together with others to struggle against scarcity, I am working with those whose existence makes that work necessary; and by my work I nourish my competitors and rivals. Scarcity, then, not only shapes our attitude to the natural world but shapes our attitude to our neighbours. Scarcity makes us all rivals, yet compels us to collaborate with our rivals; being impotent alone, we can struggle effectively against scarcity only by the division of labour and other such joint endeavours.

Nature, however, is inert and indifferent to human welfare. The world we inhabit is in part the world of nature and in part the world that has been made by our forebears in the course of their long struggle against scarcity. Sartre calls it the world of the "Practico-Inert." The world is the world of Praxis insofar as it is a world shaped by the work and projects of its past and present inhabitants. This is the world to the extent that it is man-made. But the world is also the passive, or inert, world of nature on which man has had to work. Ironically, many of the things that men have done with the aim of making the world more bearable, with the aim of diminishing scarcity, have had the effect not of improving but of worsening the world. Sartre gives the example of Chinese peasants cutting down wood to make fires and to build houses, and doing this on so large a scale that they effectively deforest their land, and so expose themselves to the hazards and disasters of constant floods. Men are tormented by their own inventions in the world of the Practico-Inert.

Thus, in a hostile universe, defined by scarcity, man becomes the enemy of man. In a typically Sartrian phrase, man becomes anti-man, Le contre-homme. And in a paragraph which is dramatic enough to be a speech in one of his plays, Sartre writes:

Nothing indeed -- neither wild beasts nor microbes -- could be more terrible for man than this intelligent, flesh-eating, cruel species, which knows how to follow and outwit the human intelligence and of which the aim is precisely the destruction of man. This species is manifestly our own, as each of us sees it, in the Other, in the context of scarcity.9

The conflicts -- or relationships of antagonism -- between man and man are thus given an economic explanation in the Critique. We come next to a piece of "dialectic." Antagonism is negative reciprocity; but that negation is itself negated in the collaboration between neighbours which is necessary to overcome scarcity. This is Sartre's "dialectical" theory of the origin of society.

He distinguishes two forms of social structure: one, in the language of the early nineteenth-century French sociologists, he calls the "series"; the other, the "group." The two are significantly different. A series is a collection of people who are united only by external proximity. It does not exist as a whole "inside" any of its members. The example Sartre gives of a series is a queue or line at a bus stop. This is a collection or gathering of people that can be observed. You can look at it, count the number of people in it. Everyone is there for the same purpose; but they do not have a common or collective interested in the other. Indeed, each member of the queue is a rival of the others. Because of the scarcity of seats in the bus, each wishes the others were not there. Each is superfluous; each is one too many. But because everyone know that he also is one too many to the others, just as each of the others is one too many to him, all agree to take it in turn to get on the bus when the bus comes. They form an orderly series to avoid a fight or war on the platform of the bus. The forming of an orderly series like a queue waiting for a bus is thus a negative reciprocal relationship which is the negation of antagonism; it is the negation of itself.

The people in the queue form a plurality of solitudes. And Sartre maintains that the whole social life of mankind is permeated by series of this kind. A city is a series of series. The bourgeoisie is a series of series, each member respecting the solitude of the others. But in human society, there is another kind of collection or gathering which Sartre recognizes; and this is what he calls the "group." A group is a collection of people who, unlike those in a series, do have a common objective or end. A football team is the example Sartre gives. The difference between a group and a series is inward. From the outside you cannot tell the difference. What makes a group is the fact that each member has committed himself to act as a member of that group. The group is held together, and therefore constituted, by commitment. Each member, as Sartre puts it, has converted his own individual Praxis to a common or social Praxis. The working class becomes a group when its members commit themselves to socialism. A group can get things done, whereas a series is impotent, since each member pursues only his own Praxis. And indeed it is precisely because the series is impotent that the group is constituted in the first place. The origin of the group, Sartre suggests, can be summed up in the discovery that we must either live by working together, or die by fighting each other."

Scarcity again is the driving force, since it is scarcity, and scarcity alone, which makes men work together for a common end. Scarcity is thus seen as the origin of human societies, as groups rather than mere series. And in developing this thought, Sartre introduces three colourful notions: the pledge (le serment), violence, and Terror. Sartre explains that the group comes into being when each individual gives his pledge to become a member of the group and not to defect from or betray the group. Society as a group is pledged group. But the pledge must be enforced, and the members must be assured that it will be enforced. This is where violence and Terror come in. It is fear which drives men to form groups in the first place, and it is fear that must keep them in these groups. The fear which keeps men in their groups is Terror. Indeed the pledge itself, says Sartre, is a demand for violence to be used against oneself if one break one's own word; and the existence of Terror is an assurance that violence will be used against any other member of the group who tries to break his pledge.

All groups, says Sartre, are in constant danger of dissolving into seriality. Everyone is conscious of the threat of dispersion in himself and in others. Hence Sartre can say that "Terror is the statutory guarantee, freely called for, that none shall fall back into seriality." Terror is more than this: it is "mortal solicitude," for it is thanks to Terror that man becomes a social being, created such by himself and by others. Terror is the violence that negates violence. Terror indeed is fraternity. For Terror is the guarantee that my neighbour will stay my brother; it binds my neighbour to me by the threat of the violence it will use against him if he dares to be "unbrotherly."

The most important example of a group which Sartre gives is the state. The state, he says, "is a group which reconstitutes itself incessantly, and modifies its composition by a partial renewal -- discontinuous or continuous -- of its members." I0 Sartre argues that the group in fusion throws up leaders; later the group perpetuates itself by founding institutions. This is the basis of sovereignty. Authority is connected with Terror in the sense that the sovereign is the man who is authorized to exercise Terror. In a serial society, I obey because I have to obey. But in a state I obey myself because it is I, by my pledge, who have merged myself in the group and authorized the sovereign to command. Sartre does not, of course, fancy that every member of a state has actually given his pledge personally -- he has been pledged by proxy -- but the pledge is no less a pledge.

Nor is this all. Sartre claims that Terror is not only fraternity, it is also liberty. For I freely merge my individual project in the common project when I pledge myself (or am pledged by proxy) to the state; and when the sovereign, fortified by Terror, commands me on behalf of the state, he is giving me back my freedom.

Such, in summary terms, is Sartre's theory of social structures. How far can it be considered a Marxist theory? There is not much doubt that it is a thoroughly Sartrian theory, one which harmonizes completely with the theory of human relationships put forward in L'Etre et le Néant, and summed up by a character in his play Huis-clos with the remark "hell is other people." This theory is, briefly, the following: If I speak, I objectify myself in words. Those words, once uttered and heard by other people, become things in the external world. Other people can hear them, think about them, talk about them. My words are part of the furniture of their world. Once I have spoken then they are no longer, strictly speaking, mine. I can no longer control them. This is what leads Sartre to say that in communicating with other people, or indeed even in being seen and heard by other people, I lose part of my self to other People. I cease to be a Self to myself and become an Other to another. At the same time, you become an Other to me. It is the Other Person, the Witness, who makes each of us an object in the universe and to that extent robs each of us of our complete freedom. The word Sartre uses for this otherness is "alterity" (alterité ).

This theory of alterity (which owes much to Hegel) Sartre developed in his earlier exposition of existentialism, L'Etre et le Néant, where he argued that relations between people are inevitably subject to mutual tensions because each individual, acting toward others as an objectifying Other, robs others of their liberty. This is what leads Sartre in L'Etre et le Néant to say that all relations between men are forms of metaphysical conflict, each individual trying to outdo the other, each robbing the other of the other's freedom by objectifying him as a thing in the world, and each trying to defend his own freedom from being thus objectified. Sartre's conclusion in L'Etre et le Néant is that the only possible relations between people are those which tend toward the sadistic and those which tend toward the masochistic. Togetherness, harmony, love, the Mitsein is impossible; all relationships between men are relationships of conflict.

In the Critique, Sartre gives a new reason for this conflict, but the conclusion is the same. He still maintains that each individual is at war with all the others; and though social groups are formed, these groups are held together only by the pledge and Terror -- they are in constant danger of relapsing into the individualistic condition of the series. Just as love, togetherness, friendship is rejected in L'Etre et le Néant, so in the Critique is any Aristotelian notion of man being social by nature.

Now, precisely because this social and political theory of Sartre is so close to his own earlier teaching, it is all the further removed from Marxism. For Marx, though ambiguous in many ways, was unambiguous in his rejection of the picture of mankind as divided into individualistic and competing atoms. Marx believed in community or human togetherness as the natural condition of man. All Sartre's talk about pledges and political societies being held together by Terror is the antithesis of Marxism. Moreover, Sartre's theory of scarcity has nothing in common with Marxist economics, which is, indeed, directly opposed to the scarcity theory as put forward by Malthus and other economists of the classical school, whom Marx regarded as bourgeois ideologues. Marx says that men lived originally together in a state of primitive Communism; then with the invention of things like iron tools and machinery, some men learned to exploit others. Expropriation reduced the dispossessed to a condition of penurious slavery; the exploiters stole from the slaves the difference between what they produced and what was needed to keep the slaves alive. And this, as Marx said, is a theory of surplus, not a theory of scarcity. The scarcity is the result of exploitation, not a characteristic of nature.

So Sartre's aim of producing a modernized Marxism can hardly be said to have been achieved. Indeed one has the impression that Sartre himself forgets his original modest intention. His early talk about Marxism being the great philosophy and existentialism being the mere ideology gives way to increasingly bold assertions about the metaphysical status of his own system. Already by page 153 of his Critique Sartre says he is going "to establish a priori (and not as the Marxists think of doing, a posteriori) the heuristic value of the dialectic method." He goes on to explain that starting with the discovery of the existential validity of the dialectical reason, he proposes to show that "the dialectical method will be efficacious as a method insofar as it will become permanently necessary as a law of intelligibility and as the rational structure of being."

Sartre is thus making for his theory higher claims than Marx makes for his; Sartre is determined, as he puts it, "to establish an order of certitudes." And this is something more than Sartre allowed in his preliminary essay, Question de méthode....

...One striking feature of Sartre's theory is that it moves from nineteenth-century philosophy back to that of the eighteenth and even seventeenth centuries, not forward to that of the twentieth. This is not only a question of language, although Sartre's talk of "Liberty" as "Terror" and "Terror" as "Fraternity" might come straight from a speech by Robespierre. It is the basic elements of the theory which belong to pre-Hegelian thought. For Sartre is putting forward a doctrine of social covenant which is virtually identical with that of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Sartre then adds to Hobbes's doctrine something which comes directly from one of Hobbes's critics -- that is, the theory of scarcity put forward by the eighteenth-century Scotsman David Hume.

Hobbes's word is not "Violence," it is "War"; he does not speak of a "Pledge," but a "Covenant"; he does not speak of "Terror," but of a sovereign who keeps peace between men by "holding them all in awe." The words are slightly different, but the theory is uncannily the same. Neither Hobbes nor Sartre offers what is, strictly speaking, a social contract theory of the kind one finds in Locke or Rousseau, but both Hobbes and Sartre hold promise-and-force theories. And although Sartre's theory of sovereignty is a little more elaborate, perhaps, than Hobbes's, Sartre says exactly what Hobbes says about fear being the basis of political society and about the sovereign being authorized by the people to do whatever he decides to do, and so giving then back their freedom when he commands them to act as he wills. And just as Hobbes is haunted by fear of political society relapsing into the intolerable condition of the state of nature where no man is safe, Sartre goes on and on about the danger of the group's relapsing into an intolerable condition of seriality. Sartre writes:

The group is not a metaphysical reality, with a certain practical relationship between men toward a shared objective and among themselves. If certain circumstances of the struggle lead to a disbanding, and if this is not followed by a regroupment, the group is dead, the contagious panic reestablishes the dominion of the Practico-Inert voilà tout..

Voilà everything indeed -- and how extraordinarily Hobbesian everything looks. And what does not look Hobbesian looks Humeian. The theory that scarcity lies at the origin of society (though anticipated in some of the unpublished works of Locke) was first elaborated by Hume in the third book of his Treatise of Human Nature, in this memorable passage:

Of all the animals with which this globe is peopled, there is none towards whom nature seems, at first sight, to have exercised more cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities with which she has loaded him, and in the slender means which she affords to the relieving of these necessities....It is by society alone he is able to supply his defects, and raise himself up to an equality with his fellow-creatures and even acquire a superiority above them....When every individual labours apart and only for himself, his force is too small to execute any considerable work; his labour being employed in supplying all his different necessities, he never attains a perfection in any particular art; and as his force and success are not at all times equal, the least failure in either of these particulars must be attended with inevitable ruin and misery. Society provides a remedy for these three inconveniences.13

Although Hume argues that society, which comes into being because of scarcity, requires what he calls a "convention" being entered into by all its members, he denies that this convention is "of the nature of a promise: society arises only" from a general sense of the common interest. Hume was attacking, among other sorts of promise, the Hobbesian notion of the "covenant"; but Sartre, though taking the Humeian notion of scarcity, has to restore the Hobbesian notion of promise because, like Hobbes, Sartre puts great emphasis on the idea of war between men as part of their natural condition. In the world of the Practico-Inert, as in Hobbes's state of nature, there is no "general sense of the common interest," for all men are enemies and rivals....

By Maurice Cranston

<http://fhss.byu.edu/polsci/BOHND/300/sartre1.htm> *****

Not a very attractive philosophy, to say the least....

Yoshie



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