Jim F.
On Wed, 11 Apr 2001 02:55:50 -0400 Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
writes:
> 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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