miracle is the materialist, who accuses idealists of indulging in metaphysics when
they reduce matter to mind, absolved from the same charge when he reduces mind
to matter?
(MR 204 )
One should not rush to enroll Sartre among the mind–body dualists in
any unqualified way. We have acknowledged thatBeing and Nothingnessis
“dualist” in nature, while pointing out that it does not subscribe to a
two-substance ontology. The most that we can conclude from the quota-
tion just cited and fromBNis that Sartre is not a “crass materialist.”
Neither was Marx, who explicitly rejected such a position. As he moves
toward a dialectical philosophy, it seems that Sartre may be adopting an
“emergentist” form of materialism, again as did Marx. This would admit
that mind developed from “matter,” to put it simplistically, but insist
that it is irreducible to matter in its distinctive features, chief of which,
for Sartre, would be “intentionality,” which he has consistently defended
as the defining characteristic of the mental.^35
Sartre is willing to consider a dialectical relationship among ideas,
as we find in Hegel, but considers it implausible in matter, which is
characterized by inertia, because “the mainspring of all dialectics is the
idea of totality” (MR 204 ). This was already his position inTranscendence
of the Ego. We shall find him continuing to reject a dialectic of nature
(what the Soviet Communists called DIAMAT) and, once he accepts
a historical dialectic in theCritique, insisting that the “practico-inert”
(heir to being-in-itself) is anti-dialectical in that it can turn praxis against
itself in counterfinality.^36
The theoretical backbone of his argument is an anticipation of his
discussion of the dialectic with the French Philosophical Society the
following year that we shall discuss inChapter 12. It turns on the
distinction between the Hegelian “notion” (Begriff) and the abstract
“concept.” “Science is made up ofconcepts, in the Hegelian sense of
the term. Dialectics, on the other hand, is essentially the play of
notions.” Voicing what could be a mantra for Sartre’s philosophical life
since he and Beauvoir first read Jean Wahl’sToward the Concretein
1932 and continuing into theCritiqueandThe Family Idiot, he explains:
“Dialectical enrichment lies in the transition from the abstract to the
(^35) See above,Chapter 7 , “The Body.” (^36) SeeCDRi: 713.
250 Existentialism: the fruit of liberation