Sartre concludes the introduction with an irenic gesture toward the
Marxists. While insisting that man, despite being totally conditioned
by his situation, harbors “a center of irreducible indetermination,” he
declares that “this sector of unpredictability is what we call freedom and
the person is nothing but his freedom” (Sitii: 26 ). This freedom is both a
curse and the unique source of human greatness. “The Marxists will
agree with us on this point in spirit, if not in the letter, because, as far
as I know, they do not abstain from leveling moral condemnations”
(Sit ii: 27 ). In other words, consistently or not, a determinist must
acknowledge a sliver of indeterminacy as a condition for making moral
judgments. If the individual is totally conditioned and totally free, then
the task that remains for the editors is to expand his possibilities of
choice; that is, to increase his concrete freedom. This is the project that
the fledgling journal sets for itself.
We already discussedAnti-Semite and Jew in an ethical context
that revealed the moral significance of the “bases and structures” of
an individual’s choices. The explicit premise of his argument is the
existence of a close reciprocal relation between human reality and the
“material conditions” of its “situation.” In effect, Sartre is calling for
structural change in society to render the “choice” of anti-Semitism
virtually impossible. He rather naively believes (pace Foucault) that
“anti-Semitism is a mythical, bourgeois representation of the class
struggle, and that it could not exist in a classless society” (Anti-Semite
and Jew 149 ). Presumably, faced with overwhelming counterevidence, he
would redefine the nature of such socialist societies as way stations on
the path to genuine Communism. In any case, gone is the near omnipo-
tence of Sartrean consciousness to redefine one’s situation at will, what
I have been calling “noetic” freedom/responsibility. One must acknow-
ledge the “dialectical” relation between the social conditions and the
freedom that both incorporates and transcends it.
Praxis and lived experience(le ve ́cu)Praxis (purposive human activity in its sociohistorical context) had
already entered Sartre’s vocabulary inWhat is Literature?( 1947 ) where
it is defined as “action in history and on history; that is, a synthesis of
historical relativity and moral and metaphysical absolute, with this
hostile and friendly, terrible and derisive world which it reveals to us.”
Humanisms and the political 293