When we add to this list of features ( 8 ) “violence,” we see why Sartre
would find their youthful exuberance and impatience with mere verbiage
so attractive, especially in his last decade. In a set of conversations (inter-
views) with two “Maoists,” one of whom will become his last secretary,^31
from November 1972 to March 1974 , Sartre took stock of his political
biography in particularly explicit and challenging remarks. Among the
many decisive statements uttered in this context was his admission that
he had moved from an “irrealist idealism” at age 18 (which is why he
abandoned his ethics of authenticity sketched in theNotebooks for an Ethics)
to an amoralist realism at 45 (with the Communists) toward rediscovery
of a moralist realism but now materialist, antihierarchical and libertarian
(with his post-Communist colleagues) (ORR 79 ). What Sartre calls
“materialist” is not a crass reductionist identity thesis of mind to brain,
nor a Marxist determinism that he rejects as “economism.” Rather, it
denotes the elaboration of his basic concept of situation in terms of
“objective possibility.” There is determinism in nature, as Kant insisted,
and in history too, as Hegel claimed, but “we can always make something
out of what we’ve been made into” – which is the Sartrean existentialist
mantra, extended via dialectical reasoning to encompass the material con-
ditions of our existential life (le ve ́cu). This irreducible wedge ofsubjectivity
(which Sartre once described as “the limit of reflexive recoil” [EN 32 ])
is the ontological ground of our freedom, whether abstract or concrete,
and our moral responsibility. This is why he can assert against orthodox
Dialectical Materialism that morality is not merely a function of the
superstructure but “exists at the very level of production.” He agrees with
the “Maoists” that “a worker is moral by virtue of the fact that he is an
alienated man who reclaims freedom for himself and for all” (ORR 45 ).
In fact, this was a basic Sartrean claim long before he encounteredles Maos.
Still, as the dilemma of Heinrich inThe Devil and the Good Lordexhibits,
some situations render choices morally bankrupt however they are made.
It is this confluence of the political and the moral in our society, Sartre
insists, that leaves each of us with dirty hands.
(^31) Benny Le ́vi (a.k.a. Pierre Victor). The so-called “Maoists” were a loose grouping of
“Gauchistes” who stood to the far Left of the Communists, and valued each of the eight
features of Sartrean thought just mentioned, especially spontaneity, violence and deep
ethical convictions. In his preface to the bookLes Maos en France, Sartre made it clear his
opening line: “I am not a Maoist” (Sitx: 38 ). But then, their identity was as fluid as their
convictions were anarchical.
308 Means and ends: political existentialism