individual freedom and its concomitant moral responsibility. Can
Marxism become a concrete philosophy? Can existentialism suffer a
truly social conditioning? Can either of them support a viable social
ethic?^22
Sartre has already made a significant concession by shifting his
focus from consciousness topraxis(roughly, purposive human activity
in its socioeconomic field), from facticity to “objective possibility,” and
from “transcendence” toneedas “going beyond a situation” (SM 91 ).^23
We shall soon witness his characterization of “comprehension” as the
“translucidity of praxis to itself ” (CDR 74 ), and his insistence that
“to grasp the meaning of any human conduct, it is necessary to have
at our disposal what German psychiatrists and historians have called
‘comprehension’;...it is originally progressive” (SM 153 ), but it may be
“entirely regressive” (SM 155 ) or “simultaneously progressive (toward
the objective result) and regressive (I go back toward the original condi-
tion)” (SM 154 ). Still, “our comprehension of the Other is never
contemplative; it is only a moment of ourpraxis, a way of living – in
struggle or in complicity – the concrete, human relation which unites
us to him” (SM 156 ).
What makes this undertaking “existentialist” is its emphasis on the
project of the laborer – his or her physical overcoming and fashioning
the resistance of the material object to yield “worked matter,” as he
will say in theCritique. It is “into this very Knowledge and into the
universality of concepts, [that existentialism] wants to reintroduce the
unsurpassable singularity of the human adventure.” So he concludes:
“Thus the comprehension of existence is presented as the human func-
tion of Marxist anthropology” (SM 176 ).^24
(^22) Again, Sartre lays out this issue programmatically in his introduction to the first issue of
LTM: “Though he is completely conditioned by his class, his salary, the nature of his work,
conditioned even in his feelings and his thoughts, it is nevertheless up to [the worker] to
decide on the meaning of his condition and that of his comrades. (WL/Presentation 265 ).”
That is the basic paradox facing the Marxist existentialist. As for the social ethic, that will be
23 the subject of his second, dialectical ethic inchapter^14.
For a more complex definition of “praxis” consider: “An organizing project which transcends
material conditions towards an end and inscribes itself, through labor, in inorganic matter as
a rearrangement of the practical field and a reunification of means in light of an end” (CDR
24 i:^734 ). We shall parse this definition when we study theCritiqueitself.
“The movement canthinkitself only in Marxist terms and cancomprehenditself only as an
alienated existence, as a human reality made into a thing. The moment which will surpass
In search of a “supple, patient dialectic” 331