Meanings of dialectic

by Raymond Williams

Critique of Dialectical Reason, by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith (NLB)

This work is a landmark in modern social thought. First published in French in 1960, its translation into English — a formidable task, in the intrinsic difficulties of the text, and in great length; the present volume runs to more than eight hundred pages — is an important reminder of the ways in which Sartre offers to change the nature of a central kind of inquiry.

Sartre the post-war existentialist was widely publicised and indeed romanticised in English thought. Sartre the Marxist has been relatively neglected: for political reasons, obviously, but also because his kind of Marxism falls between and thus beyond two formed bodies of opinion. The subjectivism and fatalism of the early work was acceptable when it was generalised as a rhetoric. Once it was grasped as history, with immediate political consequences, but also with an inevitable development towards a generalising social thought, it was quickly sealed off in ways which the label "Marxist" makes facile in official English intellectual life.

Yet at the same time the ideas and the language of this new phase were deeply unfamiliar and intractable to one important kind of orthodox Marxist: men who sustained their work by adherence to what they believed were the "scientific laws" of history and society, and among these laws "the dialectic." And then since the style of this new thought was exceptionally difficult, susceptible to quick parody from almost any position or from none, evasion was widely available.

In its present, unfinished form this work has two main themes. First, there is a brief but decisive rejection of what is ordinarily known as "dialectical materialism." Few things have brought more intellectual discredit to Marxism than the Laws of Nature and of History presented under this title; the transformation of quantity into quality, and vice versa; the interpenetration of opposites; and the negation of the negation. Empiricists, especially, have had all their suspicions of Marxism confirmed with the appearance and emphasis of these induced laws, often backed up in practice by uses of "dialectic" to mean little more than interactive, contradictory or even systemically confused.

It is there that Sartre's position is challenging, to both kinds of opinion. What Engels systematised is seen as a "transcendental materialism, " which "expects the sciences to verify" — what? An already projected set of laws — Any empiricist can subscribe to that objection, but thought Sartre makes it, it is the least important part of his argument, which includes equally fundamental objections to empiricism itself and to "analytical Reason." For the basic error of what has been known as dialectical materialism is what it shares with many apparently opposed positions: its external character: here its projection of predicated laws not only on to Nature but on to Man and History.

True dialectic, by contrast, is created anew in each action (though actions arise only on the basis of a world entirely constituted by the dialectical praxis of the past) and becomes a theoretical and practical method when action in the course of development begins to give an explanation of itself. This first briefly argued theme is the key to the character of the subsequent inquiry. It is what genuinely genuinely connects, through the necessary changes, early with late Sartre. As against the "impersonality" of orthodox social science, and also as against the "scientific Marxism" either of Engels or of the structuralists, Sartre insists that the dialectic reveals itself only to an observer situated in interiority, that is to say, to an investigator who lives his investigation both as a possible contribution to the ideology of his entire epoch and as the particular praxis of an individual defined by his historical and personal career within the wider history which conditions it.

This kind of inquiry, taking the weight of every clause, is now so rare, whatever name may be given to it, that even its definition is a landmark. And the result is that Sartre's extraordinarily sustained and intricate inquiry into the nature of social relationships in history, which takes up the rest of the volume, has qualities which distinguish it from the types of thinking and classification (Marxist and non-Marxist) with which it can in summary be confused.

His definitions of "seriality," collective and the "fused group" are permanent contributions to any active sociology and politics, but what is most remarkable, in the strong chapters, is his tangible awareness of the complexity of "lived investigation" and of the consequent complexity of all the received misleading terms from "individual" to "society," and from "experience" to "consciousness." The "interiority" of this response to a hard, scarce, diverse world is significant, finally, to the extent that it becomes general and historical without losing its specifying and inevitable self-involvement. It is in this rare and always fragile sense that the Critique maybe become not only a landmark but a turning point in the thinking of our time.