Taking as point of departure Hegelrsquo;s early reflections on his historical present, this essay examines the relationship between dialectical reason and the activity of the understanding in generating contradiction. Dialecticmdash;as logic and methodmdash;is Hegelrsquo;s attempt at a philosophical comprehension of the conflicts and the deep changes of his contemporary world. This idea of dialectic as logic of historical transformation guides the development of consciousness in the emPhenomenology of Spirit/em. Since my claim is that the dialectic of consciousness and (...) its capacity of overcoming contradiction are rooted in the historical situation of 1807, the question is raised of what would be the specific problems encountered by consciousness in our contemporary worldmdash;in 2007. What are the challenges posed by our globalized world to a phenomenology of contemporary spirit; and what is the role that contradiction and dialectic play in the understanding of our own historical present? (shrink)

The result was the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an intellectual masterpiece of the twentieth century, now republished in two volumes with major original ...

Sartre’s late work – the Critique of Dialectical Reason – attempted to develop a new theory of praxis emphasizing themes that anticipate new materialist and biopolitical turns in the humanities. Sp...

In his Critique of Dialectical Reason , Sartre argues that it is the milieu of scarcity that generates human conflict. His account of scarcity is rather ambiguous however, and at points he seems to claim that conflict is inevitable given the context of scarcity. In this article I provide a brief account of Sartre's position, and offer a critical evaluation of that position. Finally, I argue that Sartre's claims regarding the necessity of conflict are excessive, and that the (...) resources provided in the Critique offer a means to re-evaluate our relationship to scarcity. (shrink)

In his Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre argues that it is the milieu of scarcity that generates human conflict. His account of scarcity is rather ambiguous however, and at points he seems to claim that conflict is inevitable given the context of scarcity. In this article I provide a brief account of Sartre's position, and offer a critical evaluation of that position. Finally, I argue that Sartre's claims regarding the necessity of conflict are excessive, and that the resources (...) provided in the Critique offer a means to re-evaluate our relationship to scarcity. (shrink)

Identity politics is important within feminism. However, it often presupposes an overly subjectivist theory of knowledge that I term an epistemology of provenance. I explore some works of feminist standpoint theory that begin to address the difficulties of such an epistemology. I then bring Sartre's account of knowledge in the Critique of Dialectical Reason to bear on these difficulties, arguing that his work offers tools for addressing them more adequately.

This article will offer an alternative understanding of managerial decision-making drawing from Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason rather than simply Being and Nothingness. I will begin with a brief explanation of Sartre’s account of freedom in Being and Nothingness. I will then show in the second section how Andrew West uses Sartre’s conception of radical freedom from Being and Nothingness for a managerial decision-making model. In the third section, I will explore a more robust account of freedom from (...) Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. I will attempt to show that freedom is not simply a matter of choosing (or not choosing) to perform an action, but entails external constraints—including other people. Finally, I will provide the implications of this account of freedom for managerial decision-making. I will show that it’s unreasonable to place full responsibility and/or blame on managers given their constraints. This does not absolve them from responsibility, but better accounts for the way in which we ought to hold them responsible. (shrink)

Despite being the work of one of the 20th-century’s most famous philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason has never been fully integrated into our collective philosophical consciousness. None of the book’s key concepts, from seriality to the group, have come to play an important role in other philosophers’, sociologists’, or political theorists’ work. Amongst Sartre scholars, while work on the Critique has increased steadily in recent years, in particular in France and Belgium, no critical consensus exists about (...) the book’s overall meaning or value. On the occasion of the Critique’s 60th birthday, in this article I provide a summary of its main aims and concepts with a view to establishing a new basis for reading and discussing the book. I will argue that the Critique is a coherent and unique work of social theory that speaks to a world suffering an overwhelming wave of what Sartre calls ‘counter-finality’ in the form of climate change. (shrink)

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason ranks with Being and Nothingness as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the Critique to its deserved place among Sartre’s works and within philosophical discourse (...) as a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano asserts—the delivery of history into the hands of the average person. Sartre’s concern in the Critique is with the historical significance of everyday life. Can we, he asks, as individuals or even collectively, direct the course of our history? A historical context for our lives is given to us at birth, but we sustain that context with even our most mundane actions—buying a newspaper, waiting in line, eating a meal. In looking at history, Sartre argues, reason can never separate the historical situation of the investigator from the investigation. Thus reason falls into a dialectic, always depending upon the past for guidance but always being reshaped by the present. Clearly showing the influence of Marx on Sartre’s thought, the Critique adds the historical dimension lacking in Being and Nothingness. In placing the Critique within the corpus of Sartre’s philosophical writings, Catalano argues that it represents a development rather than a break from Sartre’s existentialist phase. Catalano has organized his commentary to follow the Critique and has supplied clear examples and concrete expositions of the most difficult ideas. He explicates the dialogue between Marx and Sartre that is internal to the text, and he also discusses Sartre’s Search for Method, which is published separately from the Critique in English editions. (shrink)

Frantz Fanon was an enthusiastic reader of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason and in this essay I focus on what can be gleaned from The Wretched of the Earth about how he read it. I argue that the reputation among Sartre's critics of the Critique as a failure on the grounds that it was left incomplete should take into account its presence in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth . Their shared perspectives on the systemic character of racism (...) and colonialism, on the genesis and fragility of groups, and on parties indicates the vitality of the ideas set out in the Critique . However, these similarities between the two thinkers are offset by their differences on national consciousness and on the rural masses. I end by speculating about a certain defence on Sartre's part toward Fanon's concrete experience. (shrink)

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason depends upon an ideal of subjectivity that operates linguistically. The subject of the Critique progresses through three transformations: first, the organic subject; second, the serial subject; third, the common subject. Each stage reveals different configurations of the expressive possibilities inherent in Sartre’s late conception of subjectivity and his materialistic view of language. The organic subject emerges in the initial contradiction between the human organism and its material environment. This contradiction results in the primordial (...) movement of signification that projects a future structured in response to the material system. The serial subject then emerges within the system of language and a social structure of antagonistic struggle. Finally, the common subject emerges out of the dissolution of the serial subject by means of a repetition of the original expressive gesture. This common subjectivity is the site of a complete communication occurring within the group-in-fusion. (shrink)

The Critique of Dialectical Reason was first published in France twenty years ago, in 1960. The book, we know from Simone de Beauvoir, was flung together in a hurry, written virtually without correction during the height of the Algerian war, a period, for Sartre, of stress and anxious stock-taking of his position as a Marxist and a long-term non-joiner of the Communist Party. The whole sense in which, in 1960, Sartre was a Marxist, the question of precisely how (...) eccentric his kind of Marxism was, is centred on his theory of historical explanation. I do not propose to raise many detailed questions about the relation of Sartre's views on history to those of Marx himself, still less to those of other Marxists. Ignorance alone would rule out such a course. I would like if I can, however, to consider Sartre's own view of historical explanation as it appears in the Critique, and leave it to others if they wish to fit it into the Marxist tradition, or exclude it. In order to perform this relatively modest expository task, it will be necessary for me to refer, from time to time, to Sartre's earlier philosophical views. But this will come in incidentally. (shrink)

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason ranks with Being and Nothingness as a work of major philosophical significance, but it has been largely neglected. The first volume, published in 1960, was dismissed as a Marxist work at a time when structuralism was coming into vogue; the incomplete second volume has only recently been published in France. In this commentary on the first volume, Joseph S. Catalano restores the Critique to its deserved place among Sartre’s works and within philosophical discourse (...) as a whole. Sartre attempts one of the most needed tasks of our times, Catalano asserts—the delivery of history into the hands of the average person. Sartre’s concern in the Critique is with the historical significance of everyday life. Can we, he asks, as individuals or even collectively, direct the course of our history? A historical context for our lives is given to us at birth, but we sustain that context with even our most mundane actions—buying a newspaper, waiting in line, eating a meal. In looking at history, Sartre argues, reason can never separate the historical situation of the investigator from the investigation. Thus reason falls into a dialectic, always depending upon the past for guidance but always being reshaped by the present. Clearly showing the influence of Marx on Sartre’s thought, the Critique adds the historical dimension lacking in Being and Nothingness. In placing the Critique within the corpus of Sartre’s philosophical writings, Catalano argues that it represents a development rather than a break from Sartre’s existentialist phase. Catalano has organized his commentary to follow the Critique and has supplied clear examples and concrete expositions of the most difficult ideas. He explicates the dialogue between Marx and Sartre that is internal to the text, and he also discusses Sartre’s Search for Method, which is published separately from the Critique in English editions. (shrink)

There are perpetual debates about the extent of freedom in politics. Are we free to choose? Are we overdetermined by our material conditions? Some hybrid between the two? In this text, Austin Hayden Smidt analyzes an oft-overlooked text by Jean-Paul Sartre in order to ground a logical framework for exploring this problem.

The historical origin of the concept of ‘intentionality’, as is well-known, is very remote, dating back to the age of scholastic philosophy. In the epistemological theories worked out by medieval thinkers, from Thomas Aquinas up to the latest minor exponents of the nominalistic trend, the concept of ‘intentio’ is very often to be found, there playing a role of undoubtedly primary importance. Sometimes it means the universal ‘concept’ abstracted by the human understanding from sense datum; sometimes, instead, both the act (...) through which human intelligence directs itself towards the object of its cognition, the material ‘thing’, and the reflective act by virtue of which it refers to its subjective representation of the external ‘res’. In any case, it evidently turns out to be a fundamental function of any knowing whatsoever. (shrink)

The historical origin of the concept of ‘intentionality’, as is well-known, is very remote, dating back to the age of scholastic philosophy. In the epistemological theories worked out by medieval thinkers, from Thomas Aquinas up to the latest minor exponents of the nominalistic trend, the concept of ‘intentio’ is very often to be found, there playing a role of undoubtedly primary importance. Sometimes it means the universal ‘concept’ abstracted by the human understanding from sense datum; sometimes, instead, both the act (...) through which human intelligence directs itself towards the object of its cognition, the material ‘thing’, and the reflective act by virtue of which it refers to its subjective representation of the external ‘res’. In any case, it evidently turns out to be a fundamental function of any knowing whatsoever. (shrink)

The Critique of Dialectical Reason was first published in France twenty years ago, in 1960. The book, we know from Simone de Beauvoir, was flung together in a hurry, written virtually without correction during the height of the Algerian war, a period, for Sartre, of stress and anxious stock-taking of his position as a Marxist and a long-term non-joiner of the Communist Party. The whole sense in which, in 1960, Sartre was a Marxist, the question of precisely how (...) eccentric his kind of Marxism was, is centred on his theory of historical explanation. I do not propose to raise many detailed questions about the relation of Sartre's views on history to those of Marx himself, still less to those of other Marxists. Ignorance alone would rule out such a course. I would like if I can, however, to consider Sartre's own view of historical explanation as it appears in the Critique, and leave it to others if they wish to fit it into the Marxist tradition, or exclude it. In order to perform this relatively modest expository task, it will be necessary for me to refer, from time to time, to Sartre's earlier philosophical views. But this will come in incidentally. (shrink)

Frantz Fanon was an enthusiastic reader of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason and in this essay I focus on what can be gleaned from The Wretched of the Earth about how he read it. I argue that the reputation among Sartre's critics of the Critique as a failure on the grounds that it was left incomplete should take into account its presence in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth. Their shared perspectives on the systemic character of racism and (...) colonialism, on the genesis and fragility of groups, and on parties indicates the vitality of the ideas set out in the Critique. However, these similarities between the two thinkers are offset by their differences on national consciousness and on the rural masses. I end by speculating about a certain defence on Sartre's part toward Fanon's concrete experience. (shrink)

Jean-Paul Sartre is the writer who gave the most trenchant formulation of existentialism and tried to do the same for a version of Marxism, and as a philosopher of history who got it wrong about history and then, in his last "philosophical manifesto" - volume III of the Idiot - got it brilliantly right. But Sartre did not write the second volume of the Critique. Or, more exactly, he wrote it but he did not publish it. The Critique, as Sartre (...) himself admitted, grew like a hernia on the body of the book on Flaubert, so that it had to be surgically removed and given a life of its own; but a sort of symbiosis persisted, and when it came to the continuation of the argument, Sartre seems to have sensed that volume II was a dead end, and that the route to the alternative would prove to lie after all in the Flaubert project itself. In order to understand Sartre's position, the author analyzes his conception of history, especially of the intelligibility of history by mean of the dialectical reason as a movement of totalization of practical seriality, and shows its actuality. (shrink)

What for Sartre happens when bad faith goes so deep that one is no longer master of it? In The Condemned of Altona, Franz Gerlach, after an initial show of resistance, joins the Nazi cause and tortures prisoners of war in his charge. Fleeing home from Russia at the war’s end, he sequesters himself in the attic of the family mansion and attempts to absorb the guilt of the twentieth century by frantically arguing his case before a tribunal of scuttling (...) crabs.What does Sartre’s portrayal of hallucination tell us about the human condition and is it the result of insanity? As a harbinger for the Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre’s ontology has shifted away from an emphasis on human isolation and absolute freedom to a concern with how behaviour, even of an irrational kind, is a profound reflection of one’s place in a social hierarchy. Also a reflection of a CDR-type approach, Sartre’s views change regarding the status of truth and interpersonal relations. For while someone like Nausea’s Roquentin exhibits a redemptive value through introspection, fantasy and private experience, Franz’s behaviour points to a repeated failure to deal with social reality and the associated attempt to redeem his own existence by acting authentically towards others. (shrink)

What is counter-finality? Who, or what, is the agent of counter-finality? In the Critique of Dialectical Reason , Sartre employs a complicated and multivalent notion of counter-finality, the reversal of the finality intended by an agent in different contexts and at different levels of complexity. Sartre's concept of counter-finality is read here as an attempt to rethink and broaden the traditional Marxist notion of commodity fetishism as a tragic dialectic of human history whose final act has yet to (...) play out. The article analyses and explicates Sartre's complex concept of counter-finality, focusing on material antipraxis. (shrink)

The paper examines Lévi-Strauss' criticisms of Sartre's conception of dialectical reason and history as presented in the last chapter of La Pensée Sauvage , suggesting that these criticisms are misplaced. Sartre's notion of reason and history in the Critique is much closer to structuralist accounts than Lévi-Strauss seems to recognize, but it differs in placing a strong emphasis on activity and praxis in place of the latter's passive conception of reason. The active role of the inquirer (...) in structuralist thought is examined using Roland Barthes' account of "The Structuralist Activity," which is shown to have important affinities with Sartre's own conception of the relation of structure and praxis in the Critique . I then briefly consider a modified conception of the role of history in structuralism expressed by Lévi-Strauss in the mid-seventies, suggesting that his altered position still fails to recognize the important role of praxis in structuralist accounts of history. I conclude by suggesting that Lévi-Strauss' criticisms are nonetheless important for illustrating the "Critical" character of Sartre's Critique. (shrink)

In a little remembered event in December 1961, Sartre entered into a debate with Roger Garaudy, as well as other representatives of the Parti Communiste Française (PCF), on the topic of the existence of a universal dialectical law applicable to nature as well as to human thought. In the debate, Sartre seeks to rebut the notion that humankind is merely an “alien addition“ to nature, as Engels maintained, and instead argues that individual subjectivity cannot be reduced to an object (...) of knowledge. This paper highlights the importance of the debate for both sides, but particularly for Sartre and his Critique of Dialectical Reason. (shrink)

Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason depends upon an ideal of subjectivity that operates linguistically. The subject of the Critique progresses through three transformations: first, the organic subject; second, the serial subject; third, the common subject. Each stage reveals different configurations of the expressive possibilities inherent in Sartre’s late conception of subjectivity and his materialistic view of language. The organic subject emerges in the initial contradiction between the human organism and its material environment. This contradiction results in the primordial (...) movement of signification that projects a future structured in response to the material system. The serial subject then emerges within the system of language and a social structure of antagonistic struggle. Finally, the common subject emerges out of the dissolution of the serial subject by means of a repetition of the original expressive gesture. This common subjectivity is the site of a complete communication occurring within the group-in-fusion. (shrink)

In this essay, I attempt to remedy the relative neglect that has befallen Sartre’s analysis of social relations in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. I show that, contrary to the interpretation of certain commentators, Sartre’s analysis of social relations in this text does not contradict his earlier works. While his early work focuses on individual-to-individual social relations, the Critique of Dialectical Reason complements this by focusing on the way various group formations constrain or enhance the individual’s (...) practical freedom. To outline my argument, I first discuss the relationship between Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason before going on to identify the four group formations Sartre discusses in the Critique of Dialectical Reason and the implications each has for the individual’s practical freedom. I argue that while the group formations called the series and the institution constrain the individual’s practical freedom, the open, democratic group formations called the group-in-fusion and, in particular, the organized group, enhance the individual’s practical freedom. Because it is membership of an organized group that best enhances the individual’s practical freedom, I conclude by arguing that Sartre implicitly holds that the individual’s practical and political activity should be directed towards the establishment of a group formation that has the characteristics of an organized group. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to bring to the fore the theme of sartre's "critique of dialectical reason", at present available in a very good english translation. according to sartre, marxism in its materialist and positivist interpretation, as understood by moscow, needs the correction as proposed by existentialism. what matters for sartre is to show that at the center of all sociological structures, stands the "totalizing" power of the free individual self. all in all a very impressive (...) and profoundly original book, sartre's best philosophical work. (shrink)

“Dialectical” stands in parentheses because I wish to discuss both authors in terms of a critique of reason as such in addition to specifying the issue in terms of their respective assessments of the dialectic. But I shall first consider how each employs the term “critique.” So my remarks will focus on Critique, Reason and Dialectic in that order. Of course, each topic understandably bleeds into the others. In view of the occasion, I shall conclude with a (...) brief sketch of four milestones along Sartre's way from Being and Nothingness to the Critique. (shrink)