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to allocate it to God or the Catholic Church. Sartre has allocated his
positive freedom to a different agency.
Another source is Kant. Sartre shows
his
indebtedness to Kant in
a long, perceptive essay ("Departure and Return") on the meaning of
language. Language is not only a conventional instrument mediating
between ourselves and the world; nor is it an insurmountable barrier
between ourselves and the world so that poetry becomes, as Fargue
said, "the mutual burning of words," and the rest is silence. Sartre uses
language, first of all, to show again that there must be a pure Cartesian
state of consciousness
before
language-a highly questionable assump–
tion; secondly, that language is a manifestation of the creative, produc–
tive function of the mind. To
name
a thing involves, as it does for Kant,
a synthesizing activity; and it is through this synthetic, creative act of
the mind or the imagination that we construct a common world of
words and things. Thus Descartes and Kant support two major asser–
tions: (1) that man's freedom lies in self-consciousness; and (2) that
this freedom can be positive and productive in creating a world of
words, things, machines, and social systems. "Man is the being as a
result of whose appearance a world exists,"
is
Sartre's re-formulation
of "humanism."
Sartre is also indebted to Kant for his views on ethics. Moral
choices are the most striking exemplifications of man's freedom and
autonomy. And though Sartre claims to repudiate the rationalistic,
a
jJriori
foundations of Kant's moral theory, his own solution for escaping
a radical ethical subjectivism and relativism is a watered-down restate–
ment of the categorical imperative: My own free choice is justifiable
if
in choosing myself I can also wish to choose a general, universal
type of man.
There is a third source of Sartre's ideas-Marxism; for the new
universal man must be revolutionary. Marxism provides the transition
from the implicit idealism of Descartes and Kant to the existentialist
postulate of revolutionary action. In "Materialism and Revolution," the
longest and most important essay in the present volume, Sartre attempts
to prove two things: first, that materialism is a false and self-refuting
metaphysics for a revolutionary movement; second, that his own version
of existentialism is the only true revolutionary philosophy because it
avoids the pitfalls and fallacies of both idealism and materialism. Much
of this analysis, however, simply shows that the kind of mechanical,
crudely scientific materialism which he castiga tes has nothing to do with
the much more subtle and supple theoretical instrument which Marx
called "dialectical materialism." Be that as it may-and the question
