ARGUMENTS
155
ing is what the philosopher today must not do.
In
philosophizing the
thinker depends on his own thought. Should one not make use of what
others are thinking? Perhaps Mr. Hampshire values the Marx of the
German Ideology
because Marx wrote it with a collaborator; one, to
be
sure, who was less critical-minded than he.
But was it unwise of Descartes to sit alone by his stove and medi–
tate?
In
so doing he opened the way for the mathematical physics which
has altered the lives of all of us. Mathematical physics is a success. And
so Descartes' lonely thinking, according to Mr. Hampshire, was justified.
But why, Mr. Hampshire wants to know, should a man in the twentieth
century repeat the intellectual adventure of Descartes and hope in the
isolation of his study to get significant results without more than casual
consultation of the careful efforts made by collective workers in the
various scientific fields? How can a man living in this century be as
interested in his own ideas as Sartre seems
to
be? Mr. Hampshire
compares Sartre to a hand-loom weaver "resisting the intensive division
of intellectual labor which the secure advance of knowledge now
requires."
I would suggest to Mr. Hampshire that he think carefully about
the sentence from Andrea Caffi which I quoted, which to me is as
interesting as any of Marx's th'eses on Feuerbach. The sentence refers
to the "insurmountable difficulties" Marx faced when he tried to relate
"beings of flesh and blood and the entangled reality of social life." Does
Mr. Hampshire believe that those difficulties can be surmounted more
easily by the efforts of any number of experts in various fields and can–
not be surmounted by the thought of a single individual? I see no
reason why this should be true. Nor do I think Mr. Hampshire can
give me one.
What is really difficult intellectually, in my guess, can only be
resolved
by
an individual effort. Experts are only capable of what
is
easy-for experts.
What has been Sartre's intellectual adventure during these last
twenty years? What was Sartre trying to find out about reality that
made him not rely on scientific findings or received opinions? What
was the object of his thought?
Sartre is not a metaphysician, and his object was not metaphysics,
as that term is generally understood. Nor has he been trying to solve
problems which it is up
to
the scientists to solve. He has not addressed
himself to the illogicalities of logic or the uncertainties in mathematical
thought. Sartre, I think, addressed himself from the start to those
mysteries about the relation of one man to another which Marx in his
