ARGUMENTS
169
are quite right; for instance, when Mr. Hampshire writes that Sartre
"nowhere shows any interest in the stuff and business of politics," I
have
to
agree with
him.
Which reminds me of a conversation I had
with Sartre in 1948. He asked me, a visitor for the first time to France,
why I thought Picasso had joined the Communist Party. I replied with–
out hesitating, though I had no personal acquaintance with Picasso: "He
joined the Communist Party because he's not interested in politics."
Sartre responded by agreeing. "You're quite right," he said. Of course,
at that time he had his own party, the R. D. R. After that was liquidated,
though, he gave his support to the Communists, like Picasso I should
say, because of a lack of real interest in politics.
However, as I said above, Sartre's philosophy requires him to be
interested in politics, and it is Sartre's philosophy that I have tried to
defend here against Stuart Hampshire, rather than the particular
politics Sartre has pursued in recent years. I wish he had more of a
flair for politics. That he does not have such a flair does not invalidate
the direction of his thought.
Stuart Hampshire
The main point of disagreement between Mr. Abel and me
is a strictly philosophical one: he believes, following Husserl, that there
is a superior certainty and knowledge to be found in "lived experience,"
and that philosophy is properly the pursuit of these masked certainties.
I believe that we neither have, nor can have, any criterion to distinguish
true from false statements allegedly derived from "lived experience."
He claims that the analysis of "lived experience" yields the insight that
"we are involved with others continually." This conclusion, available to
Aristotle and almost every philosopher that I can think of, is hardly
a triumph for the phenomenological method; nor does it yield "a definite,
even
if
wrong, stand on society and politics." It is equally compatible
with communist, fascist, liberal and conservative attitudes in politics.
I did not reproach Sartre with philosophizing, or imply that there is no
place for philosophical inquiry; on the contrary, I would claim that
