Sartre’s Engagement with Hegel and Trotsky

Abstract

Being and Nothingness argues that in the master–slave dialectic Hegel had a ‘brilliant insight’ contra solipsism, to the effect that each self-consciousness depends on other consciousnesses. Against Hegel, however, Sartre claims that the separation of the for-itself remains an insurmountable ‘scandal’ and that collectivity can at best exist as a ‘de-totalised totality’, never as Subject. In a confrontation with Hegelian Sittlichkeit, Notebooks for an Ethics extends this analysis to the historical modalities of the mutual recognition of freedoms. A ‘concrete ethics’ must be ‘revolutionary socialist’, centrally concerned with ‘the dialectic of the ends and means of revolution’. Finally, Sartre’s analysis of the dialectic of society and the state in the Critique of Dialectical Reason explains why sovereignty can never be the embodiment of an imaginary Subject. Sartre thus ultimately occupies a highly distinctive middle ground between Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Marx’s critique of Hegel. A fulcrum of the argument, focused on Notebooks for an Ethics, consists in a comparison between Sartre and Trotsky’s Their Morals and Ours.