Sartre's second century

206 Chapter Fourteen
programme" in the sociology of science, associated particularly with a
group at Edinburgh University, claims no less than that all scientific
knowledge rests on nothing more than conventional agreement among
scientific practitioners and has no other basis in reality. It must certainly
be acknowledged that Sartre had a regrettable blind spot in regard to
science as usually conceived—possibly due to an aversion generated by
his stepfather's authoritarian efforts to teach him science and mathematics.
In her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir notes that he would pursue such a
line of thought to the extent sometimes of being, and knowing he was
being, silly. On one occasion he argued for the non-existence of microbes
and other entities invisible to the naked eye. 11 She explains his attitude
regarding science as being due to its necessary abstractions and general
laws, contradicting his project of philosophically grasping living reality
with "more imagination than logic". 12 On the face of things, this might
indeed appear to resonate with postmodern ideas. Later, however, she
insists that if he repudiated scientific rationalism, that was on behalf of a
more dialectical and humanly conceived version. 13
In a dialectical reversal which Sartre would have appreciated, an
ideology supposedly resting on the strictest of rational principles has
turned into one of the mainstays of contemporary obscurantism. A recently
published volume, Contesting Fundamentalisms, quite properly includes
economic neo-liberalism in the fundamentalist catalogue, and this—while
claiming to be based on impeccable scientific principles (though also
embraced by the religious Right)—may well be regarded as the most
rampant and hegemonic obscurantism of them all; certainly, it has the
worst and most devastating practical consequences.
Bad Faith
The importance of the entire range of Sartre's work and its pertinence
to the twenty-first century is most significant, I would argue, in relation to
these developments. It was a philosophy of and for the twentieth century,
driven by contemporary concerns, as Sartre himself would have been the
first to insist, yet its underlying themes have a permanent relevance. He
wrote the Critique of Dialectical Reason to try—single-handedly!—to
rescue Marxism from the sclerosis that had overtaken it at the hands of the
official Communist movement and the Trotskyist sects. But the concepts
11 See Simone de Beauvoir, Prime of Life, 42.
12 Ibid., 31.
13 Ibid., 131. The Critique makes this perfectly plain.