Sartre's second century

Sartre's Legacy in an Era of Obscurantism 213
The threatened environmental catastrophe, the overriding issue of the
present, could most usefully, with appropriate modifications, be subjected
to the kind of analysis that Sartre carried out on Soviet society in the
unfinished second volume of the Critique: "[T]he anti-social forces of the
practico-inert impose a negative unity of self-destruction on the society, by
usurping the unifying power of the praxis which produced them." 26 Indeed
it could almost be possible to imagine fancifully that the Critique might
have been written with this crisis specifically in mind. Consider, for
example, the following, as summarised by Aronson (Sartre was in this
instance discussing problems of industrialisation in the USSR):
For an example of "necessity" revealing praxis as its underside, Sartre
takes the inert synthetic relationship set up between two cities when
industrial expansion requires that their communications be improved [...].
If there is now a scarcity of transport between A and B, this situation
demands new investment of resources. But even this choice will only solve
the problem by posing new ones elsewhere, while retaining the original
practico-inert demands engendered by the original praxis. Necessity then is
"the temporary alienation of this praxis in its own practical field" by
creating new relations between elements of the field. 27
Conclusion
Obscurantist tendencies have always maintained an underground
survival, even in the most rationalist of cultures. The novelty of present
times is that they have flooded to the surface and, to change the metaphor,
are militantly on the march around the globe, and more worryingly still,
they have started to be taken seriously in areas of intellectual discourse. 28
What might be termed the positivist opposition to their penetration,
represented by writers like Francis Wheen or Richard Dawkins, is
handicapped by the lack of an effective philosophical foundation and an
adequate understanding of what has generated them; in other words, they
lack a dialectical comprehension of the processes at work. 29 The strength
of Sartre's approach is that it can supply just that: it is capable of totalising
the field under consideration. Sartre's philosophy and other writings, and
their engagement with the circumstances and dilemmas of his time, hold
Quoted in Aronson, Second Critique, 115.
27 Ibid., 126.
28 For example, in 2005, The Times Higher Education Supplement (as it then was)
conducted a seemingly serious discussion on the theme of "Intelligent Design".
29 Demonstrated in the dreadful final section of Wheen's otherwise admirable
volume.