After the Revolution
Jean-Paul Sartre's On Revolution, written in 1946 (apparently unpublished until 1964), and read in a translation published in 2021, is the best thing I have read by Sartre. For the record, I have read Being and Nothingness, several of his essays, and both read and attended his play, No Exit. I am neither a Sartre scholar, nor a stranger.
From Being and Nothingness I learned defiance in the face of intimidating choices. His amicus brief published in defense of Jean Genet was magnanimous, since there was absolutely no advantage in it for Sartre, and a prime example of what Sartre calls "gratuitous gesture." We may be confident that, had he been an American during the McCarthy-era Communist witch hunts, he would have been an eloquent defender of civil liberties.
A source of frustration with Sartre is his ipso facto reasoning. Improvising, now, on what I take as typical Sartre style, consider “the rebel demands freedom because he conceives freedom and as such he is already free in his mind; he is free to be free.” It's tail-chasing at its finest.
In On Revulution, Sartre addresses the materialist philosophy of Communism in its antagonism towards ruling-class Idealism. He confronts the materialism of Communism, but what he means by materialism, and what I mean by materialism, are two different things, or, the same thing viewed from opposite ends.
The Communist revolutionary is concerned with the material conditions of the oppressed worker's existence -his poverty, for instance. It is a call to action. What I mean by materialism is both the circumstances leading to a tumult of the State, and incidents in the individual's life that may have caused him to take direct action. History is inevitable. Actions are unavoidable.
A person accused of a crime and defending himself under trial may well have had a hard life as a child and, thus, perceives himself as the victim. Be that as it may, as far as the court is concerned, he is either guilty of the crime, or not. Motive is, of course, essential for conviction, but “a hard life,” in general, is just an excuse, and thus "material" to the trial. It is a concrete existential dilemma.
What I find helpful in the dialectical Idealism of Hegel (whom Sartre quotes), and others of his ideal-istic ilk, is the elimination of the material & the irrelevant by synthesis, towards the consummation of the essence, or Idea. It has been asserted that the revolutionary is in no need of ideals, only means and ends, and yet the revolution remains an ideal until it is consummated. And how is the synthesis attained? -by dialectic, not by confrontation.
A good deal of what Sartre says is him paraphrasing his opponent's position: "Did I hear you say...?" It forms the complement to his position: “to which I reply...” I absolutely defend my opinion that half of what Sartre says, and writes, is not his own opinion. Take, for example, what he says about the process of artistic creativity, and its history, a work-in-progress:
"The organic unity of the worker's project consists in the simultaneous emergence of an end that was not originally in the universe, which manifests itself through the disposition of means for achieving it (for the end is nothing other than the synthetic unity of all the means brought together to produce it).
What this means (to me) is that everything in an artist's life, as in history generally, contributes to the creation of a work of art (or transformation of the State). Synthesis may be compared to multiple, thin strands, braided together into a stout rope. Everything is, likewise, material (or immaterial, if you prefer). What it is not is an indictment, as if the work of art had to answer for itself. The action speaks for itself.