Episode Details

Practice, power and forms of life: Sartre's appropriation of Hegel and Marx

Philosopher Terry Pinkard revisits Sartre's later work, illuminating a pivotal stance in Sartre's understanding of freedom and communal action. Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, released to great fanfare in 1960, has since then receded in philosophical visibility. As Sartre's reputation is now making a comeback, it is time for a reappraisal of his later work. In Practice, Power, and Forms of Life, philosopher Terry Pinkard interprets Sartre's late work as a fundamental reworking of his earlier ideas, especially in terms of his understanding of the possibility of communal action as genuinely free, which the French philosopher had previously argued was impossible.

Pinkard reveals how Sartre was drawn back to Hegel, a move that was itself incited by Sartre's newfound interest in Marxism. Pinkard argues that Sartre constructed a novel position on freedom that has yet to be adequately taken up and analyzed within philosophy and political theory. Through Sartre, Pinkard advances an argument that contributes to the history of philosophy as well as key debates on action and freedom.

transcript

August: (00:09) Welcome to Philosophy Podcasts, where we interview leading philosophers about their recent work. Today, we're talking about the book Practice, Power and Forms of Life: Sartre's Appropriation of Hegel and Marx by Terry Pinkard, University of Chicago Press, 2022. One review from Robert Pippin says, "Pinkard has written a pathbreaking and compelling work that shows the importance of Sartre's extensive rethinking of his understanding of Hegel and Marx and the role of Heidegger's Letter on Humanism in his later thought. Key concepts such as subjectivity, agency, reciprocity, dialectic, materiality, and sociality are given original and philosophically rich interpretations, all presented with striking lucidity. Practice, Power and Forms of Life is an extraordinary tour de force, both as interpretation and as philosophy, and it should lead to a major reassessment of the later Sartre." August: (01:18) Terry Pinkard is university professor at Georgetown University. He's the author of many books, including Does History Make Sense? And Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice. Welcome. Terry Pinkard: (01:32) Oh, thank you. Well, thank you for having me. August: (01:34) I wanted to start with a quotation from Sartre, from the article Responsibility of the Writer in 1960. I'm paraphrasing here. He writes, "The writer, whether they wish it or not, is a person who gives the names of love and hate to personal relationships and gives the names of oppression or fellowship to social relationships. The writer can, of course, choose not to speak about something, but to be silent is yet to speak. Silence means something. The writer must therefore always answer the questions: What do I want to change? Why this, rather than that? Thus, we may ask the writer, why do