Sartre and Marxism: An Ontological Analysis

Abstract

This paper analyzes why Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontology in Being and Nothingness necessitates its historical realization in a political and philosophical engagement with Marxism. After briefing the historical context of Sartre’s Marxist stance in the first part, the paper begins the second part by demonstrating the core of Sartrean ontology: the being-for-itself as a negation condemned to radical freedom. It then, in the third part, presents how this negative freedom becomes systematically alienated in capitalism. The alienation, under Sartre’s analysis, dialectically generates a pressure towards its own overcoming realized in Marxist praxis. The fourth part of the paper addresses possible objections from Alfred Betschart and Althusserian structuralism. In conclusion, the paper argues that Marxist revolutionary praxis represents the only coherent historical vehicle for the Sartrean realization of authenticity, for it fulfills the ontological imperative of negation by the collective destruction of the structures that alienate human freedom in capitalism. To be an authentic person in the modern epoch is, therefore, to adopt a Marxist stance.