Individual and Community. Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason in the Mirror of the Hungarian Reception

Dissertation's summary

Adrián Bene: Individual and Community. Jean-Paul  Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason in the Mirror of the Hungarian Reception
ABSTRACT
The aim of my dissertation is to show that the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre played a transitional role between modernity and postmodernity. I analyze the misunderstandings and ideological distortions in the reception of his oeuvre, especially in the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Pointing out the relations between ideology and philosophy I focus on the Hungarian reception, based on historical-dialectical materialism in the decades of state socialism.
My approach is a hermeneutic one: while mapping out Sartre’s philosophical context, I also reflect upon my own horizon. My interpretation is marked by the linguistic, narrative and cultural turns in humanities. The interdisciplinarity of my enterprise comes from the topic being studied which encompasses philosophy, ideology and social theory. Therefore I had to use several theoretical tools: the history of philosophy combined with ideological criticism, discourse analysis, cultural studies and reception aesthetics.
First, I place Sartre in a philosophical context, analyzing the key concepts of his thinking. The central problem of late Sartre was that of the relation between individual and community which is related to questions of alienation and estrangement. These are also the main problems of today’s society with its atomized individuals. Consequently, Sartre’s philosophical texts are worth re-reading.
After clearing the historical backgrounds of such concepts as individual, community, history and freedom in Enlightment and Modernity, I review the influence of Kierkegaard, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger on Sartre. This sheds light on the fact that Sartre’s conception of individual freedom is rooted in intersubjectivity. Thus the common interpretation of Sartre’s subjectivism as an idealism, even solipsism, could be queried. It can be claimed that this statement had no validity even in relation to the first period of Sartre’s philosophy (ended by Being and Nothingness) which was characterized by the phenomenological study of conscioussness.
After World War II Sartre emphasized the importance of situation, resposibility, and commitment in the background of individual choice and freedom. He postulated that man is conditioned (but not strictly determined) by his social, historical, and cultural context. Sartre became Marxist but retained his independence. The second period of his philosophy is embedded in the tradition of  Western Marxism which was considered heretic by the official Marxism. Sartre’s communist critique was extremely offensive, because of his philosophy of freedom and methodologic individualism. György Lukács was one of the prominent figures of the attack, and his opinion was canonized in the Hungarian reception until the 1980s. The second part of my dissertation attempts to connect discourse analysis and ideological-philosophical contextualization, and thus reveal the hidden ideological preconceptions in philosophical texts.

Keywords: philosophy, existentialism, Sartre, Lukács, Marxism, phenomenology, ideology, culture, hermeneutics, recption, canonization, discourse analysis, social theory