Word: marxisms
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...with Communism. "We encounter Marxist infiltration at every step in our Christian lives," warns conservative French Novelist Michel de Saint Pierre. Liberal Catholics, by contrast, are convinced that the church must be "on the march"; they are eager to revive the worker-priests and "carry on a dialogue" with Marxism...
Odajnyk's book is less specifically about Sartre, since he has "developed" some of Sartre's arguments in comparing existentialism with Marxism. Yet it is also more original and more exciting, for it deals directly with the problem that obsessed Sartre: is there some way of reconciling commitment to individuals and to one-self with commitment to a militant party advocating radical change...
Both Desan and Odajnyk think that Sartre's attempt at reconciliation fails, although for somewhat different reasons. Odajnyk's logic is the more direct of the two: having compared a system of Marxism with a system of existentialism, he examines Sartre's "union" and concludes that Sartre has sacrificed the essential tenets of existentialism...
Desan identifies more closely with Sartre. His criticism is more sympathetic: he wishes to emphasize that although the Critique does not succeed, it is a work of great importance. In the coarsest terms, the argument of both men is that existentialism emphasizes means (the individual) while Marxism emphasizes ends (the social system). One cannot, Odajnyk argues, combine coherently these two philosophical extremes. One must accept one or the other, or choose a philosophy such as liberalism, in some form, that views life as a series of compromise between individual and society...
...Marxists: my system has the individualist appeal that yours lacks, while yours provides a blueprint for the life of action mine implies. Let us combine. The fact that Sartre's proposed union does not seem to be philosophically possible does not make it any less worth studying. For while Marxism and existentialism may be incapable of coexisting in a real society, they coexist constantly in the imaginations of young people today. Many of these people are activists. Their programs often reflect this attempt at union. If they ever succeed in gaining some social power, what was of philosophical interest becomes...