Word: odajnyk
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...describes in The Words is any indication. But before he became a Marxist he had already expressed, in his novels, plays, and essays, an important existentialist philosophy. When he became disillusioned with Western capitalist society, instead of abandonning existentialism he tried to bring it along with him. As Walter Odajnyk describes it in Marxism and Existentialism...
...publications by Desan and Odajnyk are clear and extraordinary studies of Sartre's views on Marxism. Desan, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, has written what is largely a guide to understanding the Critique. Odajnyk instead compares the "systems" of Marxism and existentialism and deals with the weaknesses in each...
...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...
...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...