Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980), the famous French philosopher, is primarily known for his writing on existentialism. Less well known is that Sartre was deeply interested in the work of Karl Marx. And—a detail which I find fascinating—Sartre developed his love of Marx while simultaneously casting off the mental residue of a heavy mescaline trip he’d taken years earlier in Paris. In the later portion of his career, Sartre developed a highly sophisticated analysis of Marx’s work which, he hoped, would propel Marxism into the future with renewed vitality. I call it Sartre’s post-mescaline Marxism.
[Note: Sections 1, 2, and 3 explain the historical context in which Sartre used mescaline and developed his theory of Marxism. For a concise explanation of Sartre’s post-mescaline Marxism, see section 4, below. Sections 5-7 examine Sartre’s theory in closer detail.]
1. Who was Jean-Paul Sartre?
Jean-Paul Sartre, a renowned philosopher, writer, and educator, was born in 1905 in Paris. His most popular works are Nausea (1938) and Being and Nothingness (1943). Each became a landmark text in the field of existentialism, a branch of philosophy which tackles issues pertaining to the existence of the individual within the world. Although existentialism is not often thought of as particularly political in nature, much of the field was conceived during and in response to the atrocities of World War 2.
And Sartre, far from being an aloof philosopher removed from worldly issues, was deeply engaged in the politics of his day. It was during the subsequent Algerian War, a war for the independence of Algeria from French colonial control, that Sartre turned his career in an increasingly political direction. He gave his total support to the anti-colonial Algerian independence movement. And in the midst of the war, he produced one of his most dense—and arguably important—works, his Critique of Dialectical Reason. The two-part opus is almost entirely built on Marx’s ideas, and offers a new interpretation of Marxism that is simultaneously anti-racist and anti-colonial.
But Sartre’s Critique, a serious reexamination of and response to Marx, was published in two volumes, twenty-five years apart (1960 and 1985). And they were not translated into English until 1976 and 1991, respectively. Thus, Sartre’s rather vital reimagining of the Marxist potential came to the English-speaking world at a time when it was growing increasingly distant from Marxism. As a result, Sartre’s Critique has unfortunately received very little attention. But I have begun to examine it, and found that it offers something special—something worth paying attention to.
Now, you may wonder, why am I writing about all of this for a drug-themed newsletter? Well, it turns out Sartre’s life and work were uniquely shaped by his experiences with mescaline. He used plenty of other drugs, such as amphetamines, barbiturates, and copious volumes of tobacco. But as we will see, the lingering influence of his first mescaline trip deeply impacted Sartre. And when he later turned his attention toward Marxism, it was again something which occurred in relation to the impact of his experience with mescaline.
Thus, in Sartre’s Critique, we have not only a serious and thorough examination of Marx’s ideas, but one that is informed by drug use. For anyone interested in both drugs and Marx, I suspect that Sartre’s work—particularly his Critique—will hold tremendous appeal and meaning.
2. Sartre’s drug use
Remarkably, Sartre had a particularly intense trip on mescaline before he even published anything. The experience deeply impacted him and shaped his thinking for years to follow. Thus, in a sense, Sartre’s entire contribution to philosophy is arguably informed, however subtly, by his use of mescaline.
And while his first experience shook him to his core, he did eventually dabble in mescaline some more. He also used amphetamines and barbiturates, and was rarely seen without some form of tobacco in hand, lit, puffing away. Thus, Sartre’s bloodstream was permeated with psychoactive drugs. And as we will see, his use of mescaline fundamentally impacted his career in some interesting ways.
Sartre first tried mescaline in 1935 after an extended stay in Berlin. This in itself is notable because Berlin was home to a thriving bohemian subculture which both celebrated drug use and associated it with creativity and rebellion. As Mike Jay points out in Mescaline, just a few years before Sartre’s arrival, Germany had passed their 1929 Opium Law, ushering in the drug war mentality to German political culture. The use of new or rare drugs was thus seen as provocative and politically meaningful.
At the same time, there was a broader fascination with drugs in German culture which also found expression in the contemporaneous völkisch movement, a sort of mutant revival of German folk ideology and imagery that occurred largely as a reaction against modernity (and which informed Nazism).
Further, the earliest scientific literature on mescaline had been published by German scholars (such as Louis Lewin, Arthur Heffter, etc.). As such, it is rather fitting that Sartre’s first mescaline trip occurred shortly after his visit to Germany in the inter-war period. Some notable German philosophers were dabbling in drugs at the time, too, including Walter Benjamin and Ernst Jünger. But as we will see, Sartre’s post-mescaline Marxism offers a refreshing alternative to Jünger’s brand of quasi-mystical acid fascism.
3. From mescaline to Marx
Two years before he tried mescaline, Sartre had relocated to Berlin to study phenomenology, a branch of philosophy concerned with perception of reality. It is not hard to see why Sartre would have been drawn to drugs such as mescaline during what became an extended philosophic inquiry into perception. When he decided to partake, it was January 1935, and he had returned to Paris. The mescaline Sartre took was pure, and was administered via injection by his friend, a psychiatrist named Daniel Lagache, at a hospital in the city.
And even though Sartre was prepared for hallucinations, the sheer intensity of his experience still managed to shock and overwhelm him. Sartre felt he had been “submerged against his will” and became “disgusted” with the world, which he found “grotesque,” according to Jay. The visions produced by the drug, rather than appear as passing perceptions, affected him “viscerally” and “at every turn.”
Much has already been written about the ways Sartre’s mescaline trip may have influenced his early published work (Nausea, etc.). And he himself commented on it from time to time, if reluctantly.
His partner Simone de Beauvoir, who was closer to Sartre than perhaps anyone else, revealed that the experience triggered something lasting disturbance for him. For an extended period after his first mescaline trip, Sartre felt as though he was being stalked by a fleet of mysterious psychedelic crabs. They “haunted” him and lingered in his peripheral vision, casting perpetual judgment on his daily activities.
Sartre later spoke of the illusory crabs himself. He explained that he had felt as though they were “mocking” him, “reminding me that my life was absurd.” Yet they remained in his perception for so long that he became “used to them.”1
But although his first mescaline experience disturbed him, he eventually returned to the drug. In fact, Sartre told his friend and biographer John Gerassi years later that “I liked mescaline a lot.” He reminisced about tripping on the drug in the Pyrenees mountains, watching the ancient landforms “take on so many colors” and become “art," in Talking with Sartre.
Years after his crabby mescaline trip, Sartre was confronted with an even larger absurdity: the absurdity of the Cold War. Increasingly jaded with what he felt was his generation’s lack of meaningful political progress, he became depressed. Frustrated with the actions of the French president de Gaulle and his native country’s relationship with NATO, Sartre felt that politics, and the world more generally, had become absurd.2
Sartre compared this period of depression to the turmoil brought on by his first mescaline trip. But the gravity of the world he found himself in had become so heavy that the issues he had grappled with on mescaline seemed tame, even trivial, in comparison.
“I would have liked my crabs to come back,” Sartre said. But the “new depression” brought on by Cold War politics “was much worse.”3
Sartre realized that while his earlier work was meaningful, it was focused on the personal experience of life. “I had been simply protecting myself,” he recalled, “telling [myself] that the miseries of others were not my affairs.” He response to this revelation was to turn his attention toward social and political matters. He overcame his desolation “by rereading Marx” and studying communism. In the following years, his philosophy became increasingly intertwined with political theory and sociology.
It was after this political awakening that Sartre began to work on what became his Critique of Dialectical Reason. And it is in his Critique that Sartre developed a framework, simultaneously philosophy and political theory, for a renewed, revitalized Marxism. In the Critique, Sartre’s post-mescaline Marxism emerges.
4. Sartre’s post-mescaline Marxism
Sartre loved Marx’s ideas, and fundamentally agreed with nearly all of them. However, he was greatly disturbed by the direction that Stalin had taken Marxist doctrine in the Soviet Union. He was also frustrated by the array of issues that various Marxist anti-colonial movements faced in their struggles against imperial powers.
Sartre felt that Marxism had strayed from its roots, mutated and ultimately deformed by overly-rigid interpretations and cults of personality.4 Were Marx still alive, Sartre reasoned, he would be entirely open to adapting and adjusting his ideology in accordance with the march of history and ongoing development of current affairs.5
Thus, in Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre explained—in painstaking detail—his modern take on Marxism. In doing so, he hoped to offer a new, reflexive interpretation of Marx’s writings which emphasized their open-endedness. What Marx gave us, Sartre argued, was not a fixed ideology meant to be chiseled in stone and enforced via authoritarian systems. Instead, Marxism—as Sartre saw it—offers a philosophy by which social and political groups can understand history and more actively participate in its making.
Sartre’s analysis of Marxism is not concerned primarily with capitalism, but with the dialectic process. We will get into the nitty-gritty of what this means in the following section, but for now, suffice it to say that Sartre emphasized Marxism’s potential as a response to any form of political order, not just capitalism. He saw Marxism as a method by which individuals can form groups and act in ways which fundamentally change existing political systems.
A particularly unique quality of Sartre’s interpretation of Marxism is that it emphasizes the permeability and adaptability of Marx’s ideas. Sartre wanted us to “reread Marx” and reimagine his ideas in new ways, and then use that as fuel for further political change. There is no perfect solution to struggle, for Sartre. He recognized that the inherent tension of humanity is not something that can be fixed, once and for all.6 Therefore, Marxism, as Sartre saw it, is not a way to obtain the perfect State, but rather a way to materially improve political conditions.