SARTRE AND HEGEL ON THYMOS, HISTORY AND FREEDOM

ABSTRACT: Hegel’s historical idealism traced the dialectical progression of ideas over time – from agonistic encounters between consciousnesses towards a form of universal consciousness as its final end. In his simplistic appropriation of Hegel’s thymos and historical idealism, Francis Fukuyama concludes that the Cold War spelt the end of history, with liberal democracy as the triumphant ideology. But for Jean-Paul Sartre, whose ontology of hostile inter-subjectivity has been attributed to Hegelian dialectics, has instead found Hegel’s thymos and idealism to be walled up in dogmatism because to him, our human struggle is one against material needs. As such, Marxism for Sartre is “the philosophy of our time ” (SM 30). This article sets out to examine these contrasts and nuances between Sartre, Hegel and Fukuyama in three areas: first, a reassessment of Sartre’s ontology which was commonly thought to be founded on Hegel’s thymos; second, a reconsideration of Fukuyama’s conceptualisation of democracy as the end of Hegel’s historical progress and Sartre’s critique of democracy based on a humanist version of Marxism as philosophy of our time; and finally, a reevaluation of the conceptualisation of freedom through Hegel’s universal will and Sartre’s principle of universal fraternity