addressing the defining issue of resolving the presumed conflict between
structure and history. As Wilhelm Dilthey dreamed of writing a
“Fourth” Critique, this one on history to complement Kant’s other
three, so Sartre is undertaking a similar task, but refined by the recent
successes of structuralist thought, an alleged enemy of narrative history,
the human subject, and dialectic in what the French call the “human
sciences” (Les Sciences Humaines).
Echoing his advice to the Philosophical Society ten years earlier,
Sartre concludes his preface toSearch for a Methodwith the following
reminder and proposal:
From Marxism, which gave it a new birth, the ideology of existence [Existentialism]
inherits two requirements which Marxism itself derives from Hegelianism: If such a
thing as a Truth can exist in anthropology, it must be a truth that hasbecome, and it
must make itself atotalization. It goes without saying that this double requirement
defines that movement of being and knowing (or of comprehension) which since
Hegel is called “dialectic.” Also, inSearch for a MethodI have taken it for granted
that such a totalization is perpetually in process as History and as historical Truth.
Starting from this fundamental postulate, I have attempted to bring to light the
internal conflicts of philosophical anthropology, and in certain cases I have been able
to outline – upon the methodological ground which I have chosen – the provisional
solutions to these difficulties.
(SMxxiv–xxxv)
In the rest of this preface, which has been expanded for the first edition
of theCritique, he distills the foregoing into two overarching questions:
“Is there a Truth of Man?” and “Is there a Dialectical reason” to
complement well-established positivist, “analytic” reason? (CDR 10 – 11 ).
“Marxism and Existentialism”Sartre takes the title of the first chapter from his essay for the Polish
journal. The comparison had been percolating in his mind at least since
“archaeologies,” Foucault proclaimed that what he was attacking was “the last bastion of
philosophical anthropology (la pense ́e anthropologique)” ( 10 ). “Anthropologism,” he warned
in what may be the moral ofThe Order of Things, “is the great internal threat to knowledge of
our day” (Order of Things 348 ). The challenge Foucault posed to the phenomenologists and
hermeneuticists is whether they can “formalize without anthropologizing” (seeOrder of
Things 324 ). Pointing to the theoretical ground of the “humanism” propounded by Hegel,
Marx and Sartre, Foucault announced: “It was Nietzsche...who burned for us, even before
we were born, the intermingled promises of the dialectic and anthropology” (Order of Things
263 ). See below,note 24.Marxism and existentialism 323