Sartre has in mind, with its focus on life-defining choice, but now
enhanced with appeal to the unsurpassable experience of childhood and
the particular family that mediates the individual and his class. In an irenic
footnote for the benefit of skeptical Marxists, Sartre asks:
Is the general conditioning by his class...incompatible with the unsurpassable
experiences of childhood? But precisely what was this unsurpassable childhood,
if not a particular way of living the general interests of our surroundings? Nothing
is changed...It reintroduces historicity and negativity in the very way in which the
person realizes himself as a member of a well-defined social stratum.
(SM 65 ,n. 66 )
Displaying perhaps an excess of enthusiasm, he insists that “psycho-
analysis conceived as mediation, does not bring to bear any new
principle of explanation” (SM 65 n.). It does, however, provide us with
understanding.^17
Before moving to the final chapter ofSearch, let me emphasize two
claims in this chapter, one ontological and the other moral, which are of
particular relevance to theCritique. Ontologically, Sartre insists that
“there are only men and real relations between men.” He grants that
this means that a social whole such as the group “is in one sense only a
multiplicity of relations and of relations among those relations.” But
then how do we determine the type of reality and efficacy which people
our social field and which may be conveniently called the “intermundane
[Merleau-Ponty’s interworld]” (SM 74 )? Taking as an example an
anglers’ club, Sartre acknowledges that the members have a certain type
of reciprocal relation among themselves. “When we say there are only
men and real relations between men (for Merleau-Ponty I add things
also, and animals, etc.), we mean only that we must expect to find
the support of collective objects in the concrete activity of individuals.
We do not intend todenythe reality of these objects, but we claim that it
isparasitical”(SM 77 ). Still, he freely admits “the relative irreducibility
of social fields” (SM 82 ).This is a prime example of what I shall call
Sartre’s thesis of the “primacy of free organic praxis.” It has grounded his
theory of knowledge and his ethic, but it is fundamentally an ontological
(^17) On the distinction between explanation (via causes, characteristic of the natural sciences) and
understanding,Verstehen(in terms of ends, proper to the human sciences) introduced into
social philosophy by Wilhelm Dilthey and Max Weber, seeSFHRi: 16.
328 A theory of history:Search for a Method