we understand that we have actually donesomething elseand why our action has been
altered outside us, we get our first dialectical experience of necessity.
(CDRi: 222 )
To summarize his argument, he repeats: “Necessity appears in experience
when we are robbed of our action by worked matter [the practico-inert],
notin so far as it is pure materiality but in so far as it is materializedpraxis”
(CDRi: 224 ).
As he concludes bookiof theCritique, Sartre hangs his argument
on two hypotheses.The first is the methodological appeal to praxis as
comprehension: “If a situated dialecticis possible, then social conflicts,
battles, and regular conflicts, as complex events produced by the prac-
tices of reciprocal antagonism between two individuals or multiplicities,
must,in principlebe comprehensible to the third parties, who depend
on them without participating, or to observers who see them from
outside without being in any way involved.” From this point of view,
he continues, “nothing is fixed a priori: the investigation has to be
continued” (CDRi: 816 ). He proposes to do this in the progressive phase
planned for bookii. His second hypothesis makes this clear:
If History really is to be the totalization of all practical multiplicities and of all their
struggles, the complex products of the conflicts and collaborations of these very
diverse multiplicities must themselves be intelligible in their synthetic reality, that is
to say, they must be comprehensible as the synthetic products of totalitarianpraxis.
This means that history is intelligible if the different practices which can be found or
located at a given moment of the historical temporalization finally appear as partially
totalizing and as connected and merged in their very oppositions and diversities by
an intelligible totalization from which there is no appeal. It is by seeking the
conditions for the intelligibility of historical vestiges and results that we shall, for
the first time, reach the problem oftotalization without a totalizer[that is Dialectical
Reason] and of the very foundation of this totalization, that is to say, of its motive-
forces and of its non-circular direction.
(CDRi: 817 )
Thus, he concludes, “theregressivemovement of the critical investiga-
tion has demonstrated the intelligibility of practical structures and
the dialectic relation which interconnects the various forms of active
multiplicities” (CDRi: 817 ). But, he warns, we are still at the level of
synchronic totalization with our discovery of the elementary formal
structures. So we have now located thedialectical structures of a structural
346 Individuals and groups:Critique of Dialectical Reason