Now these aspects of Sartre’s ontology and epistemology come
together, whether comfortably or not.
Gustave is driven to know himself, but the analytic method deserts his enterprise,
and the premature passage to the universal is a veritable swindle. As counterpart to
an impossibleself-knowledge, he possesses an exceptionalunderstandingof his inner
impulses. We need hardly emphasize the abyss that separates the two. Understanding
is a silent adjunct to live experience (du ve ́cu), a familiarity of the subjective experi-
ence with itself, a way of putting components and moments in perspective but
without explanation; it is an obscure grasp of the meaning (sens) of a process beyond
its significations. In other words, it is itself lived experience (ve ́cue), and I shall call it
prereflexive(and not unreflected) because it appears as an undistanced redoubling of
internalization. Intermediary between nonthetic consciousness and reflexive thema-
tization, it is the dawning of a reflection, but when it surges up with its verbal tools it
frequently falsifies what is “understood”: other forces come into play (in Flaubert,
for example, the denial of the singular), which will divert it or compel it to replace
meaning with a network of significations, depths glimpsed through verbal and
superficial generalities.
(FIiii: 429 ;IFii: 1544 )
Concerning the psychosomatic phenomenon exemplified in Flaubert’s
“crisis” of 1844 , Sartre generalizes:
In cases of autosuggestion, “thought” has two faces: it is consciously lived as passive
activity because it is realized as active passivity in the very functions of life; and,
conversely, the conscious effort tobelieve in it, to make it a vital determination of the
person, accelerates its organic realization. I have said that it all happensunbeknownst
to the pithiatic subject; but it must be understood that this unknowingness is not
unaware, it is an intentional unknowingness that isplay-actedas the necessary
condition of the process. In the depths of this reflexive intimacy, meditative thought
conceals itselfand by the same tokensensesthat it issuffered, that without the body’s
docility it would remain imaginary, that it finds itsseriousnessand its reality in the
way the organism receives it and by conforming to it, gives it a dimension of
nonthought.^62
We are left to ask with Merleau-Ponty: what are the intentionalities of
the nonthought? Sartre is certainly trying to unravel the phenomenon of
what Merleau-Ponty called “operative intentionality” and doing so with
a concrete example. But his “dualism” remains intractable to any dia-
lectic – so it seems.
(^62) FIiii: 628 ;IFii: 1749 – 1750 reading “conformant” for comformant in English text.
Flaubert: the final triumph of the imaginary? 405