modification, namely, what he termed “dialectical” nominalism in the
Critique. In what sense nominalism can be “dialectical” remains to be
seen. But henceforth nominalism as an ontological and an epistemo-
logical stance remained an arrow in Sartre’s quiver.
If the scientist considers his ideas certain and the philosopher takes
his to be probable, how does the solitary man regard his thoughts?
Preparing his response, Sartre distinguished ideas and things in a
manner that anticipates his basic ontological distinction between being-
for-itself and being-in-itself in Being and Nothingnessmore than it
resembles the famous Cartesian distinction between mind and matter,
thinking things and extended things. “Ideas do not resist the spirit.
[Spirit] penetrates them easily, establishes itself at their center, controls
all their avenues, inspects the terrain to the very horizon. The air is
limpid and fresh there; it fosters the gaze; and finally it easily slides from
there into other ideas that are equally open and transparent.” Things, on
the contrary, “are impenetrable. One must go around them, touch their
shell with the hand. One seldom smashes them but, when one does,
one finds a dark maze, masses of fallen rock, rubble, a frightful disorder,
humid and stale air that clouds the view.” And Sartre concludes:
“The thoughts of the [solitary] man are a combination of things and
ideas” (EPS 52 ).
The thing-like character of his thoughts leads him to reify his ideas
into impersonal universals that draw him into the abstractions of the
scientist. But their idea-like quality draws him within, to the domain of
spontaneous thought, with its transparency and easy communication
with other ideas. Now we are describing Descartes’ thinking and
extended things. The solitary man is satisfied with neither.
At this point we encounter the event, that phenomenon which
occupies the “between” and which will open the solitary man to histor-
ical experience that we saw (in a curiously “historical” argument) was
unavailable to either the scientist or the philosopher. It brings him out of
the interior domain into a dimension of the world that combines idea
and thing into a concrete intelligible individual. In a sense, Sartre will
spend the rest of his life trying to relate the universal and the concrete
in a historically grounded individual – the singular universal of his
Critique of Dialectical Reason. But while he shares the spirit of Jean
Wahl’sVers le concret(Toward the Concrete)( 1929 ), which impressed both
him and Beauvoir at that time, Sartre has yet to discover Husserlian
44 An elite education: student, author, soldier, teacher