BNnow conjoined with the basic principle of existential psychoanalysis
that human reality is a totality, not a collection (see Introduction 261 ).
Of particular significance, secondly, is Sartre’s mention ofintegral man
near the end of the essay. This model of synthesizing anthropology finds
its major use in the lectures that Sartre will deliver at the Gramsci
Institute in Florence in 1965 which, along with the Cornell University
lectures, comprise what is called Sartre’s “second” or “dialectical”
ethics. Like his first ethics, this too will be published posthumously.^11
“Integral man” resembles the moral equivalent of what Sartre will soon
be calling the “singular universal” in epistemology as his Hegelian
vocabulary gains purchase. Here integral man is described as the worker
who mustmake himselfa worker in the sense of Nietzsche’s counsel:
“Become what you are.” He shows himself to be an integral man by
choosing himself simultaneously as a worker and a man, while at the
same time conferring a meaning on the “proletariat” in its present
condition by his choice of resignation or revolution (Introduction 265 ).
This model unites “authenticity” with socioeconomic “situation” to
yield a less individualist concept of the historical agent. Such a form of
dialectical reasoning or what we might call “telescoping” will reach its
apex when it addresses historical understanding in terms of what Sartre
calls “incarnation” and “enveloping totalization” in volumeii of the
Critique of Dialectical Reason.^12 And in the Flaubert study we will
discover that a person “totalizes his era to the extent that he is totalized
by it,” another way of describing the “singular universal.”^13 So this
short inaugural essay proves to be more programmatic than even Sartre
could have foreseen.
Finally and introducing a topic that will appear as “What is Litera-
ture?” in six successive issues ofLes Temps Modernes, Sartre mentions
the problem of “committed literature.” This is the antithesis of the
idea of “art for art’s sake” or of the detachment prized by analytic
thinking in general. The concept of commitment (l’engagement) was
already in Sartre’s active vocabulary, punctuatingBeing and Nothingness
for example and issuing in the claim that “there is only the viewpoint of
committed knowledge” (BN 308 ;EN 370 ). Now it enlivens his approach
(^11) See below,Chapter 10. (^12) See below,Chapter 13.
(^13) See below,Chapter 11 andThe Family Idiot(L’Idiot de la famille, 3 vols. [Paris: Gallimard,
1971 – 1988 ],iii: 426 ; hereafterIF).
IntroducingLes Temps Modernes 235