Sartre

to Marxism will embrace the psychological phenomena in more than a
superficial, “ideological” sense. If this path is now opened by focusing on
“lived experience,” it will reveal its promise in the several “biographies”
of famous literary and other artists that Sartre will pen in the second
half of his life. Once asked by Maoist friends why he continued to
labor over his gigantic study of Gustave Flaubert, Sartre defended his
undertaking as the attempt to produce a model “socialist” biography
(seeORR 73 – 74 ).

The historical

We know that Sartre opposed the classical concept of human nature
because he saw it as ahistorical; a “myth” of bourgeois universality. The
“human condition,” on the other hand, was a more flexible concept, one
that was open to historical development according as the concrete
features of the human condition changed. We marked his proposal of
an incomplete list of such features inBN. They included my past,
my environment, my fellow man whose intentions are inscribed in
the “instrumental complexes” of my social life such as the signs in the
subway or the directions on a medicine bottle. This aspect of our
situation proclaims our “historicity” and locates our existence in a set
of relations that are both temporal and explanatory in more than a simply
narrative sense.
Sartre elaborates this dimension of our situation by appeal to a
Hegelian saying that our “essence is our past” (Das Wesen is was gewesen
ist). If “situation” is an ambiguous mix of facticity and transcendence,
of the in-itself and the for-itself, of the given and the taken, then the
temporal dimension of our facticity is precisely our biography. But as
Sartre’s individualist ontology expands, so this description does as well:
our facticity is read as our history, not merely our biography; it is “our”
story, not simply mine.
If only he can develop a social ontology that will move us beyond
a merely psychological account of the collective subject – the “we,” the
“class” – it would fit nicely into the Marxian theory of history and class
consciousness (Luka ́cs), where the “subject” of history is the proletariat.
Sartre will subscribe to such a view in theCritique, but at this vintage
existentialist stage, he lacks the social ontology to warrant talking of a
collective or “class” subject in more than a purely psychological sense.

Humanisms and the political 295