The “progressive-regressive method,” adopted from the Marxist
sociologist Henri Lefebvre and introduced to bring this synthesis about,
was the topic of the final chapter ofSearch for a Method. In brief, it
begins with a phenomenological description of the object in question, say
Flaubert’s writing ofMadame Bovaryor the staging of a boxing match
on a September evening of 1939. The regressive movement proceeds
analytically from fact to the conditions of its possibility, working its way
through layers of increasingly abstract conditions (which could be called
“structures” at a certain level of abstraction). One could designate this as
the “sociological”or theMarxianphase of the process.
A certain intelligibility is achieved. One has located the individual or
the event in the context of class consciousness, for example, or the relations
and forces of production operative at that time. As Sartre remarks apropos
the simplistic use of economic determinist arguments: “Vale ́ry is a petit
bourgeois intellectual...But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is
Vale ́ry. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism,” Sartre urges
“is contained in those two sentences. Marxism lacks any hierarchy of
mediations” (SM 56 ). This is what existentialism will supply.
In many ways, the progressive-regressive method is better exemplified
by the Flaubert study than by theCritique. And one can understand, in
light of the above, why Sartre could defend his continued labor on that
project when the “Maoists” were urging him to abandon it in favor of
more politically useful work: “I consider the opus to be a socialist work
in the sense that, if I succeed, this will allow us to advance in the
understanding of men from a socialist viewpoint” (ORR 73 – 74 ). Still,
it was the Critique( 1960 ), not The Family Idiot( 1971 – 1972 ), that
produced the theoretical underpinning for the qualities that link exist-
ential politics with the events of May ’ 68.
In summary fashion, then, let us relate each of the aforementioned
eight features of the “Maoist” events of May 1968 listed above to
concepts that will be developed in theCritique:
( 1 ) Moral indignation. We have mentioned the primacy of the praxis of the free organic
individual. This is illustrated throughout the two volumes of theCritique.Atthe
base of the “practico-inert” conditioning (material heir to being-in-itself, as we said)
is the sedimentation of prior praxes – of the colonists, for example, whose attitude
and practices continue the effects of the system they have inherited.
( 2 ) Spontaneity. In what Sartre calls after Malraux an “apocalyptic moment,” the
alienated individuals spontaneously fuse into a group; group membership entails
new qualities such as power, right and duty.
310 Means and ends: political existentialism