Whether or not one sees a dialectic at work inBeing and Nothingness,^4
we know that Sartre had dialectical thought on his mind when he
criticized Dialectical Materialism but favored what came to be called
“Historical Materialism,” in the closing passages of his first mature
philosophical publication,Transcendence of the Ego( 1936 – 1937 ).^5 We
witnessed dialectic come to the fore in his bookAnti-Semite and Jew,
where he distinguished analytic from synthetic reason and explicitly
ascribed a decisive role to changing the “bases and structures” of choice
to counter anti-Semitism. Dialectic figured centrally in his seminal
essay “Materialism and Revolution” in which he attacked neo-Marxist
“economism” as if the only “bases and structures” to be addressed
were economic. He had not yet worked out the precise relation between
transcendence and facticity bequeathed him by the ontology ofBN,
because he still considered “materialist dialectic” a contradiction in
terms. Recall his insistence that “It is the elucidation of the new ideas
of ‘situation’ and of ‘being-in-the-world,’ that revolutionary behavior
specifically calls for. And if [the revolutionary] escapes the jungle of
rights and duties into which the idealist tries to mislead him, it
should not be only to fall into the gorges rigorously marked out
preparing a delay in publication. I don’t give a damn, but I must admit he’s an odd sort. And
why didn’t he tell me about it a month and a half ago when Wahl was sounding you out on the
subject? If Wahl didn’t do it himself, that must mean that Paulhan had taken it in hand
himself. I suppose this Machiavelli, for whatever reason, didn’t want anything to do with that
scheme. I tell you this to sketch in the character because, so far as I’m concerned, it leaves me
cold particularly since I could still offer something on Nothingness or anything else if the
spirit moved me” (Quiet Moments in a War, letters of March 9 and 10 , 1940 ). Beauvoir
responds: “I had a talk with Colette Audry. Apparently Wahl’s maintaining theL’Imaginaire
can appear as a thesis even after its publication, and that there has been a precedent with some
other fellow who’d been called up. Perhaps that’s the explanation of the little mystery” (Letters
to Sartre, March 14 , 1940 ). Sartre seems not to have pursued this further. He remained a
Lyce ́e professor till he abandoned teaching altogether at the end of June 1944 , a month after
the premiere ofNo Exit(May 27 ), which Gabriel Marcel judged “an extraordinary success”4 (Life^214 ).
Robert Cumming and Klaus Hartmann find a dialectic at work inBNand earlier, whereas
Sartre denies it in the same volume (Schilpp 61 – 71 , 631 – 632 , and 9 – 10 , respectively). For a
more detailed argument for Sartre’s “dialectics,” see Klaus Hartmann,Sartre’s Ontology
(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966 ), 132 – 138 , as well as his characterization
of the relation inBNas a “dialectic of pairs” inSartre’s Sozialphilosophie(Berlin: De Gruyter,
51966 ),^31 ; and Gerhard Seel,Sartre’s Dialektic(Bonn: Bouvier,^1971 ). SeeSFHRi:^276 ,n.^2.
I’m not counting his juvenilia, especiallyThe Legend of Truthdiscussed above inChapter 2.
A theory of history:Search for a Method 315