by the materialist” (“Materialism and Revolution” 253 ). In effect,
Sartre’s version of the “third way” between eastern communism
and western capitalism is the political expression of a fundamental
ontological and epistemic divide. As we have come to expect, this
distinction sustains a moral dimension that Sartre’s dialectical method
is keen to enable and defend. Though his second ethic is called
“dialectical” because of its explicit use of the social ontology of the
Critique, his initial “ethics of authenticity,” written in 1947 – 1948 and
posthumously published asNotebooks for an Ethics, makes frequent
appeal to dialectical relations as well.^6
Before turning to his two major texts that develop the organics of his
historical dialectic, let me mention two other publications that prepare
the way forSearch for a Methodand theCritique: “Self-consciousness
and Self-knowledge,” a lecture Sartre presented to the French Philo-
sophical Society on June 2 , 1947 ; and, as a counter-position, Merleau-
Ponty’s chapter, “Sartre and Ultra-Bolshevism,” in hisAdventures of the
Dialecticof June 1955.
(^6) Especially the “master/slave” thesis of the Hegelian-Marxism dialectics that formed the core
of Kojeve’s influential reading of thePhenomenology(among the numerous references to this theme, seeNE 73 – 74 , 384 – 388 ). Sartre’s working definition of “dialectic” in theNotebooks reads thus: The synthetic unity of a totality spread out over time. In an atemporal totality, in effect, since the whole governs the secondary structures, no secondary structure is intelligible without its complementary structure. The sole fact, therefore, of positing (determining) one of these structures calls for the other and the total intelligibility turns out to be the whole. Spread out over time, this conception means that every form that appears necessitates, if it is to be intelligible or if it is to be, the complementary form and that these two, once they appear, unite in the totality that theywere. (NE456–457) But in the case of a strike, for example, which he sees as a subjective/objective phenomenon, “I can never close the circle.” Because of the plurality of agents and intentions among the strikers as well as their “objectification” (unification) in the eyes of the bosses, we have two dialectics (among the strikers as individuals and between them and their objectification in “The Strike”). Anticipating a prime category in theCritique, Sartre describes the former as nominalist, “for there can be a nominalist dialectic”(NE 457 , emphasis added) and the latter as realist. But if I try to complete the circle in a synthesis of these two “dialectics,” he warns, “in both cases the dialectic isbroken off. There is a dialectic up to a certain point, a break, an irrational leap into another dimension of being, a new dialectic, and a new leap” (NE 458 ). Sartre says the History is dialectical, the surpassing of the dialectic, and the interference between the dialectic and its surpassing. Reserving a place for individual agency and moral responsibility in the whole, we saw that Sartre speaks of “a dialectic with holes in itune dialectique atrous”(NE 449 ). We may call this a properly “existential dialectic.”
316 A theory of history:Search for a Method