If a driving force of Sartre’s philosophical life has been to gain
access to concrete reality, kept at a distance by the neo-Kantianism of
his Sorbonne professors, and a reason why he and Beauvoir favored
Jean Wahl’sToward the Concrete, we have witnessed Sartre’s attempt
to slake this thirst by concludingBNwith a discussion of existential
psychoanalysis. This is his method to gain insight into the defining core
of an individual’s life by uncovering his/her life-defining Choice.
As history assumed increasing importance in the late 1940 sand
1950 s, Sartre found Hegelian and Marxian dialectic a useful key to
incorporating “universal” intelligibility into the concrete life of a living
individual. This was the “singular” or “concrete” universal mentioned
occasionally in earlier works but brought to center stage inSearch for
aMethodand theCritique. But the pivot of dialectical reasoning was
the concept ofmediation: specifically the concretizing power of the
human sciences to render important generalizations comprehensible,
and of the actions of individuals to realize them in the uniqueness
of their lives.
As Sartre emphasized in the preface toThe Family Idiot, which is in
many ways the culmination of his life’s work, “The Family Idiotis the
sequel toSearch for a Method. Its subject: what, at this point in time, can
we know about a man?” What Sartre is now seeking is the current state
of the human and natural sciences that enables us to “comprehend the
comprehenson” (CDR 805 , 696 ) of any subject in question, as occurs in
the boxing match that figures so prominently in volumeiiof theCritique.
Taking aim at the Marxist economic determinists as he had done in
MR, Sartre makes the now famous remark: “Vale ́ry is a petit bourgeois
intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual
is Vale ́ry. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism is con-
tained in these two sentences” (SM 56 ). As he explains: “Marxism lacks
any hierarchy of mediations which would permit it to grasp the process
which produces the person and his product inside a class and within a
given society at a given historical moment” (SM 56 ). The Marxist,
he believes, can reach the individual only by appealing tochance. Sartre
seems to imply that his existentialist version of Marxism can achieve a
kind of “dialectical rationalism” (my term) with the help of existential
psychoanalysis; that everything becomes intelligible, though not causally
determined as analytic reason would have it, since “dialectic is not a
determinism” (SM 73 ).
326 A theory of history:Search for a Method