Sartre combines the two terminologies in this last chapter ofSearch
for a Methodto ease our move to theCritique: “We shall define the
method of the existentialist approach as a regressive-progressive and
analytic-synthetic method. It is at the same time an enriching cross-
reference between object (which contains the whole period as hierarchized
significations) and the period (which contains the object as its
totalization)” (SM 148 ). Again, this will assume particular significance
inThe Family Idiot.
Finally, Sartre repeats a major ontological claim that will continue
to function both in theCritiqueand inThe Family Idiotwhen he insists:
These relations [among individual capitalists] are molecular becausethere are only
individuals and particular relations among them (opposition, alliance, dependence,
etc.); but they are not mechanical, becausein no caseare we dealing with the colliding
of simple inertias. Within the unity of his own enterprise, each person surpasses the
other and incorporates him as a means (and vice versa); each pair of unifying
relations is in turn surpassed by the enterprise of athird.
(SM 162 , last emphasis added)
What follows in the final pages of the book is a cavalcade of terms and
concepts that will be defined as they appear in the first volume of the
Critique. But the underlying question for bothSearch for a Methodand
theCritiqueis raised toward the end of the first volume of the latter:
“Do we now possess the materials for constructing a structural, historical
anthropology?” Several of Sartre’s contemporaries had produced struc-
tural anthropologies and others had given us historical anthropologies.
this opposition must reintegrate comprehension into Knowledge as its non-theoretical
foundation.” In other words, the foundation of anthropology is man himself, not as the
object of practical Knowledge, but as a practical organism producing Knowledge as a
moment of itspraxis”(SM 179 ). Appealing implicitly to a “truth of microphysics [that]
the experimenter is part of the experimental system” (SM 32 ,n. 9 ), Sartre summarizes the
risk and the promise of his methodological sketch:
It is necessary that the questioner understand how the questioned – that is, himself –
exists his alienation, how he surpasses it and is alienated in this very surpassing. It is
necessary that his very thought should at every instant surpass the intimate contradiction
which unites the comprehension of man-as-agent with the knowing of man-as-object and
that it forge new concepts, new determinations of Knowledge which emerge from the
existential comprehension and which regulate the movement of their contents by its
dialectical procedure.
(SM180)332 A theory of history:Search for a Method