which unites the organism with the environment and upon the deep contradiction
between the inorganic and organic orders, both of which are present in everyone.
(CDR 90 )
We have spoken of the translucidity of praxis, which would suggest that
it shares the transparency and unqualified responsibility of Sartrean
consciousness. But such is not the case. True, Sartre does say that
praxis enjoys the immediacy of prereflective consciousness and that,
like the prereflective, it is practical and engaged. Indeed, he asserts
that “althoughpraxisis self-explanatory and transparent to itself, it
is not necessarily expressible in words (CDRi: 93 ). This means that
the self-awareness ofpraxisis similarly prereflective. Given that “know-
ledge,” for Sartre is reflective, whereas that practical awareness called
“comprehension” or “understanding” is prereflective, it follows that
an agent or a group could comprehend more than it could know.
Sartre thinks that this is true for the group members and even for the
individuals dispersed in what he calls “serial” relations, such as the
television-viewing audience or the members of a crowd. We can now
appreciate Sartre’s claim in the Critique that bourgeois individuals
understoodthe significance of practices proper to their class as did those
who were excluded – even if they did not reflectively know it. Yet even
that “understanding” now seems to be qualified by the external influence
of its situation. The unblinking eye appears to be clouded by individual
history. To anticipate The Family Idiot where this epistemological
matter is best illustrated, Sartre concedes that “presence to self for each
of us possesses a rudimentary structure of praxis. Even on the level of
nonthetic consciousness, intuition is conditioned by individual history”
(FIi: 141 ). In Flaubert’s case, it is his childhood “passive constitution”
which accounts for a life of massive bad faith (passive activity) whose
epistemological manifestation is his “choice” of belief and the imaginary
over knowledge and the real.^7
The practico-inert
In his foreword to the second edition of theCritique, Fredric Jameson
speaks of Sartre’s having invented a “new concept and a new and durable
philosophical term, the so-called practico-inert, as a more precise way
(^7) See my “Praxis and Vision,” 30 , as well asChapter 15 below.
Vol. I,Theory of Practical Ensembles 339