description). Consider the following: the MT is a praxis; the MT
interiorizes a potentially dispersed multiplicity into a practical whole
(the Third “receives the power he gives and he sees the other third party
approaching him ashispower” [CDRi: 510 ]). If power is the first of many
“common qualities” of the group, it joins others such as “function, rights
and duties, structure, violence and fraternity.” The member (of this
team, in our example) “actualizes all these reciprocal relations as his
new being, his sociality” (CDRi: 510 ). As Sartre explains:
The members of the group are third parties, which means that each of them totalizes
the reciprocities of others. And the relation of one third to another has nothing to do
with alterity: since the group is the practical milieu of this relation, it must be a
human relation...which we shall callmediated reciprocity.
(CDRi: 374 , emphasis added)
In the middle of his analysis Sartre pauses to remind us that at the level
of the “constituted dialectic” (grouppraxis) we can understand “any
common praxis because we are always an organic individuality which
realizes a common individual,” since “to exist, to act, and to compre-
hend,” he explains, “are one and the same” (CDRi: 558 ). But this
establishes what he terms a “schema of universality,” namely “consti-
tuted dialectical Reason,” which “governs the practical comprehension
of a specific reality, which Sartre calls “praxis-process.”
He offers several examples of this comprehensibility, the most
striking of which are the “counter-finality” of Chinese deforestation
and Spanish attempts at hoarding gold from its South American
mines. In each instance, the reverse of what was intended occurred.
The Chinese lost land to flooding due to the resultant erosion, and
the Spanish government lost much of its wealth due to that inflation
which followed its policy of hoarding gold from its colonial mines.
We should note that these examples, read dialectically, yield important
examples of what Sartre calls “dialectical necessity” and constitute
something as close to a “proof ” of his approach as one could expect
at this stage:
Thus it is not a process which is transparent to itself in so far as it is produced in the
unity of a project, but an action which escapes from itself and diverts itself according
to laws which we know and clearly understand in so far as they effect an unbalanced
synthesis between interior and exterior. In so far as, having achieved our own goal,
Vol. I,Theory of Practical Ensembles 345