much of Sartre’s published work but, I would argue, reach their most
compelling form inThe Family Idiot.
The ambiguity of being-in-situation (the given and the taken)From its introduction inBeing and Nothingness,^52 the relation between
facticity and transcendence, the in-itself and the for-itself, has been
recognized as an “ambiguous mixture” – only after the fact can one
distinguish their respective contributions. But if that “mixture” is
ineluctably vague, the advance from an “idealist” emphasis on what
could pass for “noetic freedom”^53 toward a more “materialist” emphasis
on the force of circumstance exhibits a gradual “thickening” of Sartrean
freedom. Concrete freedom respects the growing importance of socio-
economic conditions in the Sartrean “situation.” That was true of his
“Existentialism is a Humanism” lecture, where the word “concrete”
denoted a freedom with a specific content. It was the apparent down-
playing of this “materialist’ aspect that led Sartre to resist publishing his
so-called “first” ethics because of its “idealist” leanings. As he became
increasingly sensitive to dialectical reason with, its negative and double
negative relations, his sense of the “factical” dimension of our social life
grew accordingly. History entered the picture as did “historialization,” a
concept he had already introduced when discussing Kaiser Wilhelm’s
inability to think beyond his life context but equal failure to embrace it
authentically.^54 The dialectical interrelation in theCritiqueassumed the
(^52) Though “transcendence” figures centrally inTranscendence of the Egoand “facticity” occurs
inSTE, the two terms appear initially as essential ingredients of our being-in-situation in
BN. “Situation” is discussed in some detail inWDnotebook 14 , 311 and 320.
(^53) I have been calling “noetic” freedom what Sartre sometimes calls “Stoic” freedom, denoting
an attitude adopted in the face of apparently insuperable resistance.
(^54) We have noted that Sartre uses “s’historialiser” quite often in his reflections on history in the
mid to late 1940 s. Introduced in his reflections in theWar Diariesand what he calls a possible
“internal relation of comprehension” between Germany’s English policy and the kaiser’s
congenitally withered arm (WD 301 ;F 365 ), the term recurs inBN, in “Materialism and
Revolution” (MR 227 ;Sitiii: 181 ), and frequently inWhat is Literature?(WL 80 , 147 , 148 ,
175 and 190 ). The topic was obviously on his mind in the late 1940 s because it appears often
inNotebooks for an Ethicsand received explicit treatment in his posthumously published
meditation on Heidegger’sOn the Essence of Truth, after its appearance in French translation
(written in 1948 and published in 1989 ). He continues to usehistorialisationinThe Family
Idiot(for example,FIv: 397 ;IFiii: 429 ). For a discussion of this term, its derivatives and
their role in Sartre’s philosophy of history, see mySFHRi: 19 – 22 , 82 – 83 and 269 n. 31.
Flaubert: the final triumph of the imaginary? 401