mentioned explicitly. Sartre’s point is that henceforth truth is fixed and
static. The paradoxes of change and motion are marginalized as such; the
fluidity of history itself is excluded from the domain of knowledge and
truth. It is banished to the grey areas of probability and opinion.
“Historical explanation has been blocked” ( 42 ).
“Between the advent of Truth and the reign of Science,” Sartre
cautions, “there is a missing link...Truth, the mythical daughter of
commerce, engenders a very real democracy, the original constitution,
the only constitution, of which different kinds of government are only
passing forms” (Legend of the Truth 44 ). This union of Science and the
democratic spirit yields a “freedom” that is nothing other than conform-
ity to (this) Truth; in other words, the recognition of necessity.^51
Since the original publication of this tale, three fragments have sur-
faced that are considered to be either enlargements or complete revisions
of the earlier piece. Sartre and Beauvoir entitled them respectively
“Legend of the Certain,” a critique of science and of the universalist
democracy that it fosters, “Legend of the Probable,” addressing the
ideology of the elite of the city, and “Legend of the Solitary Man,”
concerned with the vagabond thinker who resists the temptations of
science and the city, to learn directly from nature. The version published
inBifurand discussed so far treats all three topics in one narrative,
concluding with the promise of an account of “the birth of the probable,
truer than the true, with its corte`ge of philosophers.” The author will
“sing the praises of this late-born son of Truth and Boredom” (Legend of
the Truth 52 ). This suggests, as Vincent de Coorebyter proposes, that the
threefold division and its titles emerged in the course of subsequent
revision. Let us examine each “Legend” briefly.
(^51) Echoing Nietzsche’s critique of Socratic abstractions and the argumentative power it
conferred on the “rich young men” who gathered around him (and other “Sophists”), Sartre
remarks: “It can be seen from the preceding that this accumulated capital was only an item of
barter, precisely because men had put all their effort into detaching their thoughts from
themselves, and because this transitory master entrenched in his arsenal of political ideas did
not command assent by virtue of his own uniqueness [Er looking into the mirror] but by
virtue of a consensus with the common herd which he had sought for and been granted”
(Legend of Truth, 44 – 45 ). On various forms of “necessity,” see the so-calledCarnet Dupuis,a
portion of which appeared inOR, 1678 – 1680 but the remainder, containing Sartre’s early
thoughts on necessity, is published inE ́tudes Sartriennesno. 8 (Paris: Universite ́Paris X,
2001 ), 13 – 21. What Sartre is describing inLegendeis “general necessity,” which is the
generalized thinking of the crowd, viz. consensus ( 13 ).
Philosophical reflections in a literary mode 39