JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Sartre in the world17been three: the bourgeois individualism of Descartes and Locke, the idealistphilosophy of Kant and Hegel and now Marxism. It is not possible to think‘beyond’ a philosophy unless the historical conditions of its genesis arereplaced. Hence, any putative anti-Marxist philosophy can only be a return topre-Marxist ideas according to Sartre. In Questions of Method Sartre allocatesonly a modest place for existentialism, calling it an ‘ideology’, not in theMarxist sense, but in the sense of a parasitical system living in the margin ofknowledge. Existentialism is prima facie opposed to Marxism but needs tobe dialectically incorporated into a wider Marxism, rather as Kierkegaard’sexistentialist individualism is puportedly opposed to Hegel’s ‘totalising’philosophy but ultimately subsumable by it.In the final section of Questions of Method Sartre outlines the Progressive–Regressive Method. The aim is nothing less than the total explanation of thehuman. We have to understand, according to Sartre, that humanity makeshistory and history makes humanity. Humanity fashions the world inaccordance with human ends and projects. The human-manipulated worldof history constitutes humanity in turn. It follows that the human–historyrelation is dialectical, or reciprocal. In this framework Sartre seeks to overcomethe ‘contradictions’ between existentialism and Marxism: the individual andthe social, the free and the determined, the conscious and the material, thesubjective and the objective, the actual and the historical.These problems are addressed in the complex Marxist and Hegelianvocabulary of Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre of course envisages thisbook as a synthesis of Marxism and existentialism. In it existentialism isallocated a more salient role than the modest remarks in Questions ofMethod would suggest.Sartre is also a biographer, but not a conventional biographer. Aside fromthe autobiography Les Mots (Words) (1963), there exist Baudelaire (1947),Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952) and the massive three volumestudy of Flaubert: L’Idiot de la Famille (The Family Idiot) (1971). His aim,especially in the Flaubert, is nothing less than the total explanation of onehuman being by another. Sartre’s method is the Progressive– RegressiveMethod. Why Flaubert? Because Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), realist andobjectivist author of Madame Bovary (1857) and perfecter of the short storyin Trois Contes (1877) is the inauthentic antithesis of Sartre. By repressinghis own passions and by writing with an almost scientific detachmentFlaubert writes uncommitted literature.Sartre intends the Flaubert as a ‘true novel’ that overcomes the‘contradiction’ between fact and fiction. The Progressive–Regressive Methodof Questions of Method and the Critique is deployed alongside the existentialpsychoanalysis of Being and Nothingness and Sartre’s fictional imaginationto understand the total Flaubert: psychological interiority and social exteriority,