JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

254Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsinvestigation and the foundation of all behavior an abstract, general term, libido forexample, which would be differentiated and made concrete first in complexes and thenin detailed acts of conduct, due to the action of external facts and the history of thesubject. On the contrary, it will be a choice which remains unique and which is fromthe start absolute concreteness. Details of behavior can express or particularize thischoice, but they can not make it more concrete than it already known in a self-evidentintuition. The libido or the will to power in is. That is because the choice is nothingother than the being of each human reality; this amounts to saying that a particularpartial behavior is or expresses the original choice of this human reality since forhuman reality there is no difference between existing and choosing for itself. From thisfact we understand that existential psychoanalysis does not have to proceed from thefundamental “complex,” which is exactly the choice of being, to an abstraction like thelibido which would explain it. The complex is the ultimate choice, it is the choice ofbeing and makes itself such. Bringing it into the light will reveal it each time asevidently irreducible. It follows necessarily that the libido and the will to power willappear to existential psychoanalysis neither as general characteristics common to allmankind nor as irreducibles. At most it will be possible after the investigation toestablish that they express by virtue of particular ensembles in certain subjects afundamental choice which can not be reduced to either one of them. We have seen infact that desire and sexuality in general express an original effort of the for-itself torecover its being which has become estranged through contact with the Other. The willto power also originally supposes being-for-others, the comprehension of the Other,and the choice of winning its own salvation by means of the Other. The foundation ofthis attitude must be an original choice which would make us understand the radicalidentification of being-in-itself-for-itself with being-for-others.The fact that the ultimate term of this existential inquiry must be a choice,distinguishes even better the psychoanalysis for which we have outlined the methodand principal features. It thereby abandons the supposition that the environment actsmechanically on the subject under consideration. The environment can act on thesubject only to the exact extent that he comprehends it; that is, transforms it into asituation. Hence no objective description of this environment could be of any use tous. From the start the environment conceived as a situation refers to the for-itselfwhich is choosing, just as the for-itself refers to the environment by the very fact thatthe for-itself is in the world. By renouncing all mechanical causation, we renounce atthe same time all general interpretation of the symbolization confronted. Our goalcould not be to establish empirical laws of succession, nor could we constitute a