JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Politics327or, to put it another way, I do not attribute inertia—which must constitute the realfoundation of the group (as inertia which has been transcended and preserved)—to theactive community; on the contrary, it is my praxis which, in its unificatory movementtakes responsibility for it. And the common action, which eludes me, becomes thereality of this appearance, that is to say, the practical, synthetic substance, the totalitycontrolling its parts, entelechy, life; or, at another level of perception and for othergroups, a Gestalt. We shall encounter this naive organicism both as an immediaterelation of the individual to the group and as an ideal of absolute integration. But wemust reject organicism in every form. The relation of the group, as the determinationof a collective and as a perpetual threat of relapsing into a collective, to its inertia as amultiplicity can never in any way be assimilated to the relation of the organism to theinorganic substances which compose it.But if there is no dialectical process through which the moment of the anti-dialecticcan become by itself a mediation between the multiple dialectics of the practical fieldand the constituted dialectic as common praxis, does the emergence of the groupcontain its own intelligibility? Following the same method as we have used so far, weshall now attempt to find in our investigation the characteristics and moments of aparticular process of grouping from the point of view of the purely critical aim ofdetermining its rationality. In our investigation we shall therefore have to studysuccessively the genesis of groups, and the structures of their praxis—in other words,the dialectical rationality of collective action—and, finally, the group as passion, thatis to say, in so far as it struggles in itself against the practical inertia by which it isaffected.I will begin with two preliminary observations. First, I have claimed that the inertgathering with its structure of seriality is the basic type of sociality. But I have notmeant this in a historical sense, and the term “fundamental” here does not implytemporal priority. Who could claim that collectives come before groups? No one is ina position to advance any hypothesis on this subject; or rather—despite the data ofpre-history and ethnography—no such hypothesis has any meaning. Besides, theconstant metamorphosis of gatherings into groups and of groups into gatheringswould make it quite impossible to know a priori whether a particular gathering was aprimary historical reality or whether it was the remains of a group which had beenreabsorbed by the field of passivity: in either case, only the study of earlier structuresand conditions can answer the question—if anything can. Our reason for positing thelogical anteriority of collectives is simply that according to what History teaches us,groups constitute themselves as determinations and negations of collectives. In other