Page 321 - Contribution To Phenomenology

314 MANO DANIEL

associated in the main with the Chicago sociologists during the twenties
and thirties, had made attempts to utihze biography as a tool in the a
form of investigation that is termed "symbolic interactionism." In this
respect, Sartre was echoing a key theoretical precept in symbolic
interaction for the connection between social dynamics and historical
change; that is, an interest in the relationship between individual and
collective praxis and sociohistorical change.
What is distinctive in Sartre, however, is his attempt to utilize
biography as the litmus test of a philosophical theory (or, an existential
philosophical anthropology); that is, on its ability to explain a human life.
Sartre held that while a person cannot be the object of conceptual
knowledge, it does not follow that a person is therefore incomprehen-
sible by arguing "that each moment in a series is comprehensible on the
basis of the initial moment, though irreducible to it/'^^ Hence, his excursus
into existential psychoanalysis—the retroactive search for an original
choice, the cardinal factor, by which each human being fabricates or
fashions herself as a person, tells herself what and who she is, and
adopts a characteristic stance toward the world—in Being and Nothing-
ness, There, his brief discussion of Flaubert serves as a prelude to his
biographical tome on the French writer. Indeed, the attempt to show
that a man can be made comprehensible is the avowed aim of Sartre's
last biography. Sartre was constantly trying to find and refine tools for
understand individuals in their freedom. As Sartre put it in an interview:

The most important project in the Flaubert is to show that fundamen-
tally everything can be communicated, that . . . simply as a man like any
other, one can manage to understand another man perfectly, if one has
.
access to all the necessary elements. . . my goal, to prove that every
man is perfectly knowable as long as one uses the appropriate method
and as long as the necessary documents are available.^*

Consequently, in Search for a Method, Sartre proposes the strategy he
called the progressive-regressive method: it is progressive, or synthetic, as
it attempts "to recover the totalizing moment of enrichment which engen-

^^ Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, translated by Alan Sheridan-
Smith (London: Verso, 1982), 15.
^* Jean-Paul Sartre, "On The Idiot of the Family,"in Life/Situations, translated
by Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977), 123.