Page 322 - Contribution To Phenomenology

BIOGRAPHY AS A CULTURAL DISCIPLINE 315

ders each moment"^' And, it is regressive, or analytic, as it must "at the
start proceed as far as is possible for us in the historical particularity of
the object."^ As Sartre envisions it, he is "inventing a personage" when
he uses hypotheses to construct a narrative that encompasses this
dialectical movement and interrelationship between the individual and his
cultural context The result is the individual who is both totalizer and
totalized. The question to be asked is who someone must have been in
order to have within his field of possibilities the possibility of doing what
he did/i
Taken together the the progressive/regressive aspects of the strategy
yield man as the universal singular who is the product of the interre-
lationship between the individual and his culture. As Sartre writes:

a man is never an individual; it would be more fitting to call him a
universal singular. Summed up and for this reason universalized by his
epoch, he in turn resumes it by reproducing himself in it as singularity.
Universal by the singular universality of human history, singular by the
universalizing singularity of his projects.'*^

Sartre was well aware that his procedures were unorthodox and
flamboyantly pronounced his last biography a "true novel," thus declar-
ing it a curious hybrid of philosophical, literary, historical and psychoan-
alytic techniques. Concerned that the reception of his project would be
greeted with hostility and increduhty, he nevertheless believed that he
would be vindicated by the methodologically rigorous techniques employed
in the study:

This is a fabrication, I confess. I have no proof that it was so. And
worse still, the absence of such proofs—^which would necessarily be
singular facts—leads us, even when we fabricate, to schematism, to
generality; my story is appropriate to infants, not to Gustave in
particular. Never mind. I wanted to follow it out for this reason alone:
the real explanation, I can imagine without the least vexation, may be
precisely the contrary of what I invent, but in any case it will have to

^ Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, translated by Hazel E. Barnes (New
York: Vintage Books, 1968), 147.
^ Ibid,, 140.
^1 cf. Ibid,, 141.
^^ Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot Vol. 1, ix.