Page 323 - Contribution To Phenomenology

316 MANO DANIEL

follow the paths I have indicated and refute my explanation on the
ground I have determined.^

Now, it would be easy to dismiss this false sense of bravado as any,
even cursory, reading of the text will reveal that, at best, it is a flawed
biography. It would, however, be a serious mistake to view Sartre
"confession" as a renunciation of the biographical enterprise; as a sort of
"reductio ad absurdum." Two considerations ought to dispel this view:
First, even if Sartre's interpretation of Flaubert were inadequate, any
alternative accounts would nevertheless have to produce an equivalent
treatment of the life and work, dealing with or refuting the same issues,
and hence traverse many of the same paths that he has explored. As
such, the passage is, in effect, a disguised challenge to alternate expla-
nations. Second, if one draws a distinction between historical and
psychical reality, then the criteria for judging the reconstruction of
psychical reality cannot proceed in a manner equivalent to that of
historical veracity since there is a paucity of observable historical events.
Psychoanalytic constructions are not reducible to historically observable
events although they are constrained or fettered by them. As such, the
question of biographical veracity cannot be answered simply by the
adequacy or discovery of external facts but must also involve questions
concerning the attempt to symbolize the quality of Flaubert's subjectiv-
ity.
Douglas Collins, who defends Sartre's turn to biography, argues that:

the test of a system of ideas lies in its ability to perform in the real
world, and this ability is best revealed in its capacity to reconstruct the
life of an historical individual. A philosophical system is thus subor-
dinate in interest to the biography it generates, because in the biography
the system's success or failure is ultimately evaluated. Rather than being
the bastardization of philosophy, biography is its legitimation.'*^

Similarly, the attempt to produce a biography of a unique individual is
also to test the adequacy of the assumptions, resources and techniques
employed and deployed in the inquiry directed at the cultural world.

^^ "On the Idiot of the Family," 132.
^ Douglas Collins, Sartre as Biographer (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1980), 5.