Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, vol. 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History.

Anderson, Thomas C.

Flynn, Thomas. Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason. Volume One: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. xvi + 340 pp. Cloth, $65.00--This thoroughly researched study of Sartre's theory of history is volume one of two designed to contrast the respective philosophies of history of Sartre and Foucault. Flynn chooses these thinkers because making sense of history is integral to each man's thought and the ontological, epistemological, and moral issues involved "arise in stark contrast throughout their works" (p. x). The "works" which he uses extensively in Sartre's case, and that is one of Flynn's most valuable contributions, are the hundreds of pages of posthumous publications, especially the Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 2 and the Notebooks for an Ethics. In Volume Two he will analyze Foucault's essays and interviews recently published in the four volume Dits et ecrits and several of his unpublished lectures at the College de France.

Part 1 undertakes a detailed analysis of Sartre's reflections on history in his Notebooks. Among the core notions discussed are the ambiguity of the historical fact, which admits of multi-interpretations and yet has an "absolute" character as grounded in being-in-itself and its universal time (dated by chronicles and measured by clocks), and Sartre's insistence that a study of history also be grounded in the "absolute" which is the individual free subject and his or her individual and social actions. Flynn provocatively claim that for Sartre the fundamental meaning/direction (sens) of history is "decided" not "discovered" (p. 70). Although we discover the raw material or content of history from the absolute events and facts of the past, we ourselves introduce the structures of rationality by which to interpret them, structures which inevitably are valuative in terms of our present free projects. In the Notebooks, Flynn shows, Sartre's ultimate moral project-ideal is the city of ends, the reign of freedom. Part 1 concludes with an illuminating parallel between Sartre's notion of committed literature and what Flynn calls his committed history, history given unity and sense by being interpreted in terms of, and directed to, that "socioethical ideal ... the mutual recognition of freedoms (fraternity) in the city of ends" (p. 96).

These themes are amplified in part 2 where Flynn discusses the theory of history found in the two volumes of the Critique. Sartre's treatment of dialectical reason with its various dimensions (comprehension, totalization, progressive-regressive method, praxis, the practico-inert, the mediating third, and so on) is presented as the core of his understanding of the kind of reason present in history. Since all this was extensively discussed in Flynn's earlier Sartre and Marxist Existentialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), I turn to his reiterated claim that Sartre holds that any sense-making project involves value commitments, and that the value/goal which provides the basis for his interpretation of history's ambiguous facts is the reign of freedom. Modern history, including the class struggle, "can" (p. 144) be explicated as a movement towards that ideal. However, Flynn asks, must history be so read? His answer, not altogether clear, seems to be that Sartre believes history must be interpreted from the perspective of liberation because one cannot "consistently" choose unfreedom (p. 146). Flynn also suggests that Sartre's moral commitment overcomes the paradox that arises from his both maintaining that we can be experimentially certain of the dialectical movement of history (and, possibly, that class struggle is history's motor) and at the same time claiming that all historical knowledge is perspectival and interpretive. Sartre's "solution" (p. 147) to that antithesis is his commitment to the moral ideal/ goal in terms of which he reads history, coupled with his insistence that that perspective always be consonant with historical facts.

In analyzing volume 2 of the Critique, Flynn poses its central question--can there be a unifying totalization of the multiple facets of history (one History) without a single totalizer? As I understand it, his ingenious answer invokes Sartre's concept of enveloping totalizations, the notion that individuals and collectives create and sustain a set of objective relations and possibilities (for example socio-economic structures) which condition and envelop them (p. 177). Sartre believes we have become "one world" through advanced communications and world markets which confer on humanity a "unity of mutual conditioning" (p. 175). That unity, that "developing [enveloping] totalization" (p. 178), allows us to speak of a single meaning/direction of human History. (I find the argument here unpersuasive since to refer to a "unity [singular) of mutual conditioning" or a "developing totalization" [singular] seems question begging.) Of course, the ultimate direction and goal of that developing totalization/unification is determined by the agents who produce it (p. 210). Part 2 concludes by applying Sartre's theory of history to his multivolume study of Flaubert.

Part 3 includes an interesting presentation of the aesthetic side of Sartre's approach. Flynn argues that Sartre considers history "as much" (p. 214) the product of creative freedom as an artwork because imaginative consciousness must interpret the relevant facts and events and comprehend their sense for both individual agents and their epoch. He also discusses the limits of Sartre's committed history. His most trenchant criticism, is that both ontologically and epistemologically Sartre is unable to determine what is discovered and constructed in any situation. Thus, in spite of his realist commitment to absolute historical events, he may still be caught in the "whirlpool of relativism" (p. 232). The volume's final chapter initiates the confrontation between Sartre, the existentialist, and Foucault, the historian of systems, to be developed in Volume Two.

In conclusion, Flynn has produced the AM lengthy study of the intelligibility of history in Sartre's works and persuasively argued that a distinct, coherent, though flawed, philosophy of history is developed there. Perhaps he makes Sartre a bit too consistent, however, by minimizing the differences between his later and earlier thought. In particular, I believe the later Sartre rather "discovers" the goal of history, the earlier Sartre "decides/creates" it. Whatever the hermeneutical difficulties, Sartre in his Rome Lecture, second Critique, and Flaubert study sees humans with needs fulfilled (not simply freedom) as history's end. Because needs seeking satisfaction are, he insists, the source of all praxis, he can reasonably infer (not just "decide") that history's trajectories tend toward that ideal. Nevertheless, Flynn's is a work of immense scholarship and insight which sets extremely high standards for all future studies of the topic.