Sartre's second century

Sartre, Intentionality and Praxis 95
must now grasp the human subject in its historically determined situation
as a radically embedded spontaneity that accomplishes the rebirth of its
inherited world in its own self-projection, an embedded spontaneity whose
"objectification" must be understood as its substantial "truth": "[T]he
objectified subjective must be considered as the only truth of the
subjective." 24
It is clearly beyond the scope of this chapter to treat Sartre's various
nuanced treatments of the "objectified subjective", spanning, as they do,
recently published manuscripts as well as major late works such as Search
for a Method (1960), The Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960) and the
multi-volume work on Flaubert, The Family Idiot. However, an insightful
and compelling path into Sartre's later thought is provided by an example
that Sartre himself offered in 1966, an example that responds to our
culture's almost obsessive preoccupation with language:
There was a time when thought was defined independently of language, as
something intangible and ineffable that pre-exists expression. Today
people fall into the opposite error. They would have us believe that thought
is only language, as if language itself were not spoken.
In reality, there are two levels. On the first level, language presents
itself, in effect, as an autonomous system, which reflects social unification.
Language is an element of the 'practico-inert', a sonorous substance
unified by a set of practices. The linguist takes this totality of relations as
an object of study, and he has a right to do this because it is already
constituted. This is the stage of structure, in which the totality appears as a
thing without man [...]. But this thing without man is at the same time
matter worked by man, bearing the trace of man [...]. If you admit the
existence of such a system, you must also admit that language exists only
as spoken, in other words in act. Each element of the system refers to a
whole, but this whole is dead if nobody takes it up for his own purposes,
makes it work. 25
Peter Caws writes that "the (concept of the) practico-inert strikes me as
one of the most useful additions to the conceptual repertoire of social
philosophy in the last century". 26 This may well be true. For the moment, I
will suggest that Sartre's various comments on spoken language, today
largely unappreciated, yield valuable illustrations of the meaning and
significance of the "practico-inert".
Ibid., 98.
Sartre, L'Arc, no. 30,88-89, cited in Peter Caws, "Sartrean Structuralism?", 299.
Caws, 309.