ABSTRACT
I I HAVE hesitated for a long time before writing this biographical section. In fact, it will be difficult to give it any truly scientific accuracy, and we must remember the principle common to Pascalian epistemology and to any dialectical thought: that it is impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, and impossible to know the whole without knowing the parts. This means that any nondialectical approach, whether synthetic, analytic or eclectic, is foredoomed to failure and hides more than it reveals. The tllsk of the dialectical method-and, in my view, this is the only method which can be called scientific as far as the study of man is concerned-is gradually to bring out the essence of the phenomenon. This essence determines both the global structure of the phenomenon and the meaning of its parts, and is in fact nothing but the union between the structure and the parts. (For any structure is meaning, and every meaning is structure.)
This method is a difficult one to apply, but has made considerable progress both in the study of valid literary, philosophical or artistic works and in the realm of historical, social or economic facts. However, the difficulty is of a different kind when what is being studied is an individual life. In the first two cases the facts present themselves in real or potential 'forms', and thereby render the student's task easier. The reality of an individual life, on the other hand, has generally so little structure that the very notion of essence loses practically all meaning, with the result that the student's task is much more difficult.
