ABSTRACT
This final chapter will be brief, in contrast to Sartre’s last major work with which it deals. But the philosophical content of L’Idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot’), while far from insignificant, is not in proportion to its bulk. The book does not, like the Critique of Dialectical Reason, offer a hypothetical world, which might be this one-it offers, in this world, a hypothetical person, who may be Flaubert. Sartre of course believes that it is Flaubert, although he does not insist as he did in the Critique on apodictic certainty; on the one hand he would like the Idiot ‘to be read as a novel’, on the other he ‘would like it to be read with the idea in mind that it is true, that it is a true novel’ (L/S 112). The book announces itself as the sequel to Search for a Method; the question with which it opens-‘What can we know of a man, today?’—echoes Sartre’s remark in that work about the common aim of Marxism and existentialism, namely a knowledge of man:
The project of knowing such a man ‘comes down to totalizing the information we have about him’ (IF 7); nothing proves that this is possible-perhaps personality is irreducibly multiple; certainly the available information is heterogeneous and it may add up to no single result. Sartre however is confident; what he wanted to show, he said at the time of the publication of the book, was ‘that fundamentally everything can be communicated, that without being God, but simply as a man like any other, one can manage to understand another man perfectly, if one has access to all the necessary elements’ (L/S 123). But the man in question must be dead, which answers one of the questions left hanging at the end of the last chapter, at least as far as individual totalizations are concerned: ‘it is impossible to totalize a living man’ (L/S 122).
