ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the work In Problem of Method and in the Critique, Jean-Paul Sartre approached this project through a critical dialogue with Marxism. Merleau-Ponty died in the Spring of 1961, some thirteen months after the publication of Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason. In the memorial essay he wrote, Sartre claimed that it was from Merleau-Ponty he had ‘learned History’. However, by 1957, with the writing of Problem of Method, Sartre had arrived at the issues which continued to concern him until his last major project, his massive study of Flaubert. The key problem for Sartre was how to make ‘intelligible’ that movement in which individual projects and the generality of the social permeate and transform each other. He sought to demonstrate that human life brings into being a dialectic in which individual and social being constitute and re-constitute each other so that each of is what he calls a ‘universal singular’.
