So long as one has not studied the structures of the future in a defined society, one necessarily runs the risk of not understanding anything whatsoever about the social.
-Sartre, Search for a Method, 97
The more I read and research, the more I weirdly gravitate towards statements that just seem to word things right, rather than towards complex and interesting ideas in general--and for reasons not unrelated to what Sartre is saying above about society. The "rightness" of such phrases--and Sartre is full of them--often has to do with a vision of something ahead which the words do not fail to grasp, but make concrete. Where they fail, they fail suggestively, with something larger they project and which makes them invaluable. So as I'm currently reading Search for a Method, before I pick up the full Critique of Dialectical Reason, and as I think this particular well-put statement gets lost in the latter--I feel that I should copy it out here.
1 comment:
To clarify, Sartre does not mean structures that we might see "in" a future. Rather the structures are the structures of the future, of futurity.
Post a Comment