Kant and Sartre on Temporality

Abstract

Notwithstanding the enormity of his intellectual debt to the German philosophical tradition, Sartre’s remarks concerning Kant are, in Being and Nothingness, more often critical than complimentary.¹ Sartre’s antipathy to the Critical philosophy is perhaps especially apparent in his discussion of temporality, where Kant is accused of failing to account either for the ‘order’ of time or for its ‘course’² Moreover, what must have seemed especially objectionable to Sartre given his pre-eminent concerns with the recognition of human freedom is that, in his view, Kant’s treatment of temporality excludes any possibility of spontaneous agency on our part, and therefore commits us to the denial of our fundamental status as autonomous agents.