Abstract
This chapter analyzes when and how Sartre began his intensive reading of Husserl and reconstructs how Sartre’s critique of Husserl’s “subjectivism” must be understood against the background of a specific set of assumptions that Sartre brings to that reading.
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Notes
- 1.
La Force de l’age (Paris Gallimard 1989, 157); English translation, The Prime of Life, trans. P. Green (New York: Lancer Books, 1966), 162.
- 2.
Sartre may have discussed Husserl (and Hegel) with Ferdinand Gerassi (a student of Husserl’s) as early as 1929, the year Husserl lectured at the Sorbonne, which lectures Sartre did not attend; see John Gerassi’s Sartre: Hated Conscience of the Century, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 113.
- 3.
Sartre makes this claim in a filmed interview Sartre par lui-même (shot mostly in 1972 but not released to the public until 1976) conducted by friends and later transcribed and published. See English translation, Sartre by Himself, trans. R. Seaver (New York: Urizen, 1978), 29.
- 4.
In La Transcendance de l’égo (Library Philosophique: J Vrin, 1992 [1936]), hereafter cited TE, Sartre adopts Husserl’s early non-egological account of consciousness from Logische Untersuchungen (TE 20) and employs Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins (TE 22) to account for the temporal unity and continuity of personal identity without positing a transcendental ego, contra Husserl’s position in Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Sartre also mentions Formale und transzendentale Logik, and Méditations cartésiennes in both La Transcendance de l’égo (85) and L’Etre et le Néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), hereafter cited EN, 288. Whenever there has been a question of any problems with the French text, I have checked it with reference to the “Édition Corrigé” (1976).
With that said, all of Sartre references to these texts are rather cursory, and they could plausibly have been derived from secondary sources, e.g., Eugen Fink’s essay “Die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwärtigen Kritik.” Sartre refers to this essay twice in TE 36, 83. Fink’s essay was first published in Kant-Studien, Band XXXVIII, Heft 3–4, 319–84, and it was reprinted in Eugen Fink’s Studien zur Phänomenologie 1930–1939, Phaenomenologica 21 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), 79–156.
- 5.
Allgemeine Einfuhrung in die reine Phänomenologie, Husserliana, Gesammelte Werke, III/1, ed. Karl Schumann, (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), translated as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. Fred Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1983), henceforth cited as I followed by § number.
- 6.
See the concluding Chapter IX of L’Imagination (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1936); Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. F. Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 127, hereafter cited IP.
- 7.
Les carnets de la drôle de guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1984); War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War, trans. Q. Hoare (London: Verso, 1999), 183–84.
- 8.
See Lester Embree, “The Natural-Scientific Constitutive Phenomenological Psychology of Humans in the Earliest Sartre,” Research in Phenomenology 11 (1981): 41–60.
- 9.
Hereafter, all references will be to both L’Etre et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1971 [1943]), cited EN followed by page reference, and Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. H. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1958), cited as BN.
- 10.
Sartre’s relationship to the phenomenological reduction(s) is something of a debate. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement, vol. 2 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), 478, claims, “the phenomenological reduction is not very prominent in L’Etre et le Néant.” Joseph Catalano, Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 8, claims Sartre does not employ the reduction at all. Thomas Busch offers a much more nuanced set of considerations in “Sartre’s Use of the Reduction: Being and Nothingness Reconsidered,” Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy, (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1980), 17–30, when he persuasively argues that Sartre rejects the transcendental reduction but employs a variation of it tied up in an unelaborated concept of purifying reflection. Eric James Morelli’s “Pure Reflection and Intentional Process,” Sartre Studies International14/1 (2008): 61–77, offers a variation on Busch and argues that purifying reflection plays a central role in establishing Sartre’s ontology, but he maintains that purifying reflection should not be understood at all in terms of the transcendental reduction but rather in terms of Husserl’s notion of transcendental reflection. The details of this debate cannot be entered into here but the flatfooted claim that Sartre entirely abandoned the reduction is, at best, misleading.
- 11.
First published in La Nouvelle Revue Française 304 (January, 1939): 129–31, and reprinted in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 30–33, hereafter IFP.
- 12.
L’imagination (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1936); Imagination: A Psychological Critique, trans. F. Williams (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), hereafter cited IP. Sartre maintains the priority of phenomenology over empirical psychology and natural science in several ways. First, before experimentation, one must know “as exactly as possible what one is going to experiment upon” (IP 129). Second, without argument, Sartre follows Husserl’s thesis that only purely formal science can coherently ground material science (ibid). Third, later in EN, Sartre holds that only a first person methodology can give an adequate (non-falsifying) account of consciousness’s grasp of the world.
- 13.
Otherwise put, Husserl claims that only the theoretical natural attitude, which mistakenly interprets the material world as absolute, leads to countersense (I §55). In contrast, for Sartre, both the natural attitude and the theoretical attitude conceal an underlying incoherence. However, and this is crucial, the underlying theoretical incoherence is motivated by a deeper existential matter, namely to escape anxiety; whereas, for Husserl, it is just a theoretical confusion.
- 14.
See especially, “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalité ” (op. cit.).
- 15.
Paris: Gallimard, 1940; The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. J. Webber (London: Routledge, 2004).
- 16.
For the claim that “the concept of formal ontology was first developed by Husserl,” see Robert Poli, “Husserl’s Conception of Formal Ontology,” History and Philosophy of Logic 14/1 (1993): 1–14.
- 17.
In “Phenomenology and Metaphysics,” Metaphysics, Facticity, Interpretation: Phenomenology in the Nordic Countries (Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), ed. D. Zahavi, S. Heinämaa & H. Ruin, 5–6, Dan Zahavi argues that one can appraise Husserl’s metaphysical neutrality in Logische Untersuchungen over the way in which things really are in three ways. (1) This neutrality liberates us from a series of pseudo-metaphysical problems. (2) It prepares the way to address (appropriately posed) metaphysical questions. (3) It operates as an unnecessary and undesirable straightjacket. It should be noted that (1) and (2) are not mutually exclusive and that while Zahavi calls these “appraisals,” Husserl is more explicit in his preference for (1) and (2) than Zahavi indicates. Though these details cannot be worked out here, see Lee Nam-In’s essay “Husserl’s View of Metaphysics: The Role of Genuine Metaphysics in Phenomenological Philosophy,” Phenomenology 2005, Vol. 1: Selected Essays from Asia, ed. Cheung Chan-Fai & Yu Chung-Chi, (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2007).
- 18.
Those who argue Husserl makes robust ontological and/or metaphysical claims frequently claim that Husserl does so malgré lui. See for example, Stephen Priest who claims, “Husserl deploys an ontological, even fundamental ontological, vocabulary and may be read as a metaphysician malgré lui,” in “Husserl’s Concept of Being: from Phenomenology to Metaphysics,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 44, ed. A. O’Hear (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 209. See also M. M. van de Pitte, “Husserl: The Idealist Malgré Lui,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 37/1 (Sep., 1976): 70–78. Many of the claims attributed to Husserl “in spite of himself’ frequently turn on textual ambiguities, and, perhaps, a failure to fully appreciate Husserl’s efforts to revolutionize philosophy”.
- 19.
Steven Galt Crowell’s essay “Ontology and Transcendental Phenomenology Between Husserl and Heidegger,” Husserl in Contemporary Context, ed. Burt Hopkins (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 13–36, hereafter cited OTP, weighs in on the proximity question between Husserl and Heidegger. It clarifies complexities frequently ignored in terms of Heidegger’s proximity to Husserl, and it helped me to see that the same holds true with regards to Sartre. Crowell carefully argues that Husserl holds a more robust ontology than traditionally supposed, and, consequently, there is greater continuity between Husserl and Heidegger. This gist of Crowell’s case is that Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s Ideen I does not primarily turn on a rejection of the transcendental reduction. Rather, Heidegger’s critique concerns Husserl’s prioritization of theoretical epistemology over ontology. Unsurprisingly, Sartre (it will be seen) follows the spirit of this critical line, though not its letter. While Heidegger’s ontology remains beyond the scope of this essay, Crowell’s discussion of Husserl’s ontology will be drawn upon below.
- 20.
For a good survey of this debate’s contours, see Dan Zahavi, “The ‘absolute’ in Husserl’s transcendental project: A question of method, metaphysics or manifestation?,” Edmund Husserl 150 Years: Philosophy, Phenomenology, Sciences, ed. C. Ierna, H. Jacobs, and F. Mattens (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 281–302.
- 21.
Here are a couple of other epistemic uses. First, “absolute” refers to the exactness of formal science like pure mathematics (I, §10). Second, after performing the phenomenological reduction, we have (cognitive) access to essences, such that essences have “absolute” (epistemic/cognitive) independence from all spatio-temporal matters of fact (I, §33). In this way, essences are relative to consciousness, which Husserl’s characterizes as an absolute point of reference (I, §76).
- 22.
OTP, 36.
- 23.
See, e.g., Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Skepticism, trans. Julia Annas and Jonathan Barnes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- 24.
I read Husserl’s notion that the actual world lacks self-sufficiency “in virtue of its essence” (I, §50) to establish only this point and nothing more.
- 25.
As is well known, Kant claims that it is “a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us (from which we after all get the whole matter for our cognitions, even for our inner sense) should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof” (KrV/CPR Bxxxix note).
- 26.
See his essay “Transcendental Idealism,” Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. B. Smith and D. W. Smith (Cambridge UP, 1995), 239–322, hereafter cited TI followed by page reference. There is some ambiguity in Philipse’s discussion, see also fn. 12 below. Philipse admits Husserl recognizes that, in a factual psychological sense, consciousness depends on the world (TI, 250). For example, drinking alcohol changes our experience. Philipse, however, also claims that “the existence of the material world depends on consciousness” (TI, 256). A great deal rides on how we read “material world” and in what sense the dependence holds. Arguably the factual dependence of psychological consciousness on the actually existing material world (I, §76) entails that only the bracketed [world] depends upon on transcendental consciousness? If so, this dependence is not best described in ontological terms. Rather, the dependence should be construed broadly as epistemological. To be fair, Philipse correctly opposes the claim that “transcendental idealism is merely an epistemological doctrine, and not an ontological doctrine” (TI, 245 emphasis added). However, the question concerns just how, where and what kinds of ontological claims Husserl establishes—see below. The “independence-dependence” thesis is too strong. Even if we grant that Husserl maintains that consciousness has absolute ontological independence from the world, i.e., could exist without the world, and I think that we should not accept this, see fn. 28 below, this does not entail that the world (or the being of the world, if one prefers), could not exist without consciousness. This latter claim obviously goes too far.
- 27.
Philipse heavily weights Husserl’s annihilation of the world thought experiment in establishing the independence thesis. In I, §49 Husserl argues that we can “imagine” consciousness existing after having annihilated the world, where annihilation can be read in various ways, e.g., complete vaporization of material being or just a chaotic disordering. Philipse, at times, seems to interpret Husserl as arguing from the conceptual possibility (that consciousness could exist without a world) to the conclusion that consciousness would actually exist were the material world actually annihilated. This would be truly amazing and amplifying of our knowledge, were it true. (For amplification, see below). Philipse equivocates between the claim that consciousness “may” or ‘might’ exist without the world (TI, 256–58) and the claim that consciousness has ontological independence (TI, 244, 250). In An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1993), Rudolf Bernet et. al, 68 suggest that Husserl’s annihilation of the world thought experiment (I, §49) was “probably expounded … in a particularly misleading manner.” Probably? The conclusion to the thought experiment revolves around a (modal) ambiguity of the meaning of “can,” though clarifying this ambiguity takes some work. On the basis of imagined annihilation, Husserl says, “consequently no real being … is necessary to the being of consciousness itself” (emphasis added) and when he employs the Latin phrase, “nulla ‘re’ indiget ad existendum” (roughly, [consciousness] needs no extra-mental [thing] to exist), Husserl puts scare marks around the “re” [thing]. But if the unnecessary being is bracketed being, then it seems that what we can infer only pertains to bracketed [consciousness], i.e., transcendentally reduced consciousness. This strongly suggests that only the eidos of consciousness remains after annihilation but not any factual or actually existing consciousness. This motivates what one might call the softer, methodological reading of the annihilation thought experiment. From the essential possibility of annihilation we can conceptualize consciousness in transcendental terms, and, Husserl thinks that doing so helps to not simply grasp the non-material essence of consciousness but also that it shows how phenomenology opens up a “new” field inaccessible to empirical psychology. In §54, Husserl may be thought to tip his hand when he restates the annihilation argument conditionally. What follows from the imaginative annihilation of the world is a merely an imaginative view of what a post apocalyptic consciousness would look like. Namely, our imagined surviving consciousness would, in imaginative terms, be entirely un-empirical, e.g., it would have no body or gender. It would not even be human. In this way, we can read the thought-experiment as an aid to clarify more precisely what the phenomenological reduction achieves, namely a transcendental grasp of consciousness qua consciousness purified of all factuality. If correct, we should not read it as an argument for the ontological independence of actual consciousness from the world, pace Philipse. So understood, the modal ambiguity of “can” turns on the fact that what we see after the annihilation is not factual consciousness (can exist factually) but its eidos (can exist ideally).
- 28.
For a more sophisticated and detailed account of Husserl’s realist commitments, which entails rejecting the ontological independence-dependence thesis, see Karl Ameriks’ “Husserl’s Realism,” The Philosophical Review 86/4 (Oct., 1977): 498–519.
- 29.
For an exceptional account of post-Kantian German Idealism and this kind of concern, see Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987).
- 30.
To be fair, Husserl offers only rudimentary remarks on the details of constitution in Ideen I. Husserl spells out constitution in greater detail in Ideen II; however, Sartre did not have access to this text. So although Sartre may overreach in reading Husserl as overly Kantian, given the textual ambiguities surrounding the ontological status of noema, Sartre’s reading of Ideen I is understandable, if not plausible.
- 31.
It might be noted that pheneomenalism does not (necessarily) deny the existence of an independent world. Rather it claims that our access to the world is always mediated by something like sense data. Phenomenalists are, in other words, sometimes indirect realists but not necessarily whole hog metaphysical idealists. Now the claim that Husserl holds anything like indirect (representational) realism surely goes wrong and Sartre knows this. Husserl denies everything like (pictorial) mental representations that would need to be matched onto the world qua represented (I, §43, §52 and §90) and Sartre accepts Husserl as having made philosophical progress in abandoning this kind of embarrassing dualism (BN xlvi). So Sartre is either just confused or his worry lies elsewhere.
- 32.
As Sartre argues earlier, “we … have apprehended a being which is not subject to knowledge and which founds knowledge, a thought which is definitely not given as a representation or a signification of expressed thoughts, but which is directly apprehended such as it is and this mode of apprehension is not a phenomenon of knowledge but is the structure of being … Thus we have attained the ontological foundation of knowledge…” (lvii).
- 33.
Of course, Sartre actually says more than just that being is. He also says that, ontologically speaking, being (in the mode in-itself) is self-identical and contingent. These other claims cannot be here discussed.
- 34.
See his introduction to his edited volume, Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 3.
- 35.
For example, the necessary condition for a man’s being a bachelor is a man’s being unmarried. This necessity, however, involves no transcendental inference, since the necessary condition “being unmarried” follows merely by definition, and, therefore, it does not amplify our knowledge of bachelors.
- 36.
Sartre explicitly rejects Kant’s formalistic approach (TE 13–16; EN 38; BN 3), which asks after the conditions necessary for the possibility of any experience whatsoever. For this reason, it seems, Sartre begins with particular concrete experiences like pre-judicative question asking; see fn. 37. Saying precisely how Sartre and Kant differ goes beyond the scope of this essay.
- 37.
While Sartre begins with abstract theoretical questions (like the FQ), he emphasize practical questions (like why does my car not start) and he concentrates on pre-predicative questions, for reasons given above, i.e., pre-cognitive questions that arise before explicit predicative judgment. E.g., upon hearing a sound outside the door, I spontaneously look but see that nobody is there. On the basis of this spontaneous questioning, I may form the predicative judgment, “S. Richmond has not arrived.”
- 38.
“The Transcendental Dimension of Sartre’s Philosophy,” Reading Sartre, ed. Jonathan Webber (London: Routledge: 2010), 51.
- 39.
See for examples, Alvin Plantinga’s impressive but hasty essay, “An Existentialist’s Ethics,” The Review of Metaphysics 12/2 (Dec., 1958), 235–56 and Sarah Richmond’s eloquent “Sartre and Bergson: A Disagreement about Nothingness,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15/1 (2007): 77–95.
- 40.
Detmer, Sartre Explained (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2008), 63–64.
- 41.
A.R. Manser, “Sartre and ‘Le Néant’” Philosophy 36/137 (1961): 177–87.
- 42.
This quote comes from Flynn’s Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Sartre.
- 43.
See his essay “Metaphysical Questions in Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology,” Sartre Studies International 6/2 (2000): 52–53.
- 44.
Reading Kant in this way is not uncontroversial. Alternatively, Kant may be said transform the relationship between ontology and epistemology and set the debate upon new grounds.
- 45.
I would like to thank Lester Embree and Tom Nenon for all of their helpful suggestions and also for their work putting such a fine collection of essays together. I would also like to thank a blind referee for critical remarks. While the revisions motivated by these critical remarks will not be fully satisfying, hopefully they have improved the essay.
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Eshleman, M.C. (2013). Jean-Paul Sartre and Phenomenological Ontology. In: Embree, L., Nenon, T. (eds) Husserl’s Ideen. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 66. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5213-9_20
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