Intentionality, Consciousness, and the Ego: The Influence of Husserl’s Logical Investigations on Sartre’s Early Work

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre’s early phenomenological texts reveal the complexity of his relationship to Edmund Husserl. Deeply indebted to phenomenology’s method as well as its substance, Sartre nonetheless confronted Husserl’s transcendental turn from Ideas onward. Although numerous studies have focused on Sartre’s points of contention with Husserl, drawing attention to his departure from Husserlian phenomenology, scholars have rarely examined the way in which Sartre engaged and responded to the early Husserl, particularly to his discussions of intentionality, consciousness, and self in Logical Investigations. This essay focuses on Sartre’s critical response to Logical Investigations, arguing that Husserl’s understanding of these three notions shapes and informs Sartre’s own approach to them in The Transcendence of the Ego (1936–37), “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology” (1939), and Being and Nothingness (1943). By carefully reading Sartre side by side with Husserl, this essay articulates the ways in which Sartre allowed himself to think along with, and not against, Husserl.

Notes

1. Most studies examine specific points of conflict or disagreement between Sartre and Husserl. For instance, their different understanding of the nature of selfhood, otherness, memory, and imagination. Dealing with these disagreements, scholars either try to rehabilitate Husserl’s position and defend it from Sartre’s criticism, or develop Sartre’s critique. Examples of the former approach are Beata Stawarska, “Memory and Subjectivity: Sartre in Dialogue with Husserl,” Sartre Studies International 8 (2002): 94–111; Beata Stawarska, “Defining Imagination: Sartre between Husserl and Janet,” Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences 4 (2005): 133–53. The latter approach is taken by Alfred Schuetz in “Sartre’s Theory of the Alter-Ego,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 9 (1948): 181–99; and Dan Zahavi, “Intersubjectivity in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,” Alter 10 (2002): 265–81.

2. Beata Stawarska, “Sartre and Husserl’s Ideen: Phenomenology and Imagination,” in Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts, ed. Steven Churchill and Jack Reynolds (Durham, NC: Acuman, 2013), 12.

3. Jean-Paul Sartre, War Diaries, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 183.

4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 317.

5. Stawarska, “Sartre and Husserl’s Ideen,” 13.

6. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1, trans. John Niemeyer Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2001), 4; hereafter cited in the text.

7. Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), 106.

8. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick express a similar position in their introduction to The Transcendence of the Ego. They focus on “what is under attack by referring to the philosophy of Husserl... to suggest how this disagreement with Husserl seems to have facilitated the transition from phenomenology to the existentialist doctrines of L’Etre et le Neant.” Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 12.

9. Stawarska, “Sartre and Husserl’s Ideen,” 17–18.

10. Sartre, War Diaries, 183.

11. Stawarska, “Sartre and Husserl’s Ideen,” 17.

12. Stawarska, “Sartre and Husserl’s Ideen,” 18.

13. For a comprehensive account of the itinerary of Husserl’s thought, see Jitendra Mohanty, “The Development of Husserl’s Thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Husserl, ed. Barry Smith and David Woodruff Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 45–77.

14. In the Philosophy of Arithmetic Husserl claims that his aim is “at a psychological characterization of the phenomena on which the abstraction of that concept rests.” Edmund Husserl, Philosophy of Arithmetic, trans. Dallas Willard (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 22.

15. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 2, trans. John Niemeyer Findlay (London: Routledge, 1970), 2; hereafter cited in the text.

16. For a detailed account of the distinction between real and ideal and Husserl’s rejection of the mentalistic framework, see Lillian Alweiss, “Between Internalism and Externalism: Husserl’s Account of Intentionality,” Inquiry 52 (2009): 53–78.

17. Jean-Paul Sartre, Sartre by Himself, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Urizen Books, 1978), 26.

18. Stawarska, for instance, refers to “Sartre’s decidedly realist reading of intentionality,” in “Sartre and Husserl’s Ideen,” 21. According to her, Sartre picks up undercurrents in Husserl’s Ideas, which he then weaves into “the cloth of his own ontology” (Ibid.) As I hope to show, though Sartre certainly radicalizes Husserl’s understanding of intentionality, he is articulating a line of thinking that appears in an explicit manner in Logical Investigations, according to which the objects of consciousness are irreducible to the acts by which consciousness intends these very objects.

19. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology,” trans. Joseph Fell, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 1 (1970): 4; hereafter cited in the text.

20. This is exactly what realists think, according to Sartre: “Is not the table the actual content of my perception? Is not my perception the present state of my consciousness?” (“Intentionality,” 4).

21. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 31.

22. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 34.

23. Sartre offers an interesting reading of Kant. According to Sartre’s revisionary account, from the fact that the “I think” must be able to accompany all our representations, it does not follow that it does in fact always accompany them. Kant is asking a question of possibility says Sartre, not a question of fact.

24. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), A 106–7, 232.

25. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 492/B 520, where “the transcendental subject” is equated with “the self proper, as it exists in itself.” As a noumenal object, the transcendental self is not subject to any of the categories and cannot be said to be in space or time. At the same time, it cannot be said to be a self in any sense. Insofar as it is a condition for all experience, not just mine or yours, the transcendental ego has no particularities.

26. Edmund Husserl, 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, 1982), 261.

27. Husserl returns to this point in his Encyclopedia Britannica essay on phenomenology, where he says: “Transcendental subjectivity... is none other than again ‘I myself’... not, however, as found in the natural attitude of every-day or of positive science; i.e., apperceived as components of the objectively present world before us, both rather as subjects of conscious life, in which this world and all that is present – for ‘us’ – constitutes itself through certain apperceptions.” “‘Phenomenology’ Edmund Husserl’s Article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1927): New Complete Translation by Richard E. Palmer,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 2 (1971): 85. For an interpretation of the transcendental self as the ordinary self under a change of aspect, see David Carr, “Kant, Husserl, and the Nonempirical Ego,” The Journal of Philosophy 74 (1977): 682–90. For the alternative reading, see Herbert Spiegelberg, “Husserl’s Phenomenology and Existentialism,” The Journal of Philosophy 57 (1960): 62–74.

28. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 38.

29. Commenting on Franz Brentano’s notion of intentionality, where “every psychical phenomenon is an object of inner consciousness,” Husserl says that Brentano’s “grave misgivings... keep us from assenting to this” (Logical Investigations, 2.557). He also explicitly argues that “[H]owever we may decide the question of the existence or non-existence of phenomenal external things, we cannot doubt that the reality of each such perceived thing cannot be understood as the reality of a perceived complex of sensations in a perceiving consciousness” (2.862).

30. Husserl, Ideas, 91.

31. “By intentionality consciousness transcends itself. It unifies itself by escaping from itself.” Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 38.

32. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 38. This example is also interesting since it shows that Sartre accepts ideal entities as examples of external entities, just as Husserl does. When Sartre says that number is a “transcendent object,” he obviously does not mean that it exists in the world.

33. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 38–39.

34. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 37.

35. Husserl, Ideas, 232.

36. Husserl, Ideas, 172–73.

37. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 49.

38. Husserl, Ideas, 132.

39. Alfred Schutz, “Sheler’s Theory of Intersubjectivity and the General Thesis of the Alter Ego,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2 (1942): 342.

40. This is what Husserl calls a “phenomenological stream of consciousness” (Logical Investigations, 2.541).

41. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 45.

42. “All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something.” Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 11.

43. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 560.

44. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 44.

45. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 36.