References
- This was first published in January, 1939, in La Nouvelle Revue Française, and republished in Situations I, Paris, Gallimard, 1947, pp. 32–35, and again as Appendix V in the 1966 critical edition of La Transcendance de L'Ego, ed. Sylvie Le Bon, Paris, Vrin, pp. 109–113 (an English translation was done by Joseph P. Fell, British Journal for Phenomenology, May, 1970). Though its date of publication, 1939, is later than the first publication of The Transcendence of the Ego, 1936, we know from Sartre's correspondence with Simone de Beauvoir (Lettres au Castor, 2 vols. Paris, Gallimard, 1983) that the ideas expressed in this essay, particularly concerning “alimentary philosophy,” were in his mind and had, in fact, been largely formulated well before 1939.
- This was first published in 1936 in Recherches Philosophiques, and has been republished several times, unchanged, the first being in 1937, Paris, Vrin, and the most important the critical edition by Sylvie Le Bon in 1966. The excellent English translation by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, with helpful notes, was published in 1957, New York, Noonday. It is this translation we will cite in this article.
- His most important early philosophical works are certainly: L'imagination, Paris, PUF, 1936 (English translation by Forrest Williams, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1979), L'Imaginaire, Paris, Gallimard, 1940 (English translation, New York, Philosophical Library, 1948 as The Psychology of the Imagination), and Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions, Paris, Hermann, 1939. The most important of these by far, and the one that most orchestrates his theory of intentionality prior to Being and Nothingness, in 1943, is L'Imaginaire. His later philosophical works take quite un-Husserlian directions.
- In her biography, Sartre, A Life, Paris, Gallimard, 1985 (English translation, New York, Random House, 1987) Anne Cohen-Solal entitles two of the crucial sections of the first chapter of her book: “A Thousand Socrates,” to be followed by the section “Just One Socrates.” The titles of these divisions are taken from the words of Sartre himself; in his War Diaries he wrote that he considered the first years of his pilosophical life, from 1921 to 1929, to be the period when he was “a thousand Socrates,” but then, all of a sudden, after discovering Husserl, he was “becoming just one Socrates.”
- In Sartre by Himself, tr. Richard Seaver, New York, Urizon, 1978, p. 30. Cited by Peter Caws, Sartre, London, Routledge, 1979, p. 59.
- See François H. Lapointe, Jean-Paul Sartre and His Critics: An International Bibliography (1938–1980), Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green State University, Ohio, 1981, ca. pp. 329 ff.
- This French translation by Gabrielle Peiffer and Emmanuel Levinas, Paris, Vrin, 1953, antedated the publication of the critical German edition and the still later English translation by quite a few years.
- First published in Paris, Alcan, 1930, subsequently republished by Vrin, 1963, and, in English translation, by the Northwestern University Press, 1974, The Theory of Intuition in Husserl's Phenomenology, tr. André Orianne
- There are two good biographies, the best by Annie Cohen-Solal, cited above, the other by Ronald Hayman, Sartre, A Biography, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1987, which treat of this period in Sartre's life brilliantly. There is another biography by John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre. Hated Conscience of His Century, University of Chicago Press, 1989, which hardly mentions it. It would be interesting to study the French-German intellectual exchanges between, let us say, 1870 and 1945; one thing is certain: they were very few in number (or depth) and the influence of German thinkers on France was much greater, especially in philosophy, than the inverse. Young philosophers in the 1930's in France, like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Aron and others, made conscious efforts to come to grips with what was happening across the Rhine. But even Sartre's attempt to live in and understand Germany during his sojourn in Berlin was accomplished almost exclusively by association with his French-speaking fellows of the French Institute, telling French jokes together, visiting the sights and nightclubs together, etc. with no lasting ties having been formed with German thinkers. When Sartre left Berlin at the end of his stay on a tour of some famous German cities with Simone de Beauvoir before returning to Le Havre, he made no apparent effort at all to visit Husserl in retirement in Freiburg, or any other philosopher. This is in striking contrast to the behavior of American philosophers, for instance, of the same period, when people like Marvin Farber, Dorion Cairns, Charles Hartshome, John Wild, and many others were spending sabbaticals and periods of study in both France and Germany. Even before that, William James had formed friendships with German philosophers like Carl Stumpf, with French thinkers like Henri Bergson, and Englishmen like Henry Sidgwick, and many others, while these Europeans would never have thought of visiting or speaking to one another at that time in history.
- The War Diaries (Les Carnets de la drole de guerre, Paris, Gallimard, 1983), tr. Quenton Hoare, New York, Pantheon, 1985, p. 184 See Cohen-Solal, op, cit., p. 92, and Hayman, op. cit., p. 107.
- Cohen-Solal, op, cit., p. 187.
- Cohen-Solal, Ibid., pp. 91, 95; Hayman, op. cit., p. 107.
- Cohen-Solal, Ibid., p. 92.
- See James M. Edie, “Expression and Metaphor,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. June. 1963.
- cf. Hayman, op. cit., p. 100.
- See: James M. Edie, Speaking and Meaning, Indiana University Press, 1976, pp. 181 ff., on Sartre's interpretation of intentionality.
- Husserl gave his first extended phenomenology of perception in Ideas I, in paragraphs 40 ff Edmund Husserl, Ideas, tr. W. R. Boyce Gibson, New York, Macmillan, 1931, pp. 128 ff.
- Aron Gurwitsch, The Field of Consciousness, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1964, passim.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, tr. Williams and Kirkpatrick, New York, Noonday, 1957, p. 60.
- Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes, New York, Philosophical Library, 1956, pp. 259–260.
- Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, p. 95.
- In the Transcendence of the Ego there are some obscurities not only because of Sartre's highly metaphorical style but because the argument frequently seems badly organized. For instance, he treats of “states” and “qualities” (what I call here, in accordance with better English philosophical usage, “dispositions”), before he speaks of “actions” (or “acts”) of consciousness. His argument was much better organized when he took up the same points later in Being and Nothingness, op. cit., pp. 162 ff. However, he maintains and repeats the major content of The Transcendence of the Ego in Being and Nothingness. There is only one point which he takes back completely: whereas in The Transcendence of the Ego he claimed that his argument was the “only possible” refutation of Husserl's “solipsism”, (p. 103), in Being and Nothingness, p. 235 he writes “Formerly I believed that I could escape solipsism by refuting Husserl's concept of the transcendental “Ego”…But actually although I am still persuaded that the hypothesis of a transcendental subject is useless and disastrous, abandoning it does not help one bit to solve the question of the existence of Others.”
- Sartre, in both Being and Nothingness and in The Transcendence of the Ego is utterly opposed to “the materialistic mythology of Freud” and, seemingly, to any theory of the unconscious. But, in The Transcendence of the Ego he expresses himself hesitantly with locutions like “even if the unconscious exists…” (p. 57), and in the section on “Existential Psychoanalysis” in Being and Nothingness (and in his later “existential psychoanalyses” of Beaudelaire, Tintoretto, Jean Genet and others) he argues that even though all human actions are “meaningful” as the expressions of a “fundamental choice,” a way-of-choosing-to-be-in-the-world, all these actions and behaviors observable on the surface level of behavior have to be “interpreted.” Their meanings and connections are not immediately available to the subject itself.
- The Transcendence of the Ego, p. 45.
- Though the treatment of the matter is just as metaphorical, and considerably less focused than Sartre's, it has sometimes been remarked that Gilbert Ryle's treatment of “The Systematic Elusiveness of the “I” in his book, the Concept of Mind, New York, Barnes and Noble, 1949, pp. 195–198, makes in its own way the same point Sartre is making in The Transcendence of the Ego. Ryle writes, for instance: “So my commentary on my performances must allways be silent about one performance, namely itself, and this performance can be the target only of another commentary”. The “I” is an “elusive” quarry, an “ultimate mystery”. Even in concentrating on the problem of the “I” the philosopher can never “catch more than the flying coat-tails of that which he was pursuing. His quarry was the hunter.” See also, James M. Edie, “Sartre as Phenomenologist and as Existential Psychoanalyst,” in Lee and Mandelbaum (edd.) Phenomenology and Existentialism, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967, pp. 149 ff.
- See the excellent presentation and evaluation of Sartre's argument in Aron Gurwitsch, “A Non-egological Conception of Conscioussness,” Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1966, pp. 287–300. Gurwitsch also reorganizes Sartre's presentation to make it more logical and effective.
- William James, Principles of Psychology, Volume I, New York, Holt, p. 342. As we know, James' Principles of Psychology had considerable influence on Husserl's thought during its formative period and, through Husserl, perhaps indirectly on Sartre. See my analysis of James’ phenomenology of the experience of the “self’ in James M. Edie, William James and Phenomenology, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1987, pp. 38–4 and passim.
- The Transcendence of the Ego, pp. 83–84.
- Ibid., p. 51.
- Ibid., p. 81.
- Ibid., p. 76.
- Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, tr. Dorion Cairns, The Hague, Nijhoff, 1960, pp.24–26
- Cartesian Meditations, op. cit. p. 26. Peter Caws (Sartre, op. cit, p. 52) says laconically: “It seems unlikely that Sartre understood this since he appears to attribute to Husserl a view of the substantiality of the ego…as a substantial inhabitant of the conscious world, which inverts Husserl's position, placing the Ego in the world rather than the world in the Ego.” The translators of The Transcendence of the Ego, Williams and Kirkpatrick, state more timidly, concerning Sartre's discussion of the relationship of the eidetic to the factual, that: “This would not appear to be orthodox Husserlian phenomenology” (p. 113). One word of caution. While Caws is certainly right to point out Sartre's lack of comprehension of the true meaning of Husserl, there is a danger in using the phrase “the world is in the ego” in any phenomenologically unsophisticated manner, or we will make Hussserl into an absolute idealist which he was not. It is not, literally speaking, true that the world is “in” consciousness. What is “in” constituting, transcendental consciousness is the “constituted sense” of the world (as well as the “constituted sense” of the ego-experiencing-the-world).
- These are more carefully and cogently and clearly arranged by Gurwitsch (op. cit. pp. 291 ff.) than by Sartre himself.
- The Transcendence of the Ego, op. cit., p. 39.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., p. 41.
- In writing these words I am still inspired and indebted, these many years later, to the magnificent lectures on the Logical Investigations given by my former professor, Georges Van Riet, at Louvain in 1956–57. At a recent symposium (a memorial to Aron Gurwitsch) Bernhard Waldenfels pointed out that Husserl maintained this view throughout his life and expressed it again in his last work, the Krisis. See: Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. David Carr, Evanston, The Northwestern University Press, 1970, pp. 109–110, note.
- Edmund Husserl, The Logical Investgations, tr. John Findlay, London, Routledge, 1970, Vol. II, p.549.
- Ibid., p. 544, note 1.
- At the most important point of Husserl's discussion of this matter, cited above (note 32) he recalls the position of Kant in a marginal notation. Cartesian Meditations, op. cit., p. 25.
- Ideas, op. cit., p. 173.
- Ibid., p. 143. See my Introduction to Gaston Berger, The Cogito in Husserl's Philosophy, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1972, pp. xxi–xxii.
- Ideas, op. cit., p. 145.
- Ibid.
- The final fact of the matter is that Husserl's theory of consciousness is just as non-egological as Sartre's; it is only more complete. In his later writings Sartre himself admitted the artificiality of his argument against Husserl and needed to admit that there was an aspect/function/attitude of the ego that had to survive the reduction; he confessed that he took an anti-Husserlian stance in The Transcendence of the Ego mainly: “because I'm argumentative by nature.” Sartre by Himself, interviews with Astruc and Contat, New York, Urizen, 1978, p. 30. See also: Peter Caws, Satre, op cit., p. 59.