The Horror and the Charm: Sartres Discovery and Invention of Phenomenology

Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the North American Sartre Society
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
February 1214, 1999

Christian Y. Dupont, University of Notre Dame

Note: This is a slightly edited version prepared for posting to my academia.edu site on 23 November 2013; see:

http://independent.academia.edu/ChristianDupont

For a more contextualized treatment of Sartres appropriation of Husserlian phenomenology and his contribution to
its initial reception in France, see my dissertation, Receptions of Phenomenology in French Philosophy and
Religious Thought, 1889-1939 (University of Notre Dame, Department of Theology, 1997), which may be freely
download from academia.edu site, as well as the version that has more recently been published as Phenomenology in
French Philosophy: Early Encounters, Phaenomenologica, vol. 208, series founded by H. L. Van Breda and
published under the auspices of the Husserl-Archives, Ulrich Melle, ed. (Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York,
London: Springer, 2014).

In The Prime of Life, Simone de Beauvoir relates the story of Sartres discovery of

phenomenology.1 She and Sartre were at dinner one evening with Raymond Aron at the Bec de

Gaz on Rue Montparnasse. Aron had just returned to Paris from the French Institute in Berlin,

where he had spent the last several months working on a historical thesis and studying Husserl.

Pausing for a moment and pointing to his apricot cocktail, the specialty of the house, Aron said,

You see, my dear friend, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail, and

thats philosophy! Aron later remembered it as simply a glass of beer2 (we are reminded that
phenomenology deals with appearances) but Sartres mouth water began to water: he had been

wishing for years to be able to talk about things in the way that he encountered and touched

them, and have that be philosophy.

Returning home after dinner, Sartre stepped into a bookstore and bought a copy of a

recent book by Emmanuel Levinas on the theory of intuition in Husserls phenomenology.3 Back

1
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. of La Force de lge by Peter Green (Cleveland: World,
1962), 112.
2
Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, ed. Norman MacAfee, trans. Anna Cancogni (New York: Pantheon,
1987), 90.
3
Emmanuel Levinas, La thorie de lintuition dans la phnomnologie de Husserl (Paris : Alcan, 1930; 2nd
ed. Paris: Vrin, 1963), available in English as The Theory of Intuition in Husserls Phenomenology, trans. Andr
Orianne, 2nd ed. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995).
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 2 of 13

out on the familiar sidewalk of the Boulevard St. Michel, he quickly leafed through it, not even

bothering to lance the uncut pages. Panic struck when he thought he had found passages dealing

with the notion of contingency that seemed close to his own still unpublished insights into the

phenomenon. Reading further, however, Sartre assured himself that Husserl had not usurped his

cherished preoccupation. Fascinated nonetheless with Husserls portrayal of consciousness, he

started making arrangements to succeed Aron at the French Institute in Berlin the following year.

It was the fall of 1933. Hitler had been elected chancellor some nine months earlier. Out

in the streets military parades were clamoring and books were burning. The echo of Goebbelss

radio speeches could be heard and so could threats of violence against the Jews. Yet Sartre was

oblivious to all the noise and strife, silently locked away in his room on Landhausstrasse,

plodding his way through the very foreign and very difficult German of Husserls Ideas. And

when he wasnt reading, he was writing: his factum on contingency, as he liked to refer to the

drafts of the strange novel he continually labored over, and a response to Husserl that would be

published following his return to Paris in the 1936-37 volume of Recherches philosophiques.4

The Transcendence of the Ego: Sketch of a Phenomenological Description presents a

complex meditation on the status of the ego cogito in dialogue with Husserl, Kant, Descartes,

and the French self-love moralists. Sartres central thesis, stated succinctly at the outset, is that

the ego is neither formally nor materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world. It is a
being of the world, like the ego of another.5 The essay is divided into two main parts. In the

first, Sartre critiques theories that regard the ego as a formal necessity, while in the second he

develops his own theory concerning the material constitution of the ego as an object for

consciousness. Along the way Sartre draws out some of the implications of his theory, hinting at

its potential importance for the fields of psychology and psychoanalysis, and ultimately ethics

and politics.
4
Jean-Paul Sartre, La transcendance de lEgo. Esquisse dune description phnomnologique,
Recherches philosophiques 6 (1936-1937):85-124.
5
Available in English as Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of
Consciousness, trans. with an introduction and annotations by Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1957), 31.
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 3 of 13

In the first section of the essay concerning the formal presence of the I, Sartre draws a

neat methodological distinction between the philosophies of Kant and Husserl. Kant, he explains,

tries to establish the conditions for the possibility of consciousness and conscious acts.

According to Kant, the structure I think expresses the formal unity of transcendental

consciousness in an ideal way, which is why he states that the I think must be able to

accompany all of our mental representations. Kants viewpoint and method, however, remain

speculative: he is not concerned with how empirical consciousness is actually constituted, nor is

he responsible for the error of his followers who tried to deduce the reality of the transcendental

I from the conditions of its possibility. The I think must be able to accompany all of our

mental representationsin other words it must be recognized that all of our mental acts can be

regarded as our own, as minebut this does not require that every act have this explicit

structure, or that the I think, for that matter, is responsible for the unity of my thought and my

consciousness. We can readily see how this interpretation of Kant underlies, indeed explains,

Sartres all-important distinction between reflective and pre-reflective consciousness (pre-

reflective consciousness being that consciousness to which the I think is not explicitly joined:

my reading this paper before I stop and say to myself with great wonder I am reading!).

Nevertheless, while Sartre rejects the idealist tendency to simply posit the existence of

the transcendental I on the basis of its possibility, he still believes it is possible to approach its
existence as a matter of fact. Here it is Husserl, not Kant, who leads the way, for

phenomenology is a scientific, not critical, study of consciousness.6 Its methodology is not

speculative but intuitive. Its aim is to put us in the presence of the thing and to describe it.

Through the phenomenological reduction, Husserl discovers Kants transcendental

consciousness as an absolute fact. Furthermore, the reduction shows him that this transcendental

consciousness constitutes our empirical consciousness, our consciousness in the world.7

6
Ibid., 35.
7
Ibid., 35.
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 4 of 13

Sartre accepts Husserls demonstration of the existence of transcendental consciousness

without question or comment. On the other hand, he does question Husserls claims regarding

the existence of a transcendental I or ego. Husserls descriptions of the transcendental ego

change and evolve in writings from his later periods but have their origin in the distinction

between noesis and noema in his Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology. In Husserls scheme, the

transcendental ego is essentially the totality of noetic structures that serves to unite in a logical

and ideal way the rationalized hyletic data (i.e., the noema) of objectifying or intentional acts of

empirical consciousness. It is a substructure of consciousness that each of us possesses

individually.

Sartre criticizes Husserl for introducing a superfluous third term into the discussion. In

his view, the phenomenological doctrine of intentionality, which Husserl had first articulated in

the Logical Investigations, precludes such a move. Unlike the idealists, Husserl does not need to

posit a transcendental ego structure to guarantee the unity and individuality of empirical

consciousness, for he has demonstrated that the unity of consciousness lies not in the subject but

rather in its object. Furthermore, Husserls analysis of temporal retention in his lectures on The

Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness has shown that the unity of consciousness in the

flux of time can be explained without recourse to the synthetic power of a transcendental I.

Why, then, does Husserl revert to the classic position of the transcendental ego in Ideas and
Cartesian Meditations? Sartre asks.8

At first, Sartres appears to be questioning Husserl on a relatively minor point and thus

his indictment seems benign: Husserl carelessly betrays his own phenomenological insights and

rigor in this matter by adopting a useless remnant of idealism. Yet Sartre believes this move is

fatal. The transcendental I is the death of consciousness, he charges. If it existed it would

tear consciousness from itself; it would divide consciousness; it would slide into every

consciousness like an opaque blade.9 In order to understand these dramatic allegations one must

8
Ibid., 37.
9
Ibid., 40.
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 5 of 13

recognize that for Sartre, transcendental consciousness represents an absolute spontaneity before

whose lucidity the object shows itself through its contrasting opacity. Sartre is able to map this

dualistic, essentially Cartesian, model of consciousness onto Husserls phenomenology because

he interprets the meaning of all objectivity through the latters description of a perceptual object.

Sartre refers to perceptual objects as opaque because Husserl has shown that they can only be

revealed through an infinite series of profiles and thus never completely. Likewise Husserls

insistence on the necessity of the transcendental I in his more recent works has rendered

consciousness heavy and ponderable, according to Sartre.10

Husserls theories concerning the transcendental ego not only violate his doctrine of

intentionality, they also deny the efficacy of the phenomenological reduction, Sartre charges,

reasoning as follows. Consciousness manifests itself under two essential modalities: reflected

and unreflected. Reflected consciousness is the consciousness that takes the form of I think. It

is second-order consciousness because it takes what was previously just a function of the

inherent intentionality of consciousness and turns it into an object. In reflected consciousness,

the phenomenological principle that all consciousness is consciousness of something is preserved

because we remain in the presence of a synthesis of two consciousnesses, one of which is

consciousness of the other.11 Consciousness itself, however, is unreflected according to Sartre;

it is pure, intentional subjectivity. Even when the I think is effected, the reflecting
consciousness does not take itself as an object. The reflecting consciousness remains unreflected.

10
Ibid., 42 (emphasis Sartres). Although Sartre does not document his interpretation of Husserl, it is not
hard to bring to mind passages that support his reading. In 57 of Ideas for example, Husserl points out that even
after the phenomenological reduction has been performed, every cogitatio still takes on the explicit form cogito in
reflection. Hence he concludes, the pure Ego appears to be necessary in principle, and as that which remains
absolutely self-identical in all real and possible changes of experience (Gibson translation p. 172; emphasis
Husserls). Casting the same thought in more subjective terms in the first of his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl
writes, By phenomenological epoch I reduce my natural human Ego and my psychic lifethe realm of my
psychological self-experienceto my transcendental-phenomenological Ego, the realm of transcendental-
phenomenological self-experience (11; Cairns translation p. 26; emphasis Husserls). Husserl thus makes a
distinction between the transcendental ego and the empirical ego, and he further distinguishes the transcendental ego
from transcendental or pure consciousness itself, whose being is absolute (cf. Ideas, 50). Nevertheless, he does
little to clarify the relation of the transcendental ego to pure consciousness, although it seems that the former would
depend upon the latter in some way, but not vice versa.
11
Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 44, emphasis Sartres.
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 6 of 13

To be sure, it has a certain consciousness or awareness of itself, but not as an object. The I in

the I think is no less and no more than a transcendent product of reflected consciousness, Sartre

concludes, and all transcendence must fall under the epoch.12

While Sartres arguments are meant to purify the practice of phenomenology, his own

attempt to provide an account of the constitution of the material ego in the second part of his

essay proves equally unsatisfying from a philosophical perspective and does no better at

avoiding the introduction of a third term. Taking for his point of departure his assertion that

the ego is a transcendent object with respect to consciousness, Sartre reasons that the ego may be

viewed, phenomenologically speaking, as an intentional unitybut only to reflected

consciousness, and then only as a noematic correlate of a reflective intention.13 The I think

that emerges is thus a me. What is more, the ego stands in intentional relation to other objects

and other egos in the world. In this regard, the structure of the I think reveals the ego as a

transcendent pole of synthetic unity,14 and this, it seems, is the meaning of the ego as an I for

Sartre. He states quite plainly, in fact, that the I [je] and the me [moi] are but two aspects

constituting the ideal and indirect (noematic) unity of the infinite series of our reflected

consciousnesses.15 The I, he goes on to explain, is the ego as the unity of actions, while the

me is the ego as the unity of states and optionally of qualities.

States appear to reflected consciousness as transcendent objects of concrete intuition.

Sartre takes hatred as an example. If I hate Peter, then I can apprehend my hatred for him in

reflection. Yet, the feeling of repugnance that arises upon my reflection is not itself the hatred.

The hatred appears through the experience of repugnance, but is not limited to it, for it appears

as having already been there before the act of reflection. Hatred is therefore not of consciousness,

but a transcendent object for consciousness. To describe the peculiar passive identity of hatred

and other similar psychical objects, Sartre employs the term state. Actions, like states, are

12
Ibid., 51, emphasis Sartres.
13
Ibid., 60.
14
Ibid., 61.
15
Ibid., 60.
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 7 of 13

transcendent objects of reflected consciousness that stand as concrete unities in the stream of

consciousness. Actions may appear in the world of things, such as driving a car, or as psychical

events such as doubting. Yet, because in either case the action may be apprehended by reflected

consciousness, it must be conceived as transcendent, not immanent to consciousness. Qualities,

finally, are intermediaries between states and actions. Once we have experienced hatred toward

many different people, for example, we unify these diverse states into a psychic disposition

which Sartre calls a quality. Qualities stand in a relation of actualization with respect to states

and actions; in other words, they exist as potencies. Their existence is real, however, and as such

qualities are transcendent to consciousness, just like the states or actions which they may

spontaneously actualize under the influence of various factors.

According to Sartre, the ego is directly the unity of states and actions, and indirectly and

passively the unity of its qualities. As a complex unity, the ego is not reducible to any one of its

states or actions; rather, it is transcendent to all of them. And yet, Sartre is quick to point out, the

ego is not an abstract X whose mission is only to unify, but the infinite totality of states and

of actions.16 In other words, the ego is not to be mistaken for a purely formal presence nor for a

transcendental ego. The ego is the infinite contraction of the material unities it supports. It is,

in the language of Hegel, whom Sartre approximates with his language of totality, a concrete

universal.
Yet, how exactly is the ego related to its states, qualities and actions? Sartre contends

that, The ego is the creator of its states and sustains its qualities in existence by a sort of

preserving spontaneity.17 The spontaneity of the ego, however, must not be confused with the

spontaneity of unreflected consciousness. Being an object, the ego is passive; it cannot therefore

be a genuine spontaneity, for if it were, then it would be what it produces. Still, it seduces us

with metaphysical illusions. Sartre gives the classic statement of surprise as an example: Me

16
Ibid., 74.
17
Ibid., 78.
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 8 of 13

[Moi], I [je] could have done that!18 On the other hand, the ego is always surpassed by its

productions. Its states and actions, although incapable of existing by themselves, nevertheless

exhibit a certain independence with respect to the ego. Consequently, Sartre refers to the

spontaneity of the ego as unintelligible,19 or as a pseudo-spontaneity.20 This is the

spontaneity described by Bergson in his Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience, he

remarks, which he took for freedom, without realizing that he was describing an object rather

than a consciousness, and that union posited is perfectly irrational because the producer is

passive with respect to the created thing.21 Elsewhere Sartre describes the irrational spontaneity

of the ego and its paradoxical union to its states, qualities, and actions as magical,22 as a

poetic production,23 and even as a creation ex nihilo.24

Enchanting? Yes. Philosophically persuasive? Hardly. Sartre criticizes Husserl for falling

back on the idealist notion of a transcendental ego to unify the experiences of the empirical ego.

Yet he eliminates this third layer of consciousness only to reintroduce it under the mysterious

guise of pseudo-spontaneitysomething between the genuine spontaneity of absolute

consciousness and the absolute passivity of non-egological substances. The Sartrean ego would

appear to be in the world but not of it.

The theory of the ego that Sartre sketches in The Transcendence of the Ego gets played

out in his so-called factum on contingency. Indeed, the latter reads like a dramatization of the
former, a mise-en-scne of the ego cogito. Sartre would never labor harder over any manuscript,

save perhaps his monumental Flaubert. Revision upon revision, the writing and rewriting

stretched over some seven years. But in the end, success. In 1937, Gaston Gallimard, chief editor

18
Ibid., 80, my translation, emphasis Sartres.
19
Ibid., 80.
20
Ibid., 79.
21
Ibid., 80, emphasis Sartres. Cf. Henri Bergson, Essai sur les donnes immdiates de la conscience (Paris:
Presses Universitaires de France, 1889), 165-66.
22
Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 68, cf. 82.
23
Ibid., 60; Williams and Kirkpatrick, 77.
24
Ibid., 60; Williams and Kirkpatrick, 77.
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 9 of 13

of the famous publishing house that bore his name, finally accepted the novel for publication,

proposing himself the title for the work which would bring Sartre instant literary fame: Nausea.

Nausea is the fictional diary of Antoine Roquentin, an amateur historian living alone in

the provincial setting of Bouville, who conducts his daily researches in the municipal library on a

minor eighteenth-century scholar, Adhmar, the marquis de Rollebon. Roquentin represents

consciousness reduced to its bare minimuma self-portrait, in certain respects, of Sartre as a

high school instructor in Le Havre. Gradually the awareness of contingency grows on Roquentin.

At first, he experiences it as a feeling a nausea that he cannot explain. Slowly, however, the

superfluous and ultimately absurd character of his existence, of all existence, dawns on him. At

lunch one afternoon with the autodidact whom he would watch every day in the library,

Roquentin asks himself: Why are these people here? Why are they eating? Its true they dont

know they exist. I want to leave, go to some place where I will be really in my own niche, where

I will fit in . . . But my place is nowhere; I am unwanted, de trop.25

In a striking passage from Roquentins diary during his last day in Bouville, Sartre brings

together many of the phenomenological themes he develops in Transcendence of the Ego,

namely the impersonal character of absolute consciousness, the status of the ego as a

transcendent, and hence contingent, object of consciousness existing as unity of transcendent

states, actions and qualities, and the accidental irruption of the phenomenological epoch:

Lucid, immobile, deserted, consciousness is walled-up; it perpetuates itself. No one

lives there anymore. Just a little while ago someone said me, said my consciousness.
Who? Outside there were noisy streets, with familiar colors and odors. Now there
are only anonymous walls, an anonymous consciousness. This is all there is: walls,
and between the walls, a small transparency, alive and impersonal. Consciousness
exists like a tree, like a blade of grass. It dozes, it gets bored. Little fugitive
existences populate it like birds in the branches. Populate it and disappear.
Consciousness is forgotten, abandoned between these walls, under the gray sky.
And here is the meaning of its existence: that it is consciousness of being
superfluous [de trop].26

25
Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, 1964), 122.
26
Sartre, Nausea, 170, though I have adapted the translation in this case.
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 10 of 13

The description of consciousness offered in these lines and elsewhere in the novel blends Sartres

own insights into the contingent nature of existence with insights gained from his engagement

with Husserls phenomenology in The Transcendence of the Ego. The shortcomings of the

latter are redeemed in this new medium which fruitfully extends his provocative if not

philosophically persuasive theses into other disciplines. In Nausea we find a literary portrait of

the phenomenologically reduced empirical ego, the me and the devastating irruption of

absolute consciousness into its sphere. More than a literary device, however, Sartres budding

existentialism becomes a theory of the literary subject. In an oft-quoted passage from a piece he

contributed to the Nouvelle revue franaise in 1939, Sartre claims that Husserl has restored

horror and charm to things. He has reinstated the world of artists and prophets: terrifying, hostile,

dangerous, with havens of grace and love.27 To Sartre, phenomenology represents the promise

of melding philosophy with literature, thereby escaping the clutches of what he labels the

alimentary epistemology of neo-Kantian rationalism, which reduces everything to its bland

substance.

In Nausea Sartre already brings his interpretation of phenomenology to bear upon

psychological theories, but in other writings from the period he approaches the discipline more

directly. For instance, in his Sketch for a Theory of Emotions (1939) Sartre presents a

phenomenological psychology of emotions as a counterpoint to classical and psychoanalytic

theories. He is critical of psychoanalytic theories like Freuds because they depend upon the

notion of an unconsciousa notion that Sartre refuses to accept. In his view, consciousness is

always consciousness of something; it can never be consciousness of nothing or not conscious of

itself. Hence, there can be nothing like an unconscious standing behind consciousness and

determining it through a mechanism of psychic causality. As a corrective to classical theories,

which assume that consciousness of emotion is primarily a matter of reflection, Sartre introduces

his own notion of a pre-reflective consciousness that is aware of emotions unthematically, that is,

27
Jean-Paul Sartre, Une Ide fondamentale de la phnomnologie de Husserl: lintentionnalit, Nouvelle
revue franaise 52 (January 1939): 131.
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 11 of 13

without relation to intentional objects as such. According to this view, emotions can become a

way of escaping the realties that confront us; we transform the way the world appears to us

through our emotions because we cannot bear the way it presents itself. In Being and

Nothingness, Sartre will develop this emotional flight from the world into the existential notion

of bad faith.

In addition to having an impact on literature and psychology, Sartre believed that insights

derived from a phenomenological investigation of the intentional relationship between absolute

consciousness and the empirical ego could provide a philosophical foundation for an ethics and

a politics which are absolutely positive.28 This was the conclusion he reachedindeed, the

concluding linein The Transcendence of the Ego. Nevertheless, an articulated ethical theory

cannot be found in that early essay, nor others from the period. To be sure, there were indications

that a Sartrean ethics would turn about the poles of existential contingency and freedom. Sartre

had moreover revived issues raised by the self-love moralists, like La Rochefoucauld, who

pointed out that we often perform good actions toward others in order to promote our own

gooda view Sartre challenged by privileging actions that arise from the purity of unreflected

consciousness. Still, a more complete ethical theory would have to wait until Sartre was ready to

undertake the project of Being and Nothingness.

Being and Nothingness marks a turn in Sartres appreciation of the German

phenomenological movement. Previously, he had regarded it as homogeneous. Prior to Being

and Nothingness, for instance, Sartre made only occasional reference to Heidegger in his

discussions of phenomenology, and when he did so, he simply named him as another

phenomenologist.29 Yet the very title Being and Nothingness betrays an awareness of Heidegger

as a philosopher to be differentiated from Husserl and engaged in his own right (although it

would be inaccurate to view Sartres tome as a critique of Being and Time). Publically, however,

28
Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, 106.
29
Cf. Jean-Paul Sartre, Esquisse dune thorie des motions, ed. Jean Cavaills, 2nd ed. (Paris: Hermann,
1948), 8.
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 12 of 13

Sartre kept his distance from Heidegger (the two titans of existentialism met only briefly in 1953

when the latter visited Francean inconsequential event, Sartre later reported30), as he likewise

stayed away from Husserl and his school (Sartre never sought to meet the father of

phenomenology before his death in 1938 and apparently never initiated contact with his German-

speaking disciples). One reason may have been the linguistic barrier: Sartre never learned to

speak German with any fluency. Later, of course, there was the war. But more fundamentally, it

just was not his style. Sartre evidently preferred to have the influence of his most significant

philosophical mentors mediated by their texts. Like the autodidact in Nausea, he wanted to

remain in control of his learning. Phenomenology, in a way, had to become his own ideahis

own invention.

To what degree, though, was Sartres interpretation and reorientation of phenomenology

truly original? His bold attack on Husserls theories regarding the transcendental ego, his

beguiling description of the psychological ego as a thing in the world, and his provocative

assertion that the phenomenological reduction represents a spontaneous irruption of absolute

consciousness into mundane life, all stem from a dualistic and strongly polarized theory of

consciousness that remains essentially Cartesian. Thus, while we observe Sartre constantly

striving to break away from the neo-Kantian rationalism and idealism of Brunschvicg, Lalande,

and Meyerson, he never completely escapes their gravitational field. He jettisons their
transcendentalism as he did Husserls, but the fundamental Cartesian assumption that

consciousness stands in opposition to matter remains. Inasmuch as Sartre would shift the fulcrum

of the dialectic so that a greater proportion of supposedly rational thought would appear bound

to a worldly orbit, the essential tension persists. That he would go on to publish a Critique of

Dialectical Reason belies his ongoing engagement with the tradition of Descartes as mediated by

Kant and the neo-Kantians.

30
Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement. A Historical Introduction, 3rd revised and
enlarged ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 485.
 Dupont, Horror and the Charm, 13 of 13

Hence it would be an exaggeration, I believe, to claim that Sartre invented a new

species of phenomenological philosophy, his subtitling of Being and Nothingness an essay on

phenomenological ontology (essai dontologie phnomnologique) notwithstanding. Still, no

one can deny that he revived the horror and charm of philosophy at a time when philosophy in

France was becoming stifled by its academic traditions and institutions. Sartre certainly did more

to stimulate French awareness and interest in phenomenology than Bernard Groethuysen31 and

Georges Gurvitch,32 who published popularizing introductions to contemporary German

philosophy, and even Jean Hering33 and Emmanuel Levinas,34 who had studied with Husserl and

produced insightful studies responding to his philosophical principles and methodology. Yet

Sartres greatest contribution to the reception of phenomenology in France and philosophy

generally, I believe, is the vital manner in which he reconnected philosophy with literature, with

psychology, with ethics, and ultimately with politics. And he did so not by carrying these

disciplines off into the sphere of aesthetic ideals like the German Romantics, but rather by

penetrating with disturbing depth the experience of ordinary life. Discovering phenomenology

enabled Sartre to discover the human situation, and thereby gave him the power to invent, if not

a new philosophy, then a new way of living and engaging the world.

31
See Bernard Groethuysen, Introduction la pense philosophique allemande depuis Nietzsche (Paris:
Librarie Stock, Delamain & Boutelleau, 1926).
32
See Georges Gurvitch, Les Tendances actuelles de la philosophie allemande (Paris: Vrin, 1930).
33
See Jean Hering, Phnomnologie et philosophie religieuse. tude sur la thorie de la connaissance
religieuse (Paris: Alcan, 1926) and Sub specie aeterni. Rponse une critique de la philosophie de Husserl.
Revue dhistoire et de philosophie rligieuse 7 (1927): 351-64.
34
See Emmanuel Levinas, La thorie de lintuition dans la phnomnologie de Husserl (Paris: Alcan,
1930) and Sur les Iden de Husserl, Revue philosophique de la France et de ltranger 107 (1929): 230-65. See
also Fribourg, Husserl et la phnomnologie, Revue dAllemagne et des pays de langue allemande 5, no. 43
(1931): 402-14 and Martin Heidegger et lontologie, Revue philosophique de la France et de ltranger 113
(1932): 395-431.