From Perception to Action: Sartre's Practical Phenomenology

The European Legacy, 2016

Sartre’s early works on phenomenology reveal the complexity of his relationship to 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.

Penultimate Draft. To appear in Matthew Eshleman, Christophe Perrin and Constance Mui eds., The Sartrean Mind (New York: Routledge)

This paper examines the ideas of consciousness, intentionality and pre-reflective awareness as they feature in Sartre's Being and Nothingness. Consciousness is nothingness in the sense that no intentional object of awareness can ever be part of consciousness. Intentional directedness towards an object is a form of revealing activity in which an object is presented as being a certain way. This activity is underwritten by a mastery of the relations between environmental and bodily contingencies and the resulting consequences for appearance of the intentional object. Pre-reflective awareness is built in to intentional directedness towards the world in virtue of the fact that many, perhaps all, of the contingencies that underwrite such directedness are ones in which the conscious subject is implicated. All three of these ideas are offered both as interpretations Sartre’s view, and also as claims in their own right which, I suspect, stand a very good chance of being true.

Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 55, n. 3. 2024, pp. 201–220

The Western philosophic tradition has tended to tie the question of action to that of freedom, with the relationship structured around the free will/determinism opposition. In contrast, I show that in Being and Nothingness, Sartre offers a stringent and radical critique of these approaches. I briefly outline the conceptual parameters of Sartre's early ontology, before showing that he rejects the free will tradition because of its underlying conception of freedom and insistence that action is reflective and will-based. According to Sartre, consciousness is not a sum of parts, with one aspect (will) guiding the rest. Consciousness is a differentiated whole, divided between reflective and pre-reflective levels. Will is tied to the reflective level of consciousness and so cannot be said to be foundational given that reflectivity depends upon prereflectivity. Instead, it is an expressive effect of consciousness's spontaneous, pre-reflective, projection of itself towards a particular end and value.

Metodo. International Studies in Phenomenology and Philosophy, 2017

Being and Nothingness is extraordinarily rich and highly original. At its core, I argue, lies an insight into the aporetic character of intersubjectivity-«the scandal of the plurality of consciousnesses», as Sartre puts it-which emerges most clearly in his critique of Hegel's theory of intersubjectivity. My aim in this paper is to isolate this thesis of Sartre's and spell out his grounds for it. I argue furthermore that Hegel's conception of intersubjectivity corresponds to that of natural consciousness, such that, in rejecting Hegel, Sartre is also impugning the reality of a conception integral to ordinary thought. I suggest that Sartre's insight also holds the key to his distinctive approach to social and political theory in the Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Hubert L. Dreyfus has worked out a critique of what he calls "representationalism" and "cognitivism," one proponent of which, according to Dreyfus, is Husserl. But I think that Dreyfus misunderstands the Husserlian conception of practical intentionality and that his characterization of Husserl as a "representationalist" or as a "cognitivist" is thereby wrongheaded. In this paper I examine Dreyfus's interpretation by offering a Husserlian critique of Dreyfus's objections to Husserl, and then by outlining Husserl's account of practical intentionality and the practical lived Body. I sketch the critique and the approach of Dreyfus in three steps. First, I deal with his objections against Husserl's theory by arguing that Dreyfus understands neither the role of the reduction nor the function of background-awareness in Husserl's phenomenology. Second, I elucidate the central role that the "practical lived Body" plays in practical intentionality for Husserl, and, third, I highlight the consequences that follow from the analyses offered in the previous sections. 154 CHRISTIAN LOTZ 2 An abstract overview without concrete analysis can be found in Nam-In Lee, "Practical Intentionality and Transcendental Phenomenology as a Practical Philosophy," Husserl-Studies 1 (2000), pp. 49-63. For an overview of Husserl's phenomenology of the body see Donn Welton, The Body: Classic and Contemporary

Involuntary memories raise worries for any notion of constitution of memorial experiences and of the relationship between subjectivity, the past, and intentionality. However, this does not mean they are wholly in- tractable for an intentional analysis of consciousness. To the contrary, if one avoids conflating the will with thetic or express intentional acts, the Sartrean notion of intentionality is well-placed to account for the most salient features of involuntary memories, without resorting to appeals to non-subjective memorial processes in which any sense of implication or investment in the content of involuntary memory seems difficult to locate. To make this case, two steps are taken. The first is to map out a Sartrean phenomenology of memory, by taking into consideration how his notions of intentional con- sciousness, absence, and lack play out at the level of memory. The second is to examine how the Sartrean model of intentional consciousness appears to be well-adapted to the phenomenal traits most salient to involuntary memories. The upshot of such an examination is a provocative pheno- menological position on the nature of the resistance of the past and on doing justice to the past, that is, in regard to how memorial intentionality ought be conceived when involuntary memories contribute to the rule rather than merely being an exception in the experience of the past.

Forthcoming in The History of Mind in the 19th Century, ed. Sandra Lapointe (Routledge)

La lecture de Jean-Paul Sartre présentée ici s’attache à ce qui peut être considéré comme le noyau d’une théorie de l’action dans la pensée de Sartre, en abordant ses implications éthiques. Au cours de l’analyse, je présenterai des éléments qui permettent une perspective d’ensemble de la pensée éthique de Sartre. J’explorerai quelques passages significatifs, principalement de l’œuvre majeure de Sartre – L’Être et le Néant, son ontologie phénoménologique de 1943 – mais aussi à l’occasion d’autres œuvres à la fois antérieures et postérieures. Mon étude découle de deux considérations ontologiques et se développe le long d’un ensemble de points délimitant principalement une théorie sartrienne de l’action et finalement une éthique sartrienne. Ces deux prémisses sous-jacentes relèvent de la pensée de Sartre sur la liberté et la volonté, toutes deux définies pratiquement dès l’origine à partir de son point de vue phénoménologique. Elles forment également toutes deux le cadre des pensées critiques qui ont suivi sur la théorie de l’action et l’éthique de Sartre.