Sartre's second century

Literature and Philosophy in Sartre's Early Writings 37
me'taphysiques"). One example of such an implication is the problem of
the origin of consciousness:
Ontology teaches us two things: 1) if the in-itself were to found itself, it
could attempt to do so only by making itself consciousness [...];
consciousness is in fact a project of founding itself; that is, of attaining to
the dignity of the in-itself-for-itself or in-itself-as-a-self-cause. 9
Therefore, phenomenological ontology can affirm nothing categorically
about the "upsurge of the for-itself\ 10 As far as this problem is concerned,
it has the form of what Sartre calls a metaphysical hypothesis. Ontology,
writes Sartre, "will limit itself to declaring that everything takes place as if
the in-itself gave itself the modification of the for-itself. It is up to
metaphysics to form the hypotheses which will allow us to conceive this
process [...]." n
Secondly, these truths belong to a philosophical tradition referred to by
Heidegger as the "onto-theological" tradition. Ever since Baumgarten,
metaphysics has been understood as the "science which contains the
primary principles of human knowledge", 12 and has been divided into a
metaphysica specialis (the science of God, soul and world), and a
metaphysica generalis (the science of being qua being).
In Sartre's early writings, metaphysical truths do not form a welldefined
philosophical system that might pre-exist a literary work. Sartre is
not in possession of a set of rigorously demonstrated statements about
God, the soul, or being qua being. There is indeed a philosophical system
in his early writings, but it is not a metaphysical one. It is the
transcendental phenomenology sketched in Berlin in 1933-34 in The
Transcendence of the Ego and "A Fundamental Idea of Husserlian
Phenomenology: Intentionality". Sartre's metaphysics is composed of
uncertain and evolving convictions that can be expressed only by storytelling
and not by conceptualisation. If we try to summarize briefly the
very complex subject of these metaphysical convictions, we can identify
four experiences.
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 637.
9
Ibid., 641.
10
Ibid
11
Ibid., 640.
12
"Metaphysica est scientia prima cognitionis humanae principia continens"
(Baumgarten, Metaphysica, 1739, § 1).