JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Sartre in the world11Sartre fell into unconsciousness on 13th April 1980 and died at 9.00 pmon the 15th in Broussais hospital. He had arterial blockages which affectedthe functioning of his lungs and kidneys. Tens of thousands filled the streets,following the funeral cortege to Montparnasse cemetery on the 19th.Sartre’s worksSartre’s oeuvre oscillates between fact and fiction and ends as a synthesisof the two. His juvenalia are literary; already at thirteen years of age he waspenning a novel about Goetz von Berlichingen. Five years later his ‘L’Angedu Morbide’ and ‘Jesus la Chouette’ appear in La Revue Sans Titre in 1923.It is just over a decade later, on his return from a formative visit to the FrenchInstitute at Berlin, that he began work on the novel that would be La Nausée(Nausea). The 1933–4 period in Germany was spent learningphenomenology, and in Sartre’s first serious publications we can see himsituating himself partly within and partly outside that philosophy.La Transcendance de l’Ego (The Transcendence of the Ego) appeared in1937 as a long paper in the 1936/7 volume of Recherches Philosophiques,a distinguished journal of academic philosophy. Sartre attacks Husserl’sthesis that there exists an irreducibly subjective source of one’s ownconsciousness called the ‘transcendental ego’: an inner self that is acondition for the possibility of a person’s experience. Sartre argues that thepostulation of the transcendental ego is phenomenologically illegitimate.Phenomenology describes only what appears to consciousness. Notranscendental ego appears to consciousness, so no consistentphenomenologist can maintain the existence of the transcendental ego.(The difference between Sartre and Husserl here is in some ways analogousto that between Hume and Descartes on the self.)When Sartre was a philosophy undergraduate at the École NormaleSupérieure he wrote his final year dissertation on the philosophy andpsychology of the imagination: ‘L’Image dans la vie psychologique’ (‘TheImage in Psychological Life’). On his return from Berlin he rewrote this asthe 1936 book L’Imagination. It reads mainly as a survey of metaphysicaland psychological theories, though its final chapter entails a partial breakwith Husserl on the epoché, or methodological reduction of the world to itsappearance, on intentionality, or the ‘aboutness’ of all consciousness, andon the mental image, which Sartre treats as an act not a psychic entity.Sartre’s other book on the imagination, L’Imaginaire: PsychologiePhénoménologique de l’Imagination (The Imaginary) (1940), takes up thistheme. Rather like Wittgenstein and Ryle, Sartre argues that a mental imageis not a private picture, a non-physical psychological item that may be