JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

60Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic WritingsThe being of Dasein is being-in-the-world. The hyphenation of thisexpression signals Heidegger’s insistence that being, in and world are notontologically separable. Much of Being and Time is taken up with thedescription of the structures of being-in-the-world. Dasein is the site, orclearing in the forest (Lichtung), where being is disclosed to itself. TheSeinsfrage is not answered in Being and Time, which remained unfinished,but in its closing chapters Heidegger suggests there is a kind of timeprimordial with regard to being: a transition between future and past thatbeing itself presupposes and is constitutive of Dasein.Sartre’s own existential phenomenology is a synthesis of Husserl’s andHeidegger’s thought. Sartre substitutes the Heideggerian structure beingin-the-worldfor the Husserlian epoché. Although Heidegger eschews apsychologistic vocabulary to engage in fundamental ontology, Sartre revivesthe Husserlian emphasis on consciousness but insists that consciousnessis necessarily embedded in the world. It cannot be usefully or coherentlyabstracted from its objects.Two extracts are reproduced below, one from Sketch For a Theory ofEmotions that is accessible, the other from Being and Nothingness which ismore demanding. In the first, Sartre distinguishes phenomenology frompsychology, especially from scientific psychology, which, he feels, cannot inprinciple explain the distinctively human. In his critique of positivism hefreely appropriates the phenomenology of Husserl and the fundamentalontology of Heidegger. Heidegger was uncomfortable with Sartre’s use ofhis thought, and in Sketch For a Theory of Emotions we can see why.Heidegger is called a ‘psychologist’ by Sartre and ‘Dasein’ is rendered‘human reality’. (The standard French translation of Sein und Zeit, L’Etre etle temps, renders ‘Dasein’ as ‘realité humaine’.)Heidegger is at pains to distance himself from the psychologism andepistemology of the Western intellectual tradition and ‘Dasein’ denotes amanner of being that is not captured by the empirical connotations of ‘humanreality’. Nevertheless, Sartre is not concerned with Heideggerian exegesisbut with developing a phenomenology through the particular case of emotion.In the first part of the extract from Being and Nothingness, called ‘ThePhenomenon’, Sartre claims phenomenology’s reduction of what exists tothe appearance of what exists is progress, because it overcomes somedualisms (or binary oppositions) constitutive of philosophical problems: