JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

Phenomenology61interior and exterior, appearance and reality, act and potential, appearanceand essence. It reduces these to a prior or more fundamental dualismbetween the finite and the infinite. An object’s being a possible object ofexperience is its capacity to disclose itself through an infinite number ofprofiles (Husserlian Abschattungen) that correspond to the infinity of possibleperspectives on it. The reduction of everything to the monism of thephenomenon does not contrast ‘phenomenon’ with a Kantian ‘noumenon’or ‘thing-in-itself’.In the second part of the extract from Being and Nothingness, called ‘ThePhenomenon of Being and the Being of the Phenomenon’, Sartre arguesthat neither of these can be reduced to the other. Husserlian phenomenaand the Heideggerian disclosure of being require one another for aphenomenology that is adequate to our being-in-the-world.In the third and fourth parts, Sartre distinguishes his phenomenologyfrom the idealism of the eighteenth-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley(1685–1753) from whom he nevertheless takes the terminology of percipere.It was a slogan of Berkeley’s philosophy that in the case of physical objectsesse est percipi, to be is to be perceived. Sartre introduces Husserl’s ideaof intentionality, the doctrine crucial to phenomenology that allconsciousness is consciousness of something or other. There is noconsciousness that does not take an object, whatever the ontological statusof that object should turn out to be. Sartre’s descriptions of consciousnesshere are useful for an understanding of subsequent sections of this anthology,especially Imagination and emotion, Being, Nothingness and The self. Inthe final section called ‘The Ontological Proof’ Sartre argues that theconsciousness of consciousness not only implies the existence ofconsciousness but transphenomenal being. The existence ofconsciousness implies the existence of the world.SKETCH FOR A THEORY OF THE EMOTIONSPsychology, phenomenology and phenomenologicalpsychologyPsychology is a discipline which claims to be positive; that is, it tries to draw upon theresources of experience alone. We are, of course, no longer in the days of the