Sartre Studies International

Much has been written about Sartre’s views on artistic creativity as communication, but it has less often been remarked that the potential for not-communicating was inscribed from the outset within his theorisation of creation. This article is an exploration of those two apparent opposites, using the psychoanalytic theory of D.W. Winnicott as a counterpoint.

This article will look at Sartre’s analysis of the human act in Being and Nothingness. In Sartre’s understanding a motive is not something that exists prior to the act as its cause. Motives and causes only come to exist through freely chosen human acts, and these choices have no foundation outside the upsurge of the act itself. This is an unusual and counter-intuitive description of human action, but it fits with the phenomenological evidence of human experience, and illuminates a number of problems that arise in deterministic accounts of action.

The transition made by Sartre to an increasingly political brand of commitment after the Liberation proved to be one of the most challenging and difficult transitions of his career. L’Etre et le néant had been taken by many, both followers and critics alike, to be the fullest exposition of his world-view, but the type of commitment Sartre spoke of in this work did not seem to be an obvious candidate for reconciliation with a radical political agenda.

On 1 November 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre participated in a conference celebrating the inaugural session of the UNESCO. An important argument in his presentation – ‘La responsabilité de l’écrivain’ – was that an author writes in order to achieve recognition. As Sartre puts it: ‘The writer is a man who uses language, putting words together in a way he hopes will be beautiful. Why does he do it? I think the writer speaks in order to be recognised by the others in the sense in which Hegel talks about the mutual recognition of one consciousness by another.’ This question – ‘Why does he do it?’, Why Write? – was also taken up in the second essay of What is Literature? In this longer and more complex text, Sartre not only reiterates his position from La responsabilité de l’écrivain, he adds that the reader, too, comes to the literary work with the hope of satisfying his desire for recognition.

I am not interested in examining the development of Sartre’s view of pure reflection or in extracting a general notion of pure or purifying reflection from Sartre’s entire corpus. Instead, I am interested in understanding with Sartre’s help an experience that his account of pure reflection in the second chapter of Being and Nothingness, ‘Temporality’, concerns, namely the experience of founding a phenomenological theory.

Despite their common roots in the phenomenological tradition, Jean- Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty differed markedly in the way they formulated the problem of being-in-the-world. As is well-known, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) emphasized the dualistic, oppositional, and even antagonistic relationship between human consciousness and the world inhabited by consciousness, while Merleau-Ponty, in texts such as Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and The Visible and the Invisible (1964, posthumous), conceptualised a kind of originary communion between consciousness and world that stressed their imbrication rather than their separateness.

Gérard Wormser (ed.), Jean-Paul Sartre, du mythe à l’histoire Review by Manuel Braganca

Jack Reynolds, Understanding Existentialism Review by Rebecca Pitt

Christine Daigle (ed.), Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics Review by Helen Tattam

Gary Cox, Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed Review by Willie Thompson

Carole Seymour-Jones, A Dangerous Liaison: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre Review by Jean-Pierre Boulé

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