into a metaphysical novel. Sartre’s original psychological title, Melancholia, was
changed to Nausea by the Gallimard staff to play up the theme of ontological
unfoundedness.- Perhaps it is no surprise that Durkheim, who first formulated the general theory
of the group worshipping sacred symbols of itself, was also a product of the ENS. - It was in Koyré’s journal, Recherches philosophiques that Sartre published his first
philosophical work, “The Transcendence of the Ego,” in 1936. Within the main
line of French academic philosophy, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Aron, and most others
in the group had been taught by Léon Brunschwicg (who earlier had also taught
Koyré and Piaget). Brunschwicg had a career similar to Bergson’s: a pupil of
Boutroux at the ENS, he spent 19 years teaching at one of the elite Paris lycées
and was active in the group involved in academic reform in the early 1900s, before
arriving at the Sorbonne. Brunschwicg taught the French lineage of spiritualism
and Idealist epistemology descending from Renouvier, Maine de Biran, and Ra-
vaisson; it was against the Idealism of this position that Sartre’s generation rebelled.
Sources on these network connections (Wagner, 1983: 156, 161; Lindberg, 1990:
14–18; Boschetti, 1985: 83–92, 210; Fabiani, 1988: 20, 100, 116; EP, 1967: 2:545,
7:482; Spiegelberg, 1982). - Merleau-Ponty ([1945] 1962: xiv) makes the same point in his existential revision
of phenomenology: “The most important lesson that reduction teaches us is the
impossibility of a complete reduction.” - “The result of our inquiry so far is therefore as follows: in relation to a possible
object, the pure self-reverting activity of the self is a striving; and as shown earlier,
an infinite striving at that. This boundless striving, carried to infinity, is the
condition of the possibility of any object whatsoever: no striving, no object” (Fichte
[1794–1797] 1982: 231). Immediately preceding, Fichte had stated that the self
never can conform to the not-self, since that would overturn the original negation. - Another version of this dialectic had been enunciated in France only a few years
before Sartre. Meyerson, a German-trained scientist whose circle included
Brunschwicg, Lévy-Bruhl, and Koyré, in well-known works published in 1908 and
1921 had argued that science expresses the inexhaustible drive of the human mind
to make reality intelligible, although nature always remains independent; the
empirical is ultimately irrational. Furthermore, the essence of rational explanation
is causality, the principle of sufficient reason; and “the principle of causality is
simply the principle of identity applied to the existence of objects in time” (quoted
in Copleston, 1950–1977: 9:282). To establish causality fully would be to deduce
every phenomenon from its antecedents, which would be equivalent to removing
the independent standing of entities and reducing them to a timeless Parmenidean
immutability. (Thus far Meyerson resembles Dharmakirti’s Buddhist dissolution of
entities through omni-causality.) But this is impossible; the human mind, expressed
in its most rational form in science, strives for an unattainable unity. In his 1921
work Meyerson explicitly relates his argument to Hegel’s philosophy of nature. - Here too Sartre betrays his conviction that only the artist lives a life of authentic
freedom and meaning; it is beauty and art which is the union of essence and
existence, and thus the only equivalent to God (Sartre, 1943: 244).
1024 •^ Notes to Pages 776–778