imaginary. But that same interest supports his ongoing commitment to
the imagistic reasoning of his literary arguments, his fascination with
the moving images of the cinema and the ease with which he adopts
Husserl’s “eidetic reduction,” which consists of the “freeimaginative
variation of examples” to arrive at an immediate insight into the intelli-
gible contour or essence of a phenomenon. We shall pursue these matters
more closely when we address Sartre’s explicit adoption of the descrip-
tive method of phenomenology. But one can already sense the affinity
between imagistic reasoning, using essential or “typical” examples, and
imaginative literature. By his use of the narrative mode in the previous
philosophical “novels,” Sartre was practicing “phenomenology”avant
la lettre. He would find in Husserl’s method the point of intersection
between philosophy and literature that he required but which Husserl
had failed to exploit.
Returning to theCarnet Dupuis, we find Sartre adopting an example
that Berkeley had used to defend an idealist epistemology concerning the
relativity of knowledge, namely the flea’s view of its world in contrast to
our own or that of the giant.^18 Whereas the idealist’s interpretation
makes these perceptions of size relative to the viewer and the positivist
resolves them by measurement, Sartre supports a position that he will
later discover is defended by Husserl and Heidegger, namely, that ours is
the only “world” and that our perceptual relation to the world is prere-
flective, pre-metrical and consequently pre-scientific. Moreover, it has
neither inside nor outside, a decisively anti-Cartesian claim but one that
calls for Husserl’s concept of intentionality for its justification – a
justification Sartre will expound brilliantly in his little essay “A Funda-
mental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality.”^19
Sartre also notes briefly in theCarneta point that will emerge as
cardinal to his essay “The Transcendence of the Ego” when he asks:
“What is the Ego (le Moi) in such a theory of perception? It’s the least
real of objects, even though it’s still real in the manner of objects. It’s a
relation between different objects. A relation that is only intermittent
L’Incarnation imaginaire(Paris: L’Harmattan, 1996 ), 220 – 224. Sartre’s use of the “symbolic18 imagination” a`la Flach is discussed inPPS^444 –^453.
19 SeeSaP^125 ,n.^7.
TE, “L’Intentionnalite ́,” 85 – 89 ; see also “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s
Phenomenology,” trans. Joseph P. Fell,Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology 1 ,
no. 2 ( 1970 ): 4 – 5.
A phenomenologistavant la lettre? 57