These two short works serve as insightful introductions to phenomeno-
logical psychology with a characteristically Sartrean twist.
As we should expect from the author ofTranscendence of the Ego,the
emphasis is on the “intentionality” of consciousness (its being-into-
the-world), the power of descriptive arguments (“eidetic reductions,”
which we shall explain shortly), and the analysis of consciousness
without appeal to an overarching “Ego” but with sensitivity to its
“liberating” or “nihilating” character. Except for rejecting the tran-
scendental “ego,” these are Husserlian concepts as well and we shall
examine them explicitly when discussing the concluding chapter of
Sartre’s first little book. But these claims ground and permeate his
criticism of the metaphysical, the contemporary and the classical
psychological views of the imagination in the three respective chapters
that follow his introduction.
In this brief introduction, Sartre betrays a remnant of his early
Bergsonian sympathy when he describes consciousness, now called
“being for itself ” (eˆtre pour soi) as “spontaneity” and the nonconscious
or what he now terms “in itself ” (en soi) as “inertia.” Consciousness, he
explains at the outset, is “pure spontaneity” whereas “the world of
things” is “pure inertia.” These “two forms of existence” enable Sartre
to preserve his epistemological “realism,” that is, the independence of
“things” from our consciousness of them (what he called their
“transcendence” inTE) while enlisting intentionality to eliminate the
so-called “gap” between the two. These are claims that he will develop
at length inBeing and Nothingnesswhere the in-itself and for-itself
emerge with “being-for-others” as the three fundamental forms of
being. But the dichotomyspontaneity–inertiawill continue to mark
Sartre’s thought long after he has laid aside his Cartesian “philosophy
of consciousness.”^4
sections of the book. But most of the citations in English are taken fromSketch for a Theory of4 the Emotions, trans. Philip Mairet (London: Routledge Classics,^2008 ) (hereafterSTE).
“My early work,” Sartre admits somewhat apologetically in an interview in 1969 , “was a
rationalist philosophy of consciousness” (BEM 41 ). Though the terminology ofBeing and
Nothingness, especially the concepts of being “in-itself ” and “for-itself,” is set aside in the
Critique of Dialectical Reasonin favor of “practico-inert” and “praxis” respectively, the
fundamental dichotomy of “spontaneity” and “inertia” remain fully in force. Not until his
massive Flaubert study,The Family Idiot( 1971 – 1972 ), does he bring these two discourses of
praxis and consciousness together.
78 First triumph:The Imagination