Eidetic reductionBefore continuing, let us pause to describe the process that Husserl
called an “eidetic reduction” from fact to essence, for it will figure
implicitly and occasionally explicitly in Sartre’s subsequent works. When
people refer to phenomenological descriptions or “arguments,” it is
frequently the eidetic reduction that they have in mind. Sartre is using
this method, usually without the term, throughout his three studies in
phenomenological psychology,The Imagination,Sketch for a Theory of
the Emotions( 1939 ) andThe Imaginary( 1940 ).
Recall the “transcendental” or “phenomenological” reduction that
bracketed or suspended the naive and skeptically vulnerable beliefs of
the natural attitude in order to focus on the objects of consciousness
as “phenomena.” By this reductive move – the “suspension” orepochē
of our belief in the being-status of the objects of consciousness; that is,
by withholding our judgment as to whether or not the objects of
consciousness are “out there now real in themselves” – we achieve a
level of invulnerability that Husserl believed yielded certitude and
supported the kind of “absolute science” that Humean doubt had jeop-
ardized. This “reduction” did not deprive us of the world of our experi-
ence, Husserl insisted, but simply rendered that world a source of
dependable knowledge via our shift of attitude. In other words, the
melody is the same, only the key has changed.
Even in his enthusiastic adoption of the “intentionality” thesis, a pos-
ition he never relinquished, Sartre could not accept what he took to be the
“idealist” implications of the transcendental Ego. His courting of an egoless
“transcendental subjectivity” inTEand the “phenomenological reduction”
inThe Emotions^5 could be seen as a concession that would be retracted if the
evidence required it. The evidence of contingency that haunted him since
childhood, motivated his “existential” phenomenology and made its
dramatic appearance inNausea, did seem to require abandoning the
(^5) Toward the conclusion of hisEmotions,Outline of a Theory, Sartre relates, if not identifies,
“purifying reflection” and the phenomenological reduction: “The purifying reflection of the
phenomenological reduction can perceive the emotion insofar as it constitutes the world in a
magical form. ‘I find it hatefulbecauseI am angry’” (Emotions 91 ;F 62 ) Purifying reflection or
inBN“nonaccessory reflection,” of which Sartre once admitted he had said very little,
assumed a moral function that Sartre had already assigned to the transcendental reduction in
TE. SeeL/S 121 – 122.
The Imagination 79