phenomenological reduction, even though it is explicitly employed inThe
Imaginary( 1940 ). This existential turn was facilitated by Sartre’s realiza-
tion thatepochēand “transcendental reduction” were not one and the
same and that one could pursue an eidetic reduction even in the so-called
natural attitude.^6 Moreover, he continued to employ the expression “puri-
fying reflection” (notice the participle) inBeing and Nothingness,which
denotes the “moral” use of phenomenological reduction, even if it is not
precisely equivalent to that reduction itself. What the early Husserl called
“phenomenological psychology” managed to pursue an “eidetic” science
without benefit (or burden) of the transcendental reduction, which he
introduced later. We shall observe this “sorting out” process ofepochē
and transcendental reduction inThe Imaginaryand especially inBeing
and Nothingness, where it comes to fruition. But it must be admitted that
Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, other “existential” phenomenologists and perhaps
even the later Husserl himself, so it seems, set aside the world-constituting
transcendental phenomenological reduction while focusing on intentional-
ity and intentional analyses of the “life world.”^7
(^6) The relation between transcendental phenomenological reduction and theepochēhas been a
matter of much dispute among Husserlians. An example of the latter is Herbert Spiegelberg’s
essays on that topic in volume 5 of theJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology( 1973 ):
3 – 15 and ( 1974 ): 256 – 261 , or his survey of Sartre’s position in hisThe Phenomenological
Movement, 2 vols., 2 nd edn. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1965 ), especiallyii: 476 ff. Also
seenote 9 below. In his summary of Sartre’s relation to the transcendental reduction,
Spiegelberg remarks:
Sartre has never explicitly repudiated the doctrine of the transcendental realm. It merely
seems to be withering away in the further development of his own phenomenology, first
psychological and later ontological...Sartre’s actual phenomenology establishes itself com-
pletely on the level of human existence. It is this tacit dropping out of the transcendental
dimension and the implied humanization or “mundanization” of consciousness which consti-
tutes the most significant change in Sartre’s version of Husserlian phenomenology.
(II: 481 )
If Sartre’s commitment to Husserlian transcendental phenomenology “withered,” it was due
to Sartre’s perception that, whereas intentionality saved us from philosophical idealism,
Husserl’s implicit appeal to the “principle of immanence” as exhibited in his understanding
of imaging consciousness betrayed a basic idealist penchant. Of course, several famous
remarks inIdeasmay have removed all doubt (seeIdeas§§ 49 – 50 ). Years later, he explained
to Beauvoir that it was the idealist character of phenomenology that separated him from
Husserl in particular and from phenomenology in general (Ce ́r 234 ). Still, he never aban-
7 doned phenomenology, not even in theCritique(see Schilpp^24 ).
See the important essays “World” by Donn Welton inEncyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed.
Lester Embree et al. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1997 ), 736 – 743 (double columns) and
80 First triumph:The Imagination