as a student), who introduced Neo-Kantian Weltanschauung analysis into the
French historical critique of modern science;^17 Aaron Gurwitsch (former pupil
of Husserl, Scheler, and the Gestalt psychologists Wertheimer and Kohler at
Berlin), whose lectures on phenomenology at the Sorbonne during 1928–1930
inspired his hearer Merleau-Ponty; Kojève (a Russian émigré Marxist and
former pupil of Jaspers), whose lectures on Hegel during 1933–1939 were
heard by Aron, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and many others, including Breton and
the remains of the surrealist movement. From the Strasbourg phenomenolo-
gists, former members of the Husserl circle, Levinas entered Sartre’s circle and
later became the French promoter of phenomenology in the late 1940s. Sartre
had missed Husserl’s own lectures at the Sorbonne in 1929, but the latest rage
reached him via his multiple links with the intermediary network. Others
became French Hegel experts (such as Hippolyte, a slightly younger compatriot
of Sartre at the ENS). Sartre put the ingredients to new use, combining his own
fanaticism for phenomenology (dating since Aron converted him in 1931) with
Kojève’s new revelation of Hegel, not as a closed system but as the dialectic
of slave and master in the Phenomenology of the Spirit. The final ingredient
came in 1938, when Sartre added Heidegger to the mix. Sein und Zeit was
already the most heavily read volume in the ENS library from 1928 to 1934,
but Sartre at the time was overloaded with projects in every direction; only
after he had his own phenomenology in place, and his publishers had set him
into the Kafkaesque line, could Heidegger’s material become not a distraction
but an ingredient for his own system, and now could be redefined as existen-
tialism.
Sartre used phenomenology as a springboard for creative originality by
reversing its metaphysical implications. His key article on intentionality, pub-
lished in Nouvelle Revue Française in 1939, evokes the doctrine with which
Brentano had launched the new psychology 60 years earlier. Sartre’s tack is
that consciousness’s intending an object threatens the basic character of the
self; if it tries to grasp itself, suppressing the intentionality which locks it to
the world, it annihilates itself. This is something like Husserl’s epochê in
reverse: not objects of consciousness without concern for their existence, but
the character of existence, beyond objects.^18 Intentionality is the great coverup:
although humans are constituted so as to intend objects, they are ultimately
contingent, without reason why they, or indeed anything, should exist, rather
than nothing at all. Sartre is closer to Hegel, endorsing his bifurcation of being,
between the determinate being-something, and the undetermined being-as-
such. Being as “pure indeterminativeness and vacuity” is the condition of
privation which drives the world into activity. Sartre detaches the Hegelian
metaphysic from its world-historical system and blends it with the angst of
modern literature and theology.
Through Hegel, Sartre rediscovered Fichte’s focus on negation and freedom.
Writers’ Markets: The French Connection^ •^777