its claims, how they coalesce to form a Sartrean vision of the world and
the individual’s place at its center, and the way they issue in concepts
and instruments to justify the fullest possible “understanding” of a
human being. In other words, moving from the abstract “toward the
concrete,” as Jean Wahl proposed, this book lays the foundation for an
“existential psychoanalysis” with the moral punch that Sartre thought
Freudian analysis lacked and which he sketches in the conclusion of
his study. These outlines will be filled in by the several “biographies”
of increasing length that culminate in Sartre’s multivolume study of
Gustave Flaubert,The Family Idiot, which draws upon, if it does not
exactly synthesize, the individual and the social ontologies ofBNand the
Critiqueas well as on their distinctive vocabularies and methods. In sum,
the movement of the book ranges from the abstract to the concrete, from
Nothingness and Being to being-in-situation, freedom and individual
responsibility.
“Introduction: The Pursuit of Being”In what he called the “difficult and compromised introduction” ofBN,
philosopher Ru ̈diger Bubner points out that it was written last and should
be so read.^32 Like Heidegger and Husserl, Sartre begins with the phe-
nomenon, that which appears, in its very manner of appearing. And again
like Heidegger, he wants to avoid both a sterile phenomenalism (the
contention that there are nothing but appearances “all the way down”)
and a Kantian dualism of phenomena and thing-in-itself. Heidegger
claims that the phenomena both reveal and conceal the being of
which they are the appearances. Sartre agrees but distinguishes between
thebeing of the phenomena(which is being-in-itself [BN 171 ])^33 and the
phenomenon of being(which is an immediate, noncognitive access to
the transphenomenal; that is to being). Husserlian phenomenology
(^32) Ru ̈diger Bubner, “Pha ̈nomenologie, Reflexion und Cartesianische Existenz – Zu J-P Sartres
33 Begriff des Bewustseins,” dissertation, Heidelberg University,^1964 ,^33 n.
I am thankful to Matthew Eschleman for holding me in check on the matter of the in-itself of
the phenomenon when I was tempted by the text to conflate it with what might be called the
“phenomenality” of the phenomenon (which is their “to be able to be perceived,” their
“disclosability,” in the sense that if there were no perception, there would be no phenom-
ena). Was this Sartrean ambiguity or simply a matter of letting a Berkelean fox slip into the
phenomenological hen house?
Being and Nothingness 177