Addressing professional philosophers
While still in the glow of the existentialist comet, Sartre accepted Jean
Wahl’s invitation to address the French Philosophical Society at the
Sorbonne, the only time he did so. His topic was “Self-consciousness
and Self-knowledge.” The audience included the well-known philoso-
phers Julien Benda and Jean Hyppolite, whose translation of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit( 1939 ) and two-volume commentary onThe
Genesis and Structure of the Phenomenology of Spirit(Vrin, 1946 ) Sartre
cites frequently inNotebooks for an Ethics. The title of his talk appears in
a quote from Hyppolite’sGenesisin Sartre’sNotebooks(NE 63 ). Alexander
Kojeve’sIntroduction to the Reading of Hegelreceives even more citations in Sartre’s text. Clearly the dialectic of the French Hegel was on Sartre’s mind in 1946 – 1947. In the course of his address, Sartre makes several claims about his reading of Husserl that reveal his shift toward a dialectical account, though not a complete abandonment of phenomenology by any means. Let me cite three. One: the move toward dialectical thinking starts with Sartre’s “correction” of Descartes (and Husserl) by giving ontological priority toprereflective consciousness over the traditionalCogitowhich Sartre had claimed inBNwas commonly limited to a reflective consciousness. Failure to recognize the priority of this prereflective awareness over its reflective derivative, in Sartre’s view, left both Descartes and Husserl enclosed in idealism, solipsism and a pointillist concept of temporality. In other words, their ontologies were static rather than dynamic and their epistemologies essentialist rather than nominalist. Ironically, it is for just such temporal pointillism that Merleau-Ponty was to criticize Sartre inAdventures of the Dialetic. Obviously, Merleau-Ponty did not attend this session or read its published transcript. Two: focusing on the prereflective opens the door to a practical, pretheoretical being-in-the world that invites a hermeneutical phenom- enologyalaHeidegger. While Sartre does not speak of “hermeneutics,”
he does point out “a strictly philosophical circle to elucidate the right
of reflection to thematize what one finds characteristic of the being
of the nonthetic [prereflective]cogito” (CSKS 125 ). It also presumes the
act of “comprehension” (theVerstehenof the German social theorists like
Dilthey and Weber, favored by Aron), elaborated inNE( 276 – 277 ) and
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