concept of “comprehension” assumed growing importance in his own
epistemology. But this could have been due to Heidegger’s concept of
“preontological understanding,” which figures centrally both inSein und
Zeitand inBeing and Nothingness, as we shall see. What he read of
Scheler is uncertain, but Merleau-Ponty remarks on his enthusiasm for
the “Catholic Nietzsche” after his return from Germany, and Beauvoir
remembers how impressed both she and Sartre were by Scheler’sThe
Essence and the Forms of Sympathy( 2 nd edn. 1923 ). In fact, we have seen
Sartre link sympathy with “comprehension” in theCarnet Dupuis.We
shall underscore an implicit reference to Scheler’s value intuitions in
Sartre’s humanism lecture where he appeals to the “image” of the person
one should be that we project in our every moral judgment.^27 This is yet
another instance of Sartre’s favoring the imaginative mode of reasoning –
namely by example. Nonetheless, Beauvoir remarked that “today [ 1960 ]
we regard Scheler as a fascist lackey.”^28
The first fruit of Sartre’s Berlin efforts: two foundational essays
“A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Intentionality”This is among the most accessible philosophical essays that Sartre ever
wrote. In its brevity and directness, it is one of his most effective.
Written with the enthusiasm of someone whose prayers have just been
answered, it uses powerful imagery to attack by name his former teachers
while dissolving the famous problem of the “bridge” between mind
and reality, between the inside and the outside world bequeathed to
us by Descartes and his followers. And all within three densely
argued pages!
“They ate it with their eyes”; so begins his assault on the philosophy
of knowledge (epistemology) that dominated philosophy in general at
that time. The illusion shared by epistemic realism and idealism
alike, according to Sartre, is that “to know is to eat.” The tables, rocks
and trees of our experience are nothing but “contents of consciousness.”
Common sense looks in vain for something solid but all it gets is
“spirit.” Academic theories of knowledge have assimilated the objects
(^27) See the argument ofEHreconstructed inChapter 9 below.
(^28) Prime 287.
62 Teaching in the lyce ́e, 1931–1939