Our Sartre episode focused on one single, apparently not widely discussed text:The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. I say not very widely discussed because you would expect Sartre and consciousness to have a ton of videos on youtube and lots of scholarly papers when Googled. Instead, most of the things that come up when you search are related to existentialism, Heidegger, Bergson and the like. Cf. Daniel’s post about the BBC’s “Human, All Too Human.”

Even those articles, essays and videos that refer to consciousness allude to Being and Nothingness, existentialism, bad faith or other, later themes that he develops. I think Sartre’s critique of Husserl in ToE is pretty strong, and the notion of consciousness he advocates out of the phenomenological structure is both interesting and compelling in its own right. It seems, however, that this book for most serves only to lay the groundwork to Sartre’s later work.

I’ve noticed that, more so than other 20th century philosophers that inspire vitriolic responses, the tone against Sartre tends to be belittling. Heidegger famously derided Being and Nothingness as “Dreck” (‘muck’). Critiques often condescendingly position Sartre as a literary, rather than a philosophical figure (because that line is clear as day ). Consider these totally absurd and unfair comments from Derrida (warning, video may cause an epileptic seizure):

Watch on YouTube.

Derrida calling Sartre ‘not a very good writer’. Hmm.

I’m sure we’ll get into Being and Nothingness or Nausea or some such later on, but I want to pause and give sufficient acknowledgement to Sartre as a student of Husserl and scholar in his own right. He was thoughtful, systematic and engaging. We’ll see if my impression holds up on further readings.

–seth