Sartre's second century

Literature and Philosophy in Sartre's Early Writings 43
few lines of Sartre's article that try to describe the intentionality of
consciousness with the assistance of the image of a "bursting out"
("eclatement"). To have consciousness of things, Sartre says,
[...] is to "explode towards", to uproot oneself from the moist intimacy of
one's visceral being in order to flee over there, beyond oneself, towards
what is not oneself, out there, near the tree and yet outside it, for it escapes
me and repels me as something in which I can no more dissolve myself
than it can dilute itself in me: outside of it, outside of me. 35
Sartre thinks—incorrectly, but that is not the point here—that his reinterpretation
of Husserlian intentionality as a "bursting out of
consciousness" is closer to the interpretation in Being and Time of
"Dasein" as "being-in-the world" and "transcendence". If we ask why
Sartre, forsaking Husserl's transcendental idealism, moves to a kind of
realism in which transcendent things always overflow consciousness, the
answer is to be found in his metaphysical literature. If, for example, we
return to the episode of the public garden in La Nausee, we see that the
sickness of nausea experienced by Roquentin discloses the raw,
indeterminate being of the repulsive black root as something quite beyond
all thought. Expressed as an episode in a novel, the metaphysical truth
does not give rise to a philosophical and conceptual account, but rather
forms a conviction that influences the arguments of the article on
Husserl's theory of intentionality.
Let us now consider the matter of the spontaneity of consciousness. In
The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre significantly alters Husserl's
conception of transcendental consciousness. He states that this
consciousness is not a reflective Ego, but an anonymous, non-reflective
consciousness that he terms "spontaneity" ("spontandite"), a term rarely
used by Husserl in Ideas because it is clearly reminiscent of the
metaphysical concept of causa suL Sartre asserts that the transcendental
pre-reflective consciousness is "absolute": "This transcendental sphere is a
sphere of absolute existence, that is to say of pure spontaneities which are
"Connaitre, c'est 's'eclater vers\ s'arracher a la moite intimity gastrique pour
filer, la-bas, par-dela soi, vers ce qui n'est pas soi, la-bas, pres de l'arbre et
cependant hors de lui, car il m'£chappe et me repousse et je ne peux pas plus me
perdre en lui qu'il ne se peut diluer en moi: hors de lui, hors de moi" (Sartre, "Une
ide*e fondamentale de la phe'nome'nologie de Husserl: rintentionnalite'", 30—
translation by author and editors).