Sartre's second century

CHAPTER SEVEN
SARTRE, INTENTIONALITY AND PRAXIS 1
ROY ELVETON
In January, 1939, one year after the death of Edmund Husserl, Sartre
published a very brief essay entitled "Husserl's Central Idea". 2 In the
space of a few paragraphs, Sartre rejects the epistemology of Descartes
and the neo-Kantians and their view of consciousness's relationship to the
world. Consciousness is not related to the world by virtue of a series of
mental representations and acts of mental syntheses that combine such
representations to provide us with our knowledge of the external world.
Husserl's intentional theory of consciousness provides the only acceptable
alternative: "Consciousness and the world are immediately given together:
the world, essentially external to consciousness, is essentially related to
it." 3 The only appropriate image for intentionality and our knowing
relationship to the world is that of an "explosion": "to know is to 'explode'
toward" an object in the world, an object "beyond oneself, over there [...]
towards that which is not oneself [...] out of oneself'. 4
Sartre's account captures an important aspect of Husserl's theory of
intentionality by insisting upon the essential nature of intentionality:
consciousness is always a consciousness of an object, be it a real object, an
imagined object, a memory or an emotion.
While the ontological realism of Sartre's account of the nature of
consciousness's intentional relationship to the world (the being-in-itself of
transcendent objects is not created or constituted by consciousness)
A draft of this chapter was presented to the special conference of the UK Sartre
Society at the Institut Frangais, London, commemorating the centenary of Sartre's
birth, 18-19 March 2005.
2 Sartre," Une id6e fondamentale de la phdnom£nologie de Husserl: rintentionnalit£ ".
3 "La conscience et le monde sont donnas d'un meme coup: ext^rieur par essence h
la conscience, le monde est, par essence, relatif h elle" ("Une Id£e fondamentale de
Husserl", 32). All translations from French are my own.
4 Ibid.