Sartre and Levinas as Phenomenologists

Abstract

More than a little ink has been spilled recently debating purity of various ostensible phenomenologists. Two philosophers whose work may seem to pose a particular challenge along these lines are Jean-Paul Sartre, who explicitly uses phenomenology to develop a full-fledged ontology in Being and Nothingness, and Emmanuel Levinas, a 'phenomenologist' whose primary concern in Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being is an Other who does not appear in mode of intentional Indeed, it should be admitted that neither Sartre nor Levinas carries out a Husserlian epoche, if we understand this as a complete bracketing of transcendent, and particularly ontological questions. Nevertheless, I would argue that Sartre's ontological con- cerns and Levinas's inquiry into a non-intentional phenomenality do not mark a break with phenomenology, but rather grow out of their phenomenological analyses of human experience and support these. In order to defend this sugges- tion, I would like to discuss sense in which Sartre and Levinas remain engaged in a phenomenological project. It is not my goal to comprehensively characterize senses in which Sartre and Levinas each is and is not a 'phenomenologist.' However, drawing on their accounts of fundamental human experience, it will be possible to defend claim that Sartre's and Levinas's approaches are mean- ingfully 'phenomenological.' To identify broadly primary sense in which Sartre and Levinas remain phenomenologists, one need only observe that each undertakes a careful study of structure and contents of conscious experience in order to describe foundations of subject-object correlation and identify its conditions. Each, furthermore, accomplishes this by developing Husserlian notion of intentionality, focusing on ways in which intentional character of consciousness enables its lived encounter with what is transcendent to it.For Sartre, this project means accepting pre-reflective cogito as one's starting point, describing phenomena that appear there and way in which they do so in order eventually to reach being of consciousness itself. In utilizing cogito this way, Sartre believes that he is avoiding mistakes made by Descartes, Husserl, and Heidegger.1 The first of these, he claims, fell into error of substance by attempting to pass from functional description of consciousness to its existence a conducting thread (i.e., analysis of intentionality and modes of phenomenality constituted by conscious function). Husserl, meanwhile,warned by this error, remained timidly on plane of functional description. Due to this fact he never passed beyond pure description of appearance as such; he has shut himself up inside cogito and deserves-in spite of his denial-to be called a phenomenalist rather than a phenomenologist. . . . Heidegger, wishing to avoid that descriptive phenomenalism which leads to Megarian, antidialectic isolation of essences, begins with existential analytic without going through cogito. But since Dasein has from start been deprived of dimension of consciousness, it can never regain this dimension.2Sartre's goal, therefore, is to describe structures and meaning of human exis- tence in world starting from the dimension of consciousness. His rejection of what he takes to be Heidegger's attempt to bypass consciousness is an affirmation of Husserlian endeavor, despite his refusal to accept Husserl's limited (i.e., idealist) conclusions.If Sartre starts out, with Husserl, in interiority of cogito as source of conscious experience, he also continues with him a step further to inten- tional character of that experience. In Introduction to Being and Nothingness, Sartre argues that a proper clarification of consciousness' intentional character supports realist conclusion that objects of consciousness are things in world, not representations or ideas of them. …