Sartre and Realism-All-the-Way-Down

Abstract

In his correspondence with Camille-Simone Sans during 1926, when he was only twenty-one years old, Jean-Paul Sartre had already begun to investigate the nature of and the of reality.1 In 1931, while teaching in Le Havre, Sartre began working on his pamphlet on con tingency, which would in 1938 be published as the novel Nausea.2 During the academic year 1933-1934, while living in Berlin in order to study Hus serl's philosophy, Sartre completed the second version of his pamphlet, and wrote one long and one short Husserlian article on consciousness. The long article would be published in 1936 as The Transcendence of the Ego, the short one in 1939 as Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl 's Phenom enology.3 In Transcendence especially, but also in the Intentionality essay, Sartre's discussion of the nature of consciousness critically rejects subjective idealism in favor of realism. We are conscious of real things themselves, not of merely subjective representations of things. In Nausea, Sartre generates a liter ary portrayal of reality as fundamentally contingent. The contingency of reality displaces objective idealism. Rational form ultimately fails to capture the brute fact that the existence of all things, including humans, is fundamentally con tingent and undetermined. This double-barreled anti-idealism, worked out in these three texts, constitutes the first major step in the development of Sartre's existentialism properly understood. My schedule in Berlin was to read Husserl in the morning, Sartre said later. Then I ... came back at about five, and worked on Nausea.4 The Berlin year, during which Sartre labored intensively on the three texts, was the creative cen ter of the 10to 15-year period that ended with their publication—a period in