The Later Sartre

Abstract

Toward the midpoint of his career, Sartre famously announced the separation from his previous work which he described as a rationalist philosophy of consciousness. Henceforth, he implied, his focus would be on free organic praxis. It would be dialectical and historical not just analytical and psychological. It seemed that he was distancing himself from classical (constitutive) Husserlian phenomenology in favor of something more fluid, more concrete like the hermeneutic phenomenology that he discovered in the Heidegger of Being and Time and was recommending as an ingredient in his Existential psychoanalysis. But classical phenomenology was not so much passed over as it was placed in abeyance to return in Sartre’s study of Gustave Flaubert, his life and times. The author proposes to chart and critique this methodological circle of applied phenomenology.