Sartre’s Literary Phenomenology ANDREW INKPIN Abstract: This article focuses on the relation between philosophy and literature in early Sartre, showing, how his literary writing can be seen as philosophically significant by interpreting Sartre as practising a variant of phenomenological method. I first clarify Sartre’s approach to phenomenological method by comparing and contrasting it with Husserl’s. Despite agreeing that philosophy is a reflective descriptive study of essences, Sartre sees no use for phenomenological reduction and free variation. I then consider the philosophical function of Sartre’s literary works, arguing that, although these cannot reliably convey philosophical theories, their significance lies in describing concrete situations that ground reflective theoretical concepts. How- ever, this grounding function can be understood only if Sartre is seen as realising Husserl’s phenomenological method — including phe- nomenological reduction and free variation - more fully than he acknowledges. Finally, I address two challenges to my view and briefly assess the value of literary phenomenology as a philosophical method. Keywords: Edmund Husserl, Jean-Paul Sartre, literature, phenome- nological method, phenomenology I is widely held that philosophy and literature are closely connected in Sartre, a view naturally suggested by the breadth of his writings and the prevalence of philosophical themes in his literary writing. The precise relation between the two nonetheless remains open to debate. In what sense, if any, can literature be ‘philosophical’? Are these two independent modes of writing, or does literature have a significant and distinctive philosophical function? And, in the latter case, how might the claim that philosophy requires, or is at least complemented by, literature be understood? This article shows how these questions can be answered by seeing the early Sartre as practis- ing a specific form of phenomenology - literary phenomenology — in © UKSS and NASS Sartre Studies International Volume 23, Issue 1, 2017: 1-21 doi:10.3167/ssi.2017.230102 ISSN 1357-1559 (Print) + ISSN 1558-5476 (Online)Andrew Inkpin which literary writing has a central role in meeting the requirements of phenomenological method. This suggestion immediately raises a further concern, as one might doubt that Sartre, at least by the time of Being and Nothingness, considered himself a phenomenologist, and in particular that he took phenomenology seriously as a philo- sophical method. I therefore proceed in two main stages. In the first section I discuss the relation between Husserl’s and Sartre’s respec- tive conceptions of phenomenology to identify both their shared commitments and where Sartre’s approach appears to differ from Husserl’s. The second section considers the relation between litera- ture and philosophy in Sartre’s writing and shows how his use of lit- erature can be understood as meeting the methodological desiderata that for Husserl defined phenomenology. The article’s final section addresses a couple of potential objections and briefly assesses the value of literary phenomenology as a philosophical method. Sartre on Phenomenological Method. The broad outlines of Sartre’s engagement with phenomenology are well known. His interest in Husserl’s phenomenology crystallized sometime around 1932, as epitomized by the famous discussion with Raymond Aron in the Bec de Gaz café that persuaded Sartre of its virtues as a philosophical approach centring on conerete and contin- gent reality.’ Sartre then obtained a scholarship to spend 1933 and 1934 at the French Institute in Berlin, where he divided his time between studying phenomenology — primarily Husserl’s Ideas I - and writing the novel that would later become Nausea. In this year Sartre drafted a series of essays, published between 1936 and 1940, that defined this period as one in which both his understanding of philosophy and specific interests were broadly continuous with Husserl’s.2 Sartre’s engagement with phenomenology culminated in Being and Nothingness, a work still presented as undertaking a ‘phe- nomenological’ ontology, but which — partly influenced by Heideg- ger — adopted a more critical tone towards Husserl and drew on Hegel for its key concepts and style. Hence, it is commonly held that, following his enthusiasm for Husserl through the 1930s, Sartre was moving away from phenomenology by the time Being and Noth- ingness was published in 1943. Two ways of interpreting and assessing the latter claim should be distinguished. On the one hand, it might be taken to refer to substan- tive claims. This would involve weighing up, for example, Sartre’s nosSartre’s Literary Phenomenology early enthusiasm for the notion of intentionality and intentional analysis against his rejection of the transcendental subject and his later conviction that Husserl had remained a subjective idealist.? Whatever their differences, however, Sartre’s intensive discursive engagement with Husserl occurred against a backdrop of shared aims and underly- ing concepts, and in this respect a strong case could be made for describing Sartre as a phenomenologist throughout this period. On the other hand, Sartre’s commitment — or lack thereof — to phenome- nology might be construed methodologically. This potentially makes it more difficult to argue that Sartre was a phenomenologist for two reasons. First, unlike Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre shows little inter- est in methodology. In particular, Being and Nothingness contains no sustained discussion of phenomenological method, instead offering only isolated comments and a cursory analysis of the ‘idea of [the] phenomenon’ (L7’idée de phénoméne) in its introduction.* Moreover, the work seems strongly theory-driven, rather than following any kind of phenomenological method, and for the most part lacks the concretion that initially attracted Sartre to phenomenology. Second, various methodological features that for Husserl defined phenome- nology are missing — either explicitly criticised or ignored — in Sartre’s work. As a result, one might sympathise with Dermot Moran’s sug- gestion that Sartre is ‘guilty of emptying out the phenomenological method until it is no more than a form of creative intuition’.5 Never- theless, it is this methodological aspect of Sartre’s relation to phe- nomenology I want to focus on here by drawing on his early essays to clarify how Sartre thought of phenomenological method at the time of Being and Nothingness. Sartre shares with - and in part adopts from — Husserl several basic methodological commitments. For example, in the first chapter of The Imaginary Sartre characterises his method as centring on the first-person perspective of consciousness, as a reflective activity tak- ing pre-reflective consciousness as its subject matter, and as ‘descrip- tion’ rather than involving inductive reasoning.® He also suggests that such description can identify general structures or ‘essences’ that are ‘the same for everyone’ — a suggestion that at least sounds Husserlian.’” Nonetheless, these commitments fall short of capturing what is distinctive about Husserl’s phenomenology. On the one hand, they allow Sartre to (over-)assimilate Husserl’s method to Descartes’s in suggesting that ‘reflective consciousness delivers us absolutely certain data’ or ‘immediately certain content’, whereas Husserl allows that ‘evidences’ are in principle open to correction or revision, and ultimately leaves open the extent to which the contents aAndrew Inkpin of consciousness can be known apodictically.* On the other hand, more importantly here, these commitments do not suffice to distin- guish Sartre’s approach from what Husser! calls ‘phenomenological’ or ‘descriptive’ psychology. I will therefore focus on three further features that for Husserl worked in conjunction to define the method of phenomenology, dis- tinguishing it both from other kinds of enquiry and as a form of transcendental philosophy.’ These features will provide a background for assessing more precisely the relation between Sartre’s and Husserl’s methods. The first is the ‘phenomenological reduction’ or the epoché, the ‘bracketing’ or ‘suspension’ of assumptions about the validity or otherwise of intentional acts.!° The point of the phenomenological reduction is to define a reflective stance in which it makes no differ- ence whether the intentional objects or states of affairs under consid- eration actually exist or hold true. This step defines the ‘purity? that Husserl took to characterize phenomenology in contrast to empirical study — particularly empirical psychology — based on real experience and facts. The second feature of Husserl’s phenomenological method I want to highlight is the ability to discern, intuit or ‘see’ general structures, specifically the ability to recognize these on the basis of one or more particular examples. Husserl uses several labels to refer to such structural seeing, most famously that of ‘intuition of essences’ (Wesensschau), but also — a label Sartre refers to — that of ‘eidetic reduction’.!! The third feature, usually referred to as ‘free variation’, exploits the fact secured by the epoché that for the pur- poses of phenomenological description experience of imagined states is equivalent to experience of real states of affairs. In Husserl’s words: ‘The eidos, the pure essence, can be intuitively exemplified in the data of experience, in those of perception, memory etc., but also just as well in mere imagined data [in blogen Phantasiegegeben- heiten) 2 Although it is possible to imagine things that are truc (elsewhere), the importance of imagination for Husserl is to extend the field of enquiry to include counterfactual ‘as if? states, thus mov- ing phenomenology beyond the accountability to facts characteristic of empirical positive sciences.'* Accordingly, imagination is for Husserl closely connected with fiction, which he describes as the ‘vital element of phenomenology, as of all eidetic science’, explaining that, as in geometry, ‘clear fictions’ can provide ‘better bases [ Unter- lagen’ for phenomenology than the ‘data of actual perception and experience’. Exploiting this equivalence of fact and fiction, or per- ceptual and imaginary experience, ‘free variation’ is the ability to imagine any and all features of intentional objects and acts being age