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Being-In-Itself Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2010

Richard Holmes
Richard Holmes
Affiliation:
University of Waterloo
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Extract

In the Introduction to Being and Nothingness, entitled “The Pursuit of Being”, Jean-Paul Sartre states that Edmund Husserl has misunderstood his own essential discovery of the intentionality of consciousness and that “from the moment that he makes of the noema an unreal, a correlate of the noesis, a noema whose esse is percipi, he is totally unfaithful to his principle”. In what follows I assess this claim as I explicate Sartre's development of the concept of intentionality and the basis for his claim. In addition, I show how an understanding of the views of both Husserl and Sartre reveals a basic convergence. My primary purpose in this is to further develop the correct description of the objects of the world through an analysis and elucidation of the accounts of Sartre and Husserl.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 23 , Issue 3 , September 1984 , pp. 397 - 406
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1984

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References

1 Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. Barnes, Hazel E. (New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1956), IxiGoogle Scholar.

2 One additional disclaimer: my present concern is not with the method of phenomenol-ogy as practised by Husserl and Sartre. Rather, I am concentrating on their analyses and results. Some consideration of their method is found at the end of this article. For an excellent account of Husserl's project, see Natanson, Maurice, Edmund Husserl: Philosopher of Infinite Tasks (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973). For a comparison of their theories of consciousness, seeGoogle ScholarHolmes, Richard, “Consciousness Revisited”, Research in Phenomenology 8 (1978), 191–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Ixii.

4 Ibid. Sartre's description applies to all objects of consciousness, not just “real” physical ones; similarly any examples I use are examples of any object whatsoever.

5 Ibid., XIII.

6 Ibid., xIvii.

7 Ibid., xIviii.

8 Ibid., 1.

9 Cf.ibid., Ixii.

10 Cf.ibid., Ixi.

11 Ibid., Ixi.

12 Cf.ibid., Ixii.

13 Cf.ibid., 4.

14 For a full development of Husserl's theory of the noema see Holmes, Richard, “An Explication of Husserl's Theory of the Noema”, Research in Phenomenology 5 (1975), 143–153, andCrossRefGoogle ScholarKersten, Frederick, “Husserl's Doctrine of Noesis-Noema”, in Kersten, F. and Zaner, R., eds., Phenomenology: Continuation and Criticism (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 114–144CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Husserl, Edmund, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Cairns, Dorion (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16 Cf. ibid., 166.

17 Cf. Husserl, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations, trans. Cairns, Dorion (The Hague: Mar-tinus Nijhoff, 1960), 54 and 62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Cf. Husserl, Edmund, Phenomenological Psychology, trans. Scanlon, John (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977), 134ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Cf. , Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 54Google Scholar.

21 Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, 164–165.

22 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, lxvi.

23 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, 3.

24 Ibid., 37.

25 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, xlvi.

26 That this is not an idealism of the traditional sort, but a “new” idealism is further developed in Richard Holmes, “Is Transcendental Phenomenology Committed to Idealism”, The Monist 59 (1975), 98–114. It should be noted that Harrison Hall makes this same point in terms of the proper limits of philosophical inquiry according to Husserl, although he claims to be arguing against Holmes's views. See his “Was Husserl a Realist or Idealist?”, in HubertCrossRefGoogle ScholarDreyfus, L., ed., Husserl, Interttionality and Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982), 169–190Google Scholar.