Interpreting Husserl and Heidegger: The Root of Sartre's Thought

Abstract

Any reader of Sartre knows that there are serious problems in his thought. Standing, say, in 1947 and looking back at the early Sartre we find him reducing human problems to ontological conditions (“hell is other people”, “man is a useless passion”): we find him defending a freedom which is as untenable as it is ineffectual; we find him erasing all the structures of consciousness (emotional, cognitive, and social) which make the world intelligible and making consciousness into a “nothing”, “clear as a great wind”; and we find frustration and alienation built into life's structure and resolvable only in art.

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