Abstract

After an introductory chapter on Sartre as "the man of words" where she argues that he is first of all a philosophical, rather than imaginative writer, Professor Grene directs this interesting essay to the subject of Sartre’s philosophic predecessors. These she gathers into two groups, devoting a chapter to each: Descartes and the phenomenologists on the one hand, and the dialecticians, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Marx, on the other. She adds some valuable notes to the chorus of those who have criticized Sartre’s Cartesianism with her observations on his concepts of mind/body, time, and freedom. His root theoretical error, she believes, lies in the assumption that non-thetic, non-reflective consciousness is primarily self-referential—in Sartre’s famous phrase, that it is consciousness self. She recommends instead Michael Polanyi’s "subsidiary awareness" as being at the base of even the most plainly intuitive, positional awareness of an object. The latter, she feels, places the knower directly in the world and thereby precludes the solipsism to which Sartre’s Cartesian position inevitably falls prey.