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PARTISAN REVIEW
Phenomenological Ontology." Our criticism may, therefore, be condensed
about two points: how ably and consistently Sartre has made use of
the phenomenological method, and how intelligently he has assimilated
other sources of knowledge for the understanding of man.
This first question may be examined in Sartre's treatment of time,
a cardinal point in existential philosophy. As opposed to many philoso–
phies in which time figures as an unreal appearance in the universe,
Heidegger n•akes time of the essence. Time discloses itself as the horizon
of being. Apparently taking over Heidegger's analysis, Sartre, in fact,
undoes its meaning insofar as directed towards an elucidation of Being
generally, since he too ends up by making time an unreal appearance.
For, according to Sartre, time does not exist in the universe apart from
man: human reality brings with it into the world past, present, and
future.
This conclusion cuts altogether loose from phenomenology: it returns
us to Hegel and idealism, whereas it was a principal aim of phenom–
enology to cut under both idealism and materialism. The point must be
hammered home (since Sartre repeats this error with regard to the
category of possibility) that from the phenomenological descriptions of
human consciousness nothing whatever follows as to the absence of time
from the universe without man. Such a conclusion does not belong to
phenomenology but to speculative metaphysics. Unfortunately, Sartre
makes the transition too often, too easily, and too unconsciously. Reading
Sartre, in fact, we are impressed with the shrewdness of Heidegger, who,
sticking more consistently to his phenomenological point of view, wields
his descriptions like knifeblades to cut under unnecessary problems.
Where Heidegger, with scarcely any prelude, plunges into a phenom–
enological description of man's being with others
(Mitsein),
Sartre con–
sumes a great number of pages on that old chestnut: the problem of
the existence of other people. We would expect that Sartre as a novelist
would be sufficiently interested in the existence of other people as to be
profoundly uninterested in the discussion as to whether they exist or not.
The result is that Heidegger in
Sein und :(eit
says considerably more
than Sartre in twice the number of pages.
Sartre has become so entangled in the mechanism of his function,
like his own example of the over-attentive waiter, that he has only to
produce the inferential words
ainsi on voit.
...
alors
... etc., in order
to believe or appear to believe (and the difference between being and
seeming becomes blurred) that what these words connect is a good
philosophic argument. As the waiter plays at being waiter, Sartre plays
at being a philosopher.
My second criticism concerns Sartre's discussion of Freud, psycho–
analysis, and the unconscious.
If
I single out this point from the whole
volume, it is because in the twentieth century any philosophic view of
