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minor accomplishment when compared to
Saint Genet
or
The Idiot of
the Family.
Two other studies show Sartre's reservations about and
amusement at current psychoanalytic praxis. They reiterate his ongo–
ing critique of psychoanalytic perspectives, extending back to the time
of
Being and Nothingness.
Together all these essays demonstrate the
diversity of Sartre's genius. With the addition of
Sartre on Theatre
(Pantheon, 1976), which includes the author's various interpretations
and anecdotes about his own plays, they display the full spectrum of
his intellectual concerns.
On the popular American scene, where Sartre is still regarded as
a major figure of the third quarter of the twentieth century, some dis–
may comes over the reader of a
New York Times Magazine
article
(14 August 1977) on a mathematical logician whose greatest achieve–
ment is to be incomprehensible (in both act and will) to the larger
reading public-and even
to
most philosophers. In that article, which
is both a biographical sketch of Saul Kripke and a sociological pic–
ture of American philosophy, the author points out that an alterna–
tive branch of philosophy has followed the "affairs of the heart by
overlooking the limits of reason." "This line includes the existential–
ists, political philosophers, and phenomenologists-forever in dispute
going in and out of style." He cites specifically Marx, Nietzsche, and
Sartre as the principal proponents of this line. To assert that Sartre, for
one, follows the heart and overlooks the limits of reason is to misread
Pascal's dictum that "the heart has reasons which reason does not
know at all." Furthermore,
Being and Nothingness
and the
Critique of
Dialectical Reason-Sartre's
two major philosophical works-are
unquestionably within the limits of reason and the rationalist tradi–
tion. A rational treatment of topics such as the emotions, the imagina–
tion, political commitment, or social interaction does not mean that
reason has been exceeded-unless reason is narrowly defined by a style
of analysis that relies solely upon symbolized formulas and a specific
type of logical argumentation.
Sartre has made no contribution to mathematical logic, but should
this necessarily place him outside the "mainstream" of philosophy? In
1966, the
Times Magazine
published an article by Lewis Feuer entitled
"American Philosophy is Dead." There Feuer despaired over the
disappearance of true philosophers such as James, Dewey, and Royce.
Sartre is among the philosophers who embody the principle to which
Feuer pointed-that philosophy truly lives when it takes its place
among the other domains of human knowledge, including literature,
political theory, psychology, sociology, art, history, and religion. As
