existential phenomenology essay

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• Published: 30 October 2018

Givenness and existence: On the possibility of a phenomenological philosophy of religion

• Nikolaas Deketelaere 1  

Palgrave Communications volume  4 , Article number:  127 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

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The so-called theological turn in recent French phenomenology has been the subject of a heated debate in France and elsewhere. This article outlines a possible future for this movement by considering the possibility of a phenomenological philosophy of religion distinct from a phenomenological theology. It argues that Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology of givenness does not establish this possibility, as it aims at a theophanic experience and is therefore ultimately inscribed within a logic of faith. It is then with Jean-Luc Nancy’s phenomenology of existence that a more plausible, though undeveloped, possible future for phenomenological philosophy of religion comes into view: not aimed at theophany ( from faith), but rather at, what the article calls, the existential situation that facilitates or inhibits religious experience ( about faith). This, the article argues, is the only way of limiting phenomenological philosophy to the possibility of revelation, leaving it to theology to consider the actuality of Revelation, as Marion deems necessary. It is thus also the only way for a phenomenological philosophy of religion to have a future as distinct from theology, that is to say, for it to be possible to speak phenomenologically about religious experiences regardless of whether this is done from a position of faith or not. In establishing this possibility, the article will emphasise the often neglected phenomenological and existential aspects of Nancy’s thought.

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To hear ( hören ) God’s word does not mean to wander around the distant lands of metaphysics, but finally, at long last, to come to oneself, to learn to see oneself, to be revealed and become apparent ( offenbar werden ) to oneself, as one really is: belonging to God ( zu Gott gehörig ) and therefore so very worthy of questioning ( fragwürdig ). — Barth 1982 , p. 516.

Introduction

In his 1988 essay ‘The Possible and Revelation’ ( 2008a [1988]: p. 1), Jean-Luc Marion raises one of the most controversial questions of contemporary French philosophy: “Can phenomenology contribute in a privileged way to the development of a ‘philosophy of religion’? In other words, can ‘philosophy of religion’ become a ‘phenomenology of religion’?” The essay also contains Marion’s first articulation of the idea of the saturated phenomenon , a phenomenon so rich in intuition that it overwhelms any possible intentional horizon. He thus introduces a new mode of phenomenality, characterised by excessive intuitive givenness . Marion’s move is controversial, however, for it identifies this new mode of phenomenality with “the regime of revelation” ( 2008a , p. 16), and understands the revelation of Christ as “the preeminent saturated phenomenon” ( 2017a , p. 142), placing religious phenomena at the heart of phenomenology.

Some see this as a derogation of the phenomenological method. In his 1991 book The Theological Turn in French Phenomenology , Dominique Janicaud describes with concern how Marion is part of a larger movement, including Emmanuel Lévinas, Michel Henry and Jean-Louis Chrétien. According to Janicaud, these authors abandon the phenomenological method and philosophy altogether, for at its core stands the exclusion of any transcendence: he speaks of a veering of phenomenology, off the road of philosophy, ending up the ditch of theology ( 2000 [1991], p. 50–69). Bernard Prusak sums it up elegantly by suggesting that “Janicaud inverts the scenario of Plato’s Apology : he indicts Lévinas et al. for corrupting the future of French philosophy by introducing into phenomenology a god—the biblical god—who does not belong there” ( 2000 , p. 4).

This article explores whether this theological turn really does corrupt the future of French philosophy. Or more precisely, and this is Marion’s question, I consider whether a distinctly philosophical phenomenology of religion, as opposed to a phenomenological theology , is possible. I proceed in three steps. I first give a broad overview of the present phenomenological landscape in France and present my argument in general terms: that the separation between a phenomenological philosophy of religion and a phenomenological theology is formed by a difference in the existential situation in which phenomenological reason finds itself (faith or unfaith). As such, the question of a phenomenological philosophy of religion must concern the phenomenological implications of this existential situation of reason: it must be about faith, whilst phenomenological theology comes to experience from the situation of faith. Subsequently, I give a critical summary of how Marion relates phenomenology to theology, drawing on his early essays where this issue is at stake. Footnote 1 I argue that Marion’s phenomenology is ultimately inscribed within a logic of faith because it aims at theophany and is thus a phenomenological theology rather than a phenomenological philosophy of religion. Finally, I turn to Jean-Luc Nancy, who presents a more plausible, though undeveloped, possible future for phenomenological philosophy of religion: not aimed at theophany ( from faith), but rather at the existential situation that facilitates or inhibits religious experience ( about faith). That is to say, the task of a phenomenological philosophy of religion is to consider how faith structures experience and in doing so makes religious experience possible, irrespective of the uncontested actuality of this experience (or its theophanic character). A phenomenological theology, however, assumes the actuality of religious or theophanic experience, in virtue of the fact that it comes to experience from a standpoint of faith, and proceeds to describe it phenomenologically.

§1. The phenomenological conception of reason

A. theological intimidation and philosophical assertion.

Much scorn has been pored over the theological turn from various angles (e.g., Vattimo, 2016 ; O’Leary, 2018 ). Yet, no denunciation is more polemic than Janicaud’s. He boldly declares that “phenomenology has been taken hostage by a theology that does not want to say its name” ( 2000 , p. 43). Not that there is anything wrong with theology, he quickly adds, but it simply does not belong within phenomenology, for this would be contrary to the phenomenological method as set out by the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl.

That method rests on “a certain refraining from judgement” (Husserl, 1982 , p. 55), known as phenomenological reduction or epoché , regarding the external world. In our daily lives, we assume that our experience is tied to a world existing independently of our experience. Yet, we have no foundation for this assumption, so we must temporarily reduce or bracket it (Husserl, 1982 , p. 54). This is the first step to fulfilling Husserl’s battle-cry for philosophy to be a rigorous science by going “back to the ‘things themselves’” ( 2001 , p. 168). By bracketing our presuppositions, we achieve a level of cognition that has the right to serve as the certain starting point for philosophy, namely lived experience ( Erlebnis ). This criterion, which Husserl calls the principle of principles , guarantees philosophy’s scientific rigour: “ that every originarily giving intuition is a source of right for cognition , that everything originarily (so to speak, in its ‘personal’ actuality) offered to us in ‘intuition’ is to be accepted simply as it gives itself out to be , but also only within the limits in which it is given there ” ( 1982 : p. 43 trans. mod.). Phenomenology thus always starts from a position of radical immanence, only allowing transcendence insofar it appears within the immanence of consciousness.

Hence, Bruce Ellis Benson sums up the phenomenological attitude, achieved through reduction, succinctly as “an orientation in which the object is immanently given to a neutral consciousness” ( 2010 , p. 2). This definition captures two ideas that Janicaud sees as obstacles to a phenomenology of religion: first, the exclusion of divine transcendence from phenomenality; and, second, the phenomenologist’s neutral attitude in describing experience objectively. For example, experientially, a religious experience might very well be identical to a delusion, even though only one is qualified as referring to God. Footnote 2 That ontological qualification, however, should be reduced because it refers to a transcendent reality outside of lived experience: God is not given in experience, he does not appear. When philosophers like Marion unscrupulously recognise certain experiences as revelation, they are committing “strict treason of the reduction,” says Janicaud, by imposing an ontological assumption (that a certain experience refers to God) or a personal attitude (faith), on experience “to render phenomenological what cannot be” ( 2000 , p. 27, p. 62). Yet, “in virtue of what experience?” (Janicaud, 2000 , p. 27). Does Marion have a phenomenological criterion to recognise saturated phenomena as revelation, as opposed to a theological one? Janicaud believes the latter is the case ( 2000 , p. 27): in allowing for the phenomenon of revelation, “theology (…) installs itself at the most intimate dwelling of consciousness, as if that were as natural as could be. Must philosophy let itself be thus intimidated?”

Janicaud is bewildered by his colleagues’ “strange stubbornness” to do what cannot be done: “Between the unconditional affirmation of Transcendence and the patient interrogation of the visible, the incompatibility cries out; we must choose” ( 2000 , p. 26, p. 33). Now, Marion is certainly aware of this: insofar as the phenomenological method is applied to religious experience, he says, “it would be a question either of addressing phenomena that are objectively definable but lose their religious specificity or of addressing phenomena that are specifically religious but cannot be described objectively” ( 2008b , p. 18; 2008a , p. 12). Experience can either be religious, or it can be scientifically described; it cannot be both. For Janicaud, the new phenomenologists’ supposed ignorance of this dilemma makes them guilty of “methodological slacking off,” caused by a creative and religious zeal that “made them neglect what there was to respect in the Husserlian concern for rigour” ( 2000 , p. 91). As he is fond of declaring: phenomenology and theology make two , and one must choose ( 2000 , p. 99–103).

Yet, insofar as Janicaud suggests that these phenomenologies are an “expropriation of the phenomenological house and its methodological instruments” ( 2000 , p. 33–34), he is unfairly misrepresenting them. As has been repeatedly pointed out (de Vries, 1999 ; Welten and Jonkers, 2005 ), the interest in religious phenomena derives from a distinctly phenomenological concern, a desire for phenomenological radicality; rather than from reasons that are primarily theological. For the new phenomenologists, the religious phenomenon pushes phenomenality, and with it phenomenology, to its limits (and its heart), generating new phenomenological insights. The theological dimension would thus fulfil a purely heuristic, rather than teleological, role.

Marion himself sets up his project in this way, suggesting that “the religious phenomenon poses the question of the general possibility of the phenomenon” ( 2008b , p. 18). It offers a hitherto overlooked yet primordial form of phenomenality that the phenomenological ethos, as a fundamental openness to whatever shows itself, requires us to pick up: “more than posing a question for phenomenology,” as Jeffrey Kosky puts it, the religious phenomenon “poses the question of phenomenology itself—of its limits and the criteria it uses to determine phenomenality” ( 2000 , p. 113). In that sense, the new phenomenology has also been called radical phenomenology (e.g., Holzer, 1999 ): phenomenology of religion, rather than turning away from phenomenology and philosophy, would then exist in a profound realisation of its aims and method. Hence, Marion suggests, “the question of the possibility of a phenomenology of religion,” is now “posed in terms that are simple if not new (for it is only a matter of pushing the phenomenological intention to its end)” ( 2008b , p. 48). Marion thus wholehearted agrees with Janicaud that phenomenology and theology make two: he may be breaking with the phenomenological tradition, but only to realise its aims. For him, the saturated phenomenon of revelation is first and foremost to be studied phenomenologically, which need not involve any theology. Yet, what Janicaud accuses Marion and his colleagues of is nevertheless the exact opposite. Who are we then to believe when it comes to the relationship between phenomenology and theology within phenomenology’s theological turn?

b. Existential situation

Aaron Simmons eloquently sketches a middle way between these two extremes. First, he says, Janicaud’s critique is hypocritical: in speaking of the theological intimidation of phenomenology, Janicaud is himself abandoning the purely phenomenal field, for “to delimit the domain of phenomenological enquiry from the outset is to already resist the supposed neutrality of the phenomenological method” (Simmons, 2010 , p. 18). What Janicaud calls neutrality , is really an arbitrary restriction of the phenomenal field, itself phenomenologically illegitimate because it involves a presupposition: based solely on the phenomenological criterion of the principle of principles, we must recognise religious phenomena if they actually do appear. Thus, “instead of offering an innocuous method of neutrality, what Janicaud does is to just as problematically place out of bounds that which he does not want to find later in the middle of the playing field” (Simmons, 2010 , p. 24). Marion similarly complains that Janicaud’s “denunciation—more virulent than argued,” is dogmatic because it presupposes that there is a body of phenomenological orthodoxy that coincides with Husserl’s transcendental period: “None of these points is self-evident,” he points out, “especially insofar as it belongs essentially to phenomenology that the a posteriori render it possible and therefore that no a priori prohibition predetermine it” ( 2008c , p. 59–60). Here we clearly see how Marion is “interrogating phenomenological orthodoxy, but doing so perhaps in the name of an attempt to be orthodox” (Simmons and Benson, 2013 , p. 133). Hence, these new phenomenologies must at least prima facie be considered to be philosophically legitimate, as opposed to an abuse of phenomenological reason by theology. Yet, Simmons is also surprised by the eagerness of some to consider these phenomenologists to be philosophers and not theologians, as this would imply that theology is not at home in phenomenology ( 2010 , p. 23; 2011 , p. 158): “must it be the case that phenomenology can’t be theologically concerned precisely as phenomenology?” Have we no need for theology to understand revelation and do these phenomenologies teach us nothing about what it means for God to reveal himself?

Simmons’ point is exactly that it is not an either-or situation: though the prime concern of these phenomenologists is to think “the general possibility of the phenomenon” (Marion, 2008b , p. 18); these insights are relevant to theology too, for that general possibility rests on the particular possibility of the religious phenomenon. The idea that any position could be neutral and devoid of presuppositions, as Janicaud and Marion both claim, is itself, paradoxically, an extra-phenomenal presupposition that must be reduced (Simmons, 2010 , p. 24). As Søren Kierkegaard might put it, they both make the mistake of forgetting that they exist ( 2009 , p. 44). The neutral point of view is never itself phenomenally given: I never experience the world from a transcendental perspective that isn’t one; yet, I am intimately familiar with my own perspective that brings the world into (a) view. John Caputo, for example, points out that “the truth is gained not by approaching things without presuppositions—can you even imagine such a thing?—but by getting rid of inappropriate presuppositions (frame) and finding appropriate ones, the very ones that give us access to the things in question” ( 2013 , p. 182). Phenomena appear, not by bracketing all possible presuppositions, but by only admitting those that allow phenomena to appear to me . Footnote 3

Simmons suggests that theology and phenomenology are distinct because they rely on different sources; yet, neither being neutral, they share their reliance on a “deep situatedness of rationality itself,” or presuppositions that constitute a particular discourse or discipline as such and give it its distinctive perspective on the world (Simmons, 2010 , p. 27–28). For him this situatedness reflects the community of discourse in which reason operates and by which it is determined. This community institutes itself by means of a decision that determines what counts as rational discourse within that community (Simmons and Benson, 2013 , p. 109–111; Simmons, 2010 , p. 27–28; 2011 , p. 153). Crucially, an extra-phenomenal (even extra-rational) element constitutes phenomenality (and rationality): when phenomenology is but a particular rational method, religious phenomena are perfectly commonplace amongst theologians, in virtue of the biases reason needs to operate in that community; whilst recognising such phenomena might be the height of irrationality, treason of the reduction, when that same reason operates within the philosophical discourse community, according to different biases. Yet, reason cannot operate in a void: something only appears as rational in relation to something else. It is this question of what constitutes appearance as that has always been the phenomenological one, and the situadedness of reason is therefore of crucial phenomenological importance.

However, understanding reason’s situation in terms of discourse communities risks putting too strong an emphasis on the different sources or authorities of philosophy and theology, rather than their respective ways of experiencing the world. Simmons’ idea that phenomenological reason is situated, put in-the-world, by an extra-rational decision , can be alternatively formulated through Kierkegaard’s understanding of subjectivity as the site of decision ( 2009 , p. 163, p. 171). Footnote 4 By this, he means that it is in my subjectivity that the world opens up as what it means to me . “We are always ‘situated’, and that situation imposes a limit on us,” as Caputo puts it, “but that limit also gives us an angle of entry, and approach, a perspective, an interpretation. God doesn’t need an angle, but we do. Having an angle is the way truths open up for us mortals” ( 2013 , p. 13). Thus, phenomenological reason is always existentially situated : phenomena only appear in terms our subjective relation to the world, our being-in-it. Hence, neither Marion nor Janicaud have abandoned phenomenological rationality, it is merely situated differently. Comparing these different existential situations is in itself a question, if not the question, of phenomenology.

As such, phenomenology is an appropriate method for theology, since it is just that: a method, a specific deployment of reason. Not all philosophy is phenomenological, and not all phenomenology is philosophical. There is no (phenomenological) reason to exclude prima facie the possibility of a phenomenological theology. This is Marion’s approach too: “Some would like to leave a choice only between philosophical silence and faith without reason. (…) Yet outside of revealed theology there is no reason to prohibit reason—here, philosophy in its phenomenological bearing—from pushing reason to its end, that is, to itself, without admitting any other limits than those of phenomenality” ( 2008c , p. 61).

That is, if the claim that the religious phenomenon embodies some fundamental mode of phenomenality holds true. Indeed, one element of Janicaud’s critique has not yet been rejected: in virtue of what experience? If Marion’s phenomenology is a phenomenological philosophy of religion, as opposed to a phenomenological theology, then the religious qualification of the experience cannot be faith-dependent. The legitimacy of Marion’s phenomenology of religion, as analysis of religious phenomena, is thus not in dispute. Whether it is justified as philosophy or rather as theology, that is the question. Let us therefore now explore that phenomenology.

§2. The theophany of givenness

A. radical empiricism.

Marion too understands phenomenology as beginning from the principle of principles or “the principle of nonpresuppositions” ( 2008c , p. 55). His starting point is thus perfectly orthodox, namely “to let what shows itself be seen from itself, just as it shows itself from itself” (Heidegger, 1996 , p. 34). Indeed, Marion laments, if only Husserl and Heidegger would scrupulously stick to it themselves. They do not, because they fail to execute the reduction properly and to its end: Husserl reduces to objectness and Heidegger to beingness; but neither actually reduces to the appearing of phenomena. Marion therefore suggests a radical reduction to the mere givenness of phenomena: if the appearing of phenomena is what shows itself from itself, then “what shows itself first gives itself ” ( 2002a , p. 5). Michel Henry, ( 2015 ) suggests that Marion has thus formulated a fourth principle of phenomenology , Footnote 5 summarising all others and exposing the pure phenomenality of absolute givenness, namely: “so much reduction, so much givenness” (Marion, 1998 : 203). This fourth principle has a subtle though important consequence:

This principle enacts a revolutionary advance because the answer to the question of right (…) will henceforth no longer come from an authority or a principle anterior to the phenomena themselves or different from them, but will depend solely on the fact of their real givenness (in the flesh) to intuition or not. The question of right allows for a response of fact: phenomena no longer need to be justified before a tribunal of reason, but are given as such. Givenness finds itself erected as the self-justification of the phenomenon as such: everything that is given to intuition and only what is given to intuition is real as a phenomenon (Marion, 2017b , p. 96).

By recognising givenness as principle of phenomenality, Marion collapses the question of the phenomenon’s possibility de jure (its legitimacy as cognition) into that of its de facto possibility (its factuality as cognition). Givenness, as the only condition of possible experience, allows for the coincidence of the material and formal conditions of phenomenality: something counts as phenomenon when it is factually given; for when it is given, it is given in terms of givenness. Indeed, givenness, the mode of its appearing, is coextensive with the fact of its appearing, its givenness (Marion, 2002b , p. 17–23). Hence, the principle of givenness embodies the essence of the reduction: allowing whatever does show itself from itself, to be seen from itself (Marion, 2008a , p. 5). “The sole criterion in phenomenology issues from the facts,” Marion says, “What shows itself justifies itself by that very fact” ( 2008c , p. 60). He thus believes to be simply stating the essence of the phenomenological method: namely, “a finally radical empiricism—finally radical because it is no longer limited to sensible intuition but admits all originarily giving intuition” ( 2008c , p. 57).

Indeed, Marion and Janicaud agree on what the phenomenological method is, but disagree on what it allows for. For Marion, too, phenomenology’s radical empiricism means putting “in parentheses all transcendence, including that of God.” Where they differ, however, is that for Marion “the question of God is played out as much in the dimension of immanence as in that of transcendence” ( 2002b , p. 24, p. 27). It is thus, again, a matter of the conditions within which phenomenological rationality operates: not of the logical validity of the inference, but of the status of the assumptions that inform it. Marion’s point is that, insofar as religious phenomena give themselves , they must in principle be subject to phenomenological analysis: “religious phenomena would reappear again in philosophy, as facts justified de jure since given in fact (…)—all these lived experiences of consciousness would hence appear as phenomena by full right, at least to the extent to which they are given to consciousness” ( 2008a , p. 5; see also 2017b , p. 96). This accords perfectly with the phenomenological conception of reason. The question is whether the premise is true: whether religious phenomena do give (show) themselves, as (from) themselves. Let us therefore consider why this not traditionally thought to the case.

b. Possibility and experience

According to Marion, religious phenomena are justified in virtue of the principle of principles, yet classical phenomenology did not acknowledge this because its understanding of this principle was internally inconsistent: “not because intuition as such limits phenomenality, but because as intuition it remains framed by two conditions of possibility, conditions that themselves are not intuitive but that are nevertheless assigned to every phenomenon. The second and third traits of the ‘principle of all principles’ contradict the first, as conditions and limits—a condition and a limit—contradict the claim to absolute possibility opened by the giving intuition” ( 2008b , p. 22; 2002a , 184–189). Husserl may have exposed absolute givenness, but failed to acknowledge the coincidence of the material and formal conditions of phenomenality this implies: beyond proclaiming the supremacy of giving intuition, his principle also adds a second trait, a horizon , circumscribing the limits in which the intuition gives itself; and a third trait, the I to which the intuition gives itself and by which it is constituted into a phenomenon.

These two additional traits undo the first trait’s achievement, namely givenness’ absolute character. Otherwise put, they contradict the criterion established by the first trait, namely the reduction: because they are exclusively formal, they are illegitimate; for the first trait abolished every formal condition irreducible to a material one. For classical phenomenology, “the possibility of the phenomenon results not from its own phenomenality,” Marion says, “but from an authority that is marginal, other, if not external: that of the conditions of experience for and by the subject” ( 2002a , p. 181). It may have uncovered absolute givenness, “but it thinks that givenness only on the basis of determinations that threaten its originary character: the horizon and the reduction [to the I ]. Phenomenology would thus almost immediately condemn itself to missing what the giving intuition indicates to it as its goal: to free the possibility of appearing as such” (Marion, 2008b , p. 24).

These two formal conditions also require the exclusion of religious phenomenona: it is the de jure exclusion of revelation, as the a priori exclusion of absolute phenomena by the requirement of a limiting horizon, that makes its de facto appearance impossible. “By imposing an a priori dimension or abode and therefore a limit for revelation,” Marion says, “the concept of the horizon itself disqualifies the possibility of revelation, while at the same time making any manifestation possible. The obstacles to revelation thus coincide with the conditions of manifestation” ( 2008a , p. 12). We must thus rethink the general conditions of possibility for the phenomenon and render them adequate to what Henry calls pure phenomenality , namely Marion’s absolute givenness : conceptualising phenomenality such that in principle an absolute phenomenon can give itself absolutely, formally unconditioned. Footnote 6 We must outline the mode of phenomenality where self-giving intuition alone “secures its condition of possibility,” where “the phenomenality of givenness is indexed to intuition” (Marion, 2002a , p. 193). Ultimately, Marion says, this requires being able to think the phenomenon of revelation, and as such “the religious phenomenon poses the question of the general possibility of the phenomenon” ( 2008b , p.18).

“How then can a phenomenon that challenges any horizon appear in the horizon of a world?” Marion asks. “By saturating it” ( 2017b , p. 99). Here the famous saturated phenomenon comes in: a phenomenon so rich in intuition, because it gives itself absolutely without reserve, that it is in excess of any possible intentional horizon. As such, it “only appears by contradicting by excess the conditions of any appearance: its glory ( doxa ) is always exercised as a paradox, where evidence shows itself through bedazzlement” (Marion, 2017b , p. 99). It is exercised as a paradox because absolute givenness does not appear, since its nature exists in contradicting the conditions of appearance: “Givenness par excellence actually lays itself open to seeming to disappear (by defect) precisely because it gives itself without reserve (by excess)” (Marion, 2008c , p. 63–64). It is not what is seen , but rather the appearance of the invisible as the awareness that there is more to be seen than I can register, detected only “by the interference of its horizon, like the luminous rays that, by being reflected in the frame of a mirror, interfere with and hinder each other or, in contrast, gather their lights in an unbearable bedazzlement” (Marion, 2017b , p. 99). Hence, saturation allows for religious phenomena, such as revelation, to enter the phenomenal field: “Revelation entails a presentation. Hence it condescends to assume a horizon, but it nevertheless challenges any a priori condition imposed on its possibility. Even so these paradoxical requirements indicate the correct response: revelation presents itself in a horizon only by saturating it” (Marion, 2008a , p. 16). Revelation is not the appearance of something but rather the disruption of appearance, stunning anticipation: not experienced but making itself felt in the stunned subject of experience. Which brings us to the second condition: the I .

The third trait of the principle of principles, like the second contradicting the first, is that intuition only gives itself “to us,” to an I that constitutes what appears from what gives itself against a horizon. Or, differently put, a priori conditions of possible experience are always imposed on self-giving intuition by a subject (Marion, 2002a , p. 187). Hence, “even if it shows itself on the basis of itself,” Marion says, “the phenomenon can do so only by allowing itself to be led back ( réduit ), and therefore reduced, to the I” ( 2008b , p. 23–24). The I’s essential function is to control and condition givenness so that it can be constituted into an object. Here too, Marion asks ( 2002a , p. 189; 2008b , p. 24): “Can we imagine phenomena such that they would invert limit (by exceeding the horizon, instead of being inscribed within it) and condition (by reconducting the I to itself, instead of being reduced to it)?” Indeed, we can: the saturated phenomenon that, by giving itself absolutely, challenges the process of subjective constitution against the horizons it disrupts. Phenomena then constitute and impose themselves on a subject, rather than the subject imposing its conditions on phenomena to constitute them. The given, Marion says, “merits its name by its being a fait accompli , such that it happens to me, and in which it is distinguished from all foreseen, synthesised, and constituted objects, since it happens to me as an event” ( 2002b , p. 25). The direction of constitution is reversed: the event surprises me, I find myself constituted by it ( je me suis fait ), namely as witness to the event. In scrambling horizons, absolute givenness, “constituting its interlocutor as stunned ( interloqué ) and not as a phenomenon constituted by an I , takes up again a common phenomenological character, but here also by inverting it. It indicates the position of the I that has become a me ( moi ): responding to a givenness rather than objectifying it” (Marion, 2017b , p. 100). It can then also be understood as witness to revelation , for when it comes to the subjective character of experience, the saturated phenomenon “divests the I of any a priori character. This is commonly said as: Revelation reveals the I to itself” (Marion, 2017b , p. 100).

Marion thus places religious phenomena within reach of phenomenological reason as the general possibility of the phenomenon because it challenges phenomenologically illegitimate conditions of possible experience. Where classical phenomenology concerns what gives itself conditionally as something through constitution; Marion’s radical phenomenology concerns what gives itself unconditionally by imposition. “The difference between these standpoints does not run between rationality and credulity,” as Janicaud believes, “but between the recognition of occurrences ( faits ), even at the cost of their explanation, and the censoring of events ( faits ), even at the cost of real evidence, thus between empirical acceptance of an ‘impossible’ possibility and the banning on principle of the possibility of ‘impossible’ events” (Marion, 2017b , p. 90). Only this approach would be the radical empiricism that the phenomenological reduction requires.

c. Possibility and revelation

Phenomenology, Marion says, therefore succeeds where previous philosophy of religion failed: “freeing the possibility of revelation, hence possibility as revelation, from the grip of the (…) a priori condition of possibility (hence of impossibility) for any event to come” ( 2008a , p. 16–17). Revelation is an impossible possibility , there “where an authority that is transcendent to experience nevertheless manifests itself experientially” (Marion, 2008a , p. 2), experience that transcends the conditions of possible experience. Phenomenologically speaking, possibility precedes actuality . In Marion’s framework, however, actuality precedes possibility : since revelation is “the phenomenon taken in its fullest meaning” (Marion, 2008b , p. 46), phenomenality is only limited by the actuality of experience, rather than a priori conditions regarding its possibility. Whatever gives itself in fact, is as possible phenomenon included in the phenomenal field by right as a matter of fact. Footnote 7 Saturated phenomena thus do not put themselves into question by exceeding the conditions of possible experience the subject uses to make sense of the world, but rather put that subject into question together with his approach to the world.

What does this mean for the relationship between phenomenology and theology? Well, Marion says, “givenness radically redefines” it in terms of possibility ( 1990 , p. 800). Marion, somewhat exasperated at having to make this point over and over again, explains:

Phenomenology describes possibilities and never considers the phenomenon of revelation except as a possibility of phenomenality, one that it would formulate in this way: If God were to manifest himself (or manifested himself), he would use a paradox to the second degree. Revelation (of God by himself, theo- logical), if it takes place, will assume the phenomenal figure of the phenomenon of revelation, of the paradox of paradoxes, of saturation to the second degree. To be sure R evelation (as actuality) is never confounded with r evelation (as possible phenomenon). (…) But phenomenology, which owes it to phenomenality to go this far, does not go beyond and should never pretend to decide the fact of Revelation, its historicity, its actuality, or its meaning. (…) Only a theology, and on condition of constructing itself on the basis of this fact alone (…), could reach it. Even if it had the desire to do so (…), phenomenology would not have the power to turn into theology ( 2002a , p. 235n90).

Here, Marion distinguishes between Revelation and revelation. The former regards the actuality of religious experience: the historical event of God revealing himself, that he is given in fact (materially) to consciousness. The latter regards the possibility of such an event being experienced: the phenomenality this event takes on, outlining how such an event would be given (formally), regardless of whether it actually is. “Between phenomenology and theology,” Marion says, “the border passes between revelation as possibility and Revelation as historicity” ( 2008c , p. 64). In relation to the religious phenomenon, phenomenology thus “exercises a purely and simply critical function, in a strictly Kantian posture” (Marion, 2002b , p. 28). Its task exists in developing the analysis performed in the previous paragraph: rendering phenomenality adequate to revelation. Indeed, as Falque observes, Marion performs “a quasi-transcendental deduction of revelation starting from the saturated phenomenon” ( 2007 , p. 191). It is as such that Marion believes to have realised a phenomenological philosophy of religion that grounds phenomenology proper.

d. Phenomenology and theophany

However, we cannot yet declare ourselves satisfied, for Marion’s phenomenology of religion is also key to theology as the traditional praeambula fidei . Even within theology, to describe Revelation, Marion’s phenomenological framework must first be imported precisely because possibility (phenomenology) precedes actuality (theology). “The topic of a phenomenology of religion,” suggests James K.A. Smith, comparing Marion to Aquinas, “is precisely this theophany: what distinguishes it from theology is simply its mode of knowledge or perception.” ( 1999 , p. 22). If phenomenological philosophy of religion and phenomenological theology share the topic of theophany, then whether Marion’s phenomenology is justified as theology or philosophy remains to be decided.

The ease with which some, when the possibility an absolute phenomenon has been admitted to in principle, identify it with theophany is somewhat curious. Kosky, for example, speaks in a single breath of the “properly religious phenomena of revelation, theophany,” and contends that “insofar as revealed theology, the Scriptures, claims to describe certain appearings and manifestations, theophanies, it belongs within phenomenology” ( 2000 , p. 116–118). Marion similarly states, in an “ultra-traditional manner” (Caputo, 2007 , p. 84), that with absolute phenomenality “an experience, effectively beyond (…) the conditions of possibility of experience, is affirmed not only by its affidavit from privileged or designated individuals, but by words or expositions rightly accessible to everyone (e.g., the Scriptures). Revelation takes its strength of provocation from what it speaks universally” ( 2008a , p. 2).

Does this not confuse the phenomenological regime of revelation , a mode of phenomenality, with actual Revelation , a historically situated theophany? Only one of these is universally accessible. Even Falque, otherwise gleefully declaring that “the more we theologise, the better we philosophise” ( 2008 , p. 35; 2016a , p. 147–149), warns that “contemporary phenomenology is indeed wrong to somewhat quickly identify phenomenality with revelation” ( 2006 , p. 207). Moreover, he continues, “in the context of philosophy, one cannot so easily connect phenomenology and theophany,” precisely because “the divine is not the primary object of the phenomenologist—at least inasmuch as he is (…) a philosopher first and foremost” ( 2016b , p. 217). If an absolute phenomenon were to actually give itself absolutely, it would still remain to be seen whether what it thus gives is God. Footnote 8 Marion forgets that what is reduced in phenomenology is not just the actuality of theophany (Revelation), until only its possibility remains (revelation); rather, the reduction extends to the nature of theophany ( theophaneia ): that the appearing ( phanein ) would be that of divinity ( theos ). Marion’s claim that Scripture renders descriptions of Revelation universally accessible strikes me as naïve: faith is indeed not required to accept the historical actuality of the experiences recorded in Scripture; it is, however, required to accept the theophanic character of these experiences, instead of dismissing them as (historically actual) illusions. As Caputo puts it: “Something is given, I know not what, that is intended as a presence of the risen Jesus in the community; it could also be intended as an hallucination if one does not have faith or has a different faith” ( 2007 , p. 88). The reduction applies to theological realism , as it does to ontological realism: Marion’s distinction between actuality and possibility works if it is operative within the object of experience, rather than the experience itself. Yet, this is not what he does. Caputo similarly complains that Marion’s phenomenology is inscribed within a logic of faith:

It would be paganism to think that the divinity of Jesus would have been detectible (…). The Revelation is revelation that Jesus is the anointed one, not a revelation of the divinity, which no one can see and still live. The divinity is a matter of faith. By faith, we are given to believe that Jesus is divine, (…) but the divinity is not itself given . Even if you were standing right beside Jesus you would not see the divinity unless you believed it; and if you believed it, that is because you would not see it. You would believe it even though, indeed, in spite of the fact that you did not see it, which is what faith means ( 2007 , p. 85).

The religious specificity of the religious phenomenon, so important to Marion, is thus still in question: we must not just be able to phenomenalise an absolute, but to phenomenalise the absolute (God) as God. This question is phenomenological, according to Marion’s distinction, because it does not require God to actually reveal himself; it rather asks how God reveals himself when he gives himself as an absolute phenomenon.

We have thus returned to the only element of Janicaud’s critique still standing: the self-revelation of God as phenomenological possibility, of course; but in virtue of what experience? Jocelyn Benoist ( 2001 , p.102) similarly asks Marion: “what will you answer me if I say to you that where you see God, I see nothing?” He feels that Marion’s phenomenology has not secured “the conditions of publicity necessary (…) to answer by means other than a ruse or the violence (…) of a reduction.” Marion’s answer is that “not seeing does not prove that there is nothing to see. It can simply suggest that there is indeed something to see, but that in order to see it, it is necessary to learn to see otherwise” ( 2008d , p. 123–124). He essentially tells Benoist to have another look and this time, please, a proper look: since the saturated phenomenon gives itself unconditionally, Benoist must simply not want to see it, stubbornly refuses to acknowledge what there is to be seen .

That argument is problematic, though. According to Marion, the faith that he has and Benoist lacks, does not allow one to compensate for a lack of intuition and thus to see God where others do not, as Benoist suspects (Marion, 2017a , p. 136; 2017b , p. 99). Rather, faith is the willingness to see what there is to be seen without prejudice, a fidelity to givenness : the subject does justice to the absolute givenness of the phenomenon by seeing otherwise, by abandoning his horizons and himself. Indeed, Marion understands “the will to see ( le vouloir bien voir ),” as deciding the actuality of phenomenalisation: “in order to phenomenalise the given, one first has to admit it (to ‘want’ to receive it) and receive oneself from it as given over to it so as thus to see (…) what it shows. The decision to respond, therefore to receive, precedes the possibility of seeing” ( 2002a , p. 305, p. 307). Hence, Benoist’s inability to see simply indicates an unwillingness to see what there is to be seen. Though not seeing indeed does not mean that there is nothing to be seen, in dismissing Benoist’s objection as bad faith (or a faulty will), Marion makes the same mistake he points out in others: namely, arbitrarily refusing to accept the actuality (or lack thereof) of certain experiences. Falque describes how Marion “pays a heavy price for his audacity,” because absolute phenomenality, in “consecrating excess as standard, basically places the ‘fault’ of its nonphenomenalisation on a subject that is as impotent as it is faulty” ( 2003 , p. 74). There is a moral dimension to this, summed up eloquently by Joeri Schrijvers: “the ‘faulty will’ is the absence of that which, properly speaking, ought to be there, the will to see the given. All nonphenomenalization of the given is understood as a lack, an unwillingness, or irresponsibility to see the given as given” ( 2011 , p. 85). Not a lack of intuition, publicly accessible to anyone willing to see it; but a personal shortcoming of Benoist’s. Therefore, Schrijvers continues, Marion confirms the objection, for his “response can only be violent or by ruse: when one (…) does not see the excessive intuition of the given, this (…) cannot be due to a hole in the theory (for instance: something is simply not given) but to the absence of a certain will that, properly speaking, ought to be there” ( 2011 : 85). Marion does not, and indeed cannot, give a reason for his decision for givenness, but can only have faith: the decision must be groundless (extra-phenomenal, extra-rational) because givenness is the ultimate ground and criterion ( 2002a : 307-308). Marion has faith in givenness.

e. The theological datum

The problem of theophany could otherwise be stated as that of the theological datum , distinct from an ordinary sense datum. Joseph Rivera distinguishes between “the experience of sense data (philosophy) and the experience of divine data (theology),” suggesting that “theology provides data analogous to sense data,” that deliver “the positum of Revelation” ( 2018 , p. 182, p. 184, p. 189). The phenomenological question then becomes: “How are divine data, that is, Revelation, mediated to me?” (Rivera, 2018 , p. 189). Like Marion, Rivera seems to suggest that Scripture contains some universally accessible theological datum if one only wants to see it. Yet, what could this theological datum possibly be? Benoist’s objection is precisely that where Marion sees an extraordinary theological datum, he sees an ordinary sense datum. Indeed, why would Scripture impose itself on us as theological datum (Revelation) and not first as a sense datum (revelation)? Why ask how theological data are mediated to me, rather than how sense data are mediated to me as religious phenomena? Moreover, how could there be theological data at all? Religious phenomena do not consist in theological data imposing themselves on me, but rather in absolutely given sense data being mediated to me as religious phenomena. Only in this way can phenomenology discuss the possibility of revelation, leaving actual Revelation to theology. In doing so, however, both consider the same data, those of experience, that are merely received differently: there is no phenomenologically accessible positum of Revelation; Marion’s phenomenology merely shows that absolute givenness is the experiential positum as revelation.

When Marion then proclaims his “historical literalism about the events of the New Testament” (Caputo, 2007 , p. 83), Kosky speaks of theophany, and Rivera assumes theological data, we really do “want to believe that it is by design (…) that farewell is thus bid not only to common sense, but to the stuff of phenomena,” for “the only tie that binds these citations to whatever kind of experience is religious” (Janicaud, 2000 , p. 63). This obsession with theophany indicates to me that the phenomenology at issue here is a phenomenological theology rather than a phenomenological philosophy of religion. Indeed, Marion’s phenomenology finds its legitimacy in theology rather than in philosophy: in the will to see, which is nothing other than faith, fidelity to givenness, and inscribes that phenomenology within a logic of faith. Rivera embraces this: “Marion’s analysis,” he says, “attempts to achieve just this kind of confessional phenomenology. I have no problem with this task.” Indeed, according to him, “the future of phenomenology’s theological turn resides in the recent trend to use phenomenology as a tool for explication of dogma bound up with a particular faith tradition” ( 2018 , p. 192). This is perfectly fine, if we are prepared to concede to Janicaud that this is “a Christian phenomenology,” which has no future as a phenomenological philosophy of religion, because its “properly phenomenological sense must fall away, for a nonbeliever” ( 2000 , p. 67). Since phenomenology is merely a method, I am perfectly willing to do that: Rivera’s confessional phenomenology is entirely legitimate as a phenomenological theology that aims at describing theophany, situated within a faith tradition and its associated community of faith (or discourse). Yet, this does not help us in our present questioning, which is entwined with the possibility of Marion seeing God where others see nothing.

The question a phenomenological philosophy of religion must ask is thus: how does “the category of faith” (Nancy, 2008a , p.152), as an existential situation, function phenomenologically? How does it render possible the religious phenomenon, in the absence of its undisputed actuality ? This is a question about faith, but not from faith. For, as Marion correctly observes, a phenomenological philosophy of religion can only concern itself with the possibility of revelation. Nevertheless, this possibility cannot be established philosophically on the side of the phenomenon alone by giving actuality priority over possibility: in this way, Falque notes, Marion tries to maintain “in the framework of theology what phenomenology holds nevertheless as forbidden—the primacy of the fact over the sense” ( 2007 , p. 194; see also Carlson, 2007 , p. 161–162). In order for there to be (the actuality of) Revelation, a subjectivity receptive to revelation, faithful to givenness, is required. Taking this into account requires us to change strategies, as Falque observes:

The essential question today, in phenomenology as in theology, is not uniquely that of the ‘phenomenon of revelation’ or of ‘god’ (…). Instead it concerns the human or the receiving subject in his or her capacity—or lack of capacity—to speak about the phenomenon, or God, or whether one starts from the phenomenon itself or from God in the act of self-revelation (the descending ontological way), or starts from the human and the human conditions of existence ( in via ) rendering impossible all direct access to some beyond ( in patria ) (the ascending cosmological way/s). (…) Must we necessarily accuse of an ‘anthropological reduction’ a phenomenology that would first take ‘the human as such,’ (…) in our finitude, for the point of departure of its phenomenality? And must we not, on the contrary, hold at once as impossible (…) all the bedazzlement of the ‘phenomenon of revelation’ that would give itself all at once, almost directly and independently of all the (transcendental) conditions of its reception? ( 2007 , p. 188)

Marion takes the descending ontological way, giving absolute priority to objective givenness over its subjective reception: actuality precedes possibility, determining possibility in terms of actuality; the phenomenon predates the subject, constituting it as witness to revelation. Yet, this approach stumbles regarding the philosophical question about faith. Hence, let’s change strategies: philosophically, where actuality is in doubt or reduced, we must limit ourselves to possibility in terms of possibility; not so much ascending, but considering the possibility of ascending, namely subjective faith. Phenomenology, as Falque correctly notes, is not primarily concerned with divinity, but with humanity as such, the conditions of existence shaping experience and situating reason: the biases that make meaningful appearance possible . It is such an account that Jean-Luc Nancy offers.

§3. The revelation of nothingness

Nancy is not usually associated with the theological turn, yet has worked in parallel to it. Deeply critical of both Christianity and phenomenology, his work can nevertheless not be understood without reference to both. Footnote 9 Indeed, there is an unconventional phenomenology in Nancy: “a phenomenology that is theological, but not theophanic” (Nancy, 2008a , p. 49). Starting from finite humanity, (in) which infinite divinity opens up: the theological dimension is not experienced, but inferred from those who exist-in-faith, whose lives bear witness to it. This existential inference and interference of theology in phenomenology, forms, I believe, the future of phenomenological philosophy of religion: a phenomenology that explains how the existential situation of faith structures experience; rather than a phenomenological description of dogma, liturgy and devotion, internal to a particular religious tradition, and therefore to theology. The future belongs to a phenomenology that thinks about faith, but not from faith.

a. The givenness of nothingness

Nancy’s problem with Marion is that the latter’s “powerful and eloquent proposition does not emerge yet out of a ‘self-giving’ (and of a ‘self-showing’) of the phenomenon, whereas I propose here, simply, that nothing gives itself and that nothing shows itself —and that is what is” (Nancy, 2007 , p. 123n24). For him, everything that gives (from) itself ( se donne ), at the same time withdraws (in) itself ( s’abandonne ) by giving itself ( 1982 , p. 83). Or, as Ashok Collins puts it, “in piercing to the heart of givenness, we encounter the exposure of a patent nothingness” ( 2015 , p. 332): something only exists in and as its own effacement; there is no-thing that is given as itself in pure (phenomenal) self-immanence (Nancy, 2007 , p. 102).

For Nancy, reality exists in an infinite circulation of meanings, emerging from a never-ending process of making sense of the world by dwelling in it, and as such merging with it. Phenomenology cannot do justice to this “coming of sense,” because reduction aims at stable essences: “there is no epoché of sense,” for the epoché is itself a way of making sense of the world and is therefore “already caught up in sense and in the world” (Nancy, 1997 , p. 17–18). Hence, whatever gives itself (to a consciousness) also withdraws itself, whatever essence emerges from the world of appearances does so by merging with it: there is no pure meaning at one with itself; rather, it is always internally displaced, divided and shared, absent when fully present (to a consciousness). In other words, what the phenomenological reduction aims at—constructing all meaning as immanently constituted by a consciousness—is impossible because consciousness is always already carried along outside of itself by the movement of sense in which it is caught up. This movement can never be appropriated by a consciousness, but is nevertheless always exposed in consciousness’ engagement with the world, in its making sense of the world. Footnote 10 Therefore, Nancy says, “nothing presents itself ,” which spells “the end of a phenomenology in general, albeit that of the unapparent,” including that of givenness. Indeed, “the present does not present itself,” the given does not give itself, “and [yet] it is no less exposed. It is nothing other than that, and that is what it falls to us to think henceforth” ( 2007 , p. 72).

Theologians know this as the problem of the divine names: in naming God, he escapes us, for God exceeds any singular name. How are we then to think about God? Well, we shouldn’t. In naming the abysses of thinking God , Nancy says, “we fill in the abysses by attributing a bottom to them, and we blaspheme (…) the name of God by making it the name of some thing ” ( 1991 , p. 113). Indeed, God escapes signification, is no-thing . We must allow God to bask in the glory of his withdrawal, instead of summoning (undoing) him by naming him: to let him open up (within) the world as the abyss on which it rests, nothing . God does not give himself; yet gives himself as nothingness. How are we to think this?

Nancy replaces divine names with divine places : where for Marion God is given as superabundant givenness; for Nancy, it is as the lacking, empty nothingness, of such a given (name) that God shows himself, namely in withdrawing into himself and effacing himself: the lack of divine names is a place for divinity “to withhold itself, and as a consequence, thereby to offer itself, to offer itself in reserve, both as its own reserve and as its own withdrawal” (Nancy, 1991 , p. 120). God may then not be given (a name), but he is nevertheless exposed (in places) as the breaches in immanence we experience. This place where God is exposed, where he shows himself by hiding himself, is finite humanity, the conditions of existence: “ Here (…) divinity lets itself be seen, manifestly invisible and invisibly manifest. God reveals himself—and God is always a stranger in all manifestation and all revelation. Revelation (…) is not a presentation, or a representation: it must be the evidence of the possibility (never the necessity) of a being-unto-god . What there is revelation of is not ‘God,’ as if he were something that can be exhibited (…), it is rather the unto-God ( l’à-Dieu ) or being-unto-god” (Nancy, 1991 , p. 124). The possibility of being-unto-God sets me in-the-world in a certain way, for “the god expels man outside of himself” (Nancy, 1991 , p. 147). Namely, it sets me in relation to God, opens me unto God: “The divine is that, or he, with which or with whom man finds himself involved in a certain relation, be it one of presence or of absence, one of appearance ( parution ) or disappearance” (Nancy, 1991 , p. 132). In doing so, it sets me in relation to the nothing, for being-unto-God is being-unto-nothing (Nancy, 1991 , p. 126). Hence, the divine place is the subjectivity (in) which divinity opens up as the possibility of being-unto-God, putting it outside-of-itself and allowing it to-be-itself. A phenomenological philosophy of religion finds (the possibility of) God in, must be directed at, the subjectivity characterised by (the possibility of) faith, for this forms “the necessary relation to the nothing” (Nancy, 2008b , p.12).

b. The fidelity to nothingness

Whereas Marion understands faith as the will to see, fidelity to givenness, to what there is to be seen; Nancy, in line with Caputo, understands it as fidelity to nothingness, keeping open the void, a seeing (nothing) where nothing is to be seen (Nancy, 2008a , p. 154): faith opens up “where it is no longer a sacred presence that assures and guarantees, but the fact itself (…) of not being assured by any presence” (Nancy, 2008a , p. 55). Faith is “a relation to God,” but only “to the extent that God and his love are not present, shown,” because in relating to it, the only access it provides is “an access, consequently, to that which cuts off or withdraws access,” effacing itself in giving itself (Nancy, 2008a , p.62, p. 152). There is “no standpoint outside of God,” as Rudolf Bultmann puts it, “and thus God cannot be spoken of in general statements, general truths, which are true without reference to the concrete existential situation of the speaker” ( 1969 , p. 53, trans. mod.). Faith is thus a relation to nothing , to a presence as absent and an absence as present: “this faith,” Nancy suggests, “is the outside opening in itself a passage toward the inside,” it “does not consist in recognising the known but in entrusting oneself to the unknown” ( 2008a , p. 54; 2008b , p. 28). Faith is nothing but being-unto-nothing.

Hence, it is not about believing anything, but rather, like Nietzsche says, “a doing, above all a not -doing-much, a different being ” (Nietzsche, 2005 , p. 35; Nancy, 2008a , p. 52): being-unto-God. Only here does God manifest himself, in this different being, this existence-in-faith, of those that succeed in seeing him, seeing what is not there to be seen: “Revelation (…) reveals that there is nothing to show, nothing to make appear out of the tomb, no apparition, and no theophany or epiphany of a celestial glory” (Nancy, 2008b , p. 45). That is to say, the theological dimension opens up, manifests itself, within the subject as the nothingness to which it relates through faith, and in doing so receives itself as subject, exists entirely in and as this relation. Nancy has expressed this idea in the language of Marion’s theory of saturated phenomena:

The greatest spiritual and theological analyses of the Christian faith show that faith is rather (…) the adhesion to itself of an aim without other . I will say, in phenomenological terms, the adhesion to itself of an aim without a correlative object, or with no fulfilment of sense but that of the aim itself. One could perhaps say that faith is pure intentionality, or that it is the phenomenon of intentionality as a self-sufficient phenomenon, as a ‘saturated phenomenon,’ in Jean-Luc Marion’s sense. I understand perfectly well that Marion, in speaking of ‘saturated phenomena,’ is not talking about a phenomenon like faith, but rather of phenomena that would offer themselves as faith, or that would entail faith; nevertheless, I leave open the question of whether faith might not be such a ‘saturated phenomenon,’ or even, perhaps, saturation itself ( 2008a , p. 152–153).

Nancy’s understanding of faith as the adhesion to itself of an aim without fulfilment other than itself resonates with Caputo’s critique of Marion. Marion’s phenomenology is hyperbolic, he suggests, for it is built upon an excess, not of intuitive givenness, but of intention: faith is not the will to see what there is to be seen, but the desire (the will) to see something when there is nothing to be seen. “Now there is phenomenology here,” Caputo says, “but it is a phenomenology of faith , which is an excess in the order of intention beyond fulfilment (…) and not one of saturated givenness , which is the same for believers and nonbelievers, otherwise it is not a phenomenological datum” ( 2007 , p. 87), but a theological datum. Nancy embraces this hyperbolic reading of Marion, reconfiguring his phenomenology: it is the subjectivity or existence that can see where there is nothing to see, because it exists in faith, that thus becomes the site or the place of phenomenality. For it is there that the nothing which gives itself is made sense of and thus shows itself . The “subjective and existential adherence” (Nancy, 2008a , p. 154) of faith becomes itself the saturated phenomenon, saturation itself , precisely because saturation is not a characteristic of what appears, but of how it appears to a situated subject: saturation describes what happens to the subject, its horizons getting overwhelmed, and not the nature of the object of experience. This is perhaps why Marion at some early instances speaks of a saturating phenomenon , rather than a saturated phenomenon (see Marion, 2017b ). Nancy picks up on this by suggesting that the how (faith) is coextensive with the what (excess) of revelation: God is revealed in and as the lives of those whom he reveals himself to in virtue of their faith. It is thus a question of thinking how faith allows for the following: “how man appears to god, in the god, how the god appears to man, in man, and how that itself is totally unapparent” (Nancy, 1991 , p. 139). God is revealed in and as being-unto-God.

c. The experience of nothingness

In an essay entitled Noli me tangere , containing a meditation on the passage from the Gospel of John known under the same name, Nancy then attempts to think God as revealed in and as a particular being-unto-God. The Gospel passage relates how Mary Magdalene finds Jesus’ tomb empty. The risen Christ then appears to her, but she does not recognise him, seeing a gardener instead. Once he calls her by her name, everything changes. Jesus then instructs her not to touch him, but instead to go tell the disciples that she has seen him. Nancy wonders why Mary Magadalene did not recognise Jesus initially. What did she see and when?

Reflecting on this, he considers the various artistic depictions of this episode: the resurrection itself, though absent from the Gospels, figures prominently in the history of art and is usually presented as a spectacular show of divine power, rendering visible an event “nowhere given to be seen,” in an attempt “to confront the invisible head on (…) and to take the gesture of seeing and of making seen to the point of dazzling the gaze and rendering the canvas incandescent” (Nancy, 2008b , p. 22). Encounters with the arisen, however, are presented in a lower key. In Albrecht Dürer’s woodcut depicting the passage at issue, for example, there are no markers of Jesus’ divinity: he appears without halo, but with shovel and sun hat. Nothing visible suggests that the man depicted is anything but a gardener. Nancy therefore concludes that, regardless of the revelation, “there is nothing changed in his appearance. Thus there is nothing to change in Mary Magdalene’s seeing, and this seeing is not a mistake” ( 2008b , p. 30). Indeed, nothing is revealed, there is nothing to see. Dürer hints at this by having the sun illuminate the empty tomb and Jesus’ back: it is “in the emptiness or in the emptying out of presence that the light shines. And this light does not fill in that emptiness but hollows it out even more, since in Dürer we could venture to discern it in the proximity of the sun to the gardener’s (the gravedigger’s?) shovel” (Nancy, 2008b , p. 26). Revelation does not reveal anything to be seen by giving it, but precisely the absence and withdrawal of any such thing as the nothingness that leaves me alone with my faith.

The resurrection serves as Nancy’s paradigmatic example of this revelation of nothingness. As risen, Christ is neither dead nor alive: the divine putrefaction Nietzsche’s madman raves about has not infected the air, yet he is obviously not alive (Nancy, 2008b , p. 41). He describes this peculiar state in which Christ appears as follows:

He is the same without being the same, altered within himself. Is it not thus that the dead appear? Is it not this alteration, at once imperceptible and striking—the appearing of that which or of he who can no longer properly appear, the appearing of an appeared and disappeared —that most properly and violently bears the imprint of death? The same is no longer the same; the aspect is dissociated from the appearance; the visage is made absent right in the face; the body is sinking into the body, sliding under it. The departing ( la partance ) is inscribed into presence, presence is presenting its vacating ( son congé ). He has already left; he is no longer where he is; he is no longer as he is. He is dead , which is to say that he is not what or who he, at the same time, is or presents. He is his own alteration and his own absence: He is properly only his impropriety ( 2008b , p. 28).

Christ appears as neither alive nor dead, present nor absent. He is his departing , the presence of absence, death opening up within life, light illuminating the empty darkness of the tomb. This is not something that gives itself to be seen. Hence, Mary Magdalene does not see the risen Christ, for he is “what is not seen and what nonetheless shines,” his glory “radiates only for eyes that know how to see, and those eyes see nothing but the gardener,” it “shines only insofar as it is received and transmitted” (Nancy, 2008b , p. 17, p. 46).

How does Mary Magdalene find Christ in the gardener? Not by seeing differently, like Marion would have it, as if the gardener is a guise to be seen through; but by relating differently to what is (not) to be seen, a different being . It is thus not a question of “seeing in the darkness, that is, in spite of it,” but of “ opening one’s eyes in the darkness and of their being overwhelmed by it, or it is a question of sensing the insensible and of being seized by it” (Nancy, 2008b , p. 42). This is a matter of the subject receiving revelation, who “must have ears to hear what the gardener says, eyes to see (into) the radiant emptiness of the sepulcher, a nose to smell what smells of nothing” (Nancy, 2008b , p. 46). In the case of Mary Magdalene, she can recognise Christ in the gardener without seeing him, because she does not need to see him, she has faith because nothing gives itself to be seen: “She believes because she hears. She hears the voice that says her name. She hears this voice that contradicts the appearance of the gardener but, even so, it is not said that her seeing changes. She is responding only to the voice of he who maintains the same appearance. (…) Mary’s faith consists in her trust that he who calls her calls no other than her and that there is a fidelity to this naming” (Nancy, 2008b , p. 29–30). It is thus the existential situation of faith, Mary Magdalene’s trust in Jesus actually being there though nowhere to be seen, her being-unto-God, that serves as the condition of possibility for the divine to become phenomenal. “That is why,” Nancy says, “one must already have in order to receive: precisely, one must have the receptive disposition” of faith ( 2008b , p. 6).

Interestingly, Nancy suggests that the site of phenomenality, the place where divinity enters phenomenality, is not what is given to Mary Magdalene but rather her faith, her subjective existence itself: in the departing confronting her, “there is revelation, but it is not he who leaves that reveals; it is she upon whom the task is conferred to go and announce his departure” ( 2008b , p. 48). Hence, the phenomenology at issue is not theophanic, it does not render the divine phenomenal to a consciousness, just like Mary Magdalene sees nothing but a gardener; but it is theological in its description of how faith allows her to see in the darkness, to make sense of the nothing that is there to be seen. Here, Nancy detects a similarity between Abraham and Mary Magdalene: “like Abraham,” he says, “Mary does not demonstrate her faith through statements, hypotheses, or calculations. She leaves” ( 2008b , p. 30). She did as Jesus asked of her: leaving to go tell the good news of the resurrection. Kierkegaard similarly observes that Abraham did not doubt when confronted with a similar paradox, rather “he drew the knife” ( 1985 , p. 55). If God reveals himself in the stories of Abraham and Mary Magdalene, it is not to them that he appears in an experience of theophany, for they do not require this since they have faith; but rather in them, the lives of which the stories tell that are a testament to their being-unto-God, their faith, and thus to God himself. These lives-of-faith are the real saturated phenomena, saturation itself. Those who fail to have faith can only look upon them in awe, be dazzled by them: these lives are incomprehensible because they are unconditioned, detached, from worldly reason(s) and instead animated by faith; going beyond what is humanly possible for the human being (a father sacrificing his son). Footnote 11 As such, phenomenologically, God must be seen as “an expression of our existence” (Bultmann, 1969 , p. 60).

Conclusion—‘ philosophe avant tout ’

The attempt at outlining a phenomenological philosophy of religion, as opposed to a phenomenological theology, that I have developed over the course of these paragraphs, may appear as quaintly old fashioned. Is the phenomenology of religion not the prime example of how it has become impossible to clearly distinguish philosophy from theology? Indeed, I have not picked up the gauntlet, thrown down by Falque in an obvious reference to Marion, to think how “one is more of a philosopher by being at the same time a theologian, in the unity of the same person, than by always trying to pass as nothing but a philosopher while in fact also practicing theology” ( 2016a , p. 123).

Falque’s exploration of the borderlands of philosophy and theology, an investigation into how one can be transformed by the other, presents a fundamental challenge to the question that has dominated French philosophy (of religion) ever since the 1988 essay by Marion I opened this article with: is a phenomenological philosophy of religion possible as distinct from a phenomenological theology? Falque’s point is not so much that such a philosophy of religion is impossible, but rather that it might not be desirable. Footnote 12 In doing so, he places himself firmly within the debate concerning the question first raised by Marion, whilst at the same time attempting to move on from it. I therefore see no reason why this question would not dominate the future of French philosophy of religion as much as it has done in its recent past. This is why, despite Falque’s important challenge, I have found it worthwhile to attempt to answer Marion’s question by providing a sketch of how such a phenomenological philosophy of religion might be possible.

This sketch, however, has attempted to avoid any naivety about the very real entanglement of philosophy with theology at the heart of many phenomenologies of religion. In that sense, what I have suggested fits entirely within Falque’s framework insofar as it asks the philosopher to become aware of the fact that “the starting points are all the more philosophical when the endpoints are theological . This position can be summarised as the principle of ‘the philosopher before all else ( philosophe avant tout ),’ which should be adopted today not against theology but, on the contrary, for it” (Falque, 2016a , p. 149). In being confronted with infinite divinity as its object, the philosopher realises that, insofar as he is a philosopher, he can only proceed from below, using as his point of departure “the human per se—that is, from the horizon of the pure and simple existence of the human” (Falque, 2016a , p. 122–123). Indeed, “rather than in terms of their objects,” Falque continues, “philosophy and theology are distinct in terms of their points of departure ,” what I have called their respective existential situations , the presuppositions that orientate and constitute their respective discourses by means of a certain decision (or, indeed, a certain faith). More specifically, “the former (…) starts from ‘below’ and simply takes as ‘possible’ what the second recognises as ‘actual’ in starting from ‘above’” (Falque, 2006 , p. 207–208; 2016a , p. 122–128). Otherwise put, philosophy (of religion) considers religious experience in terms of how it is structured or made possible by faith (or existence-in-faith) and in that sense starts from below, for it approaches (possible) experience in terms of a particular determination of human finite existence (its analysis of experience is about or in terms of faith); theology, however, considers religious experience as only accessible through faith and as such starts from above, precisely because its approach to the (actual) experience that it considers to be theophanic already assumes the presence of the infinite within it (it analyses experience from within the perspective of faith). Footnote 13 Philosophy then comes before all else, just like possibility comes before actuality, in the sense that “no theologoumenon has any meaning outside outside of a lived experience or a philosophical ‘existential,’ which gives it meaning (…). In sum, it should be clear that a phenomenology from below precedes and grounds any theology from above” (Falque, 2016a , p. 124).

I have thus suggested that the future of philosophy of religion in its phenomenological style lies, not in Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, for it operates from faith and is therefore inscribed in a theo-logic of faith in virtue of its theo-phanic aim; but rather in Nancy’s phenomenology of existence, which inquires about faith as the existential situation in which phenomenological reason finds itself and allows it to operate. Hence, we could conclude with Bultmann that “it is therefore clear that if a man will speak of God, he must evidently speak of himself ” ( 1969 , p. 55), namely his finite humanity. Or, we might follow Nancy, who concludes with the more phenomenological language of an essay by Gérard Granel: “If there is something certain here, it is that perceptual experience is my experience. It is (…) the experience-of-me. To suppose that someone else could look through my eyes is absolute nonsense—not because my eyes ‘belong to me,’ but because the gaze is not made ‘by’ the eyes. The gaze is given to me on the basis of the very thing I am looking at, as also are my eyes, and even ‘me.’ Decidedly .” ( 2008 , p. 171, my emphasis).

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My approach is similar to, though more critical than, that of Christina Gschwandtner ( 2016 , p. 64–69), who has also read (some) of these essays together.

For both a recognition of the legitimacy of this question, as well as an interesting way of developing a phenomenology of mysticism regardless, see Steinbock, 2007 , p. 17–32, p. 115–147.

These two points are also made eloquently by Emmanuel Falque in his Crossing the Rubicon: The Borderlands of Philosophy and Theology ( 2016a , p. 80–88) as the ‘prejudice of the absence of prejudices’ (§11) and the idea of ‘a belief at the origin’ (§10). Falque shows how this means that the phenomenological approach to the world always runs into a certain kind of irreducible faith , whether this faith is philosophical or religious: “The idea of an original faith in the world, or rather trust in the belief that I have of the world,” he writes, “makes the world paradoxically the highest and the most certain of truths in an originary attitude of trust rather than mistrust. That this faith may be philosophical and not only religious is one of the great lessons of phenomenology, which theology today would gain from investigating, albeit to let itself be transformed in the process” (83). In that sense, he says, he is picking up on Heidegger’s description of faith in The Phenomenology of Religious Life ( 2010 , p. 248) as a phenomenologically relevant “primordial doxa , toward which the others are referred back in a certain way .” This primordial doxa thus functions in the same way as what Kierkegaard calls decision .

Whereas Kierkegaard understands the act of decision first and foremost in a profoundly ontologically way, its broader theological and phenomenological reach is wonderfully summarised by Falque ( 2016a , p. 111): “Deciding is not choosing but responding. The person who decides is never first; he is always second. One does not decide a priori but only a posteriori.”

The other three principles are: (1) Heidegger’s ‘so much appearance, so much being’ ( Soviel Schein—soviel Sein) ( 1996 , p. 36); (2) Husserl’s principle of principles; and, (3) Husserl’s ‘Back to the things themselves!’. Marion has since explicitly adopted this didactic frame offered by Henry (see 2002a , p. 7–19; 2002b , p. 17).

This is not to say that all phenomena should be thought according to the model of absolute givenness, according to the regime of revelation. Marion admits that there are various degrees of givenness, but all these degrees depend on the possibility of absolute givenness (see Marion, 2002a , p. 179–247; Gschwandtner, 2014 ).

Marion would strongly contest how I describe his position here. Indeed, he often paraphrases Heidegger, who declares in the famous seventh paragraph of Being and Time ( 1996 , p. 38), taking his cue directly from Husserl, that for the phenomenologist “Higher than actuality stands possibility . We can understand phenomenology solely by seizing upon it as a possibility.” The point that Marion wants to make is that though the absolute phenomenon of revelation might lack actuality, this does not count against its claim to phenomenality, since possibility determines actuality. Otherwise put, if experience is thus defined so as to exclude absolute phenomena from the outset, if the phenomenal field is restricted a priori ; then of course these phenomena will never appear in experience, yet this has nothing to do with their actuality. The problem here, however, is that Marion already seems to assume the actuality of this absolute phenomenon: what is the point of thinking the possibility of the impossible, of freeing the possibility of revelation, of extending phenomenality beyond what is seen to what is to be seen ; if the actuality of the impossibility is not already assumed, from which it would indeed follow that the conditions of possibility need to be redefined in order to be adequate to this impossible actuality? Why collapse all formal conditions of possible experience into material ones if one does not already have a certain actual (and therefore, it follows, it must also be possible ) experience in mind that would exceed those formal conditions? At most, possibility only precedes actuality within Marion’s framework when this is understood as possibility de facto but not possibility de jure . The point of all this, as I will develop in what follows, is that Marion’s phenomenology is theological (because it starts from actuality) rather than philosophical (which starts from possibility). Yet, curiously, Marion nevertheless identifies this dividing line correctly.

Of course, the category of saturated phenomena is not entirely coextensive with theophanic phenomena: as Kosky rightly emphasises ( 2000 , p. 116), there are also aesthetic (the sublime) and philosophical (the infinite) saturated phenomena. Yet, nevertheless, the phenomenon par excellence remains a special type of saturated phenomenon, the “paradox of paradoxes,” namely revelation, because unlike the others it is “saturated to the second degree” (Marion, 2002a , p. 247).

For two detailed studies of Nancy’s relation to both traditions, see respectively, Watkin, 2011 and Watkin, 2009 ; in addition to Lueck, 2015 and Watkin, 2015 . On Nancy’s relation to the theological turn in general, and Marion in particular, see: Collins, 2015 ; James, 2012 , p. 35, p. 38; Horner, 2009 ; ten Kate, 2008 ; Alexandrova et al. 2012 , p. 33–36; and Hackett, 2015 .

The notion of sense ( sens ) within Nancy’s work is complex and all-encompassing. What Nancy means by it can perhaps most straightforwardly be summed up as being itself, though this must always be seen as a social being-with. In that sense, it is perhaps better understood as the act and the event of being that happens between us. For it is through what happens between us, our relations, our conversations, our interpretations, that meaning is created and a world comes to be. Indeed, Nancy says, we are meaning ( 2000 , p. 1–5): sense is the meaning that we are, that we share, that we expose. Sense, in other words, is ek-sistence: “Being as such (…) is no more ‘present’ in Dasein than anywhere else (…); rather, it is the ‘that there is’ of being as sense. This sense is not a property of the ‘that there is.’ It properly is (or makes ) the ‘that there is’ as such. It engages it and engages itself in it: ‘that there is’ is what is at stake in sense. Being, absolutely and rigorously considered as such (which also means (…) considered according to its unnominalized value as a verb—being is or exists being, it ‘makes’ them be, makes them make-sense), is essentially its own ‘engagement’ as the action of sense” (Nancy, 2003 , p. 177). Indeed, because this being as ek-sistence is fundamentally being-outisde-of-itself, there can never be any real (phenomenal) immanence or (divine) transcendence. As such, sense is never given, or is given precisely as nothingness: “it is precisely this darkness, this being-not-given of sense, that leads onto the proper dimension of sense as what is, in being and of being, desired and to be accomplished (acted out). In the ordinary impropriety of simple existing, being’s propriety of sense—which consists precisely in having to make sense, and not in the disposition of a given proper sense —both dissimulates and reveals itself” (Nancy, 2003 , p. 179).

It is precisely this bedazzlement, this horror and admiration, felt by the pseudonymous author of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling , that forms the very theme of the book.

Whereas Janicaud describes philosophy’s turn to theology as treason, Falque speaks of what a great honour it is for philosophy to be able to fulfil this move and describes it almost as a homecoming: “Today philosophy seems to have forgotten the honour of the theological . By dint of claiming his autonomy, the philosopher became independent and then separated from the theological. Now long after the divorce has been completed, he returns to his old loves as to his first spouse” ( 2016a , p. 129). Elsewhere he describes how this means that “a ‘conversion’ of philosophy by theology thus becomes necessary, not to demand of the former that she submits herself to the latter, nor a ‘treason’; [but rather] for the philosopher to be thus elevated to the rank of theologian” ( 2006 , p. 208–209).

Notice that whilst phenomenological theology and phenomenological philosophy of religion do indeed consider the same object (namely, theophany or religious experience), but simply in different ways (from above or from below, from faith or in terms of faith); depending on which position one takes (that of the philosopher or that of the theologian), the objects of these respective disciplines might seem distinct after all: for the theologian, the philosopher considers the general structure or conditions of possible experience; for the philosopher, the theologian considers actual experiences that do not enter his or her proper field of view. It is perhaps here that Falque’s dictum proves to be immensely powerful: the more we theologise, the better we philosophise .

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Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Professor Emmanuel Falque for reading an earlier version of this article and his kind words of encouragement. As I hope any reader will notice, the discussion between Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy I set up here, takes place entirely within the shadow of Professor Falque’s new and exciting work on the relationship between phenomenology, philosophy and theology.

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Deketelaere, N. Givenness and existence: On the possibility of a phenomenological philosophy of religion. Palgrave Commun 4 , 127 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-018-0184-7

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• Phenomenology and Existentialism

In this Book

• edited by Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum
• Published by: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Funder: Mellon/NEH / Hopkins Open Publishing: Encore Editions

Table of Contents

• New Copyright
• Maurice Mandelbaum, Edward N. Lee
• Preface to the Paperback Edition
• Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum
• pp. vii-viii
• Essay One: Brentano on Descriptive Psychology and the Intentional
• Roderick M. Chisolm
• Essay Two: Husserl’s Theory of the Intentionality of Consciousness in Historical Perspective
• Aron Gurwitsch
• Essay Three: Notes toward an Understanding of Heidegger’s Aesthetics
• E. F. Karlin
• Essay Four: Poets and Thinkers: Their Kindred Roles in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger
• J. Glenn Gray
• Essay Five: The Existentialist Rediscovery of Hegel and Marx
• George L. Kline
• pp. 113-138
• Essay Six: Sartre as Phenomenologist and as Existentialist Psychoanalyst
• James M. Edie
• pp. 139-178
• Essay Seven: A Central Theme of Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy
• Frederick A. Olafson
• pp. 179-206
• Essay Eight: Husserl and Wittgenstein on Language
• Paul Ricoeur
• pp. 207-218
• Essay Nine: The Relevance of Phenomenological Philosophy for Psychology
• Herbert Spiegelberg
• pp. 219-242
• Essay Ten: Existentialism and the Alienation of Man
• Albert William Levi
• pp. 243-266
• pp. 267-269

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Phenomenology and Existentialism

Edward n. lee.

Originally published in 1967. Focusing on key philosophers and the tenants of their thought, Phenomenology and Existentialism forms a wide-ranging introduction to two important movements in modern philosophy. Included are essays by Roderick M. Chisholm on Brentano, Aron Gurwitsch on Husserl, E.F. Kaelin on Heidegger, J. Glenn Gray on Heidegger, George L. Kline on Hegel and Marx, James M. Edie on Sartre, Frederick A. Olafson on Merleau-Ponty,Herbert Spiegelberg on Phenomenology and psychology, and Albert William Levi on the alienation of man.

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Preface Preface to the Paperback Edition Essay 1. Brentano on Descriptive Psychology and the Intentional Essay 2. Husserl's Theory of the Intentionality of Consciousness in Historical Perspective Essay 3

Preface Preface to the Paperback Edition Essay 1. Brentano on Descriptive Psychology and the Intentional Essay 2. Husserl's Theory of the Intentionality of Consciousness in Historical Perspective Essay 3. Notes toward an Understanding of Heidegger's Aesthetics Essay 4. Poets and Thinkers: Their Kindred Roles in the Philosophy of Martin Heidegger Essay 5. The Existentialist Rediscovery of Hegel and Marx Essay 6. Sartre as Phenomenologist and as Existentialist Psychoanalyst Essay 7. A Central Theme of Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy Essay 8. Husserl and Wittgenstein on Language Essay 9. The Relevance of Phenomenological Philosophy for Psychology Essay 10. Existentialism and the Alienation of Man Index

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Phenomenological Psychology

Introduction, overviews of phenomenological psychology methodology.

• Introductions and Overviews of Phenomenological Philosophy
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• Secondary Literature on Phenomenological Philosophy
• Descriptive Phenomenological Methods
• Hermeneutic/Interpretive and Narrative Phenomenological Methods
• Metabletics/Historical Phenomenology
• Feminist and Critical Phenomenology
• Debates and Developments in Phenomenological Psychology
• Examples of Phenomenological Psychology within the Health Sciences
• Phenomenology and Psychiatry
• Daseinsanalysis and the Roots of Existential Therapy
• Existential Phenomenological Counseling and Psychotherapy (British School)
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• Logotherapy and Meaning-Centered Psychotherapies

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Phenomenological Psychology by Darren Langdridge LAST REVIEWED: 25 September 2023 LAST MODIFIED: 25 September 2023 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199828340-0210

Phenomenological psychology refers to an approach to psychology that draws on phenomenological, existential, and hermeneutic philosophy. The focus in all such work is on making sense of the meaning structures of the lived experience of a research participant or psychotherapeutic client. That is, in Husserl’s terms—the founder of phenomenological philosophy—we go “back to the things themselves” as they present themselves to consciousness in order to determine the “essence” ( eidos ) of the phenomenon. There is not one approach to phenomenological psychology, however, with the perspective better being understood as a family of methods and modes of practice. All psychological research and practice within this tradition will have its roots in the thought of Husserl and key concepts therein but will also likely be informed by other philosophical work, such as that of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre from the existential tradition, or Gadamer and Ricoeur from the hermeneutic tradition. Phenomenological psychology has its origins in European psychiatry with the work of Karl Jaspers in the early 1900s, along with figures including Ludwig Binswanger, Medard Boss, Viktor Frankl, Eugene Minkowski, and Jan Hendrick van den Berg. The primary aim of these thinkers was (a) the rejection of traditional notions of psychopathology, in favor of Husserl’s descriptive method of analyzing psychological experience; and (b) the application of ideas from existential philosophy to therapeutic practice. A variety of modes of psychotherapeutic practice have evolved from this early work including Daseinsanalysis, logotherapy, British School existential analysis, and existential-humanistic psychotherapy. The Utrecht School in The Netherlands has been identified as the location of the first attempt to apply phenomenological philosophy to psychological research. Influenced by the work of the psychologist Adrian van Kaam and the philosopher Henry Koren, Amedeo Giorgi (beginning in the early 1970s) developed a systematic phenomenological psychology methodology at Duquesne University in the United States. Other important early figures working to develop phenomenological psychology at Duquesne include Rolf von Eckartsberg, Constance F. Fischer, and Paul F. Collaizi, with the latter developing his own phenomenological method, which is more hermeneutic than the Giorgi method. Another relatively early major methodological development came about in Canada in the late 1970s with the work of the pedagogical researcher Max van Manen, who drew directly on the Utrecht School to develop a hermeneutic phenomenological methodology. Recent developments include methodologies that draw more extensively on hermeneutics or forms of critical social theory or both, including feminist theory. Some of these developments have proven controversial, with ongoing debates in the field about the boundaries and methods of phenomenological psychology.

Many people new to phenomenological research struggle to make sense of the range of available methods and the link between (often very complex) philosophical ideas and their application within psychology. A good introduction is therefore a very useful way into the discipline. Langdridge 2007 and Finlay 2011 both provide comprehensive coverage of a broad range of phenomenological methodologies, Churchill 2022 is more focused but also more recent, with all three very accessible for people new to the field. Ashworth and Cheung Chung 2006 is an edited collection with contributions from some of the leading figures in the field. It is not always an easy read but is excellent for deepening understanding. Polkinghorne 1989 and Eckartsberg 1998 are excellent introductions to phenomenological methodology and the interested reader would also be advised to read the other chapters of these two important collections. Churchill and Wertz 2015 also provides a recent overview that is both scholarly and accessible to the beginner. The edited collection Giorgi 1985 represents some of the very best of phenomenological psychology from the Duquesne School. Kockelmans 1987 is focused firmly on the Dutch School (also known as the Utrecht School) and contains essays by some of the key early figures in phenomenological psychology including Buytendijk, Strasser, and van den Berg. This was a loosely affiliated group of psychologists, psychiatrists and others, united around their opposition to positivistic methodology, who came together just after the Second World War to explore the implications of the thought of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre among others for psychological research. Finally, it is worth noting Pollio, et al. 1997 , written by an independent group that has been applying ideas from phenomenological philosophy to work on the psychology of everyday life.

Ashworth, P., and M. Cheung Chung, eds. 2006. Phenomenology and psychological science . New York: Springer.

A fascinating collection of work that includes chapters on the history and place of phenomenological psychology within the wider discipline, along with essays on methodology and also psychotherapy.

Churchill, S. D. 2022. Existential phenomenological research . Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

DOI: 10.1037/0000257-000

An excellent, concise but philosophically grounded introduction to phenomenological research covering all stages of the qualitative research process.

Churchill, S. D., and F. J. Wertz. 2015. An introduction to phenomenological research in psychology: Historical, conceptual, and methodological foundations. In The handbook of humanistic psychology: Theory, research, and practice . 2d ed. Edited by K. J. Schneider, J. F. Pierson, and J. F. T. Bugental, 275–296. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

A wonderfully clear introduction to phenomenological research from two of the leading figures in the field.

Eckartsberg, R. Von. 1998. Introducing existential-phenomenological psychology. In Phenomenological inquiry in psychology: Existential and transpersonal dimensions . Edited by R. Valle, 3–20. New York: Plenum.

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4899-0125-5_1

This chapter, along with the second chapter, provide an excellent introduction to phenomenological psychology. These chapters were originally published in Eckartsberg’s 1986 book Life-World Experience: Existential-Phenomenological Research Approaches in Psychology (Washington, DC: University Press of America) which is now very difficult to locate. The entire volume edited by Valle is also very worth reading.

Finlay, L. 2011. Phenomenology for therapists: Researching the lived world . Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

DOI: 10.1002/9781119975144

One of the more accessible introductions to the field with a focus on introducing phenomenological methodology to counselors and psychotherapists.

Giorgi, A., ed. 1985. Phenomenology and psychological research . Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne Univ. Press.

An excellent collection of essays on descriptive phenomenological psychology from leading figures that is still readily available. The more comprehensive four volume collection Duquesne Studies in Phenomenological Psychology (1971 , 1975 , 1979 , 1985 ), edited by Giorgi and colleagues, represents the greatest body of work emerging out of Duquesne in descriptive phenomenological psychology, but is sadly very difficult to locate.

Kockelmans, J. J., ed. 1987. Phenomenological psychology: The Dutch School . Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff.

A wonderful collection of essays from some of the most important early Dutch contributors to the development of phenomenological psychology.

Langdridge, D. 2007. Phenomenological psychology: Theory, research and method . Harlow, UK: Pearson.

An accessible overview of phenomenological psychology methodology covering descriptive, hermeneutic, and narrative approaches.

Polkinghorne, D. E. 1989. Phenomenological research methods. In Existential-phenomenological perspectives in psychology: Exploring the breadth of human experience . Edited by R. S. Valle and S. Halling, 41–60. New York: Plenum.

An excellent introduction to the range of Descriptive Phenomenological Methods . The other chapters in this edited collection are also worth reading.

Pollio, H. R., T. Henley, and C. B. Thompson. 1997. The phenomenology of everyday life . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511752919

This book represents the work of Howard Pollio and colleagues in which they have engaged with phenomenological philosophy and extant psychological methods to forge their own distinctive mode of phenomenological psychology. The book includes the application of this method to a range of topics from the experience of feeling alone to the meaning of death.

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Jean-Paul Sartre

Few philosophers have been as famous in their own life-time as Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80). Many thousands of Parisians packed into his public lecture, Existentialism is a Humanism , towards the end of 1945 and the culmination of World War 2. That lecture offered an accessible version of his difficult treatise, Being and Nothingness (1943), which had been published two years earlier, and it also responded to contemporary Marxist and Christian critics of Sartre’s “existentialism”. Sartre was much more than just a traditional academic philosopher, however, and this begins to explain his renown. He also wrote highly influential works of literature, inflected by philosophical concerns, like Nausea (1938), The Roads to Freedom trilogy (1945–49), and plays like No Exit (1947), Flies (1947), and Dirty Hands (1948), to name just a few. He founded and co-edited Les Temps Modernes and mobilised various forms of political protest and action. In short, he was a celebrity and public intellectual par excellence, especially in the period after Liberation through to the early 1960s. Responding to some calls to prosecute Sartre for civil disobedience, the then French President Charles de Gaulle replied that you don’t arrest Voltaire.

While Sartre’s public renown remains, his work has had less academic attention in the last thirty or so years ago, and earlier in France, dating roughly from the rise of “post-structuralism” in the 1960s. Although Gilles Deleuze dedicated an article to his “master” in 1964 in the wake of Sartre’s attempt to refuse the Nobel Prize for literature (Deleuze 2004), Michel Foucault influentially declared Sartre’s late work was a “magnificent and pathetic attempt of a man of the nineteenth century to think the twentieth century” (Foucault 1966 [1994: 541–2]) [ 1 ] . In this entry, however, we seek to show what remains alive and of ongoing philosophical interest in Sartre, covering many of the most important insights of his most famous philosophical book, Being and Nothingness . In addition, significant parts of his oeuvre remain under-appreciated and thus we seek to introduce them. Little attention has been given to Sartre’s earlier, psychologically motivated philosophical works, such as Imagination (1936) or its sequel, The Imaginary (1940). Likewise, few philosophers have seriously grappled with Sartre’s later works, including his massive two-volume Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), or his various works in existential psychoanalysis that examine the works of Genet and Baudelaire, as well as his multi-volume masterpiece on Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971–2). These are amongst the works of which Sartre was most proud and we outline some of their core ideas and claims.

1. Life and Works

2. transcendence of the ego: the discovery of intentionality, 3. imagination, phenomenology and literature, 4.1. negation and freedom, 4.2 bad faith and the critique of freudian psychoanalysis, 4.3 the look, shame and intersubjectivity, 5. existential psychoanalysis and the fundamental project, 6. existentialist marxism: critique of dialectical reason, 7. politics and anti-colonialism, a. primary literature, b. secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries.

Sartre’s life has been examined by many biographies, starting with Simone de Beauvoir’s Adieux (and, subsequently, Cohen-Solal 1985; Levy 2003; Flynn 2014; Cox 2019). Sartre’s own literary “life” exemplifies trends he thematized in both Words and Being and Nothingness , summed up by his claim that “to be dead is to be prey for the living” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 543]). Sartre himself was one of the first to undertake such an autobiographical effort, via his evocation of his own childhood in Words (1964a)—in which Sartre applies to himself his method of existential psychoanalysis, thereby complicating this life/death binary.

Like many of his generation, Sartre lived through a series of major cultural and historical events that his existential philosophy responded to and attempted to shape. He was born in 1905 and died in 1980, spanning most of the twentieth century and the trajectory that the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm refers to as the “age of extremes”, a period that was also well-described in the middle of that century in Albert Camus’ The Rebel , notwithstanding that the reception of Camus’ book in Les Temps Modernes in 1951–2 caused Sartre and Camus to very publicly fall out.

The major events of Sartre’s life seem relatively clear, at least viewed from an external perspective. A child throughout World War 1, he was a young man during the Great Depression but born into relative affluence, brought up by his grandmother. At least as presented in Word s, Sartre’s childhood was filled with books, the dream of posterity and immortality in those books, and in which he grappled with his loss of the use of one eye and encountered the realities of his own appearance revealed through his mother’s look after a haircut—suffice to say, he was not classically beautiful.

Sartre’s education, by contrast, was classical—the École Normale Supérieure. His education at the ENS was oriented around the history of philosophy, and the influential bifurcation of that time between the neo-Kantianism of Brunschvicg and the vitalism of Bergson. While Sartre failed his first attempt at the aggregation, apparently by virtue of being overly ambitious, on repeating the year he topped the class (de Beauvoir was second, at her first attempt and at the age of 21, then the youngest to complete). Sartre then taught philosophy at various schools, notably at Le Havre from 1931–36 and while he was composing his early philosophy and his great philosophical novel, Nausea . He never entered a classical university position.

Although Sartre’s philosophical encounter with phenomenology had already occurred (around 1933), which de Beauvoir described as causing him to turn pale with emotion (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 112]), with the onset of World War 2 Sartre merged those philosophical concerns with more obviously existential themes like freedom, authenticity, responsibility, and anguish, as translated into English from the French angoisse by both Hazel Barnes and Sarah Richmond. He was a Meteorologist in Alsace in the war and was captured by the German Army in 1940 and imprisoned for just under a year (see War Diaries ). During this socio-political turmoil, Sartre remained remarkably prolific. Notable publications include his play, No Exit (1947), Being and Nothingness (1943), and then completing Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), Anti-semite and Jew (1946), and founding and coediting Les Temps Modernes , commencing from 1943 (Sartre’s major contributions are collected in his series Situations , especially volume V).

Sartre continued to lead various social and political protests after that period, especially concerning French colonialism (see section 7 below). By the time of the student revolutions in May 1968 he was no longer quite the dominant cultural and intellectual force he had been, but he did not retreat from public life and engagement and died in 1980. Estimates of the numbers of those attending his funeral procession in Paris range from 50–100,000 people. Sartre had been in the midst of a collaboration with Benny Levy regarding ethics, the so-called “Hope Now” interviews, whose status remain somewhat controversial in Sartrean scholarship, given the interviews were produced in the midst of Sartre’s illness and shortly before he died, and the fact that the relevant audio-recordings are not publicly available.

One of the most famous foundational moments of existentialism concerns Sartre’s discovery of phenomenology around the turn of 1932/3, when in a Parisian bar listening to his friend Raymond Aron’s description of an apricot cocktail (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 135]). From this moment, Sartre was fascinated by the originality and novelty of Husserl’s method, which he identified straight away as a means to fulfil his own philosophical expectations: overcoming the opposition between idealism and realism; getting a view on the world that would allow him “to describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from the process”. Sartre became immediately acquainted with Emmanuel Levinas’s early translation of Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and his introductory book on Husserl’s theory of intuition. He spent the following year in Berlin, so as to study more closely Husserl’s method and to familiarise himself with the works of his students, Heidegger and Scheler. With Levinas, and then later with Merleau-Ponty, Ricœur, and Tran Duc Thao, Sartre became one of the first serious interpreters and proponent of Husserl’s phenomenology in France.

While he was studying in Berlin, Sartre tried to convert his study of Husserl into an article that documents his enthusiastic discovery of intentionality. It was published a few years later under the title “Intentionality: a fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology”. This article, which had considerable influence over the early French reception of phenomenology, makes explicit the reasons Sartre had to be fascinated by Husserl’s descriptive approach to consciousness, and how he managed to merge it with his previous philosophical concerns. Purposefully leaving aside the idealist aspects of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Sartre proposes a radicalisation of intentionality that stresses its anti-idealistic potential. Against the French contemporary versions of neo-Kantianism (Brochard, Lachelier), and more particularly against the kind of idealism advocated by Léon Brunschvicg, Sartre famously claims that intentionality allows us to discard the metaphysical oppositions between the inner and outer and to renounce to the very notion of the interiority of consciousness. If it is true, as Husserl states, that every consciousness is consciousness of something, and if intentionality accounts for this fundamental direction that orients consciousness towards its object and beyond itself, then, Sartre concludes, the phenomenological description of intentionality does away with the illusion that makes us responsible for the way the world appears to us. According to Sartre’s radicalised reading of Husserl’s thesis, intentionality is intrinsically realistic: it lets the world appear to consciousness as it really is , and not as a mere correlate of an intellectual act. This realistic interpretation, being perfectly in tune with Sartre’s lifelong ambition to provide a philosophical account of the contingency of being—its non-negotiable lack of necessity—convinced him to adopt Husserl’s method of phenomenological description.

While he was still in Berlin, Sartre also began to work on a more personal essay, which a few years later resulted in his first significant philosophical contribution, Transcendence of the Ego . With this influential essay Sartre engages in a much more critical way with the conception of the “transcendental ego” presented in Husserl’s Ideas and defends his realistic interpretation of intentionality against the idealistic tendencies of Husserl’s own phenomenology after the publication of Logical Investigations . Stressing the irreducible transparency of intentional experience—its fundamental orientation beyond itself towards its object, whatever this object may be—Sartre distinguishes between the dimensions of our subjective experiences that are pre-reflectively lived through, and the reflective stance thanks to which one can always make their experience the intentional object towards which consciousness is oriented. One of Sartre’s most fundamental claims in Transcendence of the Ego is that these two forms of consciousness cannot and must not be mistaken with one another: reflexive consciousness is a form of intentional consciousness that takes one’s own lived-experiences as its specific object, whereas pre-reflexive consciousness need not involve the intentional distance to the object that the act of reflection entails. In regard to self-consciousness, Sartre argues there is an immediate and non-cognitive form of self-awareness, as well as reflective forms of self-consciousness. The latter is unable to give access to oneself as the subject of unreflected consciousness, but only as the intentional object of the act of reflection, i.e., the Ego in Sartre’s terminology. The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflection—an object that consciousness “posits and grasps […] in the same act” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 80–1; 2004: 20]). Instead of a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, “is outside, in the world . It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another” (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).

This critique of the transcendental Ego is less opposed to Husserl than it may seem, notwithstanding Sartre’s reservations about the transcendental radicalisation of Husserl’s phenomenology. The neo-Humean claim that the “I” or Ego is nowhere to be found “within” ourselves remains faithful to the 5th Logical Investigation , in which Husserl had initially followed the very same line of reasoning (see Husserl 1901 [2001: vol. 2, 91–93]), before developing a transcendental methodology that substantially modified his approach to subjectivity (as exposed in particular in Husserl 1913 [1983]). However, for the Husserl of the Ideas Pertaining to a Phenomenology (published in 1913), the sense in which a perceptual object, which is necessarily seen from one side but also presented to us as a unified object (involving other unseen sides), requires that there be a unifying structure within consciousness itself: the transcendental ego. Sartre argues that such an account would entail that the perception of an object would always also involve an intermediary perception—such as some kind of perception or consciousness of the transcendental ego—thus threatening to disrupt the “transparency” or “translucidity” of consciousness. All forms of perception and consciousness would involve (at least) these two components, and there would be an opaqueness to consciousness that is not phenomenologically apparent. In addition, it appears that Husserl’s transcendental ego would have to pre-exist all of our particular actions and perceptions, which is something that the existentialist dictum “existence precedes essence”, which we will explicate shortly, seems committed to denying. Without considering here the extent to which Husserl can be defended against these charges, Sartre’s general claim is that the notion of a self or ego is not given in experience. Rather, it is something that is not immanent but transcendent to pre-reflective experience. The Ego is the transcendent object of one’s reflexive experience, and not the subject of the pre-reflective experience that was initially lived (but not known).

Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal (or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the absence of the I in the transcendental field. According to him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an anonymous and “impersonal” relation to a transcendent object:

When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. […] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004: 8])

The tram appears to me in a specific way (as “having-to-be-overtaken”, in this case) that is experienced as its own mode of phenomenalization, and not as a mere relational aspect of its appearing to me . The object presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are strictly independent from one’s personal relation to it. The streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that obliterates and overrides , so to speak, the subjective features of conscious experience; its “having-to-be-overtaken-ness” does not belong to my subjective experience of the world but to the objective description of the way the world is (see also Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10–11]). When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “ the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken ”, and there is no trace of the “I” in such lived-experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone ). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousness of lived-experiences. In a different example of this, Sartre argues that when I perceive Pierre as loathsome, say, I do not perceive my feeling of hatred; rather, Pierre repulses me and I experience him as repulsive (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13]). Repulsiveness constitutes an essential feature of his distinctive mode of appearing, rather than a trait of my feelings towards him. Sartre concludes that reflective statements about one’s Ego cannot be logically derived from non-reflective (“ irréfléchies ”) lived-experiences:

Thus to say “I hate” or “I love” on the occasion of a singular consciousness of attraction or repulsion, is to carry out a veritable passage to the infinite […] Nothing more is needed for the rights of reflection to be singularly limited: it is certain that Pierre repulses me, yet it is and will remain forever doubtful that I hate him. Indeed, this affirmation infinitely exceeds the power of reflection. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63–4; 2004: 13])

This critique of the powers of reflection forms one important part of Sartre’s argument for the primacy of pre-reflective consciousness over reflective consciousness, which is central to many of the pivotal arguments of Being and Nothingness , as we indicate in the relevant sections below.

For many of his readers, the book on the Imaginary that Sartre published in 1940 constitutes one of the most rigorous and fruitful developments of his Husserl-inspired phenomenological investigations. Along with the The Emotions: Outline of a Theory which was published one year before (Sartre 1939b), Sartre presented this study of imagination as an essay in phenomenological psychology, which drew on his lifetime interest in psychological studies and brought to completion the research on imagination he had undertaken since the very beginning of his philosophical career. With this new essay, Sartre continues to explore the relationship between intentional consciousness and reality by focusing upon the specific case of the intentional relations to the unreal and the fictional, so as to produce an in-depth analysis of “the great ‘irrealizing’ function of consciousness”. Engaging in a detailed discussion with recent psychological research that Sartre juxtaposes with (and against) fine-grained phenomenological descriptions of the structures of imagination, his essay proposes his own theory of the imaginary as the corollary of a specific intentional attitude that orients consciousness towards the unreal.

In a similar fashion to his analysis of the world-shaping powers of emotions (Sartre 1939b), Sartre describes and highlights how imagination presents us with a coherent world, although made of objects that do not precede but result from the imaging capacities of consciousness. “The object as imaged, Sartre claims, is never anything more than the consciousness one has of it” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 15]). Contrary to other modes of consciousness such as perception or memory, which connect us to a world that is essentially one and the same, the objects to which imaginative consciousness connects us belong to imaginary worlds, which may not only be extremely diverse, but also follow their own rules, having their own spatiality and temporality. The island of Thrinacia where Odysseus lands on his way back to Ithaca needs not be located anywhere on our maps nor have existed at a specific time: its mode of existence is that of a fictional object, which possesses its own spatiality and temporality within the imaginary world it belongs to.

Sartre stresses that the intentional dimension of imaging consciousness is essentially characterised by its negativity. The negative act, Sartre writes, is “constitutive of the image” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 183]): an image consciousness is a consciousness of something that is not , whether its object is absent, non-existing, or fictional. When we picture Odysseus sailing back to his native island, Odysseus is given to us “as absent to intuition”. In this sense, Sartre concludes,

one can say that the image has wrapped within it a certain nothingness. […] However lively, appealing, strong the image, it gives its object as not being. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 14])

The irrealizing function of imagination results from this immediate consciousness of the nothingness of its object. Sartre’s essay investigates how imaging consciousness allows us to operate with its objects as if they were present, even though these very objects are given to us as non-existing or absent. This is for instance what happens when we go to the theatre or read a novel:

To be present at a play is to apprehend the characters on the actors, the forest of As You Like It on the cardboard trees. To read is to realize contact with the irreal world on the signs. In this world there are plants, animals, fields, towns, people: initially those mentioned in the book and then a host of others that are not named but are in the background and give this world its depth. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 64])

The irreality of imaginary worlds does not prevent the spectator or reader from projecting herself into this world as if it was real . The acts of imagination can consequently be described as “magical acts” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 125]), similar to incantations with respect to the way they operate, since they are designed to make the object of one’s thought or desire appear in such a way that one can take possession of it.

In the conclusion of his essay, Sartre stresses the philosophical significance of the relationship between imagination and freedom, which are both necessarily involved in our relationship to the world. Imagination, Sartre writes, “is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 186]). Imaging consciousness posits its object as “out of reach” in relation to the world understood as the synthetic totality within which consciousness situates itself. For Sartre, the imaginary creation is only possible if consciousness is not placed “in-the-midst-of-the-world” as one existent among others.

For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escape from the world by its very nature, it must be able to stand back from the world by its own efforts. In a word, it must be free. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 184])

In that respect, the irrealizing function of imagination allows consciousness to “surpass the real” so as to constitute it as a proper world : “the nihilation of the real is always implied by its constitution as a world”. This capacity of surpassing the real to make it a proper world defines the very notion of “situation” that becomes central in Sartre’s philosophical thought after the publication of the Imaginary . Situations are nothing but “the different immediate modes of apprehension of the real as a world” (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185]). Consciousness’ situation-in-the-world is precisely that which motivates the constitution of any irreal object and accounts for the creation of imaginary worlds—for instance, and perhaps above all, in art:

Every apprehension of the real as a world tends of its own accord to end up with the production of irreal objects since it is always, in a sense, free nihilation of the world and this always from a particular point of view. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185])

With this conclusion, which prioritises the question of the world over that of reality, Sartre begins to move away from the realist perspective he was initially aiming at when he first discovered phenomenology, so as to make the phenomenological investigation of our “being-in-the-world” (influenced by his careful rereading of Heidegger in the late 30s) his new priority.

Although Sartre never stated it explicitly, his interest in the question of the unreal and imaging consciousness appears to be intimately connected with his general conception of literature and his self-understanding of his own literary production. The concluding remarks of the Imaginary extend the scope of Sartre’s phenomenological analyses of the irrealizing powers of imagination, by applying them to the domain of aesthetics so as to answer the question about the ontological status of works of art. For Sartre, any product of artistic creation—a novel, a painting, a piece of music, or a theatre play—is just as irreal an object as the imaginary world it gives rise to. The irreality of the work of art allows us to experience—though only imaginatively—the world it gives flesh to as an “analogon” of reality. Even a cubist painting, which might not depict nor represent anything, still functions as an analogon, which manifests

an irreal ensemble of new things , of objects that I have never seen nor will ever see but that are nonetheless irreal objects. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 191])

Likewise, the novelist, the poet, the dramatist, constitute irreal objects through verbal analogons.

This original conception of the nature of the work of art dominates Sartre’s critical approach to literature in the many essays he dedicates to the art of the novel. This includes his critical analyses of recent writers’ novels in the 30s—Faulkner, Dos Passos, Hemingway, Mauriac, etc.—and the publication in the late 40s of his own summative view, What is literature? (Sartre 1948a [1988]). In a series of articles gathered in the first volume of his Situations (1947, Sit. I ), Sartre defends a strong version of literary realism that can, somewhat paradoxically, be read as a consequence of his theory of the irreality of the work of art. If imagination projects the spectator within the imaginary world created by the artist, then the success of the artistic process is proportional to the capacity of the artwork to let the spectator experience it as a reality of its own, giving rise to a full-fledged world. Sartre applies in particular this analysis to novels, which must aim, according to him, at immersing the reader within the fictional world they depict so as to make her experience the events and adventures of the characters as if she was living them in first person. The complete absorption of the reader within the imaginary world created by the novelist must ultimately recreate the particular feel of reality that defines Sartre’s phenomenological kind of literary realism (Renaudie 2017), which became highly influential over the following decades in French literature. The reader must be able to experience the actions of the characters of the novel as if they did not result from the imagination of the novelist, but proceeded from the character’s own freedom—and Sartre goes as far as to claim that this radical “spellbinding” (“envoûtante”, Sartre 1940 [2004: 175])) quality of literary fiction defines the touchstone of the art of the novel (See “François Mauriac and Freedom”, in Sartre Sit. I ).

This original version of literary realism is intrinsically tied to the question of freedom, and opposed to the idea according to which realist literature is expected to provide a mere description of reality as it is . In What is Literature? , Sartre describes the task of the novelist as that of disclosing the world as if it arose from human freedom—rather than from a deterministic chain of causes and consequences. The author’s art consists in obliging her reader “to create what [she] discloses ”, and so to share with the writer the responsibility and freedom involved in the act of literary creation (Sartre 1948a [1988: 61]). In order for the world of the novel to offer its maximum density,

the disclosure-creation by which the reader discovers it must also be an imaginary engagement in the action; in other words, the more disposed one is to change it, the more alive it will be.

The conception of the writer’s engagement that resulted from these analyses constitutes probably the most well-known aspect of Sartre’s relation to literature. The writer only has one topic: freedom.

This analysis of the role of imaginative creations of art can also help us to understand the role of philosophy within his own novels, particularly in Nausea , a novel which Sartre began as he was studying Husserl in Berlin. In this novel Sartre’s pre-phenomenological interest for the irreducibility of contingency intersects with his newly-acquired competences in phenomenological analyses, making Nausea a beautifully illustrated expression of the metaphysical register Sartre gave to Husserl’s conception of intentionality. The feeling of nausea that Roquentin, the main character of Sartre’s novel, famously experienced in a public garden while obsessively watching a chestnut tree, accounts for his sensitivity to the absolute lack of necessity of whatever exists. Sartre understands this radical absence of necessity as the expression of the fundamental contingency of being. Roquentin’s traumatic moment of realisation that there is absolutely no reason for the existence of all that exists illustrates the intuition that motivated Sartre’s philosophical thinking since the very beginning of his intellectual career as a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, as Simone de Beauvoir recalls (1981 [1986]). It constitutes the metaphysical background of his interpretation of intentionality, which he would come to develop and systematise in the early dense parts of Being and Nothingness . While the experience of nausea when confronting the contingency of the chestnut tree does not give us conceptual knowledge, it involves a form of non-conceptual ontological awareness that is of a fundamentally different order to, and cannot be derived from, our conceptual understanding and knowledge of brute existence.

4. Being and Nothingness

Being and Nothingness (1943) remains the defining treatise of the existentialist “movement”, along with works from de Beauvoir from this period (e.g., The Ethics of Ambiguity ). We cannot do justice to the entirety of the book here, but we can indicate the broad outlines of the position. In brief, Sartre provides a series of arguments for the necessary freedom of “human reality” (his gloss on Heidegger’s conception of Dasein), based upon an ontological distinction between what he calls being-for-itself ( pour soi ) and being-in-itself ( en soi ), roughly between that which negates and transcends (consciousness) and the "pure plenitude" of objects. That kind of metaphysical position might seem to “beg the question” by assuming what it purports to establish (i.e., radical human freedom). However, Sartre argues that realism and idealism cannot sufficiently account for a wide range of phenomena associated with negation. He also draws on the direct evidence of phenomenological experience (i.e., the experience of anguish). But the argument for his metaphysical picture and human freedom is, on balance, an inference to the best explanation. He contends that his complex metaphysical vision best captures and explains central aspects of human reality.

As the title of the book suggests, nothingness plays a significant role. While Sartre’s concern with nothingness might be a deal-breaker for some, following Rudolph Carnap’s trenchant criticisms of Heidegger’s idea that the “nothing noths/nothings” (depending on translation from the German), Sartre’s account of negation and nothingness (the latter of which is the ostensible ground of the former) is nevertheless philosophically interesting. Sartre does not say much about the genesis of consciousness or the for-itself, other than that it is contingent and arises from “the effort of an in-itself to found itself” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 84]). He describes the appearance of the for-itself as the absolute event, which occurs through being’s attempt “to remove contingency from its being”. Accordingly, the for-itself is radically and inescapably distinct from the in-itself. In particular, it functions primarily through negation, whether in relation to objects, values, meaning, or social facts. According to Sartre this negation is not about any reflective judgement or cognition, but an ontological relation to the world. This ontological interpretation of negation minimises the subjectivist interpretations of his philosophy. The most vivid example he provides to illustrate this pre-reflective negation is the apprehension of Pierre’s absence from a café. Sartre describes Pierre’s absence as pervading the whole café. The café is cast in the metaphorical “shade” of Pierre not being there at the time he had been expected. This experience depends on human expectations, of course. But Sartre argues that if, by contrast, we imagine or reflect that someone else is not present (say the Duke of Wellington, an elephant, etc.), these abstract negative facts are not existentially given in the same manner as our pre-reflective encounter with Pierre’s absence. They are not given as an “objective fact”, as a “component of the real”.

Sartre provides numerous other examples of pre-reflective negation throughout Being and Nothingness . He argues that the apprehension of fragility and destruction are likewise premised on negativity, and any effort to adequately describe these phenomena requires negative concepts, but also that they presuppose more than just negative thoughts and judgements. In regard to destruction, Sartre suggests that there is not less after the storm, just something else (Sartre 1943 [1956: 8]). Generally, we do not need to reflectively judge that a building has been destroyed, but directly see it in terms of that which it is not —the building, say, in its former glory before being wrecked by the storm. Humans introduce the possibility of destruction and fragility into the world, since objectively there is just a change. Sartre’s basic question is: how could we accomplish this unless we are a being by whom nothingness comes into the world, i.e., free? He poses similar arguments in regard to a range of phenomena that present as basic to our modes of inhabiting the world, from bad faith through to anguish. In all of these cases Sartre argues that while we can expressly pose negative judgements, or deliberately ask questions that admit of the possibility of negative reply, or consciously individuate and distinguish objects by reference to the objects which they are not, there is a pre-comprehension of non-being that is the condition of such negative judgements.

Although the for-itself and the in-itself are initially defined very abstractly, the book ultimately comes to say a lot more about the for-itself, even if not much more about the in-itself. The picture of the for-itself and its freedom gradually becomes more “concrete”, reflecting the architectonic of the text, which has more sustained treatments of the body, others, and action, in the second half. Throughout, Sartre gives a series of paradoxical glosses on the nature of the for-itself—i.e., a “being which is what it is not and is not what it is” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 79]). Although this might appear to be a contradiction, Sartre’s claim is that it is the fundamental mode of existence of the for-itself that is future-oriented and does not have a stable identity in the manner of a chair, say, or a pen-knife. Rather, “existence precedes essence”, as he famously remarks in both Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism .

In later chapters he develops the basic ontological position in regard to free action. His point is not, of course, to say we are free to do or achieve anything (freedom as power), or even to claim that we are free to “project” anything at all. The for-itself is always in a factical situation. Nonetheless, he asserts that the combination of the motives and ends we aspire to in relation to that facticity depend on an act of negation in relation to the given. As he puts it: “Action necessarily implies as its condition the recognition of a “desideratum”; that is, of an objective lack or again of a negatité” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 433]). Even suffering in-itself is not a sufficient motive to determine particular acts. Rather, it is the apprehension of the revolution as possible (and as desired) which gives to the worker’s suffering its value as motive (Sartre 1943 [1956: 437]). A factual state, even poverty, does not determine consciousness to apprehend it as a lack. No factual state, whatever it may be, can cause consciousness to respond to it in any one way. Rather, we make a choice (usually pre-reflective) about the significance of that factual state for us, and the ends and motives that we adopt in relation to it. We are “condemned” to freedom of this ontological sort, with resulting anguish and responsibility for our individual situation, as well as for more collective situations of racism, oppression, and colonialism. These are the themes for which Sartre became famous, especially after World War 2 and Existentialism is a Humanism .

In Being and Nothingness he provides various examples that are designed to make this quite radical philosophy of freedom plausible, including the hiker who gives in to their fatigue and collapses to the ground. Sartre says that a necessary condition for the hiker to give in to their fatigue—short of fainting—is that their fatigue goes from being experienced as simply part of the background to their activity, with their direct conscious attention focusing on something else (e.g., the scenery, the challenge, competing with a friend, philosophising, etc.), to being the direct focus of their attention and thus becoming a motive for direct recognition of one’s exhaustion and the potential action of collapsing to the ground. Although we are not necessarily reflectively aware of having made such a decision, things could have been otherwise and thus Sartre contends we have made a choice. Despite appearances, however, Sartre insists that his view is not a voluntarist or capricious account of freedom, but one that necessarily involves a situation and a context. His account of situated freedom in the chapter “Freedom and Action” affirms the inability to extricate intentions, ends, motives, and reasons, from the embodied context of the actor. As a synthetic whole, it is not merely freedom of intention or motive (and hence even consciousness) that Sartre affirms. Rather, our freedom is realised only in its projections and actions, and is nothing without such action.

Sartre’s account of bad faith ( mauvaise foi ) is of major interest. It is said to be a phenomenon distinctive of the for-itself, thus warranting ontological treatment. It also feeds into questions to do with self-knowledge (see Moran 2001), as well as serving as the basis for some of his criticisms of racism and colonialism in his later work. His account of bad faith juxtaposes a critique of Freud with its own “depth” interpretive account, “existential psychoanalysis”, which is itself indebted to Freud, as Sartre admits.

We will start with Sartre’s critique of Freud, which is both simple and complex, and features in the early parts of the chapter on bad faith in Being and Nothingness . In short, Freud’s differing meta-psychological pictures (Conscious, Preconscious, Unconscious, or Id, Ego, Superego) are charged with splitting the subject in two (or more) in attempting to provide a mechanistic explanation of bad faith: that is, how there can be a “liar” and a “lied to” duality within a single consciousness. But Sartre accuses Freud of reifying this structure, and rather than adequately explaining the problem of bad faith, he argues that Freud simply transfers the problem to another level where it remains unsolved, thus consisting in a pseudo-explanation (which today might be called a “homuncular fallacy”). Rather than the problem being something that pertains to an embodied subject, and how they might both be aware of something and yet also repress it at the same time, Sartre argues that the early Freudian meta-psychological model transfers the seat of this paradox to the censor: that is, to a functional part of the brain/mind that both knows and does not know. It must know enough in order to efficiently repress, but it also must not know too much or nothing is hidden and the problematic truth is manifest directly to consciousness. Freud’s “explanation” is hence accused of recapitulating the problem of bad faith in an ostensible mechanism that is itself “conscious” in some paradoxical sense. Sartre even provocatively suggests that the practice of psychoanalysis is itself in bad faith, since it treats a part of ourselves as “Id”-like and thereby denies responsibility for it. That is not the end of Sartre’s story, however, because he ultimately wants to revive a version of psychoanalysis that does not pivot around the “unconscious” and these compartmentalised models of the mind. We will come back to that, but it is first necessary to introduce Sartre’s own positive account of bad faith.

While bad faith is inevitable in Sartre’s view, it is also important to recognise that the “germ of its destruction” lies within. This is because bad faith always remains at least partly available to us in our own lived-experience, albeit not in a manner that might be given propositional form in the same way as knowledge of an external object. In short, when I existentially comprehend that my life is dissatisfying, or even reflect on this basis that I have lived an inauthentic life, while I am grasping something about myself (it is given differently to the recognition that others have lived a lie and more likely to induce anxiety), I am nonetheless not strictly equivalent or identical with the “I” that is claimed to be in bad faith (cf. Moran 2001). There is a distanciation involved in coming to this recognition and the potential for self-transformation of a more practical kind, even if this is under-thematised in Being and Nothingness .

Sartre gives many examples of bad faith that remain of interest. His most famous example of bad faith is the café waiter who plays at being a café waiter, and who attempts to institutionalise themselves as this object. While Sartre’s implied criticisms of their manner of inhabiting the world might seem to disparage social roles and affirm an individualism, arguably this is not a fair reading of the details of the text. For Sartre we do have a factical situation, but the claim is that we cannot be wholly reduced to it. As Sartre puts it:

There is no doubt I am in a sense a café waiter—otherwise could I not just as well call myself a diplomat or reporter? But if I am one, this cannot be in the mode of being-in-itself. I am a waiter in the mode of being what I am not . (Sartre 1943 [1956: 60])

In subsequent work, racism becomes emblematic of bad faith, when we reduce the other to some ostensible identity (e.g., Anti-semite and the Jew ).

It is important to recognise that no project of “sincerity”, if that is understood as strictly being what one is, is possible for Sartre given his view of the for-itself. Likewise, in regard to any substantive self-knowledge that might be achieved through direct self-consciousness, our options are limited. On Sartre’s view we cannot look inwards and discover the truth about our identity or our own bad faith through simple introspection (there is literally no-thing to observe). Moreover, when we have a lived experience, and then reflect on ourselves from outside (e.g., third-personally), we are not strictly reducible to that Ego that is so posited. We transcend it. Or, to be more precise, we both are that Ego (just as we are what the Other perceives) and yet are also not reducible to it. This is due to the structure of consciousness and the arguments from Transcendence of the Ego examined in section 2 . In Being and Nothingness , the temporal aspects of this non-coincidence are also emphasised. We are not just our past and our objective attributes in accord with some sort of principle of identity, because we are also our “projects”, and these are intrinsically future oriented.

Nonetheless, Sartre argues that it would be false to conclude that all modes of inhabiting the world are thereby equivalent in terms of “faith” and “bad faith”. Rather, there are what he calls “patterns of bad faith” and he says these are “objective”. Any conduct can be seen from two perspectives—transcendence and facticity, being-for-itself and being-for-others. But it is the exclusive affirmation of one or the others of these (or a motivated and selective oscillation between them) which constitutes bad faith. There is no direct account of good faith in Being and Nothingness , other than the enigmatic footnote at the end of the book that promises an ethics. There are more sustained treatments of authenticity in his Notebooks for an Ethics and in Anti-semite and Jew (see also the entry on authenticity ).

Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity is often the subject of premature dismissal. The hyperbolic dimension of his writings on the Look of the Other and the pessimism of his chapter on “concrete relations with others”, which is essentially a restatement of the “master-slave” stage of Hegel’s struggle for recognition without the possibility of its overcoming, are sometimes treated as if they were nothing but the product of a certain sort of mind—a kind of adolescent paranoia or hysteria about the Other (see, e.g., Marcuse 1948). What this has meant, however, is that the significance of Sartre’s work on inter-subjectivity, both within phenomenological circles and more broadly in regard to philosophy of mind and social cognition, has been downplayed. Building on the insights of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre proposes a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for any theory of the other, which are far from trivial. In Being and Nothingness , Sartre suggests that various philosophical positions—realism and idealism, and beyond—have been shipwrecked, often unawares, on what he calls the “reef of solipsism”. His own solution to the problem of other minds consists, first and foremost, in his descriptions of being subject to the look of another, and the way in which in such an experience we become a “transcendence transcended”. On his famous description, we are asked to imagine that we are peeping through a keyhole, pre-reflectively immersed and absorbed in the scene on the other side of the door. Maybe we would be nervous engaging in such activities given the socio-cultural associations of being a “Peeping Tom”, but after a period of time we would be given over to the scene with self-reflection and self-awareness limited to merely the minimal (tacit or “non-thetic” in Sartre’s language) understanding that we are not what we are perceiving. Suddenly, though, we hear footsteps, and we have an involuntary apprehension of ourselves as an object in the eyes of another; a “pre-moral” experience of shame; a shudder of recognition that we are the object that the other sees, without room for any sort of inferential theorising or cognising (at least that is manifest to our own consciousness). This ontological shift, Sartre says, has another person as its condition, notwithstanding whether or not one is in error on a particular occasion of such an experience (i.e., the floor creaks but there is no-one actually literally present). While many other phenomenological accounts emphasise empathy or direct perception of mental states (for example, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty), Sartre thereby adds something significant and distinctive to these accounts that focus on our experience of the other person as an object (albeit of a special kind) rather than as a subject. In common with other phenomenologists like Merleau-Ponty and Scheler, Sartre also maintains that it is a mistake to view our relations with the other as one characterised by a radical separation that we can only bridge with inferential reasoning. Any argument by analogy, either to establish the existence of others in general or to particular mental states like anger, is problematic, begging the question and having insufficient warrant.

For Sartre, at least in his early work, our experience of being what he calls a “we subject”—as a co-spectator in a lecture or concert for example, which involves no objectification of the other people we are with—is said to be merely a subjective and psychological phenomenon that does not ground our understanding and knowledge of others ontologically (Sartre 1943 [1956: 413–5]). Originally, human relations are typified by dyadic mode of conflict best captured in the look of the other, and the sort of scenario concerning the key-hole we just considered above. Given that we also do not grasp a plural look, for Sartre, this means that social life is fundamentally an attempt to control the impact of the look upon us, either by anticipating it in advance and attempting to invalidate that perspective (sadism) or by anticipating it and attempting to embrace that solicited perspective when it comes (masochism). In Sartre’s words:

It is useless for human reality to seek to escape this dilemma: one must either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be transcended by him. The essence of the relations between consciousness is not the Mitsein (being-with); it is conflict. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 429])

Sartre’s radical criticism of Freud’s theory of the unconscious is not his last word on psychoanalysis. In the last chapters of Being and Nothingness , Sartre presents his own conception of an existential psychoanalysis, drawing on some insights from his attempt to account for Emperor Wilhelm II as a “human-reality” in the 14 th notebook from his War Diaries (Sartre 1983b [1984]). This existential version of psychoanalysis is claimed to be compatible with Sartre’s rejection of the unconscious, and is expected to achieve a “psychoanalysis of consciousness” (Moati 2020: 219), allowing us to understand one’s existence in light of their fundamental free choice of themselves.

The very idea of a psychoanalysis oriented towards the study of consciousness rather than the unconscious seems paradoxical—a paradox increased by Sartre’s efforts to highlight the fundamental differences that oppose his own version of psychoanalysis to Freud’s. Sartre contends that Freud’s “empirical” psychoanalysis

is based on the hypothesis of the existence of an unconscious psyche, which on principle escapes the intuition of the subject.

By contrast, Sartre’s own existential psychoanalysis aims to remain faithful to one of the earliest claims of Husserl’s phenomenology: that all psychic acts are “coextensive with consciousness” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570]). For Sartre, however, the basic motivation for rejecting Freud’s hypothesis is less an inheritance of Brentano’s descriptive psychology (as was the case for Husserl) than a consequence of Sartre’s fundamental critique of determinism, applied to the naturalist presuppositions of empirical psychoanalysis and the particular kind of determinism that it involves. In agreement with Freud, Sartre holds that psychic life remains inevitably “opaque” and at least somewhat impenetrable to us. He also stresses that the philosophical understanding of human reality requires a method for investigating the meaning of psychic facts. But Sartre denies that the methods and causal laws of the natural sciences are of any help in that respect. The human psyche cannot be fully analysed and explained as a mere result of external constraints acting like physical forces or natural causes. The for-itself, being always what it is not and not what it is, remains free whatever the external and social constraints. Sartre is consequently bound to reject any emphasis on the causal impact of the past upon the present, which he argues is the basic methodological framework of empirical psychoanalysis. That does not mean that past psychic or physical facts have no impact on one’s existence whatsoever. Rather, Sartre contends that the impact of past events is determined in relation to one’s present choice, and understood as the consequence of the power invested in this free choice. As he puts it:

Since the force of compulsion in my past is borrowed from my free, reflecting choice and from the very power which this choice has given itself, it is impossible to determine a priori the compelling power of a past. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 503])

Past events bear no other meaning than the one given by a subject, in agreement with the free project that orients his or her existence towards the future. Conversely, determinist explanations that construe one’s present as a mere consequence of the past proceed from a kind of self-delusion that operates by concealing one’s free project, and thus contributes to the obliteration of responsibility. Sartre hence seeks to redefine the scope of psychoanalysis: rather than a proper explanation of human behaviour that relies on the identification of the laws of its causation, psychoanalysis consists in understanding the meaning of our conducts in light of one’s project of existence and free choice. One might wonder, then, why we need any such psychoanalysis, if the existential project that constitutes its object is freely chosen by the subject. Sartre addresses this objection in Being and Nothingness , claiming that

if the fundamental project is fully experienced by the subject and hence wholly conscious, that certainly does not mean that it must by the same token be known by him; quite the contrary. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570])

What Freud calls the unconscious must be redescribed as the paradoxical entanglement of a “total absence of knowledge” combined with a “true understanding” ( réelle comprehension ) of oneself (1972, Sit. IX : 111). The legitimacy of Sartre’s existential psychoanalysis of consciousness lies in its ability to unveil the original project according to which one chooses (more or less obscurely) to develop the fundamental orientations of their existence. According to Sartre, analysing a human subject and understanding the meaning that orients their existence as a whole requires that we grasp the specific kind of unity that lies behind their various attitudes and conducts. This unity can only appear once we discover the synthetic principle of unification or “totalization” ( totalisation ) that commands the whole of their behaviours. Sartre understands this totalization as an an-going process that covers the entire course of one’s existence, a process which is constantly reassumed so as to integrate the new developments of this existence. For this reason, this never ending process of totalization cannot be fully self-conscious or the object of reflective self-knowledge. The synthetic principle that makes this totalization possible is identified by Sartre in terms of fundamental choice: existential psychoanalysis describes human subjects as synthetic totalities in which every attitude, conduct, or behaviour finds its meaning in relation to the unity of a primary choice, which all of the subject’s behaviour expresses in its own way.

All human behaviour can thus be described as a secondary particularisation of a fundamental project which expresses the subject’s free choice, and conditions the intelligibility of their actions. On the basis of his diagnosis of Baudelaire’s existential project, for instance, Sartre goes as far as to claim that he is “prepared to wager that he preferred meats cooked in sauces to grills, preserves to fresh vegetables” (Sartre 1947a [1967: 113]). Sartre legitimates such a daring statement by showing its logical connection to Baudelaire’s irresistible hatred for nature, from which his gastronomic preferences must derive, and which Sartre identifies as the expression of the initial free choice of himself that commands the whole of the French poète maudit ’s existence. In Sartre’s words:

He chose to exist for himself as he was for others. He wanted his freedom to appear to himself like a “nature”; and he wanted this “nature” which others discovered in him to appear to them like the very emanation of his freedom. From that point everything becomes clear. […] We should look in vain for a single circumstance for which he was not fully and consciously responsible. Every event was a reflection of that indecomposable totality which he was from the first to the last day of his life (Sartre 1947a [1967: 191–192]).

Baudelaire’s choice of himself both accounts for the subject’s freedom (insofar as it has been freely accepted as the subject’s own project of existence) and exerts a constraint on particular behaviours and attitudes towards the world, so that he is bound to act and behave in a way that must be compatible with that choice. Although absolutely free, such an initial choice takes the shape and the meaning of an inescapable and relentless destiny —a destiny in which one’s sense of freedom and their inability to act in any other way than they actually did come to merge perfectly: “the free choice which a man makes of himself is completely identified with what is called his destiny” (Sartre 1947a [1967: 192]).

In the years following the publication of Being and Nothingness , Sartre refines this original conception of existential psychoanalysis. He applies it methodically to the biographical analysis of a series of major French writers (Baudelaire first, then Mallarmé, Jean Genêt, Flaubert, and himself in Words ), warning against the dangers of all kinds of determinist interpretations, from the constitution of psychological types to materialist explanations inherited from Marxian historical analyses. Sartre’s analyses become more subtle over time, as he substitutes fine-grained descriptions of the concrete constraints that frame and shape the limits of human lives to the strongly metaphysical theses on freedom that he was first tempted to apply indistinctly to each of these writers. Accordingly, existential psychoanalysis plays a central role in the development of Sartre’s thought from the early 40s up to his last published work on Flaubert. It allows him to unify and articulate two fundamental threads of his philosophical thinking: his ontological analysis of the absolute freedom of the for-itself in Being and Nothingness ; and his later attempt to take into consideration the social, historical and political factors that are inevitably involved in the determination of one’s free choice of their own existence. Already in his War Diaries from 1940, the method of analysis of “human reality” arises from Sartre’s attempt to understand rather than explain (according to Dilthey’s famous distinction) Emperor Wilhelm II’s historical situation and its relation to the aspects of his personal life that express his specific way of being-in-the-world (Sartre 1983b [1984: 308–309]). The application of his method to the specific cases of these French writers allowed him to refine the ahistorical descriptions of his earlier work, by bringing the analysis of the subject’s freedom back to the material/historical conditions (both internal and external) of constitution of their particular modes of existing.

Sartre’s inquiries into existential psychoanalysis also anticipate and intersect with his philosophical investigations on historical anthropology. The progressive-regressive method presented in Search for a Method and Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre 1960a [1976]) was first sketched and experimented through Sartre’s essays in existential psychoanalysis. Sartre’s detailed analyses of Flaubert’s biography in The Family Idiot can be read as synthesising the hermeneutical methodology theorised in Search for A Method and the conception of the freedom involved in one’s initial choice of themselves that arose from Being and Nothingness . Moving discretely away from an all-too metaphysical doctrine of absolute freedom, Sartre goes back to the most concrete details of Flaubert’s material conditions of existence in order to account for the specific way in which Flaubert made himself able, through the writing of his novels, to overcome his painful situation as a “frustrated and jealous younger brother” and “unloved child” thanks to a totalizing project that made him “the author of Madame Bovary ” (Sartre 1971–72 [1987, vol. 2: 7]). If Flaubert’s novel and masterpiece is consequently understood and described as the final objectivation of Gustave’s fundamental project, Sartre is now careful to point out the economic, historic and social conditions within which this project only finds its full intelligibility. Sartre’s psychoanalytic method is then expected to reveal, beyond what society has made of Flaubert, what he himself could make of what society has made of him. In order to fly away from the painful reality of his unbearable familial situation, the young Gustave chooses irreality over reality, and chooses it freely, though achingly. From that moment on, his dedication to literature commits him to a fictional world that he couldn’t but choose to elect as the realm of his genius.

While Search for a Method (1957) had been published earlier, it is not until 1960 that Sartre completed the first volume—“Theory of Practical Ensembles”—of what is his final systematic work of philosophy, Critique of Dialectical Reason . The second volume, “The Intelligibility of History”, was published posthumously in French in 1985. It would be 1991 before both volumes were to be available in English, which goes some of the way towards explaining their subsequent neglect. It is also a book that rivals Being and Nothingness for difficulty, even if some of its goals and ambitions can be expressed straightforwardly enough. Never a member of the French Communist Party, Sartre nonetheless begins by laying his Marxist cards on the table:

we were convinced at one and the same time that historical materialism furnished the only valid interpretation of history and that existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality. (Sartre 1957 [1963: 21])

Critique offers a systematic attempt to justify these two perspectives and render them compatible. In broad terms, some of the main steps needed to effect such a synthesis are clear, most notably to deny or limit strong structuralist and determinist versions of Marxism. Borrowing some themes from Merleau-Ponty’s Humanism and Terror , Sartre maintained that any genuinely dialectical method refuses to reduce; it refuses scientific and economic determinism that treats humans as things, contrary to reductive versions of Marxism. He pithily puts his objection to such explanations in terms of what we might today call the genetic fallacy. Sartre says,

Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism is contained in these two sentences. (Sartre 1957 [1963: 56])

Moreover, for Sartre, class struggle is not the only factor that determines and orients history and the field of possibilities. There is human choice and commitment in class formation that is equally fundamental. The way in which this plays out in Critique is through an emphasis on praxis rather than consciousness, which we have seen is also characteristic of his existential psychoanalytic work of the prior decade.

Without being able to adequately summarise the vast Critique here (see Flynn 1984), one of the book’s core conceptual innovations is the idea of the practico-inert. Sartre defines this as “the activity of others insofar as it is sustained and diverted by inorganic inertia” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 556]). The concept is intended to capture the forms of social and historical sedimentation that had only minimally featured in Being and Nothingness . It is the reign of necessity,

the domain … in which inorganic materiality envelops human multiplicity and transforms the producer into its product. (Sartre 1960a [1976: 339])

For Sartre, the practico-inert is the negation of humanity. Any reaffirmation of humanity, in which genuine freedom resides, must take the form of the negation of this negation (negation is productive here, as it also was in Being and Nothingness ). For Sartre, then, there are two fundamental kinds of social reality: a positive one in which an active group constitutes the common field; and a negative one in which individuals are effectively separated from each other (even though they appear united) in a practico-inert field. In the practico-inert field, relations are typified by what Sartre calls seriality, like a number, or a worker in a factory who is allocated to a place within a given system that is indifferent to the individual. Sartre’s prime example of this is of waiting for a bus, or street-car, on the way to work. If the people involved do not know each other reasonably well there is likely to be a kind of anonymity to such experiences in which individuals are substitutable for each other in relation to this imminent bus, and their relations are organised around functional need. If the bus is late, or if there are too many people on it, however, those who are waiting go from being indifferent and anonymous (something akin to what Heidegger calls das Man in Being and Time ) to becoming competitors and rivals. In a related spirit Sartre also discusses the serial unity of the TV watching public, of the popular music charts, bourgeois property, and petty racism and stereotyping as well. These collective objects keep serial individuals apart from one another under the pretext of unifying them. Sartre thus appears to accept a version of the Marxian theses concerning commodity fetishism. This competitive or antagonistic dimension of the practico-inert is amplified in situations of material scarcity. This kind of seriality is argued to be the basic type of sociality, thus transforming the focus on dyadic consciousnesses of Being and Nothingness . In the Critique , otherness becomes produced not simply through the look that Sartre had previously described as the original meaning of being-for-others, but through the sedimentation of social processes and through practico-inert mediation. Society produces in us serial behaviour, serial feelings, serial thoughts, and “passive activity” (Sartre 1960a [1976: 266]), where events and history are conceived as external occurrences that befall us, and we feel compelled by the force of circumstance, or “monstrous forces” as Sartre puts it. It is the practico-inert, modified by material and economic scarcity, which turns us into conflictual competitors and alienates us from each other and ourselves. Only an end to both material scarcity and the alienating mediation of the practico-inert will allow for the actualisation of socialism.

While Sartre is pessimistic about the prospects for any sort of permanent revolution of society, he maintains that we get a fleeting glimpse of this unalienated condition in the experience of the “group in fusion”. This occurs when the members of a group relate to each other through praxis and in a particular way. The group in fusion is not a collective à la the practico-inert, but a social whole that spontaneously forms as a plurality of serial individuals respond to some danger, pressing situation, or to the likelihood of a collective reaction to their stance (Flynn 1984: 114). We could consider what happens when an individual acts so as to make manifest this serial otherness, like Rosa Parkes when she refused to give up her seat and thus drew attention to the specific nature of the colonialist seriality at the heart of many states in the USA. This sometimes creates a rupture and others might follow. Sartre’s own prime example is of a crowd of workers who were fleeing during the French Revolution in 1789. At some point the workers stopped fleeing, turned around and reversed direction, suddenly energised alongside each other by their practical awareness that they were doing something together. For this kind of “fusion” to happen it must fulfil the following four key conditions for genuine reciprocity that Flynn summarises as follows:

• That the other be a means to the exact degree that I am a means myself, i.e., that he be the means towards a transcendent goal and not my means;
• That I recognize the other as praxis at the same time as I integrate him into my totalizing project;
• That I recognize his movement towards his own ends in the very movement by which I project myself towards mine;
• That I discover myself as an object and instrument of his own ends by the same act that makes him an object and instrument of mine. (Flynn 1984: 115, also see previous version of this entry [Flynn 2004 [2013]] and cf. Sartre 1960a [1976: 112–3]).

Sartre calls the resurrection of this freedom an “apocalypse”, indicating that it is an unforeseen and (potentially) revolutionary event that happens when serial abuse and exploitation can no longer be tolerated. The group in fusion has a maximum of praxis and a minimum of inertia, but serial sociality has the reverse.

Unfortunately, Sartre insists that this group in fusion is destined to meet with what he calls an “ontological check” in the form of the institution, which cannot be escaped as some versions of anarchism and Marxism might hope. The group relapses into seriality when groups are formalised into hierarchical institutional structures. Serial otherness comes to implicate itself in interpersonal relations in at least three ways in the institution: sovereignty; authority; and bureaucracy (see Book 2, Chapter 6, “The Institution”). From the co-sovereignty of the group in fusion, someone inevitably becomes sovereign in any new social order. Similarly, a command-obedience relation comes about in institutions, to greater and lesser extents, and there will be exhortations to company loyalty, to do one’s duty, etc. (Flynn 1984: 120). Bureaucratic rules and regulation also inevitably follow, partly as a reaction to fear of sovereignty, and this installs what Sartre calls vertical otherness—top-down hierarchies, as opposed to the horizontal and immanent organisation of the group in fusion (Sartre 1960a [1976: 655–663]). As such, the revolutionary force of the group in fusion is necessarily subject to mediation by the practico-inert, as well as the problems associated with institutionality just described. Although is it still structured through a series of oppositions, the Critique delivers a sophisticated social ontology that both addresses some weaknesses in Sartre’s earlier work and unifies the social and political reflections of much of his later work.

Although it is not possible to address all of Sartre’s rich and varied contributions to ethics and politics here, we will introduce some of the key ideas about race and anti-colonialism that were important themes in his post Being and Nothingness work and are currently significant issues in our times. Sartre was generally stridently anti-colonialist, perhaps even advocating a multiculturalism avant la lettre , as Michael Walzer has argued in his Preface to Anti-semite and Jew (Walzer 1995: xiv). His books and more journalistic writings typically call out what he saw as the bad faith of many French and European citizens.

The issue of race was part of Sartre’s French intellectual scene, and Sartre himself played a major role in facilitating that in the pages of Les Temps Modernes , L’Express , and elsewhere. Debates about the intersection of philosophy and race, and colonialism and multiculturalism, were all being had. These concerned not only the French Algerian and African “colonies” but also Vietnam via Tran Duc Thao, who had challenged Sartre’s efforts to bring phenomenological existentialism together with Marxism. Initially at least, Sartre’s arguments here typically drew on and extended some of the categories deployed in Being and Nothingness . There is an obvious sense in which a critique of racism automatically ensues from Sartrean existentialism. Racism is a form of bad faith, for Sartre, since it typically (perhaps necessarily) involves believing in essences or types, and indeed constructing essences and types. His Notebooks suggest that all oppression rests on bad faith. In racism, in particular, there is an “infernal circle of irresponsible responsibility, of culpable ignorance and ignorance which is knowledge” (Sartre 1943 [1956: 49]), as well as what Sartre calls passive complicity. Many of us (or Sartre’s own French society) may not obviously be bigots, but we sustain a system that is objectively unjust through our choices and sometimes wilful ignorance. In relation to colonialism, Sartre likewise contends that we have all profited from colonialist exploitation and sustained its systems, even if we are not ourselves a “settler”.

This is also the key argument of Anti-semite and the Jew , composed very quickly in 1944 and without much detailed knowledge of Judaism but with more direct knowledge of the sort of passive anti-semitism of many French citizens. The text was written following the Dreyfus affair and before all of the horrors of the holocaust were widely known. Sartre was aiming to understand (and critique) the situation he observed around him, in which the imminent return of the French Jews exiled by the Nazis was not unambiguously welcomed by all. The book is perceptive about its prime targets, the explicit or implicit anti-semite, who defines the real Frenchmen by excluding others, notably the Jew. Now, of course, few of his contemporaries would admit to being anti-semites, just as few would admit to being racist. But there are patterns of bad faith that Sartre thinks are clear: we participate in social systems that force the dilemma of authenticity or inauthenticity upon the Jew, asking them to choose between their concrete practical identities (religious and cultural) and more universal ascriptions (liberty, etc.) in a way that cannot be readily navigated within the terms of the debate. Sartre consistently ascribes responsibility to collectives here, even if those collectives are ultimately sustained by individual decisions and choices. For him, it is not just the assassin say, nor just Eichmann and the Nazi regime, who are held responsible. Rather, these more obviously egregious activities were sustained by their society and the individuals in it, through culpable ignorance and patterns of bad faith.

Sartre also addressed the negritude movement in his Preface to Black Orpheus (1948), an anthology of negritude poetry. He called for an anti-racist racism and saw himself as resolutely on the side of the negritude movement, but he also envisaged such interventions as a step towards ultimately revealing the category of race itself as an example of bad faith. Here the reception from Frantz Fanon and others was mixed. In Black Skin, White Masks (1952), Fanon argues this effectively undermined his own lived-experience and its power (see entries on negritude and Fanon ; cf. also Gordon 1995). Sartre continued to address colonialism and racism in subsequent work, effecting a rapprochement of sorts with Fanon that culminated in his “Introduction” to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961), where also Sartre appears to endorse a counter-violence.

Although we have not given much attention to Sartre’s literary and artistic productions since section 3 above, he continued to produce artistic work of political significance throughout his career. Continuous with insights from his What is Literature? , Sartre argues that in a society that remains unjust and dominated by oppression, the prose-writer (if not the poet) must combat this violence by jolting the reader and audience from their complacency, rather than simply be concerned with art for its own sake. His literary works hence are typically both philosophical and political. Although the number of these works diminished over time, there is still a powerful literary exploration of the philosophical and political themes of the Critique in the play, The Condemned of Altona (1960).

We cannot neatly sum up a public intellectual and man of letters, like Sartre, to conclude. We do think, however, that it is arguable, with the benefit of hindsight, that some of Sartre’s interventions are prescient rather than outmoded remnants of the nineteenth century ( à la Foucault). They certainly presage issues that are in the foreground today, concerning class, race, and gender. That doesn’t mean that Sartre got it all correct, of course, whatever that might mean in regard to the complex realities of socio-political life. Indeed, if one is to take a stand on so many of the major socio-political issues of one’s time, as Sartre did, it is inevitable that history will not look kindly on them all. Sartre’s life and writings hence present a complex and difficult interpretive task, but they remain a powerful provocation for thought and action today.

This bibliography presents a selection of the works from Sartre and secondary literature that are relevant for this article. For a complete annotated bibliography of Sartre’s works see

• Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1974, The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre , two volumes, Richard C. McCleary (trans.), (Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology & Existential Philosophy), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
• 1975, Magazine littéraire , 103–4: 9–49,

and by Michel Sicard in

• 1979, special issue on Sartre, Obliques , 18–19(May): 331–347.

Michel Rybalka and Michel Contat have complied an additional bibliography of primary and secondary sources published since Sartre’s death in

• Rybalka, Michel and Michel Contat, 1993, Sartre: Bibliographie 1980–1992 , (CNRS Philosophie), Paris: CNRS and Bowling Green, OH:: Philosophy Documentation Center, Bowling Green State University.

A.1 Works by Sartre

A.1.1 individual works published by sartre.

• 1957, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness , Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (trans.), New York: Noonday Press.
• 2004, The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description , Andrew Brown (trans.), London: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203694367
• 1936b [2012], L’imagination , Paris: F. Alcan. Translated as The Imagination , Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf (trans.), London: Routledge, 2012. doi:10.4324/9780203723692
• 1938 [1965], La Nausée: Roman , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Nausea , Robert Baldick (trans.), Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
• 1939a [1970], “Une idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl: l’intentionnalit”, La Nouvelle Revue française , 304: 129–132. Reprinted in Situations 1. Translated as “Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology”, Joseph P. Fell (trans.), Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology , 1(2): 4–5, 1970. doi:10.1080/00071773.1970.11006118
• 1939b [1948], Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions , Paris: Hermann. Translated as The Emotions: Outline of a Theory , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1948.
• 1940 [2004], L’Imaginaire: Psychologie Phénoménologique de l’imagination , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination , Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre (ed.), Jonathan Webber (trans.), London: Routledge, 2004.
• 1956, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology , Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library.
• 2018, Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology , Sarah Richmond (trans.), London: Routledge.
• 1945–49, Les Chemins de la liberté (The roads to freedom), Paris: Gallimard. Series of novels L’âge de raison (The age of reason, 1945), Le sursis (The reprieve, 1945), and La mort dans l’âme (Troubled sleep, 1949).
• 1946a [2007], L’existentialisme est un humanisme , (Collection Pensées), Paris: Nagel. Translated as Existentialism is a Humanism , John Kulka (ed.), Carol Macomber (trans.), New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.
• 1946b [1948/1995], Réflexions sur la question juive , Paris: P. Morihien. Translated as Anti-semite and Jew , George J. Becker (trans.), New York: Schocken Books, 1948 (reprinted with preface by Michael Walzer, 1995).
• 1946c [1955], “Matérialisme et Révolution I”, Les Temps Modernes , 9: 37–63 and 10: 1–32. Reprinted in Situations III , Paris: Gallimard, 1949. Translated as , “Materialism and Revolution”, in Literary and Philosophical Essays , Annette Michelson (trans.), New York: Criterion Books, 1955.
• 1947a [1967], Baudelaire , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Baudelaire , Martin Turnell (trans.), London: H. Hamilton, 1949. Reprinted, Norfolk, CT: New Directions, 1967
• 1947b [1949], Huis-Clos , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1944. Translated as No Exit , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1947c [1949], Les Mouches , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1943. Translated as The Flies , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1948a [1988], “Qu’est-ce que la littérature?”, Les Temps modernes . Collected in Situations II . Translated in “What Is Literature?” and Other Essays , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
• 1948b [1967], “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi”, Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie , n° 3, avril-juin 1948. Translated as “Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self”, in Readings in Existential Phenomenology , Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’Connor (eds), Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1967.
• 1948c [1949], Les mains sales: pièce en sept tableaux , Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1948. Translated as Dirty Hands , in No Exit, and Three Other Plays , New York: Vintage Books, 1949.
• 1952a [1963], Saint-Genêt, Comédien et martyr , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: George Braziller, 1963.
• 1952b [1968]. “Les communistes et la paix”, published in Situations VI . Translated as “The Communists and Peace”, in The Communists and Peace, with A Reply to Claude Lefort , Martha H. Fletcher and Philip R. Berk (trans.), New York: George Braziller, 1968.
• 1957 [1963/1968], Questions de méthode , Paris: Gallimard. Later to be a foreword for Sartre 1960. Translated as Search for a Method , Hazel E. Barnes (trans.), New York: Knopf, 1963. Reprinted New York: Random House, 1968.
• 1960a [1976], Critique de la Raison dialectique, tome 1, Théorie des ensembles pratiques , Paris, Gallimard. Translated as Critique of Dialectical Reason, volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles , Alan Sheridan-Smith (trans.), London: New Left Books, 1976. Reprinted in 2004 with a forward by Fredric Jameson, London: Verso. The second unfinished volume was published posthumously in 1985.
• 1960b, Les Séquestrés d’Altona (The condemned of Altona), Paris: Gallimard. First produced 1959.
• 1964a [1964], Les mots , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Words , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Braziller, 1964.
• 1969, “Itinerary of a Thought”, interview with Perry Anderson, Ronald Fraser and Quintin Hoare, New Left Review , I/58: 43–66. Partially published in Situations IX .
• 1971–72 [1981–93], L’Idiot de la famille. Gustave Flaubert de 1821 à 1857 , 3 volumes, Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert, 1821–1857 , 5 volumes, Carol Cosman (trans.), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981/1987/1989/1991/1993.
• 1980 [1996], “L’espoir, maintenant”, interview with Benny Lévy, Le Nouvel observateur , n° 800, 801, 802. Reprinted as L’espoir maintenant: les entretiens de 1980 , Lagrasse: Verdier, 1991. Translated as Hope Now: The 1980 Interviews , Adrian van den Hoven (trans.), Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

A.1.2 Collections of works by Sartre

References to Situations will be abbreviated as Sit. followed by the volume, e.g., Sit. V .

• 1947, Situations I: Critiques littéraires , Paris: Gallimard. Partially translated in Literary and Philosophical Essays , Annette Michelson (trans.), London: Rider, 1955. Reprinted New York: Collier Books, 1962.
• 1948, Situations II , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1949, Situations III: Lendemains de guerre , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1964b, Situations IV: Portraits , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1964c, Situations V: Colonialisme et néo-colonialisme , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Colonialism and Neocolonialism , Azzdedine Haddour, Steve Brewer, and Terry McWilliams (trans), London: Routledge, 2001. doi:10.4324/9780203991848
• 1964d, Situations VI: Problèmes du marxisme 1 , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1965, Situations VII: Problèmes du marxisme 2 , Paris:, Gallimard.
• 1971, Situations VIII: Autour de 68 , Paris: Gallimard.
• 1972, Situations IX: Mélanges , Paris: Gallimard. Material from Situations VIII et IX translated as Between Existentialism and Marxism , John Mathews (trans.), London: New Left Books, 1974.
• 1976, Situations X: Politique et autobiographie , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken , Paul Auster and Lydia Davis (trans), New York: Pantheon, 1977.
• 1981, Œuvres romanesques , Michel Contat, Michel Rybalka, G. Idt and G. H. Bauer (eds), Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
• 1988, “What is Literature?” and Other Essays , [including Black Orpheus ] tr. Bernard Frechtman et al., intro. Steven Ungar, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• 2005, Théâtre complet , Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.

A.1.3 Posthumous works by Sartre

• 1983a, Cahiers pour une morale , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Notebook for an Ethics , David Pellauer (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• 1983b [1984], Carnets de la drôle de guerre, septembre 1939 - mars 1940 , Paris: Gallimard. Reprinted in 1995 with an addendum. Translated as The War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phoney War , Quinton Hoare (trans.), New York: Pantheon, 1984.
• Tome 1: 1926–1939
• Tome 2: 1940–1963
• 1984, Le Scenario Freud , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Freud Scenario , Quinton Hoare (trans.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
• 1985, Critique de la raison dialectique, tome 2, L’intelligibilité de l’histoire , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 2: The Intelligibility of History , Quintin Hoare (trans.), London: Verso, 1991. Reprinted 2006, foreword by Frederic Jameson, London: Verso. [unfinished].
• 1989, Vérité et existence , Paris: Gallimard [written in 1948]. Translated as Truth and Existence , Adrian van den Hoven (trans.), Ronald Aronson (intro.), Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992.
• 1990, Écrits de jeunesse , Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka (eds), Paris: Gallimard.

A.2 Works by others

• Astruc, Alexandre and Michel Contat (directors), 1978, Sartre by Himself: A Film Directed by Alexandre Astruc and Michel Contat with the Participation of Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques-Larent Bost, Andre Gorz, Jean Pouillon , transcription of film, Richard Seaver (trans.), New York: Urizen Books.
• Beauvoir, Simone de, 1947 [1976], Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Ethics of Ambiguity , Bernard Frechtman (trans.), New York: Philosophical Library, 1948. Translation reprinted New York: Citadel Press, 1976.
• –––, 1960 [1962], La force de l’âge , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as The Prime of Life , Peter Green (trans.), Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1962.
• –––, 1963 [1965], La force des choses , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Force of Circumstance , Richard Howard (trans.), New York: Putnam, 1965.
• –––, 1981 [1986], La cérémonie des adieux: suivi de, Entretiens avec Jean-Paul Sartre, août-septembre 1974 , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre , Patrick O’Brian (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books, 1984. Translation reprinted London and New York: Penguin, 1988.
• Carnap, Rudolf, 1931, “Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache”, Erkenntnis , 2(1): 219–241. Translated as “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language”, Arthur Pap (trans.), in Logical Positivism , A. J. Ayer (ed.), New York: The Free Press, 1959, 60–81. doi:10.1007/BF02028153 (de)
• Contat, Michel and Michel Rybalka, 1970, Les écrits de Sartre: Chronologie, bibliographie commentée , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Volume 1: A Bibliographical Life , Richard C. McCleary (trans.), Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974.
• Deleuze, Gilles, 2004, Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974 , David Lapoujade (trans.), Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
• Derrida, Jacques, 1992 [1995], Points de Suspension: Entretiens , Elisabeth Weber (ed.), (Collection la philosophie en effet), Paris: Editions Galilée. Translated as Points: Interviews, 1974–1994 , Peggy Kamuf (trans.), (Meridian), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995.
• Fanon, Francis, 1952, Peau noire, masques blancs , Paris, Seuil. Translated as Black Skin, White Masks , Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2008.
• –––, 1961, Les damnés de la terre , Paris: Maspero. Translated as The Wretched of the Earth , Richard Philcox (trans.), New York: Grove Books, 2005.
• Foucault, Michel, 1966 [1994], “L’homme est-il mort?” (interview with C. Bonnefoy), Arts et Loisirs , no. 38 (15–21 juin): 8–9. Reprinted in Dits et Écrits , Daniel Defert, François Ewald, & Jacques Lagrange (eds.), 540–544, Paris: Gallimard, 1994. 2001, Dits et Écrits , volume 1, Paris: Gallimard.
• Heidegger, Martin, 1957 [1962], Sein und Zeit , Tübingen: M. Niemeyer. Translated as Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans), London: SCM Press.
• Husserl, Edmund, 1913 [1983], Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie , Halle: Niemeyer. Translated as Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy , volume 1, F. Kersten (tr.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1983.
• –––, 1950 [1960], Cartesianische Meditationen eine Einleitung in die Phänomenologie , The Hague: Nijhoff. Translated as Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology , Dorion Cairns (trans.), The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960.
• –––, 1900/1901, 1913/1921 [1970, 2001], Logische Untersuchungen , two volumes, Halle: M. Niemeyer. Second edition 1913/1921. Translated as Logical Investigations , 2 volumes, J. N. Findlay (trans.), London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1970. Revised English edition, 2 volumes, London: Routledge, 2001.
• Levinas, Emmanuel, 1930 [1963], La théorie de l’intuition dans la phénoménologie de Husserl , Doctoral dissertation, Université de Strasbourg. Published Paris: Vrin, 1963.
• Marcuse, Herbert, 1948, “Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Etre et Le Neant”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research , 8(3): 309–336. doi:10.2307/2103207
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1947 [1969], Humanisme et terreur: essai sur le problème communiste , (Les Essais [2 sér.] 27), Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem , John O’Neill (trans.), Boston: Beacon Press.
• Moran, Richard, 2001, Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge , Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
• Anderson, Thomas C., 1993, Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity , La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Aronson, Ronald, 1987, Sartre’s Second Critique , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Baring, Edward, 2011, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968 , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511842085
• Barnes, Hazel Estella, 1981, Sartre & Flaubert , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Bell, Linda A., 1989, Sartre’s Ethics of Authenticity , Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press.
• Busch, Thomas W., 1990, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre’s Philosophy , Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Cabestan, Philippe, 2004, L’être et la conscience: recherches sur la psychologie et l’ontophénoménologie sartriennes (Ousia 51), Bruxelles: Editions Ousia.
• Catalano, Joseph S., 1974, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (Harper Torchbooks 1807), New York: Harper & Row. New edition Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
• –––, 1986, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Churchill, Steven and Jack Reynolds (eds.), 2014, Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts , New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315729695
• Cohen-Solal, Annie, 1985 [1987], Sartre , Paris: Gallimard. Translated as Sartre: A Life , Norman MacAfee (ed.). Anna Cancogni (trans.), New York: Pantheon Books, 1987.
• Coorebyter, Vincent de, 2000, Sartre face à la phénoménologie: Autour de “L’Intentionnalité” et de “La Transcendance de l’Ego” (Ousia 40), Bruxelles: Ousia.
• –––, 2005, Sartre, avant la phénoménologie: autour de “La nausée” et de la “Légende de la vérité” (Ousia 53), Bruxelles: Ousia.
• Cox, Gary, 2019, Existentialism and Excess: The Life and Times of Jean-Paul Sartre , London: Bloomsbury.
• Detmer, David, 1988, Freedom as a Value: A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul Sartre , La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Dobson, Andrew, 1993, Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason: A Theory of History. , New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Fell, Joseph P., 1979, Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place , New York: Columbia University Press.
• Flynn, Thomas R., 1984, Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility , Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 1997, Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason: volume 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• –––, 2004 [2013], “Jean-Paul Sartre”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/ >
• –––, 2014, Sartre: A Philosophical Biography , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Gardner, Sebastian, 2009, Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”: A Reader’s Guide (Continuum Reader’s Guides), London: Continuum.
• Gordon, Lewis R., 1995, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism , Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
• Henri-Levy, Bernard, 2003, Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century , Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Howells, Christina (ed.), 1992, The Cambridge Companion to Sartre , Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CCOL0521381142
• Jeanson, Francis, 1947 [1980], Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre (Collection “Pensée et civilisation”), Paris: Éditions du myrte. Translated as Sartre and the Problem of Morality , Robert V. Stone (trans.), (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1980.
• Judaken, Jonathan (ed.), 2008, Race after Sartre: Antiracism, Africana Existentialism, Postcolonialism (Philosophy and Race), Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
• McBride, William Leon, 1991, Sartre’s Political Theory , (Studies in Continental Thought), Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
• Existentialist Ontology and Human Consciousness
• Sartre’s French Contemporaries and Enduring Influences: Camus, Merleau-Ponty, Debeauvoir & Enduring Influences
• Sartre’s Life, Times and Vision du Monde
• Existentialist Literature and Aesthetics
• Existentialist Background: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger: Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Jaspers, Heidegger
• Existentialist Ethics: Issues in Existentialist Ethics
• Existentialist Politics and Political Theory
• The Development and Meaning of Twentieth-Century Existentialism
• Moati, Raoul, 2019, Sartre et le mystère en pleine lumière (Passages), Paris: Les éditions du Cerf.
• Morris, Katherine J., 2008, Sartre , (Blackwell Great Minds 5), Malden, MA: Blackwell.
• Mouillie, Jean-Marc and Jean-Philippe Narboux (eds.), 2015, Sartre: L’être et le néant: nouvelles lectures , Paris: Les Belles Lettres.
• Murphy, Julien S. (ed.), 1999, Feminist Interpretations of Jean-Paul Sartre , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Renaudie, Pierre-Jean, 2017, “L’ambiguïté de la troisième personne”, Revue Philosophique de Louvain , 115(2): 269–287. doi:10.2143/RPL.115.2.3245502
• Reynolds, J. and P. Stokes, 2017, “Existentialist Methodology and Perspective: Writing the First Person”, in The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology , Giuseppina D’Oro and Søren Overgaard (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 317–336. doi:10.1017/9781316344118.017
• Santoni, Ronald E., 1995, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy , Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
• –––, 2003, Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent , University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Schilpp, Paul Arthur (ed.), 1981, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre , (Library of Living Philosophers 16), La Salle, IL: Open Court.
• Schroeder, William Ralph, 1984, Sartre and His Predecessors: The Self and the Other , London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. doi:10.4324/9780429024511
• Stone, Robert V. and Elizabeth A. Bowman, 1986, “Dialectical Ethics: A First Look at Sartre’s Unpublished 1964 Rome Lecture Notes”, Social Text , 13/14: 195–215.
• –––, 1991, “Sartre’s ‘Morality and History’: A First Look at the Notes for the unpublished 1965 Cornell Lectures”, in Sartre Alive , Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (eds), Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 53–82.
• Taylor, Charles, 1991, The Ethics of Authenticity , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Van den Hoven, Adrian and Andrew N. Leak (eds.), 2005, Sartre Today: A Centenary Celebration , New York: Berghahn Books.
• Webber, Jonathan (ed.), 2011, Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism , London ; New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203844144
• Walzer, Michael, 1995, “Preface” to the 1995 English translation reprint of Sartre’s Anti-semite and Jew , New York: Schocken Books.

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• Jean Paul Sartre: Existentialism , by Christian J. Onof at the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• U.K. Sartre Society
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• Flynn, Thomas, “Jean-Paul Sartre”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2022 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2022/entries/sartre/ >. [This was the previous entry on this topic in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy — see the version history .]

aesthetics: existentialist | authenticity | Beauvoir, Simone de | Camus, Albert | existentialism | Fanon, Frantz | Foucault, Michel | Heidegger, Martin | Husserl, Edmund | intentionality | Kierkegaard, Søren | Merleau-Ponty, Maurice | Négritude | Nietzsche, Friedrich | nothingness | phenomenology | self-consciousness: phenomenological approaches to

Acknowledgments

Jack would like to acknowledge Marion Tapper, who taught him Sartre as an undergraduate student. In addition, he would like to thank Steven Churchill, with whom he has worked on Sartre elsewhere and the work here remains indebted to those conversations and collaborations. Thanks also to Erol Copelj for feedback on this essay.

Copyright © 2022 by Jack Reynolds < jack . reynolds @ deakin . edu . au > Pierre-Jean Renaudie < pierre-jean . renaudie @ univ-lyon3 . fr >

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Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Black Existentialism and Phenomenology

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• First Online: 22 July 2023
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• Mukasa Mubirumusoke 3  

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Africana Philosophy ; Black Existentialism ; Critical philosophy of Race ; Decolonial Philosophy

Black existentialism and black phenomenology broadly reference a collection of thinkers and writers who utilize a method of critical inquiry grounded in black experience and/or its limits.

Introduction

Black existentialism and black phenomenology broadly reference a collection of thinkers and writers who utilize a method of critical inquiry grounded in black experience and/or its limits. Some of these thinkers and writers are responding and incorporating the techniques and frameworks developed by European philosophers that are traditionally attributed to foregrounding phenomenology and existentialism as modes of philosophical investigation and reflection, for example, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Simone De Beauvoir, and Hannah Arendt. While others are not necessarily philosophers by training, with some of their writings...

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This may be good place to acknowledge that conversations surrounding Fanon and sexism have not gone overlooked. For a well-known resource see T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (New York: Rowan & Littlefield, 1998 ).

George Yancy is a black existentialist who accepts its fundamental premises, but instead of focusing on black experience and its limits, analyzes whiteness as the under theorized and under appreciated norm of exclusion. See, George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes , (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017 ).

It would be impossible to create an exhaustive list, but just to name a few more: R.A. Judy, David Marriot, Sharon Patricia Holland, Nahum Dimitri Chandler, Axelle Karera, Jared Sexton, Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe, Kevin Quashie, Patrice Douglass, and Zakkiyah Iman Jackson.

This should be distinguished from the term ‘afropessimism’ popularized in the 1980’s to describe how sub-Saharan African countries were apparently incapable of economic and political stability because of an inherent cultural ‘backwardness’.

Wilderson derives the concept of the slave as socially dead, i.e., structured by natal alienation, gratuitous violence, and general dishonor, and in opposition to the human through a reading of Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death , (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982 ).

Chandler, Nahum Dimitri. 2014. X-The problem of the negro as a problem of thought . New York: Fordham University Press.

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De Beauvoir, Simone. 2009. The second sex (trans: Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany Chevallierr). New York: Vintage Books.

Ellison, Ralph. 1952. Invisible man . New York: Vintage Books.

Fanon, Frantz. 2007. Black skin, white masks (trans: Richard Philcox). New York: Grove Press.

———. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth (trans: Richard Philcox). New York: Grove Press.

Gordon, Lewis R. 1997. In Existence in Black: An anthology of black existential philosophy , ed. Lewis R. Gordon. New York: Routledge.

———. 1995. Bad faith and antiblack racism . New York: Humanity Books.

Hartman, Saidiya. 1997. Scenes of subjection: Terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America . Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2019. Wayward lives, beautiful experiments: Intimate histories of social upheaval . New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Morrison, Toni. 1970. The bluest eye . New York: Vintage Books.

Moten, Fred. 2003. In the break: The aesthetics of the black tradition . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

———. 2018. The universal machine . Durham: Duke University Press.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of perception (trans: Colin Smith). New York: Routledge

Sartre, Jean Paul. 2003. Being and nothingness: An essay on phenomenological ontology (trans: Hazel Estella Barnes). New York: Routledge.

Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and social death . Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. 1998. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and feminisms . New York: Rowan & Littlefield.

Snorton, C. Riley. 2017. Black on both sides: A racial history of trans identity . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Spillers, Hortense. 2003. Black, white, and in color: Essays on American literature and culture . Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Warren, Calvin. 2018. Ontological terror: Blackness, nihilism, and emancipation . Durham: Duke University Press.

Wilderson III Frank B. R. (Ed.) 2010. White, and black: Cinema and the structure of U.S. Antagonism. Durham: Duke University Press.

Yancy, George. 2017. Black bodies, white gazes: The continuing significance of race . Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

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Mubirumusoke, M. (2023). Black Existentialism and Phenomenology. In: de Warren, N., Toadvine, T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Phenomenology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-47253-5_322-1

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