Sartre’s Legacy

Our Sartre episode focused on one single, apparently not widely discussed text:The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. I say not very widely discussed because you would expect Sartre and consciousness to have a ton of videos on youtube and lots of scholarly papers when Googled. Instead, most of the things that come up when you search are related to existentialism, Heidegger, Bergson and the like. Cf. Daniel’s post about the BBC’s “Human, All Too Human.”

Even those articles, essays and videos that refer to consciousness allude to Being and Nothingness, existentialism, bad faith or other, later themes that he develops. I think Sartre’s critique of Husserl in ToE is pretty strong, and the notion of consciousness he advocates out of the phenomenological structure is both interesting and compelling in its own right. It seems, however, that this book for most serves only to lay the groundwork to Sartre’s later work.

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