SARTRE AND MODERN IDEALISM

When Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980 his body lay in state and was viewed by more than fifty thousand people. It is safe to say that few of these were there because the deceased had authored a volume with the forbidding subtitle, “An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology,” or because he had helped to free modern thought from the spell of transcendental idealism. Sartre died a notorious public intellectual – “the hated conscience of his century” – and it was his pugnacious advocacy of unpopular causes, his commitment to resistance in all its forms, his well-known novels and plays, and, of course, his association with the legends of “existentialism,” that fascinated the crowd. Sartre dominated French intellectual life as no one had before and no one has since, but by 1980 the idea that his philosophy was worth critical consideration seemed quaint. Being and Nothingness? Old hat. Naïve. Pre-linguistic-turn. Metaphysical. Phenomenological. Sartre's idiom seemed irrevocably tied to the subjectivism and psychologism that structuralism and analytic philosophy had finally laid to rest. No matter that Sartre himself had deconstructed the metaphysical subject; the emphasis on consciousness in Being and Nothingness marked it as passé.