Jean-Paul Sartre (review)

492 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY to be, with wesen, which meant the same in ancient German, but he adds to it a new nuance in accord with his thinking. Wesen ("to be") is to linger a while. Thus he coins the sentence, "Das Wesen der Sprache: Die Sprache des Wesens" (Unterwegszur Sprache, p. 200). The first part of the phrase speaks of what language is, its essence; the second part indicates in what the essence consists, namely, that speech belongs to that that lingers, or what Being manifests. Heidegger wants to emphasize the latter meaning whenever he speaks of Die Sprache des Wesens. Vail renders it as "the language of essence," which is not accurate (p. 171). Krell and Capuzzi commit a similar error by translating das wesende Sprechen as "essential speaking of language" (p. 64). Wesende, by the way, is the gerundive form of the verb and is perhaps best given in English by a secondary clause. These critical remarks are not intended to disparage the translations in question. For they represent considerable achievements despite these and other misunderstandings of the German text. I hope that my brief observations may stimulate further discussion of the complex problem of Heidegger's language. ELISABETHF. HIRSCH Trenton State College Jean-Paul Sartre. By Arthur C. Danto. (New York: Viking Press, 1975. Pp. xiii + 175. $8.95) Danto views his book on Sartre as being governed by three primary aims: exposition, criticism, and the "ecumenical" aim of furthering the rapprochement between continental philosophy and linguistic analysis that had its symbolic beginning several years ago at the Royaumont Colloquium. He hopes thereby to contribute to overcoming the "silly and destructive " ideologized division among analysts, phenomenologists, and existentialists, for "we are all doing the same thing, pursuing all the same structures, whether the ostensible topic of our investigation is language or consciousness" (p. xiii). Danto begins his exposition with a sketch of the fundamental problem that forms the background and context of Sartre's philosophizing: absurdity, or the radical gap separating language and existence. Opening his analysis with a discussion of Nausea, Danto argues that the central movement of the novel on a philosophical level is from the presupposition of the unity of the order of discourse and the order of things, through the discovery that logical form belongs only to language and not to the world, a discovery that culminates in the "descriptive impotency felt by Roquentin" (p. 6). Noting that an earlier Wittgenstein experienced a similar discovery but found it liberating rather than destructive, Danto argues that such a discovery could lead instead to a rethinking of the presupposed picture-theory of language rather than to nausea, to a sounder metaphysics of language rather than to Roquentin's linguistic agonies. Approaching Roquentin's anguish from another perspective, that of the relation between essence and existence, Danto argues that Roquentin's vision of existence as de trop is the insight that "the existence of things is always logicallysuperfluous, and never part of the concept we may apply to them" (p. 10). Stripped of its distinctively Sartrean emotive aspects, such a view of reality is strikingly Humean, and Danto seeks to show that these emotive aspects are not necessary components of the philosophical thesis Sartre is advancing through Roquentin. The problem of absurdity has its philosophical roots in Sartre's own desire for maximal individuation , for a complete preservation of "phenomena in their immediacy and uniqueness" (p. 17); and the allegedly falsifying character of language becomes a problem for Sartre precisely within the context of this attempt to capture the individual in all its immediacy and uniqueness. In a similar way, Roquentin's Boschian vision of the radical contingency of existence is seen by Danto as a "surrealistic gloss on Hume," a powerful literary expression of the Humean intuition "that there is no necessity to our causal laws of the sort to be found in systems of logic or in analytical propositions..." (p. 20). This intuition is also the basis of BOOK REVIEWS 493 Sartre's critique of seriousness, that is, the view that our beliefs about the world correspond to the order of things themselves. Moreover, there is yet another face to the absurdity that...