Esistenza e Corporeità in Sartre (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 107 uncritically by Mme. Bachelard are not reassuring. For, Evidenz means (1) the sense of property which the judgment as meaning has about being "fitted" to an actuality which corresponds to it; (2) the sense of original possession of the true or actual being itself; (3) the original consciousness of the correctness of the judgment; (4) "possession" of the things themselves [which are not, Mme. Bachelard reminds us, facticities or naively conceived 'realities', but "the itself given" or Das 'selbstgegeben'--which is sometimes treated as if it were not constituted in transcendental subjectivity]; and (5) simply consciousness of correctness. While the author is quite aware of the circularity which is immanent in Husserl's view that constituting subjectivity can criticize itself in terms of its own constituting activity (p. 221), she is not sensitive to the apparent circularity in Husserl's notion of Evidenz. This study of Husserl's logic and the phenomenology of judgment which emerges in Formal and Transcendental Logic is rich in detail and allusions to complementary notions in Husserl's other works. Mme. Bachelard has a remarkable, sympathetic understanding of Husserl's notion of phenomenology and a capacity to clarify what is often obscure in Husserl's writings. This is a valuable companion to Husserl's difficult work and Mme. Bachelard is a reliable (if insufficiently critical) cicerone for a detailed tour of the labyrinthine structure of Husserl's Formale und transzendentale Logik. GEOgGE J. STACK SUNY at Brockport Esistenza e Corporeitd in Sartre. Dalle prime opere all'Essere e Nulla. By Annagrazia Papone. (Firenze: Istituto di Filosofia della FacoltA di Lettere e Filosofia dell' Universit~t di Genova. Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1969. Pp. 157. L. 2,500) This book is a critical survey of Jean-Paul Sartre's phenomenology of existence from his first philosophical essays up to and including his main work, Being and Nothingness. The author concentrates on one subject of Sartre's phenomenology, his theory of the human body, i.e., the corporeity and its significance. This subject is, of course, the most central of the whole phenomenology of Sartre. The survey of the writer is a critical one but done, nevertheless, from an existentialist standpoint--mostly that of Merleau-Ponty. Sartre's "nothingness" corresponds, it should be stressed, to what was called in another idiom "soul" or "spirit." The starting point of his metaphysics is the Cartesian "cogito" and his universe is based on a dichotomy of the en sol and a pour sol. These terms remind one of the German terms an sich and/iir sich but they mean here something different: the en soi is what was called in the past 'matter' (hyle) while the pour soi is its opposite, the essence of subjectivity, namely, 'consciousness'. Its only character is "nothingness" and its activity is a chain of annihilations which are "explosions " of intentionality. The meaning of this complicated nomenclature is to say that the pour soi or the 'consciousness' has no nature or substance of its own, that it is "nothing," its only function being the overcoming of the "brute matter" in general and of its own moments of existence in particular in an eternal flight from itself. Sartre starts where Husserl and Heidegger ceased their investigations; it is from this point that Sartre began his own. The body is in general viewed, Sartre affirms, as a tool of our consciousness, but this leads to an unjustified dualism. The body is the consciousness incarnate; it can be viewed from a subjective standpoint and then there is no body--it disappears because it coincides with one's own person; or, it can be viewed as a body by other people-- 108 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY then it can be observed and made even an object of anatomical study, but this does not reveal its true function. It is a necessary structure inasmuch as it means our inescapable rooting in the world, and without it there could be even no consciousness; yet it is not only necessary, but at the same time contingent, because its configuration--its situation in the world--does not depend on our will (pour soi) but is completely contingent and irrational. As the function...