Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity

PART II. Subjectivity in Sartre's Existential Phenomenology

Sartre’s earliest works build mostly on the philosophy of Husserl, but unlike Husserl, who holds on to the notion of a transcendental ego that categorially intuits the object in its essence, Sartre rejects the notion of a transcendental ego altogether. In this way, as we shall see, Sartre’s brand of phenomenology is able to avoid the basic charge that we saw Adorno level against Husserl’s phenomenology—namely, that it perpetrates a static subject-object relation in which both the empirical subject and the empirical object are lost. According to Sartre, consciousness is always immersed in the empirical world, and it is for this reason that Sartre, like Adorno, reproaches Husserl for the idealistic character of his thought. With the advent of Being and Nothingness, which is usually taken to be the culmination of his “early philosophy,” Sartre moves beyond his earlier works in at least two crucial ways, one explicit and one implicit. Explicitly, Sartre brings Heidegger’s ontology into a productive tension with his own unique appropriation of Husserl’s phenomenology—that is, Sartre relies on Heidegger to bring his own notion of a “consciousness in the world” into an existential 69 PART II Subjectivity in Sartre’s Existential Phenomenology relation with a world that is peopled (although emphatically not as Heidegger’s “being-with”). In this way, Sartre does not fall prey to what Adorno finds most disconcerting about Heidegger’s ontology—namely, his “taboo concerning subjective reflection” (JOA, p. 126)—which evidences his rejection of the individual subject in favor of Dasein, whose self-identity is ultimately a mere function of “the they.” Implicitly, Sartre appropriates certain crucial features of Hegel’s model of subjectivity formation —that is, Sartre relies on Hegel’s notion that consciousness is characterized by negativity, which, for Sartre, tends to drive the individual subject past every existing self-identity. In this way, Sartre does not fall prey to what Adorno arguably finds most disconcerting about Hegel’s dialectic—namely, the drive toward a “glorified totality,” in which the individual is absorbed with “serene indifference” (MM, p. 17). With respect to the status of other people, which is implicated in these various moves, Sartre’s philosophy undergoes a continuous evolution from his earliest works through Being and Nothingness, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and, finally, The Family Idiot, his five-volume biography of Flaubert. Yet, drawing on Sartre’s own words in Being and Nothingness—in which he says that his portrayal of interpersonal relations as basically contentious does not preclude the possibility of a “radical conversion” that would produce “an ethics of deliverance and salvation” (B&N, p. 534)—many critics claim that there is a “radical conversion” in Sartre’s own thought between Being and Nothingness and Search for a Method, the introductory essay to the Critique of Dialectical Reason. It seems to me that this claim, which is better understood in terms of what Althusser calls an “epistemological break,” is wrong, and Sartre himself denies the notion that there is a “conversion” or “break” in his thought. In a 1975 interview with Michel Rybalka and Oreste Pucciano (hereinafter “the Schilpp interview”), he states: There is an evolution [in my thought], but I don’t think there is a break. The great change in my thinking was the war: 1939–1940, the Occupation, the Resistance, the liberation of Paris. All that made me move beyond traditional philosophical thinking to thinking in which philosophy and action are connected, in which theory and practice are joined. . . . I underwent a continuous evolution beginning with La Nausée all the way up to the Critique de la raison dialectique. My great discovery was that of the sociality during the war. . . . The sociality is not in La Nausée, but there are glimpses of it.1 70 PART II So, too, in a 1976 interview with Leo Fretz, Sartre emphasizes the fact that there is a continuity in his thought: I think that there is more continuity in thought. I do not believe that there is a break. There are naturally changes in one’s thinking; one can deviate; one can go from the one extreme to the other; but the idea of a break, an idea from Althusser, seems to me to be mistaken. For example, I do not think that there is a break between the early writing of Marx and Capital. Naturally there are changes, but a change is not yet...