The Philosophy of Sartre (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 187 sciousness experiences the world. If the "empty intentions" of consciousness are not "filled" in intuitive experience of their objects, they remain merely "possible" and "unreal" essences as opposed to the "real" essences of intuitive experience whose objects are given abschattungsweise. I am not claiming, of course, that Husserl resolved this tension in his theory (I would be the first to claim the opposite), nor should Sokolowski be criticized for not treating of everything in one book. On the contrary, he should be praised for wisely speaking of one thing at a time and for limiting himself to the clarification of the concept of constitution and its place in Husserl's philosophy as a whole. My only motive, therefore, in making this critical reservation is that, without a parallel study of the concept of "intuition" and its equally important place in Husserl's theory of meaning, Sokolowski's conclusions remain quite tentative and partial. On the basis of what he has here achieved, I can think of nobody who has a greater right or a greater call to develop the companion study which this work calls for. It is perhaps of minor importance to remark on two terminological devices which this reader found puzzling. Sokolowski consistently uses "categorical" where we should expect to find "categorial," and he further makes a subtle distinction between "encounter" (taken to designate external experience, for instance, the experience of material objects in perception ) and "experience" (which is reserved to the experience of internal feelings or intentions ). Neither of these usages seems consonant with current practice and, in a period when terminology is not entirely fixed and all idiosyncratic decisions cause difficulty, such arbitrary definitions can do more to confuse than to clarify an argument. Since this reviewer has felt it necessary on several recent occasions to complain about the careless copy-editing of English-language works of philosophy emanating from the offices of Martinus Nijhoff, it is a pleasure to be able to report that this book is almost entirely free of typographical errors and other printing faults. This leads one to wonder whether the distressing number of such faults in other books published in this series is not perhaps due to the publisher's relinquishing responsibility in such matters to unskilled proofreaders. JAMES M. EDIE Northwestern University The Philosophy o] Sartre. By Mary Warnock. (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1965, Pp. 186. $3.00.) Miss Warnock's recent book on Sartre gives further indication that dialogue between Anglo-Saxon and Continental philosophy is possible. But it must be said that her study is of uneven quality. While it is moderately successful as "a guide to what Sartre has already written," Warnock does not even make clear what she intends by adding that it is also "a partial introduction to what he has still to write" (p. 11). Although she purports to limit her examination to Sartre qua philosopher, and indeed expresses considerable suspicion of his literary-descriptive philosophical techniques, she avails herself repeatedly of just these techniques and devotes much of her space to Sartre's psychological and political concerns. And whereas she maintains that "throughout this book my aim has been to clarify" (p. 12), a surprising amount of criticism is forthcoming--criticism which her analysis often does not adequately substantiate. The first chapter is misleadingly titled "Cartesianism." It is actually an introductory sketch of Sartre's most familiar doctrines concerning self-consciousness, freedom, bad faith, the emotions, and his quarrel with the Freudians. The bulk of the text has as its focus Sartre's account, in Being and Nothingness, of the modes of being: being-in-itself, being-for-itself, being-for-others, and being-in-the-world. The second chapter, "Nothingness," suffers on the level of conceptual analysis from her refusal to trace with any care the source of concepts like self-consciousness, negativity, and anguish in Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and others (pp. 45f.: "but it is unnecessary to trace back [Sartre's] own complex views to their still more complex sources"). Here she is most effective when giving concrete examples of bad faith, most of them 188 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Sartre's own. Yet her discussion of this subject...