The Philosophy of Sartre (review)

This book is part of a wave of new texts that endeavour to use Sartre’s philosophy to illuminate contemporary debates in the Philosophy of Mind and the study of consciousness. It adds up to a valiant attempt to overthrow Gilbert Ryle’s entrenched prejudice against the ‘metaphysical nonsense’ of existentialist philosophy. Sartre’s early work on intentionality, perception, emotion, imagination, being, existence, and essence, Hatzimoysis argues, contributes significantly to our understanding of consciousness and to current philosophical enquiry. The focus of the book is quite odd: rather than appraising systematically or chronologically Sartre’s philosophy as a whole, the author takes what he describes as ‘the rather less travelled path of introducing Sartre’s thought by focusing just on specific parts of Sartre’s own work’ (p. xii). The upside to this is a clear and precise exposition of key themes that successfully anchors the reader in the intricacies and nuances of Sartre’s early philosophy. I particularly liked the opening chapter, ‘A Narrative Prelude’, in which the author adeptly uses Sartre’s novel La Nausée to explore the themes of contingency and existence that lie at the heart of Sartre’s early thought. The subsequent chapters deal succinctly with the following themes: respectively, ‘Intentionality’, ‘The Ego’, ‘Emotion’, ‘Imagining’, and ‘Being’. Despite the analytical rigour that Hatzimoysis brings to Sartre’s philosophy, one can’t help feeling that, in his ‘thinking through’ of the specifics, he veers towards a kind of analytical parochialism in terms of addressing the wider interpretations of Sartre’s work. In Chapter 3, for instance, on the ego, he works through the philosophical implications of Sartre’s rejection of the Cartesian cogito without reference to Christina Howells’s important work in this area. This opens out on to a wider criticism of the book: the title The Philosophy of Sartre is somewhat misleading in so far as it seems to imply an overview of the diachronic unfolding of Sartre’s philosophy from beginning to end. What we are offered instead is a frozen chronological snapshot of a specific segment of Sartre’s early philosophy that makes no reference to the maturation, philosophical refinement, and dialectical unpacking of this philosophy in his later work. Sartre’s theory of consciousness and world (pour-soi/en soi), which undergoes significant re-thinking in the Critique de la raison dialectique (1960) as well as in his passage to a more materialist reference point, is passed over by Hatzimoysis, leaving the reader thinking that Sartre’s final word on all things philosophical was uttered somewhere around 1945. Perhaps Key Themes in Sartre’s Early Philosophy would have been a more suitable title. For those with a special interest in Sartre’s early thought, however, the book works admirably in Hatzimoysis’s perceptive treatment of these themes.