ABSTRACT
Before a final summing-up is attempted, it is worth while to devote a few pages to a writer whose reputation rests on the literary, rather than the philosophical, value of his work. Yet in so far as a novelist, who is entitled to pose problems without solving them, can be considered a philosopher, at least by the standards of this study, Saint-Exupéry’s claims are not negligible. His temperament and outlook show a dualism which illustrates what has been said in the foregoing pages about the two poles of a settled and, where it is wisely used, fruitful past (in-itself), and a restlessly progressive present-becoming-future (foritself). There is enough strictly phenomenological interest in his writings to make some of his descriptions relevant to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.1 And if the ‘circle of selfhood’ is anywhere manifest it is in these novels and autobiographical writings.
