ABSTRACT

Turned into a world-wide known cultural trend, often labeled as “atheistic existentialism”, scattered through very different domains (psychology, aesthetics, literary criticism, ontology, politics, ethics, psychoanalysis), employing a wide range of literary forms (philosophical essays, novels, dramas, journal articles), Jean-Paul Sartre’s contribution to philosophy is both rich and extremely variegated. In an unusually academic style and mode of argumentation, The Transcendence of the Ego focuses on what seems to be a quite technical issue, i.e. the status of psychic life and the relation between consciousness and ego. Sartre’s phenomenological description of emotions as intentional conducts is thus meant to account for the fundamental affective being of human existence. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness was supposed to end by addressing the problems of morality. The task of addressing morality from the standpoint of a phenomenological ontology remained unfulfilled for more than fifteen years.