ABSTRACT
The thought that I will explore in this paper is that the Sartre of Being and Nothingness and the earlier writings is in certain fundamental respects a transcendental thinker, and that viewing him in this light makes a positive, favourable difference to how we understand and assess his ideas, arguments, and position as a whole. The use of such plastic and open-textured categories in the history of
philosophy is, of course, notoriously treacherous, and ‘transcendental philosophy’ is probably in no better shape than most. Consequently there will be some interpretations of the claim that Sartre is a transcendental thinker which make it (pretty much) trivially true, and others that make it (pretty much) plainly false. If transcendental means simply lying in an open-ended line of descent from Kant, then of course Sartre is a transcendentalist, along with almost every other modern European philosopher. If, on the other hand, a philosophical position qualifies as transcendental only if it pursues the very same agenda as that of Kant’s first Critique, then drastic reconstructive surgery would be required to show Sartre to be a transcendental philosopher. The task, therefore, is to come up with an interpretation of the claim for
Sartre’s transcendentalism that is sufficiently strong to be interesting, but not so strong as to lack plausibility. Rather than attempt to fix the meaning of ‘transcendental’ at the outset – which would lead off into thickets from which it would be hard to find an exit – I am going to work through half a dozen headings which will, I think, be accepted as denoting characteristic features of transcendental philosophy. These include transcendental argumentation and transcendental idealism, the hallmarks of transcendentalism. So if under each of the headings enough of a case can be made for their centrality to Sartre’s concerns – if it can be shown not merely that Sartre says certain things which can be squeezed under those headings, but that he is deeply engaged with the relevant issue – then the cumulative effect, I hope,
will be to vindicate the historical claim and, much more importantly, to give an idea of why it matters.
