Sartre's method
philosophical therapy or transcendental argument?
pp. 197-216
in: Sorin Baiasu (ed), Comparing Kant and Sartre, Berlin, Springer, 2016Abstract
There is no doubt that Sartre offers descriptions of everyday experiences and makes phenomenological (indeed, phenomenological-ontological) claims about the essential structures of the lifeworld and what he calls "human reality". The question I want to address here is where Sartre sees his philosophical work to lie in relation to these sorts of offerings.1 I will consider two rather different types of answer. On the first, what I will call the transcendental reading, where the real philosophical work comes is in demonstrating, via a transcendental argument, that the phenomenological claims are conditions for the possibility of the everyday experiences Sartre describes.2 On the second, what I will call the therapeutic reading, the phenomenological claims are elicited (in a manner to be indicated) from the descriptions; to be sure, there is serious philosophical work involved in doing this well (although a different kind of philosophical work than the transcendental reading supposes), but there is also important philosophical work to be done, unrecognized by the transcendental reading, in loosening the hold of intellectual "bad faith' in the grip of which his descriptions (and as a consequence, his phenomenological claims) cannot be acknowledged as accurate.3 To put the point otherwise, whereas transcendental arguments are typically understood to begin from indisputable premises — namely, in the case of the transcendental reading of Sartre, the descriptions of everyday experiences — the therapeutic reading recognizes that these "premises' are disputed; thus on the therapeutic reading, there is work to be done not just in moving from descriptions to phenomenological claims but in breaking down bad-faith-generated resistance to the descriptions.
