Edmund Husserl

Edmund Husserl is a central philosophical interlocutor in Sartre’s account of consciousness: his phenomenology supplies indispensable descriptions, but Sartre argues that its reliance on an instantaneous cogito and knowledge as the measure of being ultimately prevents it from accounting for transcendence. Across discussions of self-consciousness, temporality, perception, and other minds, Husserl appears both as a decisive source and as a thinker whose methods, in Sartre’s view, stop short of the existential relations they set out to clarify.

Husserl as a phenomenological point of departure

Sartre places Husserl between Descartes and Heidegger in a dispute about how to describe consciousness. Descartes begins from the functional acts of doubting and thinking, but, Sartre argues, passes too quickly from them to an existential account and falls into the error of substance. Husserl avoids that move by remaining with functional description, yet Sartre says he consequently confines himself to the appearance as such. The cogito becomes a closed field of description rather than a point of departure from which to reach the totality of human reality. Heidegger, by contrast, begins with existential analysis without passing through the cogito; Sartre objects that a Dasein deprived from the outset of consciousness cannot recover that dimension later.

Sartre’s alternative is to return to the pre-reflective cogito, which does not posit consciousness as an object but is nevertheless the necessary condition for reflection. Husserl’s analyses help establish that reflection modifies the experience reflected upon: the fact of being seen is not neutral for an experience. Sartre accepts the importance of this finding while distinguishing reflective consciousness from pre-reflective self-awareness. The latter is already present within consciousness before consciousness turns itself into an object of explicit reflection.

This distinction shapes Sartre’s account of belief. Consciousness of belief does not stand apart from belief as an impassive observer might inspect a psychic state; it exists in the act of believing, even as that act is troubled and unable to coincide fully with itself. Sartre invokes Husserl’s analysis of methodical doubt and the idea of putting a phenomenon in parentheses to clarify the point: dissociation from what is believed belongs to reflection, not to the original consciousness of belief. His criticism is thus not that Husserl’s descriptions are useless, but that reflective procedures cannot by themselves explain the living unity they disclose.

The limits of Husserlian intentionality and knowledge

Sartre’s disagreement turns on what intentionality can accomplish. He credits Husserl with recognizing consciousness as directed toward something, but contends that Husserl’s philosophical resources leave consciousness unable to transcend itself toward being. The issue recurs in Sartre’s treatment of time: if consciousness begins as instantaneous, neither future-directed protentions nor past-directed retentions can break out of the present. They remain attempts to reach beyond a present that the account has already sealed off. In Sartre’s judgment, Husserl’s conception of existence and his account of intentionality provide no adequate explanation for the past’s return into present consciousness.

The same criticism informs Sartre’s account of intuition. Husserl defines intuition as the thing’s presence in person to consciousness. Sartre reverses the formulation: being-in-itself cannot itself be present, because presence is an ecstatic mode of the for-itself. Intuition must instead be understood as consciousness’s presence to the thing. This shift relocates the explanatory work from an object supposedly presenting itself to a consciousness to the relation through which consciousness is present to being.

Sartre also rejects the idea that perception is the passive reception of qualities that consciousness subsequently combines. The lemon, for example, is not a bare object behind separable features: its sourness is yellow, and its yellow is sour. A cake’s color can be tasted, while jam’s sticky coldness reveals its sugary taste; the qualities of water likewise appear together rather than as isolated data. Sartre uses such examples to oppose a Husserlian account in which a synthetic necessity unconditionally unites color and form. The qualities disclose the thing as a whole, while perception makes the for-itself aware of its own difference from the being it apprehends. Knowledge is not the ingestion or assimilation of an object but a relation of proximity that retains distance.

Temporality and the failure to reach beyond the present

Sartre tests Husserl’s phenomenology against the problem of the past. One solution grants past events a continuing existence: Sartre associates this view with Bergson, who treats an event as remaining at its date even after it ceases to act. Another approach, associated with Husserl, explains continuity through retentions that preserve earlier consciousnesses at their dates. Sartre’s objection is directed to the gap both accounts must bridge: if the cogito is first given as instantaneous, how can anything retained or preserved actually connect it to what has been?

He describes Husserl’s protentions as battering in vain against the windowpanes of the present and says retentions face the same obstacle. The image gives concrete form to a structural criticism: an account that encloses consciousness within an instant cannot later supply a genuine passage out of that instant. Whether the past is said to continue to be, as in the accounts Sartre discusses, or no longer to be, matters little if every bridge between it and the present has already been cut.

The present presents a parallel difficulty. Sartre treats it as for-itself, in contrast to the past as in-itself, and notes that a rigorous attempt to strip the present of the past and immediate future leaves only an infinitesimal limit. Drawing on Husserl’s observation that division pushed indefinitely toward an ideal limit arrives at nothingness, Sartre shows how analysis of the present rediscovers the inseparability of being and nothingness. But the present is not merely an instant: it is presence to being-in-itself, an internal relation through which consciousness exists outside itself near what it is not.

Sartre’s account of the future sharpens the contrast. The future is not a represented content housed in the present; if an intention toward the future were itself merely present, it would not explain futurity, while an intention that genuinely transcended the present would already require a future mode of being. The for-itself must therefore be its future by coming to itself through possibilities, rather than by storing a picture of what is to come. The recurring criticism of Husserl is that a consciousness treated as confined to the present cannot explain its reach toward either temporal horizon.

The Other: constitution, absence, and solipsism

Husserl’s effort to answer solipsism receives a more qualified appraisal. In the account Sartre sketches from the Cartesian Meditations and Formal and Transcendental Logic, the Other is a permanent condition of the world’s unity and richness. A table, tree, or bare wall is not experienced as belonging to an isolated consciousness alone; its objectivity includes systems of reference to an indefinite plurality of consciousnesses. The Other is therefore involved not only in the constitution of worldly objects but also in the constitution of the empirical self, which appears in the world alongside other empirical selves.

Sartre recognizes this as progress over classical theories. The instrumental thing refers from the moment of its discovery to a plurality of for-itselfs, and the meaning of the Other is not simply derived from experience or from an analogy drawn after encountering another person. Experience is interpreted in the light of the concept of the Other. Yet Sartre argues that Husserl’s account remains too close to Kant’s because it retains a transcendental subject distinct from the empirical Ego. The central problem then shifts to the relation between transcendental subjects beyond experience—a relation that cannot be secured merely by treating the Other as a meaning required for the constitution of a world.

The difficulty becomes decisive when the Other is considered as a consciousness in its own right. Sartre insists that another person cannot be reached as that person knows himself: such access would require an internal identification between consciousnesses that remain distinct. Husserl, Sartre notes, understands that the Other appears in concrete experience as an absence, an object of empty intentions who refuses himself and flees. But Sartre asks how a philosophy that measures being through knowledge can give a full intuition of an absence. If the Other remains only the empty noema corresponding to an intention, then what survives is the intending consciousness and its unifying operations, not the real being of the Other beyond the world.

Sartre also revisits his own earlier attempt to escape solipsism by rejecting Husserl’s transcendental Ego. He remains convinced that this subject is unnecessary and damaging to the theory, but concludes that abandoning it does not solve the existence of other minds. Even if consciousness is a transcendental field without a subject, affirming the Other still requires the existence beyond the world of a similar field. The problem is not settled by removing the Ego; it requires showing that consciousness is, in its very being, affected by other consciousnesses.

The book’s account of the Other’s look supplies a related description of why another consciousness resists objectification. When Pierre looks at someone, the eyes fixed on the body can be described as objective facts in the world, but the meaning of the look is not itself another worldly fact. Smiles, promises, and threats cannot capture the free judgment being sought: the Other’s apprehension remains beyond the efforts meant to provoke it. The Other appears at once as the meaning of conduct and as an irreducible freedom, a presence that is never simply possessed as an object.

Husserl’s continuing methodological legacy

Sartre’s criticism does not erase Husserl’s influence. The glossary defines phenomenology broadly through Husserl’s work while emphasizing that Sartre, despite substantial disagreement, regards his own study as phenomenological. A phenomenological investigation, in this usage, examines how being appears or is revealed; Sartre’s difference lies in his account of the transphenomenality of being and in his refusal to reduce consciousness to a self-contained description of appearances.

Several technical terms preserve the Husserlian framework even as Sartre reworks its implications. The glossary identifies the noema as the objective pole of conscious experience after the epoché, the object intended with its essential phenomenal features, and the noesis as the act of intentional direction toward an external object. Eidetic reduction is described as considering an object or an isolated example of subjectivity as an example of what it is, apart from affirming its actual existence. Epoché, by contrast, is the bracketing of claims about the world’s existence in order to examine consciousness independently of them—a procedure Sartre says he cannot follow because his task is to examine consciousness in the world.

This combination of inheritance and resistance defines Husserl’s role in the book. He provides a vocabulary for intentionality, appearance, intuition, reflection, and the constitution of experience; Sartre repeatedly takes those analyses seriously enough to identify where their assumptions become limiting. The persistent fault line is whether description can remain within consciousness and still explain its actual relation to what it is not. Sartre’s answer is that phenomenology must begin with consciousness, but cannot stop inside it.