Describing the World Anew : An Essay on the Philosophical Aim of Sartre’s Early Works

アカサカ, シンタロウ

Akasaka, Shintaro

オオサカ ダイガク ダイガクイン ニンゲン カガク ケンキュウカ シャカイガク ニンゲンガク ジンルイガク ケンキュウシツ

Sociology, Anthropology and Philosophy, Graduate School of Human Sciences, Osaka University

現象学

非決定論

想像力

自由

Sartre

phenomenology

indeterminism

imagination

freedom

This study argues that the early works of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) represent a coherent attempt to create a philosophical theory that allows us to organize the given world in a different way. In Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939) and The Imaginary (1940), Sartre explores the capability of writing something new on the given world. When a human subject faces the impossibility of acting, some emotions emerge and then the subject reorganizes the world in a new way. In the theory of imagination, Sartre relates the capacity of rewriting to the concept of freedom. These two acts, however, are only subjective impressions. After these books, in the theory of action in Being and Nothingness (1943), Sartre starts to argue on intervention in real and objective situations. In What is Literature? (1948), applying the results from his former works, Sartre focuses on the act of writing. This act inevitably reshapes the experiences of others because of its communicability. The author discovers here that the changes brought to the given world are shared among people and spread in the intersubjective fi eld.