“A life develops in spirals: It always passes through the same points, but at different levels of integration and complexity” (CRD I, p. 71). This observation, which underpins Sartre's synthesis of biographical and historical methods in studying the individual and society, might also apply to the preoccupation with committed writing that characterized his own life and work. The reader cannot fail to note the persistence and the far from linear development of the concepts and methods which articulate that preoccupation. The range of concepts itself promises complexity. Psychological, moral, social, political, historical, linguistic, literary, and aesthetic issues must all be integrated through a correspondingly intricate method that draws its inspiration, without lapsing into eclecticism, from a number of different intellectual traditions. The tracing of the spiral is fascinating, frustrating, and exemplary - fascinating because of the commitment and tenacity of Sartre's arguments, frustrating because those arguments reach no conclusion, exemplary because the inconclusiveness is itself inherent in the problem analyzed and in the method of analysis: Sartre's open-ended writing itself enacts an open dialectic.

Two of the major theoretical points through which Sartre's spiral passes are Qu'est-ce que la littératuie? (1947), usually taken to offer the classic description of "committed" literature, and "Questions de méihode" (i960), which presents a more complex view of the interaction of individual, society, and history, prescribes a method for revealing the dialectical relationship of social conditioning and individual project, and prepares the reader for the potentially surprising claim that a writer as apparently uncommitted as Flaubert may be considered to be "engagé."

In reflecting upon Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophical writings in their entirety, the question arises as to whether these writings constitute a harmonious development or rather provide clear evidence of breaks. Generally, the critical literature assumes that the ontological, epistemological, and anthropological positions that are taken in the early philosophic-psychological writings are further elaborated and deepened in the first major work Being and Nothingness. Consequently, there would seem to be no grounds to suppose that in the period between 1934 (the year during which Sartre, in Berlin, worked on The Transcendence of the Ego) and 1943 (the year when the first major work was published) alterations in Sartre's philosophical conceptions occurred of such a magnitude as to interfere with the continuity of his thinking.

Matters are quite different with respect to the period between 1943 and i960, the year when the second major work, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, was published. Whereas Being and Nothingness represents an existentialist conception of man, in which the unique individual - essentially still free even when in chains - is master of his own fate, in the Critique the superiority of a historical-materialistic view of man and history is defended, while existentialism is reduced to the status of an enclave within the tenets of Marxism. Evidently, during the course of - and after - the Second World War, Sartre's ideas altered to such a degree as to necessitate a radical revision of his anthropological viewpoints.

Across its long history moral philosophy has been as concerned with the cultivation of certain moral dispositions, or traits of character, or moral psychologies, as it has been with establishing the validity and universality of moral rules and principles. Moral psychology begins with the inner person: not how we outwardly conform to external moral rules, but how we are in our hearts and souls and, particularly, how we are when we are truly flourishing as human beings. It is therefore concerned with the ethics of virtue, and a casual glance at the respective moral psychologies of Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and the existentialists would reveal analyses of such virtues as integrity, justice, prudence, courage, magnanimity, sincerity, and authenticity. These are not innate dispositions, or inherited traits of personality like shyness or cheerfulness. They are acquired by teaching or practice or reflection, and to a certain extent reveal what we have made of ourselves; thus they express our moral way of being, and our fundamentl moral outlook, and not just something we happen to have.

Sartre's concern with the ethics of character, the conditions of self-determination and human agency, and the phenomenology of moral life, places him within this tradition of moral and philosophical psychology. This essay is concerned with elaborating and clarifying a number of interrelated aspects of Sartre's moral and philosophical psychology, particularly as they are developed in Being and Nothingness: self-determination and agency, responsibility for self, the unity of a life, moral reasoning, and self-knowledge.

INTENTIONAL ANALYSIS

The title of one of Sartre's essays, Questions of Method, is perhaps a sufficient reminder of how remote from us he was as a philosopher. Questions of methodology, Charles Taylor long ago pointed out, are “usually thought to be a waste of time” in England, where most philosophers prefer to adopt “the stance of the inarticulate gardener with a green thumb being interrogated by the agronomist - I just plants it and it grows.” Sartre takes over from Husserl's phenomenology two methodological procedures, “intentional analysis” and “eidetic analysis.” Intentional analysis is a procedure for analyzing consciousness with respect to its “meaning-endowing” acts, by which I identify something as being what it is. Thus I am conscious of it as “a triangle,” as “a table,” as “anger.”

Sartre takes over from Husserl's phenomenology two methodological procedures, "intentional analysis" and "eidetic analysis." Intentional analysis is a procedure for analyzing consciousness with respect to its "meaning-endowing" acts, by which I identify something as being what it is. Thus I am conscious of it as "a triangle," as "a table," as "anger." Phenomenological analysis is in-tentional in the etymological sense that it follows out the identifying reference of the "act" to the object "aimed at" as the "target" of the reference. Sartre's dedication to intentional reference is manifest in the succession of two titles: Having reviewed traditional theories of the imagination under the title L'Imagination, he conducts his own analysis under the title L'Imaginaire. The difference in title indicates a change from the traditional analysis in which the imagination is one of the faculties of the mind, to an intentional analysis in which characteristics of the imagination are determined by following out the reference to the imaginary object. I shall offer an example of this intentional analysis as soon as I have brought out how an intentional analysis is also "eidetic."

THE CURVE OF THE EPOCH

By the time of Sartre's death in 1980, Structuralism, as a movement, had evaporated, and various forms of Post-Structuralism were in full swing. At the beginning of his career, in the 1920s and 1930s, Structuralism was just beginning to be thought of, in a few localities remote from Paris and existentialism in disciplinary and in geographical space - for example technical linguistics in Prague. There is a sense, then, in which Sartre's life and that of Structuralism run in parallel, a tempting observation enough in the light of his theory of oracular lives, of the “curves” of epochs, in the third volume of L'Idiot de la famille. The conjecture that Sartre and Structuralism might have had a serious affinity seems at first glance however to be a nonstarter, given the lack of apparent overlap between his concerns and those of the major structuralists (whether by avowal or attribution): Althusser, Barthes, Dumézil, Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss.

What the structuralists had in common was a preoccupation with embodied relationships - whether political, literary, religious, historical, psychoanalytic, or ethnological - taken to be objective, sharing or borrowing the structure of language, and reflecting the unconscious structure of mind. What Sartre emphasized, in contrast, was the complete lucidity of the conscious subject as free to enter or not into relationships, and the responsibility of the agent for the constitution and maintenance in practice of the group structures to which he or she might belong.

How does one of the twentieth century's great thinkers help us illuminate one of its great paradoxes? What does Sartre contribute toward clarifying the problem of thinking about history as it has emerged in the late twentieth century? After a century and a half of celebrating and living by the idea of progress, amidst staggering scientific-technological progress, almost no one in the West continues to believe in progress. In the current climate of intellectual disillusionment no serious thinker is willing to defend Bury's formulation that the world is slowly advancing in “a definite and desirable direction” leading to a “condition of general happiness” that will “justify the whole process of civilization.” On the one hand, the postmodernist temper shows, as Lyotard says, “incredulity toward metanarratives” such as the idea of progress. On the other, the current mood seems sympathetic toward negative metanarratives - those that suggest that things are getting worse. Witness, for example, the remarkable success of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, or the works of Christopher Lasch - which suggest that as time goes by, we are losing the most vital of values, attitudes, and skills. The negative mood is starkly captured in Theodor Adorno's claim: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”

Even though Sartre repeatedly emphasized the divergences between Hegel and himself, this chapter discusses their convergences. It will be seen, moreover, that these often conflict with Sartre's own stress on the differences between them.

Sartre does not refer to Hegel in his early works; he seems to have become familiar with him only from Being and Nothingness onward, where Hegel, along with Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, is one of his chosen interlocutors and adversaries. This essay deals with certain specifically philosophical aspects of the debate: the conception of being-for-itself and being-for-others in Sartre and Hegel. Being and Nothingness also discusses the dialectical conception of nothingness. Juliette Simont has analyzed this question in an important footnote to her article "Sartre et Hegel: le probleme de la qualite et de la quantite." I shall not therefore return to it directly.

In Sartre's analysis of being-for-itself and for-others, the most significant references are to the two Logics (the Science of Logic and the first part of the Encyclopedia) and to the Propédeutique. Sartre's perceptiveness with respect to these dry texts leads one to conjecture that he had more than a merely academic knowledge of Hegel - did he perhaps discuss him with some of Kojève's pupils, with Jean Wahl, Lefèbre, and Hartmann, authors of a collection of selected texts from Hegel, Hyppolite, and Maurice de Gandillac? It is possible, but as yet unproven.

In what may be his single most famous passage, the first sentence of which was even inscribed on his tombstone, Immanuel Kant concluded his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) thus:

BACKGROUND

By the middle of the seventeenth century, Lutheran theology had become an ossified and sterile orthodoxy. It was challenged by two currents of thought that were to lead to the eighteenth-century German Enlightenment. The first was Pietism, founded by Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705). The Pietists regarded Christian faith not as a set of doctrinal propositions but a living relationship with God. They stressed above all the felt power of God's grace to transform the believer's life through a conversion of “born again” experience. Pietism was hostile to the intellectualization of Christianity. Like Lutheran orthodoxy it exalted scriptural authority above natural reason, but for Pietism the main purpose of reading scripture was inspiration and moral edification. The experience of spiritual rebirth must transform the believer's emotions and show itself in outward conduct. Within the universities, the Pietists favored cultivation of piety and morality in life rather than theoretical inquiry. In religious controversy, they urged that the aim should be to win over the heart of one's opponent rather than to gain intellectual victory.

Although Kant never developed a theoretical psychology of his own, he discussed psychological topics throughout his life. These discussions ranged from early, brief remarks on mind-body interaction in the True Estimation of Living Forces (§§5-6, 1:20-1) of 1747 to the relatively late, extended treatment of the faculties of cognition in the Anthropology, published from Kant's lecture notes under his supervision in 1797. In his lectures on metaphysics, from the 1760s onward, he followed common practice and regularly discussed what he and his contemporaries called “empirical” and “rational” psychology (records of these lectures survive through student notes: 28:59- 122, 221-301, 583-94, 670-90, 735-75, 849-74, 886-906). And in the preface to his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (1786) he examined the question of whether empirical psychology could ever achieve a scientific status like that of physics, notoriously answering that it could not (4:471). For our purposes, however, the central problems pertaining to Kant's relation to psychology arise in the Critique of Pure Reason. In the Critique Kant distinguished his philosophical aim from that of empirical psychology. He also investigated the possibility of empirical and especially of rational psychology. In addition, and problematically, he adopted, even in the avowedly philosophical portions of the work, an implicitly psychological vocabulary. Because of his extensive use of this vocabulary, interpreters have, from the instant of the Critique's publication, disputed the extent to which Kant rested his arguments on psychological ground.

In the preface to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781, Kant wrote:

However, the initial response to Kant's argument, which he also titled the “transcendental deduction of the categories” (A 85 /B 117), was largely one of incomprehension, and in the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, published in 1786, Kant himself acknowledged that precisely “that part of the Critique which should have been the clearest was the most obscure, or even revolved in a circle” (4:474 n.). So in the second edition of the Critique, published the following year, Kant completely rewrote the transcendental deduction. He claimed that this revision touched only the manner of “presentation,” not the “propositions themselves and their grounds of proof” (B xxxvii-xxxviii). But in spite of Kant's efforts at clarification, the intervening two centuries have brought little agreement in the interpretation of the deduction, even on the fundamental question of whether the two editions of the Critique, in 1781 and 1787, try to answer the same question by means of the same argument. The last three decades alone have brought forth dozens of competing interpretations or “reconstructions” of Kant's transcendental deduction.

Kant's attitude toward metaphysics and ontology is ambiguous in his Critical work. On the standard view of the Critique of Pure Reason, the positive and negative aspects of this attitude map neatly onto the two major sections of that work. After that first section presents a “Transcendental Analytic” of the understanding, or a “metaphysics of experience,” which legitimates the use of certain pure concepts necessary for structuring our spatiotemporal knowledge, a Transcendental Dialectic is provided to expose fallacies that theoretical reason entangles itself in when it extends itself beyond experience. Just prior to that Dialectic, Kant also inserts an “Appendix” on “concepts of reflection” that sketches how the restriction of our use of pure concepts to the domain of experience limits the general claims of the traditional ontology of the Leibnizian system. These attacks would appear to complement each other. Whereas the specific errors of rational psychology, rational cosmology, and rational theology are exposed in the core of the Dialectic, the critique of ontology and the general discussions of the operations of “reflection” and “reason” suggest a principle of closure for dismissing all claims of our theoretical reason that would stray beyond a merely immanent spatiotemporal field.

The Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason has three main sections: the Metaphysical Deduction, the Transcendental Deduction, and the Analytic of Principles. The second and third sections have spawned much lively controversy, both interpretive and substantive. The first, by contrast, has generated little interest. Most readers have thought it clear what Kant means to establish here, and how. Most have also thought it plain that his argument is a failure, unworthy of continued exploration.

I will not try to defend the argument of the Metaphysical Deduction. I will try to show that this section of the Critique contains material of considerable importance, however. First I will summarize Kant's argument (I) and review some of the difficulties with it (II). Then I will discuss the notion of synthesis, trying to show that the Metaphysical Deduction helps to shed light on this important but otherwise obscure notion (III). Finally, I will comment briefly on the central contention of the Metaphysical Deduction (IV).