The Mystical Sources of Existentialist Thought by George Pattison Kate Kirkpatrick & Kate Kirkpatrick

Author:George Pattison,Kate Kirkpatrick & Kate Kirkpatrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

Jean-Paul Sartre

Over the last decade the relation between Sartre and mysticism – like the relation between Sartre and theology more generally – has received increased attention in English-speaking research. Although there were some twentieth-century studies of the theological or mystical themes in Sartre’s works – notably Francis Jeanson’s Sartre Devant Deiu, Thomas King’s Sartre and the Sacred, Jacques Sylvan’s The Scandalous Ghost, Christina Howells’s ‘Sartre and Negative Theology’ – the posthumous publication of Sartre’s early works, the Notebooks for an Ethics, letters, working drafts, and unpublished manuscripts has given scholars an even fuller picture of Sartre’s voluminous corpus.68 But although these new publications have offered some illumination of Sartre’s works, they have also raised new questions.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote in The Prime of Life that during the 1930s Sartre ‘took an interest in the psychology of mysticism’, which prompted Beauvoir herself to read Catherine Emmerich and Angela of Foligno. We have seen already that her interest in mysticism predates this. And Sartre’s interest in mysticism also stretched back much further than is commonly acknowledged; his mémoire for the Diplôme d’Études Supérieures included a section on mystics, including Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross.

Margaret Simons’s research on Beauvoir demonstrates that Sartre may in fact have encountered phenomenology for the first time not in the famous apricot-cocktail conversation with Raymond Aron in the early 1930s, but in discussions with Beauvoir about mysticism. During the 1920s, as we have seen, Beauvoir wrote a dissertation under the supervision of Jean Baruzi, who may have drawn on phenomenology.69 Just two years later, Sartre’s dissertation (mémoire) for the Diplôme d’Études Supérieures was supervised by Henri Delacroix. The subject was the ‘image’, and it contained a chapter on ‘attitudes toward the image’ that included a section on mystics. Sartre’s work drew not only from Baruzi’s book on John of the Cross, but also from Delacroix (Le Mysticisme en Allemagne au XIVe siècle; Etude de psychologie et d’histoire du mysticisme), Gilson, and mystics themselves: Tauler and Saint Teresa.

The young Sartre, like Beauvoir, was attracted to philosophy through the work of Bergson – even though its fashionability was waning. In Bergson, Sartre wrote, ‘I immediately found a description of my own psychic life’.70 In the mémoire he discusses the question of whether ‘intuition’ is an ‘image’, and draws on mystics whose lives, he says, ‘guarantee that they did not have intuitions of fantasy [intuitions de fantasie]: Saint Teresa, John of the Cross, and Eckhart’.71 Sartre argues that he is little qualified to make psychology of philosophy. But nevertheless, he notes that other authors are writing in support of the view that philosophy is reducible, in some sense, to psychology:

James speaks of a sub-universe that we carry within us, Jaspers considers all metaphysicians paranoiacs. Behind these exaggerations, there is the incontestable fact that any philosophical system is the construction of a reality which has no guarantee apart from itself, which one cannot even call a point of view, but the image of a point of view on the universe.

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