Rethinking Sartre

This work reexamines Sartre's phenomenology from the perspective of contemporary debates in political theory with particular attention to the reemergence of theories of human nature. For Sartre, any construct that stood between the self and its direct encounter with the world was suspect. Sartre's version of direct realism is a strong refutation of the "new essentialism" that has emerged in recent years as a back-door invocation of theories of human nature. This book provides an account of the major ideas that inform the new essentialism and that serve to further identify it as other than what it claims to be, a scientific grounding of human behavior. Instead, from the perspective of Sartre's realism it is exposed as an abstract ideology. One aspect of this new essentialism has been its encouragement of ideological claims about human essences, historically and culturally derived attributes of individuals that, it is alleged, define individual human existence itself. Thus human freedom is diminished even while essentialist categories such as male aggression become an overlooked underpinning for political ideology.

Sartre's later philosophical account of why essentialist theories of human nature are particularly damaging in relation to political theory is explained with an eye towards the current global danger wherein ideologies of human nature are increasingly masked as religion. Sartre's philosophy insists that the full exposition of human freedom and agency must be established first for only then can the life of history and culture enhance and not detract from the actualization of humanist goals. It explicates this concept first, through a study of Sartre's early article on Intentionality, and then the larger work, Transcendence of the Ego. A detailed account is given of Sartre's direct realism in which the intentional structure of consciousness emerges as evidence against essentialist claims of human nature.

Professor Carney's analysis considers the way Sartre develops the concept of Intentional