Abstract
This is not about the “life and times” of either philosopher, though it is about their “times.” Anyone familiar with the work of Foucault knows that such a foray into intellectual history would be inappropriate. Rather, I wish to examine what each has to say about the nature of time, especially about historical time. Both were historians of a sort, the one psychoanalytic and sociological (Sartre) and the other archaeological and genealogical (Foucault), and each expressed a distinctive understanding of historical temporality. Sartrean time is progressive and moral while that of Foucault is noncumulative and comparative. In fact, I shall argue that the latter is spatialized (“squared,” if you will) in a sense that resists Hegelian-Marxist dialectic and forces us to view “history” from a unique perspective. Our examination of what these distinctive and seemingly contradictory positions reveal about the nature of history will also help to elucidate the phenomenological heritage of each.
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References
Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life, trans. Peter Green (New York: Lancer Books, 1962), 162.
“Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” in P. A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1981), 10; hereafter cited as “Schilpp.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, L’Etre et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), trans, by Hazel E. Barnes as Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), hereafter cited as EN and BN respectively.
The text with which Sartre was doubtless familiar was edited by Martin Heidegger in 1928 and has been translated by James S. Churchill as The Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1964). For a more complete collection of Husserl’s lectures, see On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893–1917), trans. John B. Brough (Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer, 1991).
“Nihilation” is the relation of “othering” that consciousness necessarily establishes toward its objects. This relation can be described in terms of the temporalizing activity of consciousness (being-for-itself): as consciousness temporalizes it likewise “nihilates,” that is, constitutes itself as other than its objects and other than its own “self (a strikingly postmodern claim). Such neologisms are Sartre’s way of describing being-for-itself as sui generis.
In addition to his discussion of temporality in that work, he does refer to the Past as the coincidence of my ekstatic dimension and the past of the world; it is through the past that I belong to universal temporality (BN 208). Other indications of an awareness of the problem of historical time are his references to the “infinite density” of the world (BN 326) and to prehistoric historization (BN 339). Elsewhere I discuss at length the evolution of Sartre’s interest in the philosophy of history, beginning with his dialogue with Raymond Aron, continuing with his response to the criticisms of Merleau-Ponty, advancing through his defense of dialectical rationality, and culminating in his “socialist” biography of Flaubert (see my Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, Vol. 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997]).
Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: New Left Books, 1976), vol. 2, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1991), hereafter cited as CDR with volume and page.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), hereafter cited as NE.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The War Diaries of Jean-Paul Sartre, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Pantheon, 1984), hereafter cited as WD.
Jean-Paul Sartre, The Family Idiot, trans. Carol Cosman, 5 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981–93), 3:44, hereafter cited as FI with volume and page. “Practico-inert” is a basic ontological category introduced in the Critique. Heir to being-in-itself from his earlier work, the term denotes “the activity of others in so far as it is sustained and diverted by inorganic inertia” (CDR 1:556).
For an elaboration of this point see my “Mediating Reciprocity and the Genius of the Third” in Schilpp, 345–70 or my Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of Collective Responsibility (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 116–19.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Situations 10 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1947–76), 9:101.
These are concepts I discuss at length in my Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, vol. 1, Toward an Existentialist Theory of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), especially chapter 9.
See Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966).
Philippe Gavi, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Pierre Victor, On a raison de se révolter (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 73–74.
Jean-Paul Sartre, “Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self,” in Readings in Existential Phenomenology, ed. Nathaniel Lawrence and Daniel O’Connor (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967), 131.
Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1964–1988, ed. Daniel Defert et Francois Ewald avec Jacques Legrange, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 4:764; hereafter cited as DE with volume and page.
Actually, he admitted that he oscillated for a few years “between the internal analysis of scientific discourses and the analysis of the external conditions of their development.” In Madness and Civilization, he analyzed both the structure and the external practices of the psychiatric movement; in other words, he “tried to grasp the historical ground” on which that movement occurred. The Order of Things, on the contrary, suspended questions about external conditions in favor of the “internal analysis” of the things said and their rules of formation. In effect, he was agreeing with his critics that there was a “structuralist” flavor to that major opus (DE 3:583).
At least Foucault credits Jean Hyppolite with pursuing the two French Husserlian paths in his Hegelian writing (see DE 1:783).
Thus Foucault condemns those “who refuse to formalize without anthropologizing,” that is, “who refuse to think without immediately thinking that it is man who is thinking” (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things [New York: Vintage Books, 1970], 342–43, hereafter cited as OT). Though he sometimes speaks as if the entire phenomenological movement succumbed to this anthropological temptation, his distinction of two lines of Husserlian inspiration in French thought suggests otherwise. In any case, he correctly associated phenomenology with a philosophy of consciousness and (usually transcendental) subjectivity, both of which he rejected.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews & Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), p. 70, hereafter cited as PK.
Already in his “existentialist” period, he had applauded Binswanger’s image of a rise and fall as being closer to temporality “in its primitive sense” than the horizontal opposition of near and far or departure and arrival as in Aristotle, though curiously he thought Binswanger’s metaphor distinguished time more clearly from space (see DE 1:107).
For an analysis of the complex but pivotal notion of the event in Foucault’s work, see my “Michel Foucault and the Career of the historical Event” in At the Nexus of Philosophy and History, ed Bernard P. Dauenhauer (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 178–200. I develop this topic in the second volume of my Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason, vol. 2, A Post-Structuralist Mapping of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming).
Michel Foucault, “Theatrum Philosophicum,” in Language, Counter-Memory and Practice, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977), 175, hereafter cited as LCP.
Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, trans. Sean Hand (Minneapolis, Minn.: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics, 16,1 (Spring, 1986), 22, hereafter cited as “Spaces.” This was a lecture delivered on March 14, 1967.
Maurice Clavel, Ce que je crois (Paris: Grasset, 1975).
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Flynn, T.R. (2000). Times Squared: Historical Time in Sartre and Foucault. In: Brough, J.B., Embree, L. (eds) The Many Faces of Time. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 41. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9411-0_11
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