Il nulla, l’essere, la mistica, nella filosofia del giovane Sartre (1933-1943)

This work is dedicated to the study of Jean-Paul Sartre’s earlier philosophy, in the years between 1933 and 1943, namely between his first philosophical work, The Transcendence of the Ego, and Being and Nothingness. Its aim is to demonstrate how the suggestions related to his own studies on speculative mysticism influenced the same philosopher during this period. The issue about how to reconcile the level of the religious experience of mysticism with the one of the phenomenological analysis of his early works finds a solution in Sartre himself: in fact, he justifies his adhesion to phenomenology as the possibility of speaking about life itself, and for this reason his quasi-religious experience (an expression coined here in relation to analogous forms used by Sartre) finds the form of philosophic expression. The first part of this thesis shows how the stages that Sartre goes examines in his analysis of human consciousness resemble those which characterize the path of speculative mysticism (phases of the mystic process are always the same even though they refer to authors who differ for their historical collocation, nationality and religious experience). These stages are: 1. The death of the ego; 2. Separation; 3. The emerging of a will which appears external to the subject; 4. The tendency towards nothingness and the discovery of the subject as nothingness; 5. The abandonment to be hetero-directed; 6. Freedom as a necessity; 7. The non existence of value; 8. Anguish; 9. The experience of silence; 10. Apophatic speech; 11. The identification with the absolute (although Sartre sees it as a failure); 12. The morality of commitment. In the second chapter the relationship between being and entity in Sartre is analyzed, thus showing how the Eckartian concept of the relationship between divinity and creature is put forward again. In particular, the “solution” to the problem suggested by Sartre mirrors the one which fills, in his mysticism, the abyss between Man and the Absolute; in fact, only by taking the difference to extremes, for which man becomes absolutely nothing, God can make him divine; equally in Sartre, the subject, the absolute nothing, can know the object without modifying it. In the third chapter M. Eckahrt's mysticism of the image is related to Sartre's metaphysics of the image, thus demonstrating that Sartre's theses on the nature of the image derive from speculative mysticism: in fact, the image is not an opaque object, the degradation of perception, but a way in which the human consciousness presents itself in its creative activity. Finally, in the Conclusion, the aim is to go beyond the period 1933-43, to see if the search key on mysticism could be suitable for a new possible interpretation of the entire Sartrian work.