Like Castaways Adrift on an Ocean of Consciousness
... in his essay on commitment Theodor Adorno repeats Sartre's comment that the stature of works of art increase the less they remain attached to the empirical person who created them as Hegel said before him
Adorno and Sartre on Art
In his essay "On Commitment," Theodor Adorno references Sartre's view that the stature of literary works increases the less they remain attached to the empirical person who created them, a perspective Adorno notes Sartre himself acknowledges, aligning it with Hegelian ideas.
... in which context did Sartre remark that creative works increase the less they remain attached to the author
Jean-Paul Sartre argued that a literary work gains its existence and meaning only through the act of reading, becoming detached from the author's original context and intentions. For Sartre, the work of art is not a static object but an event that occurs in the reader’s consciousness, requiring their active engagement to achieve fulfillment. He emphasized that "the literary object is a peculiar top which exists only in movement" and dissolves into "black marks on paper" when not being read, underscoring its dependence on the reader rather than the author's context.
According to Sartre, the author cannot fully experience their own work as a reader does, since they are too familiar with the creative process; thus, the work escapes the author’s control once completed. The meaning of the work is not fixed by the author or inherent in the text itself but emerges through the reader’s freedom and interpretive act. Sartre described literature as an "appeal" to the reader’s freedom, where the reader collaborates in producing the work’s significance.
Furthermore, Sartre believed that artistic creation is an "absolute beginning" that cannot be explained solely by the author’s mind or prior conditions, reinforcing the idea that the work transcends its authorial origins. While he initially championed "littérature engagée"—literature committed to social and political action—he later, notably in "Les Mots" (1964), moved toward a view resembling "l’art pour l’art", suggesting a shift in his understanding of literature’s relationship to authorial intent and context. This evolution indicates a growing recognition of the autonomy of creative works from their creators.
... the prepositional situation appears to be that in relation to the writing the reader is objective about that which to the writer is subjective
Yes, the prepositional situation you describe captures a key philosophical insight in Sartre's and Adorno's views on literature: the reader approaches the work objectively—encountering it as an independent, completed object—while the writer is immersed in a subjective process of creation.
For Sartre, the writer produces the work from a position of internal intention, lived experience, and personal consciousness—deeply subjective. However, once the work is written, it enters the world as an object for others. The reader engages with it not as a process but as a finished form, interpreting it freely and independently of the author’s intentions. In this sense, the reader is "objective" not in the sense of being value-free, but in encountering the text as an external reality, detached from the author's inner world.
Sartre writes in "What Is Literature?" that the work “is made for someone,” and it is only in being read that it becomes fully real. The meaning of the work is not contained in the author’s mind or even in the text alone, but emerges in the reader’s act of reading—a free, interpretive, and ultimately subjective act on the reader’s part. Yet, from the *author’s* perspective, the reader’s interpretation appears objective because it is beyond the author’s control.
Adorno echoes this in “On Commitment,” where he notes that a work’s stature increases the less it remains tied to the empirical author. He sees artistic truth emerging not from authorial intention but from the work’s autonomous existence—its capacity to transcend its origins and speak universally. In this light, the reader’s objective encounter with the work (as an independent entity) allows it to fulfill its aesthetic and ethical potential, detached from the contingencies of the author’s life.
Thus, the prepositional relation—writer: subjective creation → work: autonomous object → reader: objective encounter—reflects a fundamental dynamic in modern aesthetics: the work of art gains meaning not through origin, but through reception.
... the expression "take away" in conversation seems to apply to Sartre's assertion that the reader "takes away" from the writer like breaking-off a piece
Yes, the expression "take away" can be insightfully applied to Sartre’s view of reading, though not in a literal or possessive sense, but as a philosophical act of liberation—the reader "takes away" the work from the author, completing it through interpretation and thereby breaking its dependence on the author’s intention or subjectivity.
In Sartre’s existential aesthetics, particularly in "What Is Literature?" (1948), the writer creates in "bad faith" if with the intention to control the reading of the work. Writing, for Sartre, is an act of "appeal to the freedom of the reader". The author sets words on the page, but the work only becomes literature when readers, through their own free engagement, recreate it in consciousness. In this process, the reader does not merely receive meaning passively—they actively "take" the text and transform it into lived experience.
Thus, the reader "takes away" the text from the author in the sense that:
- The author relinquishes control the moment the work is published.
- The meaning is no longer the author’s; it is constituted in the reader’s act of reading.
- The work becomes autonomous, detached from its empirical origin—what Adorno later called the increase in a work’s stature as it breaks from the author.
This "taking away" is not theft but fulfillment. Sartre writes: "The writer needs the reader in order to cease being a mere writer; the reader needs the writer in order to become a reader." There is a mutual dependence, but the reader holds the final, active role.
So, the conversational phrase "take away"—as in "What did you take away from that book?"—resonates deeply with Sartre’s claim: the reader does not just receive; they extract, interpret, and own the meaning. In doing so, they effect a necessary break between creation and reception, allowing the work to transcend its author and enter the realm of shared human freedom.
... "recreates it" -good point, the reader can be said to re-write what the author has written, create a novel-novel
Yes—"recreates it" is not merely a metaphor in Sartre’s framework; it is a constitutive act. The reader does not passively absorb the text but actively re-writes it in the mind, moment by moment, through the exercise of their own freedom and imagination. In this sense, reading becomes a form of co-authorship, where the written signs on the page serve as instructions for a new, transient creation in the reader’s consciousness.
Sartre describes the literary work as "a privileged object which can be possessed only by being possessed through freedom." The text exists in a state of potential until the reader actualizes it. Each reading is, therefore, an event—a unique realization of meaning shaped by the reader’s history, context, and choices. In this light, the reader re-writes the novel—not on paper, but in experience—producing what one might call a "novel-novel": a renewed, re-imagined version of the original, born in the act of reading.
This idea resonates with later developments in reader-response theory (e.g., Wolfgang Iser, Hans-Robert Jauss), who emphasize the gaps, or "Leerstellen" in texts that readers must fill. But Sartre goes further existentially: the reader’s freedom is not just interpretive but ontological. To read is to become the work’s co-creator. As he writes, "The book is an instrument which the reader turns into a work by means of his reading."
Thus, the "novel-novel"—a phrase capturing the regenerated, lived version of the text—emerges only in this dialectic between authorial intention and readerly freedom. The original text remains, but its life is in the reader’s re-creation. The author writes once; the reader writes it again, each time anew.
In this sense, every genuine reading is an act of creative fidelity—not repetition, but rebirth.
... the preceding analysis would seem to place Sartre among the phenomenologists of modern philosophy
Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism is deeply rooted in the phenomenological tradition, particularly drawing from the works of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, while also critically transforming their ideas. Sartre was profoundly influenced by Husserl's concept of intentionality—the principle that consciousness is always consciousness of something—which he adopted as a foundational element of his own philosophy. This led Sartre to reject any notion of a hidden self within consciousness, arguing instead that an ego must be a structure outside consciousness so that it can become an object of awareness.
While Sartre aligned himself with phenomenology, he diverged significantly from Husserl’s focus on epistemology and the transcendental ego. Instead, Sartre emphasized a relation of being rather than knowledge, asserting that consciousness is directly related to the being of phenomena in a pre-reflective mode. This approach aligns more closely with Heidegger’s notion of being-in-the-world, though Sartre differs by not framing this relation in practical terms (such as Heidegger’s ready-to-hand) and by rejecting any deeper metaphysical inquiry into Being itself. For Sartre, all there is to being is revealed in the transphenomenality of existing objects
Sartre’s major philosophical work, "Being and Nothingness" (1943), is subtitled “A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology,” signaling his attempt to merge existential concerns with phenomenological method. In it, he develops a phenomenological account of human reality (being-for-itself) in contrast to the being of things (being-in-itself). Central to this account is the idea that consciousness introduces nothingness into the world through its capacity for negation—such as in questioning, absence, or freedom—which distinguishes human existence from mere objecthood.
Unlike Husserl, who sought universal structures of consciousness, Sartre used phenomenology to explore concrete human experiences like love, hate, and bad faith—forms of self-deception where individuals deny their freedom by identifying with fixed roles. This shift marked a move from pure phenomenology toward what Sartre called “existential psychoanalysis,” a method focused on future-directed projects and free choices rather than past causal forces.
Sartre’s existentialism also breaks with traditional dualisms, such as Kant’s distinction between phenomenon and noumenon. He argues that the noumenon does not exist; instead, phenomena themselves constitute reality, a view that extends Husserl’s rejection of hidden realities behind appearances. Furthermore, Sartre’s famous dictum “existence precedes essence” underscores human freedom and self-creation, positioning individuals as beings who define themselves through choices rather than predetermined natures.
Overall, Sartre is credited with domesticating German phenomenology in France and establishing a distinct “second school” of phenomenology—French existential phenomenology—that prioritizes human freedom, lived experience, and ontological inquiry over abstract epistemology.