Anyone who has ever waded page-by-page through L'Etre et le Neant or Critique de la raison dialectique knows the exasperation of bogging down in a passage that defies reasonable interpretation, only to find another passage, ten pages further on, which deals with the same point in a perfectly intelligible way. The transgression is obvious: Sartre pasted when he should have cut. Less common, but more damaging, are misleading declarations like Sartre's dramatic promise near the end of his "Introduction" to L'Etre et le Neant: "I1 nous faudra montrer que le probleme [of transphenomenal being] comporte une autre solution, par dela le realisme et l'idealisme."1 Gullible students of Sartre still repeat this promise as a kind of invocation, even though the ontological position developed in the body of L'Etre et le Neant (as well as in Sartre's earlier phenomenological studies) is a well-argued version of natural realism. What Sartre meant, and should have said, was "a solution other than idealism or representational realism." Even in his earliest works Sartre was careless with details. Where was