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Sartre's
philosophical career focuses, in its first phase, upon the
construction of a philosophy of existence known as 'Existentialism'.
Adopting and adapting the methods of phenomenology, Sartre sets out
to develop an ontological account of what it is to be human. The main
features of this ontology are the groundlessness and radical freedom
which characterise the human condition. These are constrasted with
the unproblematic being of the world of things. Sartre's substantial
literary output adds dramatic expression to the always unstable
co-existence of facticity and freedom in an indifferent world. After
a brief summary of Sartre's life, we shall look at the main themes
characterizing Sartre's early philosophical works. The ontology
developed in Sartre's main existential work, Being and
Nothingness will then be analysed. Finally, an overview is
provided of the further development of existentialist themes in his
later works.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to those parts of this article)
1. Sartre's life
2. Early works
a. Methodology
b. The ego
c. Ethics
d. Existential phenomenology
3. The Ontology of Being and Nothingness
a. The being of the phenomenon and consciousness
b. Two types of being
c. Nothingness
4. The for-itself in Being and Nothingness
a. A lack of self-identity
b. The project of bad faith
c. The fundamental project
d. Desire
5. Relations with others in Being and Nothingness
a. The problem of other minds
b. Human relationships
6. Authenticity
a. Freedom
b. Authenticity
c. An ethical dimension
7. Other contributions to existential phenomenology
a. Critique of Dialectical Reason
b. The Problem of Method
8. Conclusion
9. References
a. Sartre's works
b. Commentaries
1. Sartre's life
Sartre was born in 1905 in Paris. After a
childhood marked by the early death of his father, the important role
played by his grandfather, and some rather unhappy experiences at
school, Sartre finished High School at the LycÈe Henri IV in Paris.
After two years of preparation, he gained entrance to the prestigious
Ecole Normale SupÈrieure, where, from 1924 to 1929 he came into
contact with Raymond Aron, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty
and other notables. He passed the 'AgrÈgation' on his second attempt,
by adapting the content and style of his writing to the rather
traditional requirements of the examiners. This was his passport to a
teaching career. After teaching philosophy in a lycÈe in Le Havre, he
obtained a grant to study at the French Institute in Berlin where he
discovered phenomenology in 1933 and wrote The Transcendence of
the Ego. His phenomenological investigation into the imagination
was published in 1936 and his Theory of Emotions two years
later. During the Second World War, Sartre wrote his existentialist
magnum opus Being and Nothingness and taught the work of
Heidegger in a war camp. He was briefly involved in a Resistance
group and taught in a lycÈe until the end of the war. Being and
Nothingness was published in 1943 and Existentialism and
Humanism in 1946. His study of Baudelaire was published in 1947
and that of the actor Jean Genet in 1952. Throughout the Thirties and
Forties, Sartre also had an abundant literary output with such novels
as Nausea and plays like Intimacy (The wall), The flies,
Huis Clos, Les Mains Sales. In 1960, after three years working on
it, Sartre published the Critique of Dialectical Reason. In
the Fifties and Sixties, Sartre travelled to the USSR, Cuba, and was
involved in turn in promoting Marxist ideas, condemning the USSR's
invasion of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and speaking up against
France's policies in Algeria. He was a high profile figure in the
Peace Movement. In 1964, he turned down the Nobel prize for
literature. He was actively involved in the May 1968 uprising. His
study of Flaubert, L'Idiot de la Famille, was published in
1971. In 1977, he claimed no longer to be a Marxist, but his
political activity continued until his death in 1980.
2. Early works
Sartre's early work
is characterised by phenomenological analyses involving his own
interpretation of Husserl's method. Sartre's methodology is
Husserlian (as demonstrated in his paper "Intentionality: a
fundamental ideal of Husserl's phenomenology") insofar as it is a
form of intentional and eidetic analysis. This means that the acts by
which consciousness assigns meaning to objects are what is analysed,
and that what is sought in the particular examples under examination
is their essential structure. At the core of this methodology is a
conception of consciousness as intentional, that is, as 'about'
something, a conception inherited from Brentano and Husserl. Sartre
puts his own mark on this view by presenting consciousness as being
transparent, i.e. having no 'inside', but rather as being a 'fleeing'
towards the world.
The distinctiveness of Sartre's development of Husserl's
phenomenology can be characterised in terms of Sartre's methodology,
of his view of the self and of his ultimate ethical
interests.
a. Methodology
Sartre's methodology
differs from Husserl's in two essential ways. Although he thinks of
his analyses as eidetic, he has no real interest in Husserl's
understanding of his method as uncovering the Essence of things. For
Husserl, eidetic analysis is a clarification which brings out the
higher level of the essence that is hidden in 'fluid unclarity'
(Husserl, Ideas, I). For Sartre, the task of an eidetic analysis does
not deliver something fixed immanent to the phenomenon. It still
claims to uncover that which is essential, but thereby recognizes
that phenomenal experience is essentially fluid.
In Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Sartre replaces the
traditional picture of the passivity of our emotional nature with one
of the subject's active participation in her emotional experiences.
Emotion originates in a degradation of consciousness faced with a
certain situation. The spontaneous conscious grasp of the situation
which characterizes an emotion, involves what Sartre describes as a
'magical' transformation of the situation. Faced with an object which
poses an insurmountable problem, the subject attempts to view it
differently, as though it were magically transformed. Thus an
imminent extreme danger may cause me to faint so that the object of
my fear is no longer in my conscious grasp. Or, in the case of wrath
against an unmovable obstacle, I may hit it as though the world were
such that this action could lead to its removal. The essence of an
emotional state is thus not an immanent feature of the mental world,
but rather a transformation of the subject's perspective upon the
world.
In The Psychology of the Imagination, Sartre demonstrates his
phenomenological method by using it to take on the traditional view
that to imagine something is to have a picture of it in mind.
Sartre's account of imagining does away with representations and
potentially allows for a direct access to that which is imagined;
when this object does not exist, there is still an intention (albeit
unsuccessful) to become conscious of it through the imagination. So
there is no internal structure to the imagination. It is rather a
form of directedness upon the imagined object. Imagining a heffalump
is thus of the same nature as perceiving an elephant. Both are
spontaneous intentional (or directed) acts, each with its own type of
intentionality.
b. The ego
Sartre's view also diverges from Husserl's
on the important issue of the ego. For Sartre, Husserl adopted the
view that the subject is a substance with attributes, as a result of
his interpretation of Kant's unity of apperception. Husserl endorsed
the Kantian claim that the 'I think' must be able to accompany any
representation of which I am conscious, but reified this 'I' into a
transcendental ego. Such a move is not warranted for Sartre, as he
explains in The Transcendence of the Ego. Moreover, it leads
to the following problems for our phenomenological analysis of
consciousness.
The ego would have to feature as an object in all states of
consciousness. This would result in its obstructing our conscious
access to the world. But this would conflict with the direct nature
of this conscious access. Correlatively, consciousness would be
divided into consciousness of ego and consciousness of the world.
This would however be at odds with the simple, and thus undivided,
nature of our access to the world through conscious experience. In
other words, when I am conscious of a tree, I am directly conscious
of it, and am not myself an object of consciousness.
Sartre proposes therefore to view the ego as a unity produced by
consciousness. In other words, he adds to the Humean picture of the
self as a bundle of perceptions, an account of its unity. This unity
of the ego is a product of conscious activity. As a result, the
traditional Cartesian view that self-consciousness is the
consciousness the ego has of itself no longer holds, since the ego is
not given but created by consciousness. What model does Sartre
propose for our understanding of self-consciousness and the
production of the ego through conscious activity?
The key to answering the first part of the question lies in Sartre's
introduction of a pre-reflective level, while the second can then be
addressed by examining conscious activity at the other level, i.e.
that of reflection. An example of pre-reflective consciousness is the
seeing of a house. This type of consciousness is directed to a
transcendent object, but this does not involve my focussing upon it,
i.e. it does not require that an ego be involved in a conscious
relation to the object. For Sartre, this pre-reflective consciousness
is thus impersonal: there is no place for an 'I' at this level.
Importantly, Sartre insists that self-consciousness is involved in
any such state of consciousness: it is the consciousness this state
has of itself. This accounts for the phenomenology of 'seeing', which
is such that the subject is clearly aware of her pre-reflective
consciousness of the house. This awareness does not have an ego as
its object, but it is rather the awareness that there is an act of
'seeing'.
Reflective consciousness is the type of state of consciousness
involved in my looking at a house. For Sartre, the cogito emerges as
a result of consciousness's being directed upon the pre-reflectively
conscious. In so doing, reflective consciousness takes the
pre-reflectively conscious as being mine. It thus reveals an ego
insofar as an 'I' is brought into focus: the pre-reflective
consciousness which is objectified is viewed as mine. This 'I' is the
correlate of the unity that I impose upon the pre-reflective states
of consciousness through my reflection upon them.
To account for the prevalence of the Cartesian picture, Sartre
argues that we are prone to the illusion that this 'I' was in fact
already present prior to the reflective conscious act, i.e. present
at the pre-reflective level. By substituting his model of a
two-tiered consciousness for this traditional picture, Sartre
provides an account of self-consciousness that does not rely upon a
pre-existing ego, and shows how an ego is constructed in
reflection.
c. Ethics
An important feature of
Sartre's phenomenological work is that his ultimate interest in
carrying out phenomenological analyses is an ethical one. Through
them, he opposes the view, which is for instance that of the Freudian
theory of the unconscious, that there are psychological factors that
are beyond the grasp of our consciousness and thus are potential
excuses for certain forms of behaviour.
Starting with Sartre's account of the ego, this is characterised by
the claim that it is produced by, rather than prior to consciousness.
As a result, accounts of agency cannot appeal to a pre-existing ego
to explain certain forms of behaviour. Rather, conscious acts are
spontaneous, and since all pre-reflective consciousness is
transparent to itself, the agent is fully responsible for them (and a
fortiori for his ego).
In Sartre's analysis of emotions, affective consciousness is a form
of pre-reflective consciousness, and is therefore spontaneous and
self-conscious. Against traditional views of the emotions as
involving the subject's passivity, Sartre can therefore claim that
the agent is responsible for the pre-reflective transformation of his
consciousness through emotion.
In the case of the imaginary, the traditional view of the power of
fancy to overcome rational thought is replaced by one of imaginary
consciousness as a form of pre-reflective consciousness. As such, it
is therefore again the result of the spontaneity of consciousness and
involves self-conscious states of mind. An individual is therefore
fully responsible for his imaginations's activity.
In all three cases, a key factor in Sartre's account is his notion
of the spontaneity of consciousness. To dispel the apparent
counter-intuitiveness of the claims that emotional states and flights
of imagination are active, and thus to provide an account that does
justice to the phenomenology of these states, spontaneity must be
clearly distinguished from a voluntary act. A voluntary act involves
reflective consciousness that is connected with the will; spontaneity
is a feature of pre-reflective consciousness.
d. Existential phenomenology
Is there a common thread to these
specific features of Sartre's phenomenological approach? Sartre's
choice of topics for phenomenological analysis suggests an interest
in the phenomenology of what it is to be human, rather than in the
world as such. This privileging of the human dimension has parallels
with Heidegger's focus upon Dasein in tackling the question of Being.
This aspect of Heidegger's work is that which can properly be called
existential insofar as Dasein's way of being is essentially distinct
from that of any other being. This characterisation is particularly
apt for Sartre's work, in that his phenomenological analyses do not
serve a deeper ontological purpose as they do for Heidegger who
distanced himself from any existential labelling. Thus, in his
"Letter on Humanism", Heidegger reminds us that the analysis of
Dasein is only one chapter in the enquiry into the question of Being.
For Heidegger, Sartre's humanism is one more metaphysical perspective
which does not return to the deeper issue of the meaning of Being.
Sartre sets up his own picture of the individual human being by
first getting rid of its grounding in a stable ego. As Sartre later
puts it in Existentialism is a Humanism, to be human is
characterised by an existence that precedes its essence. As such,
existence is problematic, and it is towards the development of a full
existentialist theory of what it is to be human that Sartre's work
logically evolves. In relation to what will become Being and
Nothingness, Sartre's early works can be seen as providing
important preparatory material for an existential account of being
human.
But the distinctiveness of Sartre's approach to understanding human
existence is ultimately guided by his ethical interest. In
particular, this accounts for his privileging of a strong notion of
freedom which we shall see to be fundamentally at odds with
Heidegger's analysis.
Thus the nature of Sartre's topics of analysis, his theory of the
ego and his ethical aims all characterise the development of an
existential phenomenology. Let us now examine the central themes of
this theory as they are presented in Being and
Nothingness.
3. The Ontology of Being and Nothingness
Being and Nothingness
can be characterized as a phenomenological investigation into the
nature of what it is to be human, and thus be seen as a continuation
of, and expansion upon, themes characterising the early works. In
contrast with these however, an ontology is presented at the outset
and guides the whole development of the investigation.
One of the main features of this system, which Sartre presents in
the introduction and the first chapter of Part One, is a distinction
between two kinds of transcendence of the phenomenon of being. The
first is the transcendence of being and the second that of
consciousness. This means that, starting with the phenomenon (that
which is our conscious experience), there are two types of reality
which lie beyond it, and are thus trans-phenomenal. On the one hand,
there is the being of the object of consciousness, and on the other,
that of consciousness itself. These define two types of being, the
in-itself and the for-itself. To bring out that which keeps them
apart, involves understanding the phenomenology of nothingness. This
reveals consciousness as essentially characterisable through its
power of negation, a power which plays a key role in our existential
condition. Let us examine these points in more detail.
a. The being of the phenomenon and consciousness
In Being and Time,
Heidegger presents the phenomenon as involving both a covering and a
disclosing of being. For Sartre, the phenomenon reveals, rather than
conceals, reality. What is the status of this reality? Sartre
considers the phenomenalist option of viewing the world as a
construct based upon the series of appearances. He points out that
the being of the phenomenon is not like its essence, i.e. is not
something which is apprehended on the basis of this series. In this
way, Sartre moves away from Husserl's conception of the essence as
that which underpins the unity of the appearances of an object, to a
Heideggerian notion of the being of the phenomenon as providing this
grounding.
Just as the being of the phenomenon transcends the phenomenon of
being, consciousness also transcends it. Sartre thus establishes that
if there is perceiving, there must be a consciousness doing the
perceiving.
How are these two transphenomenal forms of being related? As opposed
to a conceptualising consciousness in a relation of knowledge to an
object, as in Husserl and the epistemological tradition he inherits,
Sartre introduces a relation of being: consciousness (in a
pre-reflective form) is directly related to the being of the
phenomenon. This is Sartre's version of Heidegger's ontological
relation of being-in-the-world. It differs from the latter in two
essential respects. First, it is not a practical relation, and thus
distinct from a relation to the ready-to-hand. Rather, it is simply
given by consciousness. Second, it does not lead to any further
question of Being. For Sartre, all there is to being is given in the
transphenomenality of existing objects, and there is no further issue
of the Being of all beings as for Heidegger.
b. Two types of being
As we have
seen, both consciousness and the being of the phenomenon transcend
the phenomenon of being. As a result, there are two types of being
which Sartre, using Hegel's terminology, calls the for-itself
('pour-soi') and the in-itself ('en-soi').
Sartre presents the in-itself as existing without justification
independently of the for-itself, and thus constituting an absolute
'plenitude'. It exists in a fully determinate and non-relational way.
This fully characterizes its transcendence of the conscious
experience. In contrast with the in-itself, the for-itself is mainly
characterised by a lack of identity with itself. This is a
consequence of the following. Consciousness is always 'of something',
and therefore defined in relation to something else. It has no nature
beyond this and is thus completely translucent. Insofar as the
for-itself always transcends the particular conscious experience
(because of the spontaneity of consciousness), any attempt to grasp
it within a conscious experience is doomed to failure. Indeed, as we
have already seen in the distinction between pre-reflective and
reflective consciousness, a conscious grasp of the first transforms
it. This means that it is not possible to identify the for-itself,
since the most basic form of identification, i.e. with itself,
fails.
This picture is clearly one in which the problematic region of being
is that of the for-itself, and that is what Being and
Nothingness will focus upon. But at the same time, another
important question arises. Indeed, insofar Sartre has rejected the
notion of a grounding of all beings in Being, one may ask how
something like a relation of being between consciousness and the
world is possible. This issue translates in terms of understanding
the meaning of the totality formed by the for-itself and the
in-itself and its division into these two regions of being. By
addressing this latter issue, Sartre finds the key concept that
enables him to investigate the nature of the for-itself.
c. Nothingness
One of the most
original contributions of Sartre's metaphysics lies in his analysis
of the notion of nothingness and the claim that it plays a central
role at the heart of being (chapter 1, Part One).
Sartre (BN, 9-10) discusses the example of entering a cafÈ to meet
Pierre and discovering his absence from his usual place. Sartre talks
of this absence as 'haunting' the cafÈ. Importantly, this is not just
a psychological state, because a 'nothingness' is really experienced.
The nothingness in question is also not simply the result of applying
a logical operator, negation, to a proposition. For it is not the
same to say that there is no rhinoceros in the cafÈ, and to say that
Pierre is not there. The first is a purely logical construction that
reveals nothing about the world, while the second does. Sartre says
it points to an objective fact.
However, this objective fact is not simply given independently of
human beings. Rather, it is produced by consciousness. Thus Sartre
considers the phenomenon of destruction. When an earthquake brings
about a landslide, it modifies the terrain. If, however, a town is
thereby annihilated, the earthquake is viewed as having destroyed it.
For Sartre, there is only destruction insofar as humans have
identified the town as 'fragile'. This means that it is the very
negation involved in characterising something as destructible which
makes destruction possible.
How is such a negation possible? The answer lies in the claim that
the power of negation is an intrinsic feature of the intentionality
of consciousness. To further identify this power of negation, let us
look at Sartre's treatment of the phenomenon of questioning. When I
question something, I posit the possibility of a negative reply. For
Sartre, this means that I operate a nihilation of that which is
given: the latter is thus 'fluctuating between being and nothingness'
(BN, 23). Sartre then notes that this requires that the questioner be
able to detach himself from the causal series of being. And, by
nihilating the given, he detaches himself from any deterministic
constraints. And Sartre says that 'the name (...) [of] this
possibility which every human being has to secret a nothingness which
isolates it (...) is freedom' (BN, 24-25). Our power to negate is
thus the clue which reveals our nature as free. Below, we shall
return to the nature of Sartre's notion of freedom.
4. The for-itself in Being and Nothingness
The structure and
characteristics of the for-itself are the main focal point of the
phenomenological analyses of Being and Nothingness. Here, the
theme of consciousness's power of negation is explored in its
different ramifications. These bring out the core claims of Sartre's
existential account of the human condition.
a. A lack of self-identity
The
analysis of nothingness provides the key to the phenomenological
understanding of the for-itself (chapter 1, Part Two). For the
negating power of consciousness is at work within the self (BN, 85).
By applying the account of this negating power to the case of
reflection, Sartre shows how reflective consciousness negates the
pre-reflective consciousness it takes as its object. This creates an
instability within the self which emerges in reflection: it is torn
between being posited as a unity and being reflexively grasped as a
duality. This lack of self-identity is given another twist by Sartre:
it is posited as a task. That means that the unity of the self is a
task for the for-itself, a task which amounts to the self's seeking
to ground itself.
This dimension of task ushers in a temporal component that is fully
justified by Sartre's analysis of temporality (BN, 107). The lack of
coincidence of the for-itself with itself is at the heart of what it
is to be a for-itself. Indeed, the for-itself is not identical with
its past nor its future. It is already no longer what it was, and it
is not yet what it will be. Thus, when I make who I am the object of
my reflection, I can take that which now lies in my past as my
object, while I have actually moved beyond this. Sartre says that I
am therefore no longer who I am. Similarly with the future: I never
coincide with that which I shall be. Temporality constitutes another
aspect of the way in which negation is at work within the
for-itself.
These temporal ecstases also map onto fundamental features of the
for-itself. First, the past corresponds to the facticity of a human
life that cannot choose what is already given about itself. Second,
the future opens up possibilities for the freedom of the for-itself.
The coordination of freedom and facticity is however generally
incoherent, and thus represents another aspect of the essential
instability at the heart of the for-itself.
b. The project of bad faith
The way in which the incoherence of the
dichotomy of facticity and freedom is manifested, is through the
project of bad faith (chapter 2, Part One). Let us first clarify
Sartre's notion of project. The fact that the self-identity of the
for-itself is set as a task for the for-itself, amounts to defining
projects for the for-itself. Insofar as they contribute to this task,
they can be seen as aspects of the individual's fundamental project.
This specifies the way in which the for-itself understands itself and
defines herself as this, rather than another, individual. We shall
return to the issue of the fundamental project below.
Among the different types of project, that of bad faith is of
generic importance for an existential understanding of what it is to
be human. This importance derives ultimately from its ethical
relevance. Sartre's analysis of the project of bad faith is grounded
in vivid examples. Thus Sartre describes the precise and mannered
movements of a cafÈ waiter (BN, 59). In thus behaving, the waiter is
identifying himself with his role as waiter in the mode of being
in-itself. In other words, the waiter is discarding his real nature
as for-itself, i.e. as free facticity, to adopt that of the
in-itself. He is thus denying his transcendence as for-itself in
favour of the kind of transcendence characterising the in-itself. In
this way, the burden of his freedom, i.e. the requirement to decide
for himself what to do, is lifted from his shoulders since his
behaviour is as though set in stone by the definition of the role he
has adopted.
The mechanism involved in such a project involves an inherent
contradiction. Indeed, the very identification at the heart of bad
faith is only possible because the waiter is a for-itself, and can
indeed choose to adopt such a project. So the freedom of the
for-itself is a pre-condition for the project of bad faith which
denies it.
The agent's defining his being as an in-itself is the result of the
way in which he represents himself to himself. This misrepresentation
is however one the agent is responsible for. Ultimately, nothing is
hidden, since consciousness is transparent and therefore the project
of bad faith is pursued while the agent is fully aware of how things
are in pre-reflective consciousness.
Insofar as bad faith is self-deceit, it raises the problem of
accounting for contradictory beliefs. The examples of bad faith which
Sartre gives, serve to underline how this conception of self-deceit
in fact involves a project based upon inadequate representations of
what one is. There is therefore no need to have recourse to a notion
of unconscious to explain such phenomena. They can be accounted for
using the dichotomy for-itself/in-itself, as projects freely adopted
by individual agents. A first consequence is that this represents an
alternative to psychoanalytical accounts of self-deceit. Sartre was
particularly keen to provide alternatives to Freud's theory of
self-deceit, with its appeal to censorship mechanisms accounting for
repression, all of which are beyond the subject's awareness as they
are unconscious (BN, 54-55). The reason is that Freud's theory
diminishes the agent's responsibility. On the contrary, and this is
the second consequence of Sartre's account of bad faith, Sartre's
theory makes the individual responsible for what is a widespread form
of behaviour, one that accounts for many of the evils that Sartre
sought to describe in his plays. To explain how existential
psychoanalysis works requires that we first examine the notion of
fundamental project (BN, 561).
c. The fundamental project
If the project of bad faith involves a
misrepresentation of what it is to be a for-itself, and thus provides
a powerful account of certain types of self-deceit, we have, as yet,
no account of the motivation that lies behind the adoption of such a
project.
As we saw above, all projects can be viewed as parts of the
fundamental project, and we shall therefore focus upon the motivation
for the latter (chapter 2, Part Four). That a for-itself is defined
by such a project arises as a consequence of the for-itself's setting
itself self-identity as a task. This in turn is the result of the
for-itself's experiencing the cleavages introduced by reflection and
temporality as amounting to a lack of self-identity. Sartre describes
this as defining the `desire for being~ (BN, 565).
This desire is universal, and it can take on one of three forms.
First, it may be aimed at a direct transformation of the for-itself
into an in-itself. Second, the for-itself may affirm its freedom that
distinguishes it from an in-itself, so that it seeks through this to
become its own foundation (i.e. to become God). The conjunction of
these two moments results, third, in the for-itself's aiming for
another mode of being, the for-itself-in-itself.
None of the aims described in these three moments are realisable.
Moreover, the triad of these three moments is, unlike a Hegelian
thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, inherently instable: if the
for-itself attempts to achieve one of them, it will conflict with the
others. Since all human lives are characterised by such a desire
(albeit in different individuated forms), Sartre has thus provided a
description of the human condition which is dominated by the
irrationality of particular projects. This picture is in particular
illustrated in Being and Nothingness by an account of the
projects of love, sadism and masochism, and in other works, by
biographical accounts of the lives of Baudelaire, Flaubert and Jean
Genet.
With this notion of desire for being, the motivation for the
fundamental project is ultimately accounted for in terms of the
metaphysical nature of the for-itself. This means that the source of
motivation for the fundamental project lies within consciousness.
Thus, in particular, bad faith, as a type of project, is motivated in
this way.
The individual choice of fundamental project is an original choice
(BN, 564). Consequently, an understanding of what it is to be
Flaubert for instance, must involve an attempt to decipher his
original choice. This hermeneutic exercise aims to reveal what makes
an individual a unity. This provides existential psychoanalysis with
its principle. Its method involves an analysis of all the empirical
behaviour of the subject, aimed at grasping the nature of this
unity.
d. Desire
The fundamental project has
been presented as motivated by a desire for being. How does this
enable Sartre to provide an account of desires as in fact directed
towards being although they are generally thought to be rather aimed
at having? Sartre discusses desire in chapter I of Part One and then
again in chapter II of Part Four, after presenting the notion of
fundamental project.
In the first short discussion of desire, Sartre presents it as
seeking a coincidence with itself that is not possible (BN, 87, 203).
Thus, in thirst, there is a lack that seeks to be satisfied. But the
satisfaction of thirst is not the suppression of thirst, but rather
the aim of a plenitude of being in which desire and satisfaction are
united in an impossible synthesis. As Sartre points out, humans cling
on to their desires. Mere satisfaction through suppression of the
desire is indeed always disappointing. Another example of this
structure of desire (BN, 379) is that of love. For Sartre, the lover
seeks to possess the loved one and thus integrate her into his being:
this is the satisfaction of desire. He simultaneously wishes the
loved one nevertheless remain beyond his being as the other he
desires, i.e. he wishes to remain in the state of desiring. These are
incompatible aspects of desire: the being of desire is therefore
incompatible with its satisfaction.
In the lengthier discussion on the topic 'Being and Having', Sartre
differentiates between three relations to an object that can be
projected in desiring. These are being, doing and having. Sartre
argues that relations of desire aimed at doing are reducible to one
of the other two types. His examination of these two types can be
summarised as follows.
Desiring expressed in terms of being is aimed at the self. And
desiring expressed in terms of having is aimed at possession. But an
object is possessed insofar as it is related to me by an internal
ontological bond, Sartre argues. Through that bond, the object is
represented as my creation. The possessed object is represented both
as part of me and as my creation. With respect to this object, I am
therefore viewed both as an in-itself and as endowed with freedom.
The object is thus a symbol of the subject's being, which presents it
in a way that conforms with the aims of the fundamental project.
Sartre can therefore subsume the case of desiring to have under that
of desiring to be, and we are thus left with a single type of desire,
that for being.
5. Relations with others in Being and Nothingness
So far, we have presented the
analysis of the for-itself without investigating how different
individual for-itself's interact. Far from neglecting the issue of
inter-subjectivity, this represents an important part of Sartre's
phenomenological analysis in which the main themes discussed above
receive their confirmation in, and extension to the inter-personal
realm.
a. The problem of other minds
In chapter 1, Part Three, Sartre
recognises there is a problem of other minds: how I can be conscious
of the other (BN 221-222)?
Sartre examines many existing approaches to the problem of other
minds. Looking at realism, Sartre claims that no access to other
minds is ever possible, and that for a realist approach the existence
of the other is a mere hypothesis. As for idealism, it can only ever
view the other in terms of sets of appearances. But the
transphenomenality of the other cannot be deduced from them.
Sartre also looks at his phenomenologist predecessors, Husserl and
Heidegger. Husserl's account is based upon the perception of another
body from which, by analogy, I can consider the other as a distinct conscious
perspective upon the world. But the attempt to derive the other's
subjectivity from my own never really leaves the orbit of my own
transcendental ego, and thus fails to come to terms with the other as
a distinct transcendental ego. Sartre praises Heidegger for
understanding that the relation to the other is a relation of being,
not an epistemological one. However, Heidegger does not provide any
grounds for taking the co-existence of Daseins ('being-with') as an
ontological structure.
What is, for Sartre, the nature of my consciousness of the other?
Sartre provides a phenomenological analysis of shame and how the
other features in it. When I peep through the keyhole, I am
completely absorbed in what I am doing and my ego does not feature as
part of this pre-reflective state. However, when I hear a floorboard
creaking behind me, I become aware of myself as an object of the
other's look. My ego appears on the scene of this reflective
consciousness, but it is as an object for the other. Note that one
may be empirically in error about the presence of this other. But all
that is required by Sartre's thesis is that there be other human
beings.
This objectification of my ego is only possible if the other is
given as a subject. For Sartre, this establishes what needed to be
proven: since other minds are required to account for conscious
states such as those of shame, this establishes their existence a
priori. This does not refute the skeptic, but provides Sartre with a
place for the other as an a priori condition for certain forms of
consciousness which reveal a relation of being to the
other.
b. Human relationships
In the experience of shame (BN,
259), the objectification of my ego denies my existence as a subject.
I do, however, have a way of evading this. This is through an
objectification of the other. By reacting against the look of the
other, I can turn him into an object for my look. But this is no
stable relation.
In chapter 1, Part Three, of Being and Nothingness, Sartre
sees important implications of this movement from object to subject
and vice-versa, insofar as it is through distinguishing oneself from
the other that a for-itself individuates itself. More precisely, the
objectification of the other corresponds to an affirmation of my self
by distinguishing myself from the other. This affirmation is however
a failure, because through it, I deny the other's selfhood and
therefore deny that with respect to which I want to affirm myself.
So, the dependence upon the other which characterises the
individuation of a particular ego is simultaneously denied. The
resulting instability is characteristic of the typically conflictual
state of our relations with others. Sartre examines examples of such
relationships as are involved in sadism, masochism and love.
Ultimately, Sartre would argue that the instabilities that arise in
human relationships are a form of inter-subjective bad
faith.
6. Authenticity
If the picture
which emerges from Sartre's examination of human relationships seems
rather hopeless, it is because bad faith is omnipresent and
inescapable. In fact, Sartre's philosophy has a very positive message
which is that we have infinite freedom and that this enables us to
make authentic choices which escape from the grip of bad faith. To
understand Sartre's notion of authenticity therefore requires that we
first clarify his notion of freedom.
a. Freedom
For Sartre (chapter 1,
Part Four), each agent is endowed with unlimited freedom. This
statement may seem puzzling given the obvious limitations on every
individual's freedom of choice. Clearly, physical and social
constraints cannot be overlooked in the way in which we make choices.
This is however a fact which Sartre accepts insofar as the for-itself
is facticity. And this does not lead to any contradiction insofar as
freedom is not defined by an ability to act.
Freedom is rather to be understood as characteristic of the nature
of consciousness, i.e. as spontaneity. But there is more to freedom.
For all that Pierre's freedom is expressed in opting either for
looking after his ailing grandmother or joining the French
Resistance, choices for which there are indeed no existing grounds,
the decision to opt for either of these courses of action is a
meaningful one. That is, opting for the one of the other is not just
a spontaneous decision, but has consequences for the for-itself. To
express this, Sartre presents his notion of freedom as amounting to
making choices, and indeed not being able to avoid making choices.
Sartre's conception of choice can best be understood by reference to
an individual's original choice, as we saw above. Sartre views the
whole life of an individual as expressing an original project that
unfolds throughout time. This is not a project which the individual
has proper knowledge of, but rather one which she may interpret (an
interpretation constantly open to revision). Specific choices are
therefore always components in time of this time-spanning original
choice of project.
b. Authenticity
With this notion of
freedom as spontaneous choice, Sartre therefore has the elements
required to define what it is to be an authentic human being. This
consists in choosing in a way which reflects the nature of the
for-itself as both transcendence and facticity. This notion of
authenticity appears closely related to Heidegger's, since it
involves a mode of being that exhibits a recognition that one is a
Dasein. However, unlike Heidegger's, Sartre's conception has clear
practical consequences.
For what is required of an authentic choice is that it involve a
proper coordination of transcendence and facticity, and thus that it
avoid the pitfalls of an uncoordinated expression of the desire for
being. This amounts to not-grasping oneself as freedom and facticity.
Such a lack of proper coordination between transcendence and
facticity constitutes bad faith, either at an individual or an
inter-personal level.
Such a notion of authenticity is therefore quite different from what
is often popularly misrepresented as a typically existentialist
attitude, namely an absolute prioritisation of individual
spontaneity. On the contrary, a recognition of how our freedom
interacts with our facticity exhibits the responsibility which we
have to make proper choices. These are choices which are not trapped
in bad faith.
c. An ethical dimension
Through the practical consequences
presented above, an existentialist ethics can be discerned. We
pointed out that random expressions of one's spontaneity are not what
authenticity is about, and Sartre emphasises this point in
Existentialism and Humanism. There, he explicitly states that
there is an ethical normativity about authenticity. If one ought to
act authentically, is there any way of further specifying what this
means for the nature of ethical choices?
There are in fact many statements in Being and Nothingness
which emphasise a universality criterion not entirely dissimilar from
Kant's. This should come as no surprise since both Sartre and Kant's
approaches are based upon the ultimate value of a strong notion of
freedom. As Sartre points out, by choosing, an individual commits not
only himself, but the whole of humanity (BN, 553). Although there are
no a priori values for Sartre, the agent's choice creates values in
the same way as the artist does in the aesthetic realm. The values
thus created by a proper exercise of my freedom have a universal
dimension, in that any other human being could make sense of them
were he to be placed in my situation. There is therefore a
universality that is expressed in particular forms in each authentic
project. This is a first manifestation of what Sartre later refers to
as the 'singular universal'.
7. Other contributions to existential phenomenology
If Being and Nothingness
represents the culmination of Sartre's purely existentialist work,
existentialism permeates later writings, albeit in a hybrid form. We
shall briefly indicate how these later writings extend and transform
his project of existential phenomenology.
a. Critique of Dialectical Reason
The experience of the war and the
encounter with Merleau-Ponty contributed to awakening Sartre's
interest in the political dimension of human existence: Sartre thus
further developed his existentialist understanding of human beings in
a way which is compatible with Marxism. A key notion for this phase
of his philosophical development is the concept of praxis. This
extends and transforms that of project: man as a praxis is both
something that produces and is produced. Social structures define a
starting point for each individual. But the individual then sets his
own aims and thereby goes beyond and negates what society had defined
him as. The range of possibilities which are available for this
expression of freedom is however dependent upon the existing social
structures. And it may be the case that this range is very limited.
In this way, the infinite freedom of the earlier philosophy is now
narrowed down by the constraints of the political and historical
situation.
In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre analyses different
dimensions of the praxis. In the first volume, a theory of "practical
ensembles" examines the way in which a praxis is no longer opposed to
an in-itself, but to institutions which have become rigidified and
constitute what Sartre calls the 'practico-inert'. Human beings
interiorise the universal features of the situation in which they are
born, and this translates in terms of a particular way of developing
as a praxis. This is the sense Sartre now gives to the notion of the
'singular universal'.
b. The Problem of Method
In this book Sartre redefines the
focus of existentialism as the individual understood as belonging to
a certain social situation, but not totally determined by it. For the
individual is always going beyond what is given, with his own aims
and projects. In this way, Sartre develops a 'regressive-progressive
method' that views individual development as explained in terms of a
movement from the universal expressed in historical development, and
the particular expressed in individual projects. Thus, by combining a
Marxist understanding of history with the methods of existential
psychoanalysis which are first presented in Being and
Nothingness, Sartre proposes a method for understanding a human
life. This, he applies in particular to the case of an analysis of
Flaubert. It is worth noting however that developing an account of
the intelligibility of history, is a project that Sartre tackled in
the second volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, but
which remained unfinished.
8. Conclusion
Sartre's
existentialist understanding of what it is to be human can be
summarised in his view that the underlying motivation for action is
to be found in the nature of consciousness which is a desire for
being. It is up to each agent to exercise his freedom in such a way
that he does not lose sight of his existence as a facticity, as well
as a free human being. In so doing, he will come to understand more
about the original choice which his whole life represents, and thus
about the values that are thereby projected. Such an understanding is
only obtained through living this particular life and avoiding the
pitfalls of strategies of self-deceit such as bad faith. This
authentic option for human life represents the realisation of a
universal in the singularity of a human life.
9. References
a. Sartre's works
"Intentionality: a fundamental ideal of
Husserl's phenomenology" (1970) transl. J.P.Fell, Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology, 1 (2), 4-5
Psychology of the Imagination (1972) transl. Bernard Frechtman,
Methuen, London
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1971) transl. Philip Mairet,
Methuen, London
The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of
Consciousness (1957) transl. and ed. Forrest Williams and Robert
Kirkpatrick, Noonday, New York
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1958)
transl. Hazel E. Barnes, intr. Mary Warnock, Methuen, London
(abbreviated as BN above)
Existentialism and Humanism (1973) transl. Philip Mairet, Methuen, London
Critique of Dialectical Reason 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles
(1982) transl. Alan Sheridan-Smith, ed. Jonathan RÈe, Verso, London
The Problem of Method (1964) transl. Hazel E. Barnes, Methuen,
London
b. Commentaries
Caws, P. (1979)
Sartre, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London
Danto, A.C. (1991) Sartre, Fontana, London
Howells, C. (1988) Sartre: The necessity of freedom, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge
Howells, C. ed. (1992) Cambridge Companion to Sartre, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge
Murdoch, I. (1987) Sartre : Romantic Rationalist, Chatto and Windus,
London
Natanson, M. (1972) A Critique of Jean-Paul Sartre's Ontology,
Haskell House Publishers, New York
Schilpp, P.A. ed. (1981) The philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Open
Court, La Salle
Silverman, H.J. and Elliston, F.A. eds. (1980) Jean-Paul Sartre:
Contemporary Approaches to his Philosophy, Harvester Press, Brighton
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