Philosophy of existence 2SartreThomas R.FlynnBorn 21 June 1905, in Thiviers (Dordogne), Jean-Paul Sartre was raised in the Parisianhome of his widowed mother’s parents. After his mother’s remarriage, he spent severalyears with her and his stepfather in La Rochelle but returned to the capital to continue hiseducation, first at the prestigious lycées Henri IV and Louis-le-Grand, and then at therenowned Ecole Normale Supérieure. After several years of teaching in various lycées,interspersed with a year of research at the French Institute in Berlin (1933–4),mobilization during the Phoney War (1939–40), and internment in a prisoner of warcamp (1940–1), Sartre abandoned teaching for a career as an author and critic. Hefounded the review
Les Temps modernes with Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir andothers (1944), refused the Legion of Honour (1945) and the Nobel Prize for Literature(1962), and became increasingly involved in the politics of the left in the second half ofhis life. Sartre adopted a former student, Arlette Elkaïm (1965), who had become hisliterary heir. He died in Paris on 15 April 1980.Perhaps no one in the twentieth century better exemplifies the union and creativetension among philosophy, literature and public life than Jean-Paul Sartre. His novel
Nausea and play
No Exit emerged in the 1940s as paradigmatic ‘existentialist’ pieces, forwhich his masterwork,
Being and Nothingness, served as the theoretical underpinning.This last, like Darwin’s
Origin of Species, was more mentioned than read during thehalcyon days of café existentialism. But its basic insights and powerfulphenomenological descriptions have continued to attract a number of contemporaryphilosophers as well as the general reading public. Several of these themes and thesescontinued to direct Sartre’s philosophy throughout the shifts and adjustments of the nextthirty-seven years of his career.So we cannot refer to a rejection of, or a ‘turning’ from,his earlier thought in his later work as is often done in the cases of Wittgenstein andHeidegger respectively.The present chapter will survey Sartre’s philosophical development, analyse thefundamental concepts and principles that constitute his contribution to philosophy ineight standard fields of inquiry, and conclude with reflections on Sartre’s relationship tofour movements in the recent history of philosophy, namely, existential phenomenology,Marxism, structuralism and postmodernism.
PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENTSartre once admitted that his inspiration to write philosophy came from readingBergson’s
Time and Free Will. The Bergsonian influence on his thought, both positiveand by way of reaction, has yet to be studied in depth. But the presence of this formidableFrench theorist is obvious from the centrality of time and temporalizing consciousness inSartre’s published philosophical writings from the very start. These works of the 1930s,culminating in
Psychology of Imagination (1940), exhibit both a keen sensitivity to livedexperience as distinct from the mechanical or quantified phenomena of positive science(a well-known Bergsonian theme) as well as a profound opposition to the philosophicalidealism of his neo-Kantian professors at the Sorbonne. His early writings also tended totake imaging consciousness as paradigmatic of consciousness in general. In fact, if Sartreis known as
the philosopher of freedom in our times, he could with equal justification beconsidered
the philosopher of imagination. We shall observe various forms of imagingconsciousness emerge in the course of our essay.Sartre’s long-time companion, Simone de Beauvoir, relates the story of their meetingwith Raymond Aron after the latter’s return from a year in Berlin. At Aron’s account ofthe new philosophy of Edmund Husserl that could describe ‘phenomenologically’ anindividual object such as the cocktail glass before them, she recounts, Sartre ‘turned palewith emotion’. As they left the café, she recalls, Sartre had to find a bookstore open atnight in order to purchase a copy of Levinas’s
The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’sPhenomenology.If phenomenology enabled Sartre to philosophize about concrete, individual reality, itscentral concept of intentionality allowed him to escape the ‘principle of immanence’ thatentangled idealist philosophers in a mind-referring world. Philosophical idealism claimsthat reality is essentially mental or mind-referring. Berkeley’s famous maxim ‘To be is toperceive or be perceived’ illustrates this view. Sartre published an essay in 1939 thatcountered this idealist claim with the principle of
intentionality, namely, thatconsciousness is essentially other-referring: ‘All consciousness is consciousness
ofanother.’ He applied this Husserlian principle with characteristic rigour, even directing itagainst Husserl himself, whom he accused of sliding into idealism by appeal to a‘transcendental’ ego.Sartre’s robust realism continued to shape his epistemological claims over the years.He always insisted that we can know the real world in itself, that historical facts are notthe result of our individual or collective creation, and that the harsh facticity of everysituation must be dealt with, indeed, that failure to do so is simply ‘bad faith’. It madehim an apt, if initially reluctant, convert to philosophical materialism in the 1950s. Ofcourse, mechanistic materialism was never a temptation. He had consistently opposed itsclaims from the start. But once he could separate the emergent features of dialecticalmaterialism from its quasi-mechanical use by Marxist ‘economism’, he appealed to the‘material conditions of history’ that Marxists of all shades respected and undertook toincorporate these socio-historical considerations into his philosophy of individualfreedom-responsibility.The Second World War was the dividing point between the phenomenologicalexistentialist Sartre and his Marxist existentialist avatar. As he said in one of his manyinterviews, his ‘experience of society’ during those years forced him to shift from aphilosophy of consciousness to one of
praxis, understood roughly as human action in itsmaterial, socio-historical environment. If it is a mistake to see the early Sartre as anunqualified phenomenologist, witness his rejection of a basic Husserlian concept in
TheTranscendence of the Ego (1937), it is equally erroneous to read him as a Marxist
sansphrase. In fact, in his final decade he explicitly denied he was a Marxist, insisting that‘existentialist’ would be a more appropriate label if one had to make such designations.In
Search for a Method (1958) and the
Critique of Dialectical Reason, vol. 1 (1960), hemakes ample use of historical materialist categories and arguments. Even in his massiveFlaubert study,
The Family Idiot (1971–2), where existentialist and Marxist terms areintertwined, he seems to regard physical labour and human need as the touchstones ofreality. Still, his association with
les maos (ultraleftists) after the student uprising of1968, and his unpublished collaborative effort with Benny Levy on yet another ethic,confirms the judgment that Sartre was and remained a
moralist. For it was the desire toretain a place for moral assessment within social critique that attracted him to theseyoung radicals. As he noted, in obvious disgust, ‘The Communists don’t give a damnabout justice. All they want is power’ [3.28], 76. It is his moralist tendencies more thanhis so-called ‘Cartesianism’ that locate him squarely in the French philosophicaltradition.Sartre’s final interviews with Levy are much controverted. Simone de Beauvoir andRaymond Aron claim that the young man took advantage of Sartre’s age and ill health toproject a false image, a Sartre without critical bite, a domesticated warrior. Indeed, theseconversations do read like Platonic dialogues, with Levy assuming the controlling role ofSocrates. Though it would be a mistake to read these pages without reference to thedevelopment of Sartre’s thought as a whole, comparison of several disputed passageswith claims made in posthumously published material from different stages of Sartre’scareer indicates that at least some of Sartre’s so-called revisions of his well-knownpositions were actually ideas he had defended in these other works quite independent ofLévy’s purported influence. Thus his remarks about love and ‘fraternity’ are anticipatedand developed at length in his
Notebooks for an Ethics (written 1948–9), as we shall see.Again, this does not mean that Sartre ‘renounced’ his existentialist philosophy in his finalyears. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But it does reveal Sartre as a living,evolving thinker, responding to the everchanging challenges of his day. For Sartre, tophilosophize was his way of being-in-the-world.
PHILOSOPHICAL CONTRIBUTIONSExistentialists have been portrayed as non- or even anti-systematic thinkers. No doubtthis stems from Kierkegaard’s notorious animus against Hegel’s ‘System’ andNietzsche’s strictures against academic philosophy in general. But, unless by ‘systematic’one means ‘axiomatic deductive’, classical existentialist thinkers like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger (who rejected the association) and others were rigorous and consistenttheorists, who applied fundamental principles and concepts according to a clear method.Given the interlinking and cumulative nature of Sartre’s thought, it is best to order ourexposition according to the standard philosophical sub-disciplines. Not only will thisfacilitate our consideration of his massive
oeuvre, it will also exhibit the unity andcoherence of his theoretical work.
Methodology and epistemologySartre had a remarkable talent for psychological description. His novels, plays and shortstories were replete with arresting, insightful accounts of both typical and dramaticmoments in the human condition. So it is small wonder that he was taken by Husserl’sphenomenological method of ‘eidetic reduction’. By a ‘free, imaginative variation ofexamples’, Husserl proposed to focus on the essence,
eidos, or intelli-gible contour of any‘object’ whatsoever. Not only physical nature, mathematical abstractions or metaphysicalcategories but acts of ingratitude and artistic events were likely objects for thephenomenologist’s eye. Like the forensic artist’s composite photograph, these reductivedescriptions serve to reveal the form, figure or essence of an object, whether this be anabstract entity, like ‘material object’, an emotion, like ‘resentment’, or a particularphenomenon, like ‘this glass’. At its best, such descriptive analysis reveals the essentialfeatures of the object in question, that is, those that withstand the imaginative variationsto which they are subject by the describer. Descriptive phenomenology is a ‘science’ ofwhat Aristotle called ‘formal’, not ‘efficient’ causes. As Husserl noted, ‘phenomenologydoes not try to explain…but simply to get us to see’. When it is unable to generate whatHusserl termed the ‘intuition of essences’
(Wesensschau), the phenomenological methodmust be satisfied with possible or probable opinions about the matter in question. So thefirst two parts of Sartre’s
Psychology of Imagination are entitled the ‘certain’ and the‘probable’ respectively.What we may call an epistemology of ‘vision’, the Husserlian legacy, remains aconstant feature of Sartre’s method. It accounts for some of the most arresting passages inhis philosophical writings, and serves to ‘concretize’ some of the most abstract sectionsof his theoretical works. The presuppositions of Husserl’s method are Cartesian,however, and Sartre’s writings up to and including
Being and Nothingness refer to a formof the
cogito as essential to any method that would move beyond mere probability tocertainty in its basic claims. The insight of individual reflective consciousness in thisapproach is taken as the final court of appeal in philosophical argument. Although Sartreseemed to modify this view in his later years, he never abandoned it, as is clear from hisretention of the language of
Being and Nothingness in his final work on Flaubert. Atension between this epistemology of vision and an overlapping epistemology of
praxisrenders Sartre’s later philosophy problematic.After the war, Sartre adopted a form of the dialectical method, which he had beenstudying in the works of Hegel and Marx during that period. Central to this approach, ashe saw it, were the notions of ‘finality’, ‘negativity’ and ‘time’. It is a feature ofdialectical reasoning, he insists, to acknowledge ‘a certain action of the future as such’.Explanation in terms of Aristotle’s ‘final’ causality had been philosophically unpopularsince Descartes. But Sartre argues that our comprehension of human activity
(praxis) asdistinct from mechanical behaviour depends on the purposes that guided the agentsthemselves.He criticized philosophers since Descartes for ‘failing to conceive negativity asproductive’, an oversight that he certainly avoided in
Being and Nothingness, wherenegativity assumes pride of place as an essential feature of consciousness as such.Sartre’s dialectic differs most from Hegel’s by its insistence on the primacy of individualactivity in dialectical advance and in its denial of any ‘end’ to the dialectical process solong as consciousness/praxis sustains it. A pivotal claim, and the undoing of anytotalitarian theory, is Sartre’s thesis that a ‘totalizing’ consciousness/praxis cannottotalize itself, that is, it cannot be completely absorbed in a social whole of which itstotalizing activity is a part. This ‘nihilating’ character of consciousness in the early Sartreremains in the
praxis of the later one to preclude any ‘organicist’ or totalitariantendencies in his social thought.The later, dialectical thinker prefers ‘notions’ to ‘concepts’ as the vehicles forexpressing historical intelligibility. Sartre argues that developmental thinking alone canrender comprehensible a fluid reality and that notions as dynamic are superior to staticconcepts in performing this task. Like Aristotle’s and Kant’s categories, concepts as suchare atemporal whereas notions include an essential reference to temporality in their verymeaning. We should see ‘notion’ as a ‘dialectical concept’ and read Sartre’s writingsafter
Being and Nothingness as abounding in them.Sartre’s discourse on method is the essay
Search for a Method, published first as anarticle and later as a kind of preface to the
Critique of Dialectical Reason. It combines thephenomenological and dialectical moments in an approach that develops the ‘method ofunderstanding’
(Verstehen) of German social theory at the turn of the century. Themethod entails three stages or dimensions. The first is a phenomenological description ofthe subject matter to be studied. The terminus of eidetic reduction, it now forms thebeginning of Sartre’s approach. The second step is a ‘regressive’ move from the object ofinvestigation to the conditions of its possibility. These may be purely ‘formal’, such asthe structures of social relations that Sartre uncovers in the
Critique of DialecticalReason, vol. 1, or they may include a specific content, like the intrafamilial relations ofthe young Flaubert that conditioned his psychosocial development. The third move inwhat Sartre calls his ‘progressive-regressive’ method is the progressive spiral ofinteriorization/exteriorization of these material and formal conditions by the agent whosemeaning-direction
(sens) we are attempting to uncover. If successful, the progressiveregressivemethod enables us to ‘understand’ (not ‘conceptualize’) an agent as well oreven better than he or she understood himself or herself, the ideal of hermeneuticalinvestigation since Kant.
PsychologySartre’s first published philosophical books were in psychology:
Imagination (1936),
Sketch for a Theory of Emotions (1939), and
The Psychology of Imagination (1940). Notcoincidentally, they emphasize the role of the imagination in our psychic life and pursuein depth Husserl’s thesis that intentionality is the defining characteristic of the mental.Both these remain influential in Sartre’s subsequent writings.His phenomenological analysis of the imagination reveals three characteristics of itsstructure: the imagination is a
consciousness; like all consciousness, it is
intentional; andit differs from perceptual consciousness in the way it ‘intends’ its object, namely, asabsent, non-existent or
unreal.It is better, he argues, to speak of ‘imaging consciousness’ than of ‘imagination’ withits corresponding ‘images’. The latter form of expression tends to hypostatizeconsciousness and to turn images into
simulacra, ‘inner’ icons of some ‘exterior’ object.Such discourse succumbs to what Sartre calls the ‘illusion of immanence’ shared byrealists and idealists alike. Rather, imaging consciousness should be conceived as amanner of being-in-the-world, a Heideggerian term that Sartre adopts. Intentionalityavoids the paradoxes of traditional inside-outside epistemology and accounts for therelational character of consciousness. Imaging consciousness ‘derealizes’ the perceptualor recollected object, relating to it in the properly imaginary mode. This derealizingactivity employs physical or psychic material (for example, painted surfaces orphosphenes in the case of aesthetic or oneiric objects respectively), to serve as an
analogue for the imagined object. Sartre’s concept of ‘representative analogue’ figures inmuch that is original and interesting in his aesthetic theory. It is integral to his existential‘biographies’ of such ‘lords of the imaginary’ as Baudelaire, Genet, Flaubert andMallarmé. For each in his own way will be portrayed as ‘derealizing’ the bourgeois worldof his contemporaries and enticing others with his art to do likewise. A conceptual flawthat weakens Sartre’s usage is his failure to explain in detail what he means by thesecardinal terms, ‘analogy’ and ‘analogue’.These features of imaging consciousness are summarized in the following definition:‘The image is an act which intends [literally, “aims at”
(vise)] an absent or non-existentobject in its corporality by means of a physical or psychical content which is given notfor its own sake but only as an “analogical representative” of the intended object’ ([3.30],25; in the French text, p. 45). It is remarkable that Sartre speaks of imaging consciousnessin this first period of his writings as the locus of possibility, negativity and lack, andinsists that only in the imagining act is the ‘nihilation’ of objects revealed (see [3.30],243–5; French, pp. 360–1), because, in
Being and Nothingness and thereafter, theseemerge as the proper features of consciousness in general. To the extent that Sartre’searly philosophy by his own admission is a ‘philosophy of consciousness’, it is likewise aphilosophy of the imagination. Our survey of his thought and works will justifyconsidering him
the philosopher of the imagination as much as
the philosopher offreedom—the title by which he is commonly designated.His analysis of the emotions is in direct parallel with that of the image. Like images,emotions are not ‘inner states’ that somehow correspond to external stimuli. Neither arethey reducible to their physiological expression, as some have argued. Emotionalconsciousness is another way of being-in-the-world. In this case, it is one that entails aphysiological change as a means of relating to the world in a ‘magical’ manner.Emotional consciousness is ‘failure behaviour’
(la conduite d’échec), an expression thatwill play an important role in Sartre’s biography of Flaubert. The agent, unable to changethe world through rational activity, changes himself or herself in order to conjure up aworld that is no longer frustrating. Thus, the golfer gets red in the face before his/herfailure to escape a sand trap. Sartre reads this as conscious, that is, ‘intentional’,behaviour. Its purpose is to generate another world as if by magic via one’s bodilychanges: perspiration, increased blood pressure, agitated motions and the like—these are‘intended’ to help whisk the ball on to the green. Again, Sartre’s phenomenologicaldescriptions are aimed at escaping the ‘inner life’ and underscoring the correlativity ofconsciousness and world, psychology and ontology.
OntologyIf Sartre is a moralist, he is likewise basically an ontologist. The close relation betweenethics and ontology in his thought lends it a ‘traditional’ flavour quite foreign to that ofrecent French intellectuals. His masterwork,
Being and Nothingness, subtitled ‘An Essayin Phenomenological Ontology’, develops the basic categories of his theory of being(ontology) and concludes with the promise of an ethics, which never appeared in Sartre’slifetime.Inspired by the divisions of Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit but always relying on the‘apodictic’ evidence of Husserl’s eidetic reduction, Sartre undertakes a description of thefundamental forms of being. He calls these ‘being-in-itself’
(l’être-en-soi), ‘being-foritself’
(l’être-poursoi) and ‘being-for-others’
(l’être-pour-autrui). Each has distinctivecharacteristics and is irreducible to the others. Exploiting the proximity ofphenomenology to psychology, ontology and literary ‘argument’, Sartre relies onpowerful examples and tropes to convey his insights. In fact, his first literary success,
Nausea (1938), both anticipates and ‘works through’ imaginatively the themes and thesesof
Being and Nothingness, published five years later.Being-in-itself or the non-conscious is the inert plenum. It is self-identical and withoutthe features commonly ascribed to being in realist ontologies. For example, it is neitheractive nor passive, is beyond negation and affirmation (other than the judgment that it isand is self-identical), knows no otherness, is not subject to temporality and is neitherderived from the possible nor reduced to the necessary. ‘Uncreated, without reason forbeing, without any connection with another being, being-in-itself is
de trop (superfluous)for eternity’ ([3.2] lxvi). Sartre derives these characteristics from an initialphenomenological investigation of the being of any phenomenon. He confirms them byappeal to certain experiences like nausea and boredom that he believes are revelatory ofits ontological nature.Being-for-itself or consciousness is the counter-concept to being-in-itself and is itsinternal negation. It brings ‘otherness’ into play, is precisely non-self-identical, and ischaracterized as a ‘pure spontaneous upsurge’, a feature Sartre’s concept shares with theconcept of mind in classical German idealism. The for-itself ‘temporalizes’ the ‘world’that it constitutes by its intentional relations. As we noted above, consciousness is thelocus of possibility, negativity and lack. Early in
Being and Nothingness, Sartreundertakes an analysis of our act of questioning, a tactic doubtless learned fromHeidegger’s
Being and Time, with which his book has several affinities. His descriptiveanalysis concludes that the negativity which permeates our lives from the fragility ofobjects to the absence of friends is not dependent on the act of judging—the standardview—but conversely. We have ‘a certain prejudicative comprehension of nonbeing’([3.2], 7), and it is this that grounds the negative judgments and realities
(négativités) that populate our world. Sartre proceeds to argue that this ‘nihilating’relation of consciousness to the world is possible only because consciousness (the foritself)is of its very nature a no-thingness
(néant), an ‘othering’ relation that holds the initself(‘thingness’) at bay even as it conspires with being-in-itself to constitute theexistential ‘situation’.The essence of consciousness as the internal negation or no-thingness of being-in-itselfaccounts for many of the paradoxes that abound in Sartre’s ontology. Chief among theseis the claim that ‘human reality’ (his translation of Heidegger’s
Dasein), ‘is not what itis…and is what it is not’ ([3.2], 123). Human reality ‘is’ its ego, its past, its ‘facticity’, inthe manner of not-being these givens of its situation, that is, as the internal negation ofbeing-in-itself. Metaphorically, the for-itself ‘secretes’ nothingness
(le néant) orotherness between itself and whatever predicate one might wish to ascribe to it. Theseverbal twists are meant to capture the ephemerality of the for-itself, a transitivity whichechoes that of temporality, which the for-itself constitutes.Following Heidegger, Sartre distinguishes lived or
ekstatic temporality from the‘universal time’ measured by chronometers. The latter is quantitative and homogeneous;the former, qualitative and heterogeneous. Being-for-itself is not ‘in’ time the way a handis in a glove, or even the way the glove is ‘in’ time. Rather, it ‘temporalizes’ the worldwhich it constitutes. The for-itself ‘exists’ in three temporal
ekstases: the past as facticityor ‘already’, the future as possibility or ‘not yet’, and the present as ‘presence to’ or the‘othering’ relation that at once unites and distinguishes the for-itself from being. Theseare three structured moments of an original synthesis. Sartre insists that it is better toaccent the present
ekstasis rather than the future as Heidegger does, because presence-tobest exemplifies the internal negation of being-in-itself, which is the total synthetic formof temporality ([3.2], 142).When one moves from the abstractions of the in-itself and the for-itself to the concreteindividual agent, these functional concepts, being-in-itself and being-for-itself, assumethe roles of ‘facticity’ and ‘transcendence’ respectively. Every individual is a being-insituationand ‘situation’ is a vague, indeterminate mix of the givens, including one’sphysical and cultural environment as well as one’s previous choices, on the one hand, andthe project that moves beyond them, on the other. These givens must be reckoned with,but, Sartre insists, they are not determining. ‘One can always make something out ofwhat one has been made into’ is the maxim of Sartrean humanism. The first half of hiscareer was spent explaining the first portion of that remark; the remainder was devoted toarticulating how society and history have limited our choices without removing thementirely.Although Sartre insists that being-for-others is as fundamental as the in-itself and thefor-itself, it is clearly dependent on them ontologically. In one of the most famouspassages of
Being and Nothingness, he offers his ‘proof for the existence of other mindsin the form of an eidetic reduction of shame-consciousness. After criticizing the adequacyof traditional arguments from analogy to account for the certainty with which we believein the existence of other minds, he performs an ‘imaginative reconstruction’ of anexample to reveal how such certainty figures essentially in our experience of shame.He imagines someone looking through a keyhole at a couple. Like all Sartreanconsciousness, the couple’s consciousnesses are objectifying one another in a reciprocalgaze. The voyeur is a ‘pure’ consciousness, seeing but unseen, objectifying butunobjectified, whereas they are in a mutual relation of looking/looked at, unaware of thethird party. Suddenly, the interloper hears a noise from behind. In one and the samereaction of shame, one experiences the
other as subject and oneself objectified. In otherwords, one’s experience of shame is analysable into the condition of its possibility,namely, one’s embodiedness-as-perceived by another consciousness. One cannot beobjectified except by another subject, nor is it possible to feel shame except as anembodied being. Even if the noise turns out to have been a false alarm, the mere rustlingof the curtains, for example, the agent has had an immediate experience of another
assubject; it is written in the blush on his/her face. This ‘proof of other minds isexperiential. Rather than the probability of some weak analogy, it yields the certainty ofthe
Wesensschau.After establishing the existence of other minds, albeit in a general, ‘pre-numerical’manner that renders my being for-others the precondition of my being objectified by anysubject in particular (see [3.2], 280–1), Sartre directs his ontological investigation to eachof the conditions for that experience, namely, the body and the other subject.There are three dimensions to bodily being-in-the-world, namely, the body as for-itself,as for-others, and as what Sartre calls the way I ‘exist for myself as a body known by theOther’ ([3.2], 351). The absurdities of the mind-body problem, Sartre believes, stem fromfailure to respect these ontological levels regarding the body and in particular frombeginning our analysis with the body-for-others. The latter approach sees body as a thingamong things and hence as externally related to consciousness and to other bodies. Sartrebegins, on the contrary, with body as being-for-itself, that is, as my way of being-in-theworld.As such, body is ‘lived’ (pre-reflectively) and not ‘known’ (reflectively), it is theabsolute centre of instrumentality that I am, rather than an instrument that I employ, andit is at once my point of view and my point of departure for acting in the world. HenceSartre can claim that ‘being-for-itself must be wholly body and it must be whollyconsciousness; it can not be
united with a body’ ([3.2], 305). Sartre’s peculiar kind of‘materialism’ depends on defending a body that is likewise wholly intentional, that is,that is not simply externally related to the projects by which an agent is individuated.Accordingly, body is integral to the existential ‘situation’ and is the vehicle by whichother ‘necessary contingencies’ of our situation such as our race, our class and our verypast figure in the mix. In other words, body as being-for-itself is the basic form of ourfacticity.Once we have phenomenologically described our way of ‘existing’ our body, there isno temptation to misread the body-for-others as a thing among things. The latter nowappears as the Other’s
flesh, a term elaborated by Merleau-Ponty and designating forSartre ‘the pure contingency of [the Other’s] presence’ ([3.2], 343). What he calls ‘thepure intuition of the flesh’ is especially evident in the Other’s face (aclaim that invitescomparison with that of Levinas regarding the primacy of the Other and the ethicalsignificance of the face in this revelation). The body is thus revealed as a ‘synthetictotality of
life and
action’ ([3.2], 346, emphasis his).The third ontological dimension of the body, for Sartre, is ‘my body as known by theOther’. This denotes that real but uncontrollable aspect of our being-in-the-world beforeothers—the poet’s ‘as others see us’. If shame-consciousness reveals the existence ofother subjects, affective structures such as shyness indicate a vivid awareness of my bodynot as it is for me but as it is ‘for the Other’. Significantly, Sartre insists that languageshows us abstractly the principal structures of our body-for-others. We shall observe himsubsequently locate language among the ‘practico-inert’. This relation between languageand body-for-others is a suggestive dimension of Sartre’s ontology yet to be fullyexplored.The social dimension of Sartre’s vintage existentialism elaborates our being-for-othersas well as the facticity of our being-in-situation. His famous analysis of our basicrelations to each other as an attempt to ‘assimilate the Other’s freedom’ through sadisticor masochistic manoeuvres scandalized the public and contributed to his reputation forpessimism in the late 1940s. This was reinforced by the well-known line from his play
NoExit (1944), that ‘Hell is other people’
(l’enfer, c’est les autres).Although he later contextualized these remarks, along with the passages in
Being andNothingness on which they form a gloss, as referring to interpersonal relations ‘in analienated society’ such as ours, the source of the difficulty and the obstacle to a moresatisfactory social theory is ontological, not historical: his looking/looked-at model forinterpersonal relations. Until this is surpassed in the
Critique of Dialectical Reason,Sartre can offer us at best a theory of the other writ large, but not a social philosophyproperly speaking.
EthicsIt is now common to divide Sartre’s ethical thought into three phases: the ethics ofauthenticity of his vintage existentialist years, the dialectical ethics that he began toformulate in the 1950s and 1960s, and the ‘ethic of the we’ that he was fashioning withBenny Levy toward the end of his life. Since the first is his best known and most fullyarticulated theory, we shall concentrate on the ethics of authenticity.If there is any existentialist ‘virtue’, it has been remarked, it is authenticity. The basisfor this concept is appropriately ontological: ‘man is free because he is not a self but apresence-to-self’ ([3.2], 440). In other words, human reality is a ‘being of distances’—whatever it is, it is in the manner of not-being that property, that is, as being other
thanthat.So the male homosexual’s friend who urges him to ‘come out’ and admit what he is,in Sartre’s example, is really asking him to be inauthentic, to be a homosexual ‘the way astone is a stone’, that is, in the manner of the self-identity of being-in-itself. But, ofcourse, that is precisely what he cannot do—since, as conscious, he is ‘in situation’ as ahomosexual. He is homosexual, French, courageous, or whatever, in the manner oftranscending that facticity. Still, it is
that facticity which he transcends, ‘nihilates’,‘others’. The ‘moral’ challenge, if that word is appropriate, is to live that tension fromday to day. One can no more resign oneself to complete identity as a homosexual than thereformed gambler or alcoholic can rest secure in his or her ‘sobriety’ after years ofsuccess. What others see as pessimism Sartre proclaims as hope: we are not condemnedby our upbringing, our characters or our past behaviour; we are freed from determinismsof every kind; we can always make something out of what we have been made into.Perhaps Sartre’s best description of ‘authenticity’ published in his lifetime is found in
Anti-Semite and Jew (1946): ‘Authenticity consists in having a true and lucidconsciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks it involves, inaccepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate’ ([3.1], 90). Whatemerges from existentialism in general and from Sartre in particular is authenticity as anethical
style. Its elements are: first, a heightened awareness of
facticity and
possibility,that is, of the existential situation; second, the exercise of creative
choice of self withinthis situation; and finally,
owning or appropriating the consequences of this choice, thatis, of the altered situation, the altered self. As he remarks in his posthumously published
Notebooks for an Ethics (1992), ‘It is this double, simultaneous aspect of the humanproject, gratuitous at its core and consecrated by a reflective reprise, that makes it into
authentic existence’ ([3.26], 481). This is not
amor fati. Simply to resign oneself to one’sfacticity is a lie, for it denies that other dimension of the existential situation,transcendence or consciousness, which must sustain the resignation and thereby leaverebellion a constant possibility. Rather, authenticity is the challenge to ‘have the courageto go to the limits of ourselves in both directions at once’ ([3.32], 599). This is the moralSartre draws from the biography of his ‘hero’ of authenticity, Jean Genet.The ambiguity of ‘situation’, its indeterminate mélange of facticity and transcendence,reflects the now-self-coincidence of human reality. It makes ontologically possible ‘badfaith’, the best known of Sartrean moral categories. There are two basic forms of badfaith, depending on whether the individual flees the anguish of his or her freedompossibilityfor identification with facticity (for example, the alcoholic who is ‘cured’ onceand for all) or denies the force of circumstances to float in the realm of pure possibility(like James Thurber’s Walter Mitty). Each is a kind of ‘lie to oneself, which, of course, isimpossible unless one introduces another kind of otherness or inner distance into humanreality, namely, one that affects consciousness itself.Sartre discovers a twofold duality in the human way of being: ontological (presence-toself)and psychological (levels of consciousness). The former accounts for the othernessthat infects our very being; the latter divides our awareness such that we can be consciouswithout ‘knowing’ it. The former constitutes the split; the latter renders possible the selfdeception.In
Being and Nothingness, he speaks of ‘pre-reflective’ and ‘reflective’consciousness. The former is our immediate experience of the other, our being-in-theworld.It is
ekstatic and pre-personal in the sense that it is not closed in on itself but is‘already in the world’ when reflection intervenes. With reflection comes the self (asquasi-object of reflection), the concepts of ‘knowledge’ as distinct from the notions of‘understanding’, which are rooted in the pre-reflective, and the objects of deliberation towhich one turns when ‘making up one’s mind’.Significantly, the pre-reflective enjoys both an epistemic and an ontological primacy. Itis the level of ‘fundamental project’ that orients our reflective moments as well as thelocus of that comprehension which accompanies every conscious act. In fact, prereflectivecomprehension functions in Sartre’s thought in a manner not unlike Freud’s‘unconscious’, to which Sartre was notoriously opposed. The chief and crucial differenceis that appeal to the pre-reflective enhances rather than diminishes responsibility forSartre. The extreme responsibility to which Sartre holds us in his polemical writings is anapplication of this far-reaching concept of pre-reflective comprehension: we allunderstand what we are about, even if we do not reflectively know it. Awareness andresponsibility are coextensive.This virtual identification of consciousness and responsibility will strike many ashyperbolic, given the traditional conditions for moral responsibility, namely, some degreeof control in addition to an element of knowledge. In the brief compass of a sub-section,it is impossible to pursue this at length, but it should be noted that Sartre is concernedwith ‘responsibility’ in the sense of being the ‘incontestable author of an event or of anobject’ ([3.2], 553). What we might call
noetic responsibility, that is, our appropriation ofthe meanings that constitute ‘our world’, is the ground of the other forms of responsibilitythat Sartre acknowledges. And here it does not seem incredible to claim that awarenessand responsibility are extentionally equivalent. Sartre confirms this interpretation whenhe occasionally responds as a trump card: ‘Well, he or she could always commit suicide.’The point is that, if they did not do so, they have ‘chosen’ in the existential sense the‘world’ in which they live.Fundamental ‘choice’ or project is both the individuating feature of existentialontology, the factor that distinguishes consciousnesses among themselves, and thetotalizing aspect of human reality that renders it thoroughly responsible for its situation.Problematic as the concept is—Sartre once likened it to what psychologists mean by‘selective attention’ (see [3.2], 462)—it is consistent with his claim that being-in-itselfcannot act upon consciousness, that the for-itself is a ‘pure spontaneous upsurge’, andthat consciousness is what makes motives motivate. Some have compared basic choice toR.M.Hare’s ‘decisions of principle’ in that both are prior to the principles to which oneappeals in settling arguments. As Sartre puts it, when one pauses to decide, the ‘chips are[already] down’ ([3.2], 451). Fundamental choice is constitutive, not selective. It iscoterminous with pre-reflective consciousness. It is a ‘choice’ which we ‘are/were’, toparaphrase a barbarism that Sartre introduces to express the transitivity and harshfacticity of lived time.Because consciousness, choice, freedom, responsibility are roughly extentionallyequivalent terms in what Iris Murdoch called Sartre’s ‘great inexact equations’, thechallenge to authenticity and the consequences of inauthenticity are all-encompassing.There is a
‘Weltanschauung of bad faith’, for example; it constitutes a manner of beingin-the-world ([3.2], 68).In a set of unpublished manuscripts for lectures in the 1960s, Sartre begins to elaborateanother, dialectical ethic. This is more socially minded than his characteristicallyindividualist stance of twenty years earlier. It builds on his concepts of situation and theexemplarity of moral choices as well as the thesis that no one can be free if anyone isenslaved—themes addressed briefly in his earlier works. His ontological categories arethose of the
Critique of Dialectical Reason and his discussions, for the most part inchoateand sketchy, are phenomenological descriptions of moral experience, especially thefollowing of moral norms and their violation in moments of moral crisis and creativity.The ideal is no longer the ‘authentic’ individual but ‘integral man’, understood
grossomodo as the person who has entered into relations of positive reciprocity with otherswhose basic animal and human needs have likewise been met such that they are liberatedfrom the alienating tyranny of material scarcity and the violence it engenders. These arenecessarily vague notions, Sartre admits, because they gain their precision from thatwhich they oppose, namely, what he calls ‘sub-man’ or the oppressed and oppressingindividuals of contemporary society.The most that can be said of integral man in thepresent state of our social existence is that he or she is made possible by the continuousrefusal to live as sub-man. Although Sartre cites the colonist-native relationship toexemplify the notion of sub-humanity, he has always considered this an instance of moregeneral relations of oppressive practice and structural exploitation that characterizebourgeois society.Clearly, Sartre was dissatisfied with this second attempt and so in his last yearsundertook a third ethic in discussion with Benny Levy. Characterized by Sartre as an‘ethics of the WE’, this third version remains buried in the tape-recordings in Lévy’spossession. From Sartre’s somewhat exaggerated accounts, we learn that this product of a
livre à deux was to leave uncriticized not a single major thesis of his earlier philosophy.As we noted earlier, the published interviews indicate that this is not the case, thoughthey do reveal the revival of some more ‘positive’ theses from earlier works such as
Notebooks for an Ethics. In any case, these tapes, if they are ever published, will almostcertainly be chiefly of biographical value and are not likely to warrant our rejecting thesystematic thought of Sartre at his prime.
Existential psychoanalysisAlthough it has ‘not yet found its Freud’ ([3.2], 575), this approach to understanding thefundamental project of an agent is followed in increasing detail in Sartre’s ‘biographies’of Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert as well as in his Nobel-Prize-winning autobiography,
The Words.The method is an application of the ontology of
Being and Nothingness, although itdoes not rely on the latter’s discredited social theory. It assumes that human reality is atotalization, not a totality, and that this ongoing unity is forged by the existential project.If human reality is the ‘useless passion’ to coincide consciously with itself, to be in-itselffor-itself, that is, if each of us exemplifies the famous futile desire to be God, thenpsychoanalysis exercises an hermeneutic on the signs of an individual’s life that indicateits distinctive manner of living this futile desire—whether authentically, for example, orinauthentically. Because pre-reflective consciousness has replaced the Freudianunconscious, Sartre considers it possible in principle to understand an individualcompletely, that is, to uncover his or her self-defining project in complete transparency.Like so many of the claims enunciated at the height of existentialist enthusiasm, the idealof total transparency is qualified in Sartre’s later works, where force of circumstance(‘what we have been made into’) modifies absolute freedom and ideology cloudsindividual awareness. But he remained true to theRousseauian concept of personal andsocial transparency, at least as an ideal.The details of Sartre’s love-hate relationship with Freud have yet to be recounted. Onthe one hand, he rejected the Freudian concept of the unconscious as being deterministic,and criticized Freud’s ‘censor’ for being in bad faith (it both knows and does not knowwhat is acceptable to consciousness). And yet he employs the concept of pre-reflectiveconsciousness in a manner that imitates Freudian unconscious in important ways andallows the analyst to reveal to the analys-and meanings which he or she had hitherto notknown (in a reflective sense). Preparing the never-to-be-filmed script for a John Houstonmovie, later published as
The Freud Scenario, forced Sartre to rethink his ideas about theunconscious. He acknowledged finding Lacan’s theory of the unconscious structured as alanguage less troublesome but did not go so far as to embrace the idea. As always, theconcept of individual freedom-responsibility remained a non-negotiable.Sartre’s most ambitious exercise in existential psychoanalysis and most thorough useof the progressive-regressive method is his massive study of the life and work of GustaveFlaubert,
The Family Idiot (1971–2). Numbering over three thousand pages in theoriginal, it constitutes a kind of
summa of Sartre’s intellectual endeavours, embracingeverything from ontology and psychoanalysis to literary and social criticism. It addressesthe question, ‘What at this point in time, can we know about a human being?’ ([3.15],French, vol. 1, p. ix). A synthesis of existential psychoanalysis and historical materialism,the progressive -regressive method seeks to uncover Flaubert’s basic project, namely, his‘choice’ of the unreal-imaginary through adopting the ‘neurotic’ lifestyle that bourgeoissociety thrust upon any would-be artist of Flaubert’s generation. As becomes usual in thesecond phase of Sartre’s career, biography has broadened into social critique. What isboth banal and profound in Sartre’s undertaking is his attempt to comprehend Flaubert’slife and times through the dialectical relationship between his progressive‘personalization’ and the production and public reception of
Madame Bovary. It is acommonplace to study the ‘life and times’ of a historical figure in mutual clarification.But there is something boldly ‘rationalistic’ about Sartre’s attempt to understand whyFlaubert had to write
Bovary and how he could finally claim, ‘I am Madame Bovary.’
Philosophy and literatureNo thinker in our century more adequately brokers the marriage of these two disciplinesthan Sartre. His novels, short stories and plays gave him an audience denied to mostphilosophers, and his criticism, gathered with occasional pieces in the ten volumes of
Situations, established him as a major voice in that domain. This was furthered by thejournal of opinion and criticism,
Les Temps modernes, which he founded at the end of thewar. In a collection of articles published first in that journal and later as a book,
What isLiterature? (1947), Sartre defends his concept of ‘committed literature’
(littératureengagée). Given his ontological theses of the fundamental project and the possibility ofbad faith, Sartre examines literary art in terms of the authenticity and inauthenticity, notmerely of its content (which would smell of socialist critiques) but of its very form.He distinguishes prose from what he calls generically ‘poetry’ and insists that the lattercannot be committed. Poetry employs its ‘analogues’ (words, musical sounds, paintedsurfaces and the like) as ends in themselves. They do not point beyond themselves to ourbeing-in-the-world but undertake to short-circuit that outward movement by rendering theaesthetic object present-absent, that is, imaginatively present, for its own sake. We mightsay that, for Sartre, where prose looks beyond the pointed finger to the object indicated,‘poetry’ focuses on the fingertip. If not precisely escapist, such art avoids the challengesof a period of crisis. Sartre believes that the postwar years form such a period. Hence hisrecommendation that artists should address social concerns and do so in a manner that‘gives the bourgeoisie a bad conscience’. Once he appropriates this advice himself,ironically about the time the Nobel Committee is preparing to award him the prize forliterature, he all but abandons imaginative literature except for an adaptation ofEuripides’
The Trojan Women (1965) and his ‘novel that is true’ about Flaubert. And yetthis very move to committed literature reveals that the distinction between poetry andprose is functional rather than substantive in the final analysis and that imaginative‘derealization’ can constitute a form of social action even in genres that Sartre seemed tohave dismissed as ‘poetic’. In fact his early (1948) praise of black poetry in French as‘the only great revolutionary poetry of our time’ ([3.36], vol. 3, p. 233) indicates that hehad understood his original distinction in a functional manner from the start.At this point we should summarize the elements of Sartre’s aesthetic theory. Itsfoundation is the theory of imaging consciousness developed in
Psychology ofImagination. It applies intentionality to the constitution of an ‘aesthetic object’ for whichthe physical artefact serves as
analogon. Both cognitive and affective ‘intentions’conspire to ‘presentify’, that is, to render imaginatively present-absent the object in anaesthetic mode. In the case of non-figurative art, the artefact serves as analogon for itself.Words or their grammatical and syntactical configuration form the analogue of theliterary object, a ‘world’ with its proper space and time that is a ‘derealization’ of our realworld of
praxis. Given both the paradigmatic nature of imaging consciousness for Sartreand the extensional equivalence of ‘consciousness’ and ‘freedom’, it is not surprising tofind him discussing the work of art as an ‘invitation from one freedom to another’ andinterpreting artistic creativity as an act of generosity. In fact, invitation-response replacescommand-obedience as the model for ideal social relations in Sartre’s ‘city of ends’, aswe shall now see.
Social philosophyIn his ‘biography’ of Jean Genet, Sartre avows: ‘For a long time we believed in the socialatomism bequeathed to us by the eighteenth century…. The truth is that “human reality”“is-in-society” as it “is-in-the-world”; it is neither a nature nor a state; it is made’ ([3.32],590). As we noted earlier, the possibility of developing an adequate social theory washampered by Sartre’s looking/looked-at model of interpersonal relations. At best, thisontology warranted the methodological individualism that his erstwhile friend RaymondAron ascribed to him in the social realm. But by subsuming his philosophy ofconsciousness into one of praxis, Sartre increases qualitatively the social potential of histhought. Whereas there is no such thing as a plural look, except as a merely psychologicalexperience (a basic claim of methodological individualists), there is a ‘syntheticenrichment’ of my action when it is incorporated into that of a group. ‘We’ can do manythings that remain impossible for me alone.Sartre’s major contribution to social philosophy is made at the level of social ontology,the theory of individual and group identity and action. It takes the form of two concepts,the
practico-inert and the
mediating third. But to explain each we must first elucidate thenotion of
praxis, which is the pivot on which his social theory turns.P
raxis denotes purposive human activity in its cultural environment. It is distinct fromhuman action
sans phrase in being historical; its ‘world’ is a horizon of meanings that arealready ‘there’, yet liable to interpretation in light of the ongoing project. But whereas theHusserlian discourse of intentions, meanings and noetic responsibility dominated thelandscape of
Being and Nothingness, Sartre displays a marked preference for thelanguage of historical materialism in the
Critique of Dialectical Reason. The basic formof praxis is
labour as a response to material need. This original relationship overcomeswhatever lingering idealism Sartre’s theory may have been liable to and generates adialectic of negation, negation of negation, and transcendence
(dépassement) adaptedfrom the Hegelio-Marxist tradition. If the early Sartre left the impression that one couldsimply change oneself rather than change the world, since the terms were correlative inany case, such ‘Stoic’ freedom is strongly opposed by the later Sartre, and the facticalcomponent of one’s situation is finally given its due.Functional heir to being-in-itself, the ‘practico-inert’ refers to the facticity of our socialsituation in its otherness, especially the material dimension of our cultural environment,as well as to those sedimented
past praxes that return to haunt us. If the act of speaking isan instance of
praxis, language is a form of the practico-inert. This is the category of‘counterfinality’ whereby intended ends entail unintended consequences. Sartre’s classicexample is the deforestation by Chinese peasants that resulted in the very erosion fromfloods of the land they hoped to cultivate. Similarly, he employs this concept in hisaccount of the impoverishment of the Spanish state through inflation caused by itshoarding of gold from its newly exploited American mines. Practicoinert ‘mediation’ isalienating, it steals one’s activity the way the ‘look’ of the Other robs one of one’sfreedom in
Being and Nothingness. And when qualified by material scarcity, practicoinertmediation renders human relations violent. Sartre describes violence as ‘interiorizedscarcity’. The fact that there is not enough of the goods of the world to go around colourshuman history as a tale of violence and terror. Towards the end of his life, Sartre admittedto Benny Levy that he had never reconciled these fundamental features of social life,fraternity and violence. Both are essential to his social thought.‘Fraternity’ is Sartre’s term for the mutuality and positive reciprocity that constitute hissocial ideal and which are achieved, albeit temporarily, in the spontaneously formedaction group. Most relations are ‘serial’ because they are mediated by the practico-inert.Most of the individuals who populate our world, from the television-viewing public to thepeople waiting for the same bus, are rendered serial by the ‘false’ or ‘external’ unityimposed on them by such collective objects as a television announcer or an expected bus.They are related among themselves as ‘other’ to ‘other’—as competitors for scarce space,for example, or as fashioning their opinions as the newscaster dictates. Sartre notes thatsuch ‘serial impotence’ is cultivated by dictators who wish to maintain an illusion ofpower on the part of their subjects in the midst of the latter’s profound malleability.In the ‘apocalyptic’ moment when people realize in a practical manner through acommon project that they are ‘the same’, not ‘other’, and that each is performing the taskwhich the other would do were he or she required to do so at this point, the ‘We’ emergesin a fusing group. Sartre’s idealized example of such a genesis is the famous storming ofthe Bastille. Under threat from an external source, the crowd changes from serialdispersion to practical unity, from a mob to a group. By a performative utterance thateffects what it describes, the cry ‘We are a hundred strong!’ in Sartre’s imaginativereconstruction of the event creates a new entity: the fused group. The
mediating Third isthe ontological vehicle for this transformation. Unlike the objectifying voyeur of
Beingand Nothingness, the third party in group formation performs a mediating, not analienating function. By subordinating purely personal or divisive concerns to generalinterest, he or she emerges as the ‘common individual’. Mediation is exercised no longervia the practico-inert but by means of the
praxes of ‘common’ individuals. Completeorganic integration is impossible, Sartre continues to insist; some otherness alwaysremains. But it is ‘discounted’, not fostered. He calls it ‘free alterity’ of the group in
praxis as opposed to the serial otherness of the impotent collective.A threefold primacy of
praxis emerges in Sartre’s later thought. At the ground is an
ontological primacy. Even at the highest moment of social integration, the group-infusion,it is organic
praxes who create and sustain the group. The entire ‘inner life’ of thegroup is a revolving circle of practical relations whereby each
praxis ‘interiorizes’ themultiplicity of the rest. (Any member could have cried ‘We are a hundred strong!’) Eventhe practico-inert is not an autonomous force that renders us powerless. It is, after all,
practico-inert; the
praxes that it absorbs or deflects are still operative, though in alienatedfashion. Sartre explicitly adopts the Marxist thesis that ‘there are only individuals andreal relations among them’ ([3.35], 76). If Sartre’s early work was a relentless rejectionof idealism, his later, social theory is intent on avoiding organicism. The ontologicalprimacy of
praxis is his chief weapon in that campaign.On this original primacy Sartre founds an
epistemological and an
ethical primacy aswell. The epistemological primacy of
praxis stems from the fact that comprehension isthe consciousness of
praxis and that we can comprehend the other’s comprehensionthrough the progressive-regressive method. This is an elaboration of the
Verstehendesociology of Dilthey, Weber and others, placed in service of an historical materialistconception of social change. But unlike Marxist ‘economism’, the comprehension Sartreseeks comes to rest in the
praxisproject of the organic individual. Sartre summarized thedifference in a memorable line: ‘Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual…. But not everypetit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry’ ([3.35], 56).Because individual
praxis sustains the most impersonal economic laws, like the ‘ironlaw of wages’, and the most ‘necessary’ practicoinert processes, such as the colonialistsystem, one can ascribe existential-moral responsibility to the serialized ‘agents’ whosepassive activity carries them out. In other words, one cannot escape responsibility byappeal to facticity. For Sartre the moralist, the spark of human freedom-responsibility isunquenchable: you can always make something out of what you have been made into.
Philosophy of historyA glance at the posthumously published
War Diaries which Sartre kept during thePhoney War of 1939–40 reveals that his interest in the topic was not the result of his socalledconversion to Marxism after the war. But he does set the matter aside in
Being andNothingness, reserving a lengthy discussion of morality and history for his
Notebooks foran Ethics, again not published in his lifetime. In the
Diaries, his dialogue is primarilywith Raymond Aron, whose two volumes on the philosophy of history had just beenpublished. In criticism of Aron, Sartre enunciates a thesis that will be formative of hisexistential approach to history ever after: the only way to achieve historical
unity is bystudying the lived appropriation of historical events by an individual agent. What is beingsketched at this early stage is the rationale of his existential psychoanalyses of the nextdecades. If history is to be more than the positivist concatenation of facts and dates, itmust come to life in the projects of the historical agent. This is more than psychohistory,to which it exhibits a marked resemblance, because of Sartre’s characteristic moralconcerns as well as the historical materialist dimension which he will introduce after thewar.In the
Notebooks Sartre indicates that an existentialist theory of history will have torespect the paradox of moral responsibility. At this stage the dialogue is with Hegel andthe French Hegelians, Kojève and Hyppolite. The existentialist individual makes an ‘end’to history inconceivable: any totality of which consciousness is part will be a‘detotalized’ totality. Although he speaks of positive reciprocity, the generosity-giftrelationship and good faith in ways that correct the one-sided, pessimistic view ofinterpersonal relations conveyed in
Being and Nothingness, these notes remain in thrall tothe looking/looked-at model of the social. Accordingly, the theory of history is faced withseemingly insurmountable difficulties as it attempts to interrelate the individual and thesocial, morality and history.It is in the two volumes of the
Critique of Dialectical Reason, where the dialogue isnow with Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of his social thought in the latter’s
The Adventures ofDialectic, that Sartre formulates the philosophy of
praxis and its attendant socialontology that enable him to construct a theory of history that accounts for collectiveaction and counterfinalities, recognizes the specificity of the sociohistorical, and reservespride of place for existential-moral responsibility on the part of organic individuals. Sincehis
War Diaries, it has been clear that the root problem for an existentialist theory is therelationship between biography and history. He treats this matter apropos of Joseph Stalinand the Soviet Union in the 1930s in his posthumously published notes for volume 2 ofthe
Critique, but the relation of biography to history receives its most extendedconsideration in
The Family Idiot (especially in volume 3 of the French edition).
SARTRE AND TWENTIETH-CENTURY CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHYAlthough one of the few major twentieth-century philosophers not to be associated withacademe for most of his career, Sartre was professionally trained and remained indialogue with academic philosophy all of his life. Any assessment of his thought shouldaddress his relationship to the leading philosophical movements of his time.
Existential phenomenologyIt was Gabriel Marcel who first called Sartre an ‘existentialist’. By the time of his famouspublic lecture,
Existentialism is a Humanism (1945), his name had become synonymouswith the movement. Indeed, it was in part to separate himself from association withSartrean existentialism that Heidegger denied he was an existentialist and wrote hisgroundbreaking
Letter on Humanism (1947) to explain why. We have noted Sartre’s debtto Husserlian phenomenology throughout this chapter. In
Being and Nothingness hecriticizes Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger at several junctures but clearly has adoptednumerous concepts from each. While it is a gross exaggeration to characterize Sartre’smasterwork as
‘Being and Time translated into French’, the similarities as well as theprofound differences between each thinker are underscored by comparing the two works.As soon as a French translation of Heidegger’s 1930 lecture
The Essence of Truthappeared (1948), Sartre wrote a lengthy response. It was published posthumously as
Truth and Existence (1989).Sartre was a close collaborator with Simone de Beauvoir in the sense that they readeach other’s work prior to publication, and she completed several of the lacunae in hissocial ethic in the mid-1940s with her
The Ethics of Ambiguity. Despite its obviousoriginality, Merleau-Ponty’s
The Phenomenology of Perception shows numerous signs ofSartrean influence, even as it takes Sartre to task for his ‘Cartesianism’. But we noted thatthe
Critique seems to be a response to the trenchant criticism levelled by Merleau-Pontyin his
Adventures of the Dialectic against a Sartrean social philosophy. Sartre’sindebtedness both to Merleau-Ponty and to Kierkegaard is recounted in memorial essayshe penned in honour of each (‘Merleau-Ponty Alive’ (1961) and ‘Kierkegaard: TheSingular Universal’ (1966)).The ‘existential turn’ that Husserl’s phenomenological movement took, if initiated byHeidegger, was completed by Sartre. To the extent that such phenomenology grewincreasingly anthropological and ethical, it became associated with its Frenchpractitioners. The phenomenological method was enriched and its limitations as anapproach to history were compensated for by the progressive-regressive method. Thislast, as we noted, is a synthesis of existential psychoanalysis and historical materialism.The former places it in direct line with the hermeneutic tradition of interpreting symbolicaction; the latter relates Sartre’s method to more ‘scientific’ (in the Hegelian sense)approaches to historical intelligibility.
MarxismSartre’s ‘Marxism’ was always adjectival to his existentialism. In the late 1940s, headvised the workers to support the Communist Party
faute de mieux, while refusing tojoin it himself. In
Search for a Method, he declares Marxism ‘the philosophy of ourtimes’ and even makes it synonymous with ‘knowledge’
(savoir). But he described the
Critique of Dialectical Reason, to which
Search served as a kind of preface, as an ‘anticommunistbook’ and in his last years explicitly denied he was a Marxist. Still, historicalmaterialism (the Marxist theory of history) is operative in
The Family Idiot as well as inhis other writings after the late 1950s.Sartre joins that group of Marxists known as ‘revisionists’ in that they question orreject totally the Marxist dialectic of nature (DIAMAT) and emphasize the humanisticdimension of Marx’s writings. In
Search for a Method, Sartre announces that his missionin this regard is ‘to conquer man within Marxism’ ([3.35], 83). It is because of theirfailure to respect the moral dimension of human action, that Sartre abandoned evenfellow-travelling in favour of
les maos after the events in Paris of 1968. This odyssey isrecounted in his discussion with two members of that group, published as
On a raison dese révolter (1974).
StructuralismThe structuralist movement in France as exemplified by the work of Althusser, Lacan,Lévi-Strauss, Barthes and others in the 1960s is commonly credited with having replacedexistentialism as the reigning Parisian ‘philosophy’. This is true to a large extent, thoughthat school of thought was subsequently eclipsed by poststructuralist writers. Sartreoccasionally criticized the structuralists for ignoring history in general and human agencyin particular—essential existentialist concerns. But even a cursory reading of the
Critiqueof Dialectical Reason will reveal the important role that Sartre reserves for structuralfactors in his account. The ‘formal conditions’ revealed by the regressive movement ofthe progressive-regressive method are arguably structural. In fact, the major portion ofvolume 1 of the
Critique is synchronic and structural. Whether it is thereby ‘structuralist’depends on the meaning of the term. Clearly, Sartre opposed it as a system because of itsinadequacy to existential experience. And its binary relations, he would accept only ascomplementing the dialectical, totalizing ‘Reason’ that he was elucidating in the
Critique.The ontological locus of structural relations in his social ontology is the practico-inert.Recall that language as such, for him, is practicoinert. So too is analytical, as distinctfrom dialectical, reason. Sartre speaks of the practico-inert and hence of structure as nonhistoricaland even ‘anti-dialectical’. But this must be taken in the context of thetotalizing activity
of praxis, which renders these structures historically relevant. The‘platonizing’ tendencies of structuralist thought are tempered by Sartre’s ‘dialecticalnominalism’, an approach to ontology and epistemology that respects the qualitativedifference between individual and collective phenomena as well as the irreducibility ofthe latter to the former, while insisting on the threefold primacy of free organic praxis.Dialectical nominalism is a middle ground between holism and individualism in themethodology of the social sciences.
PostmodernismFoucault once referred to Sartre as the last of the nineteenth-century philosophers. It wasnot only his interest in History with a Hegelian ‘H’ and his seeming fixation on Flaubertthat generated this remark. It was equally Sartre’s philosophy of the subject, of freedomand of moral indignation that lay behind Foucault’s words. And yet one can find severalstrikingly ‘postmodern’ theses in Sartre’s work. These would make valuablecontributions to the current philosophical conversationand deserve closer scrutiny bycontemporary thinkers. By way of conclusion let us consider three.Postmodern thinking is noted for its ‘evacuation of the subject’ from current discourse.In so far as the ‘subject’ in question is the Cartesian
res cogitans, Sartre never held thatposition. His concept of ‘presence to self instead of a substantial self or ego, with itsattendant ‘circuit of selfness’ rather than an outer spatio-temporal plane, leaves Sartrefree to consider the fluidity of subjectivist discourse and speak of the self as anachievement rather than an origin. The constitution of a moral ‘self, to which Foucaultdevoted his last years, could have been the topic of a Sartrean treatise.There is an aesthetic strain in Sartre’s thought, owing to the paradigmatic role that heaccords imaging consciousness. Postmodern critics from Lyotard to Foucault have showna marked preference for aesthetic categories as well, even to the point of advocating theNietzschean aestheticist injunction to ‘make one’s life a work of art’. Not that Sartreshould ever be accused of aestheticism. But his reading of history is certainly ‘poetic’,and his existential biographies as ‘novels that are true’ suggest a fruitful field of futureinquiry and dialogue with postmodern writers.The Nietzschean inspiration of Sartre’s thought has not received the attention itdeserves, especially since the ‘postmodern’ Nietzsche has emerged. Sartre’s early essay‘The Legend of Truth’, written in 1929, is profoundly Nietzschean in content and tone.The general problem of contingency and chance, which Foucault wished to reintroduceinto postmodern historiography, was an abiding theme of Sartre’s existentialist thought. Itsurfaces again in the posthumous
Notebooks for an Ethics. The career of Nietzscheaninterpretation forms another link between Sartre and postmodern thinkers.And yet it would be excessive to refer to Sartre as a ‘postmodern’. He was a thinker of
unities, not of fragments. His emphasis on intentional consciousness and later ontotalizing
praxis was meant to counter the historical pluralism of Raymond Aron as wellas the brute facts of the positivists. And his corresponding commitments aimed ateffecting socio-economic changes that would make it possible for ‘freedoms’ torecognize one another. He shared the neo-Stoic belief of postmoderns that one should tryto maximize freedom even though there is no hope of complete emancipation. But hepersevered in the hope that such a ‘city of ends’ might be possible and urged people towork to realize its advent. Again, we encounter the integral role of the imagination ineffecting a meaning-direction
(sens) to history.If Sartre is to be remembered as an important and influential philosopher of thetwentieth century, it will be as much for the consistency of his commitment to individualfreedom as for the insights of his phenomenological descriptions and the force of hiscategories (bad faith, authenticity, practico-inert, and the like). When he died, the presslikened him to Voltaire and noted that we had lost the conscience of our age. It is asmoralist, philosopher of freedom and philosopher of the imagination that he made hismost memorable contributions. Despite the Teutonic length of his sentences, especially inthe later works, he was a quintessential Gallic philosopher.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHYReferences to the original French texts are given below only in cases where thetranslations in the text of the chapter are by the author and not from the publishedversions.
Translations3.1
Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. G.J.Becker, New York: Schocken, 1948.3.2
Being and Nothingness, trans. H.E.Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.3.3
Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. J.Mathews, New York: William Morrow,1974.3.4 ‘Cartesian Freedom’, in [3.18], 180–97.3.5
The Communists and Peace with
A Reply to Claude Lefort, trans. M.H. Fletcher andP.R.Berk respectively, New York: Braziller, 1968.3.6
The Condemned of Altona, trans. S. and G.Leeson, New York: Random House,Vintage Books, 1961.3.7 ‘Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self’, in N.Lawrence and D. O’Connor(eds),
Readings in Existential Phenomenology, Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1967.3.8
Critique of Dialectical Reason, 2 vols: vol. 1
Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans.A.Sheridan-Smith, London: NLB, 1976; vol 2,
The Intelligibility of History, trans.Q.Hoare, London: Verso, 1991. An emended edition of vol.1 was produced byA.Elkam-Sartre,
Critique de la raison dialectique précédé de
Questions de méthode,vol. 1,
Théorie des ensembles pratiques, Paris: Gallimard, 1985.3.9
The Devil and the Good Lord, trans. K.Black, New York: Random House, VintageBooks, 1960.3.10
Ecrits de Jeunesse, ed. M.Contat and M.Rybalka, Paris: Gallimard, 1990.3.11
The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, trans. B.Frechtman, New York: PhilosophicalLibrary, 1948.3.12
Entretiens sur la politique, with D.Rousset and G.Rosenthal, Paris: Gallimard, 1949.3.13 ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, in
Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre,selected and intro. W.Kaufmann, Cleveland: World Publishing, Meridian Books, 1956.3.14 ‘Hope, Now…Sartre’s Last Interview’,
Dissent, 27 (1980):397–422.3.15
L’Idiot de la famille, 3 vols, Paris: Gallimard, 1971–2, vol. 3 revised edn, 1988; vols1 and 2 trans. C.Cosman as
The Family Idiot, 4 vols, Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1981–91.3.16 ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’,
Journal of theBritish Society for Phenomenology, 1:2 (1970):4–5.3.17 ‘Introducing
Les Temps modernes, in [3.41], 247–67.3.18
Life/Situations: Essays Written and Spoken, trans. P.Auster and L.Davis, New York:Pantheon, 1977.3.19
Literary and Philosophical Essays, trans. A.Michelson, New York: Crowell-Collier,Collier Books, 1962.3.20 ‘A Long, Bitter, Sweet Madness’,
Encounter, 22 (1964):61–3.3.21
Marxisme et existentialisme: Controverse sur la dialectique, with R.Garaudy,J.Hyppolite, J.P.Vigier, and J.Orcel, Paris: Plon, 1962.3.22 ‘Materialism and Revolution’, in [3.18], pp. 198–256.3.23 ‘Merleau-Ponty’, in [3.36], vol. 4, pp. 189–287.3.24
Nausea, trans. L.Alexander, New York: New Directions, 1959.3.25
‘No Exit’ and Three Other Plays, trans. L.Abel, New York: Random House, VintageBooks, 1955.3.26
Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. D.Pellauer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1992.3.27
Oeuvres Romanesques, ed. M.Contat and M.Rybalka with G.Idt and G. H.Bauer,Paris: Gallimard, 1981.3.28
On a raison de se révolter, with P.Gavi and P.Victor, Paris: Gallimard, 1974.3.29
On Genocide, intro. A.Elkaïm-Sartre, Boston: Beacon, 1968.3.30
The Psychology of Imagination, trans. B.Frechtman, New York: Washington SquarePress, 1966;
L’Imaginaire, Paris: Gallimard, 1940.3.31 ‘The Responsibility of the Writer’, in
Reflections on Our Age, intro. D. Hardiman,New York: Columbia University Press, 1949.3.32
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr, trans. B.Frechtman, New York: Braziller, 1963.3.33
Sartre on Theater, ed. M.Contat and M.Rybalka, trans. F.Jellinek, New York:Pantheon, 1976.3.34
Sartre, un film, produced by A.Astruc and M.Contat, Paris: Gallimard, 1977.3.35
Search for a Method, trans. H.E.Barnes, New York: Random House, Vintage Books,1968.3.36
Situations, 10 vols, Paris: Gallimard, 1947–6.3.37
The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. F.Williams and R.Kirkpatrick, New York:Noonday Press, 1957.3.38
Truth and Existence, trans. A.van den Hoven, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1992.3.39 ‘L’Universel singulier’, in [3.36], vol. 9, pp. 152–90; ‘Kierkegaard: The SingularUniversal’, in [3.2], pp. 141–69.3.40
War Crimes in Vietnam, with V.Dedier, Nottingham: The Bertrand Russell PeaceFoundation, 1971.3.41
The War Diaries, trans Q.Hoare, New York: Pantheon, 1984.3.42
What is Literature? and Other Essays, trans. B.Frechtman
et al., intro. S. Ungar,Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988.3.43
The Words, trans. B.Frechtman, New York: Braziller, 1964.3.44 Preface to
The Wretched of the Earth by F.Fanon, trans. C.Farrington, New York:Grove Press, 1968.
Bibliographies3.45 Contat, M. and Rybalka, M.
The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, 2 vols, Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 1974. Updated in
Magazine littéraire, no. 103–4(1975):9–49; and in
Obliques, 18–19 (1979):331–47.3.46 Contat, M. and Rybalka, M.
Sartre: Bibliographie 1980–1992, Paris: CNRS, 1993.3.47 Lapoint, F. and C.
Jean-Paul Sartre and His Critics: An International Bibliography(1938–1980), 2nd edn, rev., Bowling Green: Philosophy Documentation Center, 1981.3.48 Wilcocks, R.
Jean-Paul Sartre: A Bibliography of International Criticism,Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1975.
Criticism3.49 Anderson, T.C.
The Foundation and Structure of Sartrean Ethics, Lawrence:Regents Press of Kansas, 1979.3.50 Aron, R.
History and the Dialectic of Violence, trans. B.Cooper, Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1975.3.51 Aronson, R.
Jean-Paul Sartre, New York: New Left Books, 1980.3.52 Aronson, R.
Sartre’s Second Critique, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.3.53 Aronson, R. and van den Hoven, A. (eds),
Sartre Alive, Detroit: Wayne StateUniversity Press, 1991.3.54 Barnes, H.E.
Sartre, New York: Lippincott, 1973.3.55 Barnes, H.E.
Sartre and Flaubert, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.3.56 Bell, L.A.
Sartre’s Ethics of Authenticity, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press,1989.3.57 Burnier, M.A.
Choice of Action, trans. B.Murchland, New York: Random House,1968.3.58 Busch, T.W.
The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances inSartre’s Philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.3.59 Cannon, B.
Sartre and Psychoanalysis, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991.3.60 Catalano, J.S.
A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’,Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.3.61 Catalano, J.S.
A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Critique of DialecticalReason,’ Volume 1, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.3.62 Caws, P.
Sartre, London: Routledge, 1979.3.63 Collins, D.
Sartre as Biographer, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,1980.3.64 Danto, A.C.
Jean-Paul Sartre, New York: Viking Press, 1975.3.65 de Beauvoir, S.
Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre, trans. P.O’Brian, New York:Pantheon, 1984.3.66 de Beauvoir, S.
Letters to Sartre, trans. and ed. Q.Hoare, New York: Arcade, 1991.3.67 Desan, W.
The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre, Garden City: Doubleday AnchorBooks, 1965.3.68 Detmer, D.
Freedom as Value, La Salle: Open Court, 1986.3.69 Fell, J.
Emotion in the Thought of Sartre, New York: Columbia University Press,1965.3.70 Fell, J.
Heidegger and Sartre: An Essay on Being and Place, New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1979.3.71 Flynn, T.R.
L’Imagination au Pouvoir: The Evolution of Sartre’s Political andSocial Thought’,
Political Theory, 7:2 (1979):175–80.3.72 Flynn, T.R. ‘Mediated Reciprocity and the Genius of the Third’, in [3.83], 345–70.3.73 Flynn, T.R.,
Sartre and Marxist Existentialism: The Test Case of CollectiveResponsibility, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.3.74 Hollier, D.
The Politics of Prose, trans. J.Mehlman, Minneapolis: University ofMinnesota Press, 1986.3.75 Howells, C. (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992.3.76 Jameson, F.
Marxism and Form, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.3.77 Jeanson, F.
Sartre and the Problem of Morality, trans. and intro. R.V.Stone,Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.3.78 McBride, W.L.
Fundamental Change in Law and Society: Hart and Sartre onRevolution , The Hague: Mouton, 1970.3.79 McBride, W.L.
Sartre’s Political Theory, Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1991.3.80 Merleau-Ponty, M.
Adventures of the Dialectic, trans J.Bien, Evanston:Northwestern University Press, 1973.3.81 Murdoch, I.
Sartre, Romantic Rationalist, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953.3.82 Poster, Mark,
Sartre’s Marxism, London: Pluto Press, 1979.3.83 Schilpp, P.A. (ed.)
The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, La Salle: Open Court, 1981.3.84 Silverman, H.J.
Inscriptions: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism, London:Routledge, 1987.3.85 Silverman, H.J. and Elliston, F.A. (eds)
Jean-Paul Sartre: ContemporaryApproaches to his Philosophy, Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1980.3.86 Verstraaten, P.
et al. Sur les écrits posthumes de Sartre, Bruxelles: Editions del’université de Bruxelles, 1987.
Journal issues devoted to Sartre3.87
L’Arc, 30 (1966).3.88
Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 12 (1970).3.89
Magazine Littéraire, 55–6 (1971) and 103–4 (1975).3.90
Obliques, 18–19 (1979) and 24–5 (1981).3.91
Les Temps modernes, 2 vols, nos 531–3 (1990).