Existentialist Ontology and Human Consciousness

William L. McBride

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135631895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Existentialist Ontology and Human Consciousness The majority of the distinguished scholarly articles in this volume focus on Sartre's early philosophical work, which dealt first with imagination and the emotions, then with the critique of Husserl's notion of a transcendental ego, and finally with systematic ontology presented in his best-known book, Being and Nothingness. In addition, since his preoccupation with ontological questions and especially with the meanings of ego, self, and consciousness endured throughout his career, other essays discuss these themes in light of later developments both in Sartre's own thought and in the phenomenological, hermeneutic, and analytic traditions.

Existentialism: Remarks On Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Être et Le Néant*

Introduction

“The following pages deal with the sentiment of absurdity which prevails in our world.” This opening sentence of Albert Camus’ Le Mythe de Sisyphe conveys the climate in which Existentialism orginates. Camus does not belong to the existentialist school, but the basic experience which permeates his thought is also at the root of Existentialism. The time is that of the totalitarian terror: the Nazi regime is at the height of its power; France is occupied by the German armies. The values and standards of western civilization are coordinated and superseded by the reality of the fascist system. Once again, thought is thrown back upon itself by a reality which contradicts all promises and ideas, which refutes rationalism as well as religion, idealism as well as materialism. Once again, thought finds itself in the Cartesian situation and asks for the one certain and evident truth which may make it still possible to live. The question does not aim at any abstract idea but at the individual’s concrete existence: what is the certain and evident experience which can provide the foundation for his life here and now, in this world?

Like Descartes, this philosophy finds the foundation in the self certainty of the Cogito, in the consciousness of the Ego. But whereas for Descartes the self-certainty of the Cogito revealed a rational universe, governed by meaningful laws and mechanisms, the Cogito now is thrown into an “absurd” world in which the brute fact of death and the irretrievable process of Time deny all meaning. The Cartesian subject, conscious of its power, faced an objective world which rewarded calculation, conquest, and domination; now’ the subject itself has become absurd and its world void of purpose and hope. The Cartesian res cogitans was opposed by a res extensa which responded to the former’s knowledge and action; now the subject exists in an iron circle of frustration and failure. The Cartesian world, although held together by its own rationality, made allowance for a God who cannot deceive; now the world is godless in its very essence and leaves no room for any transcendental refuge.

The reconstruction of thought on the ground of absurdity does not lead to irrationalism. This philosophy is no revolt against reason; it does not teach abnegation or the credo quia absurdum. In the universal destruction and disillusion, one thing maintains itself: the relentless clarity and lucidity of the mind which refuses all shortcuts and escapes, the constant awareness that life has to be lived “without appeal” and without protection, Man accepts the challenge and seeks his freedom and happiness in a world where there is no hope, sense, progress, and morrow. This life is nothing but “consciousness and revolt,” and defiance is its only truth. Camus’ Mythe de Sisyphe recaptures the climate of Nietzsche’s philosophy:

“L’homme absurde entrevoit un univers brûlant et glacé, transparent et limité, où rien nlest possible mais tout est donné, passé lequel c’est l’effondrement et le néant.”¹

Thought moves in the night, but it is the night

“du désespoir qui reste lucide, nuit polaire, veille de l’esprit, d’où se lèvera peut-être cette clarté blanche et intacte qui dessine chaque objet dans la lumière de l’intelligence.”²

The experience of the “absurd world” gives rise to a new and extreme rationalism which separates this mode of thought from all fascist idealogy. But the new rationalism defies systematization. Thought is held in abeyance between the “sentiment of absurdity” and its comprehension, between art and philosophy. Here, the ways part: Camus rejects existential philosophy: the latter must of necessity “explain” the inexplicable, rationalize the absurdity and thus falsify its reality. To him, the only adequate expression is living the absurd life, and the artistic creation, which refuses to rationalize (“raisonner le concret”) and which “covers with images that which makes no sense” (“ce qui n’a pas de raison”). Sartre, on the other hand, attempts to develop the new experience into a philosophy of the concrete human existence: to elaborate the structure of “being in an absurd world” and the ethics of “living without appeal.”

The development of Sartre’s Existentialism spans the period of the war, the Liberation, and reconstruction. Neither the triumph nor the collapse of fascism produce any fundamental change in the existentialist conception. In the change of the political systems, in war and peace, before and after the totalitarian terror—the structure of the “réalité humaine” remains the same. “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The historical absurdity which consists in the fact that, after the defeat of fascism, the world did not collapse, but relapsed into its previous forms, that it did not leap into the realm of freedom but restored with honor the old management—this absurdity lives in the existentialist conception. But it lives in the existentialist conception as a metaphysical, not as a historical fact. The experience of the absurdity of the world, of man’s failure and frustration appears as the experience of his ontological condition. As such, it transcends his historical condition. Sartre defines Existentialism as a doctrine according to which “existence precedes and perpetually creates the essence.”³ But in his philosophy, the existence of man, in creating his essence, is itself determined by the perpetually identical ontological structrue of man, and the various concrete forms of man’s existence serve only as examples of this structure. Sartre’s existential analysis is a strictly philosophical one in the sense that it abstracts from the historical factors which constitute the empirical concreteness: the latter merely illustrates Sartre’s metaphysical and meta-historical conceptions. In so far as Existentialism is a philosophical doctrine, it remains an idealistic doctrine: it hypostatizes specific historical conditions of human existence into ontological and metaphysical characteristics. Existentialism thus becomes part of the very ideology which it attacks, and its radicalism is illusory. Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant, the philosophical foundation of Existentialism, is an ontological-phenomenological treatise on human freedom and could as such come out under the German occupation (1943). The essential freedom of man, as Sartre sees it, remains the same before, during, and after the totalitarian enslavement of man. For freedom is the very structure of human being and cannot be annihilated even by the most adverse conditions: man is free even in the hands of the executioner. Is this not Luther’s comforting message of Christian liberty?

Sartre’s book draws heavily on the philosophy of German idealism, in which Luther’s Protestantism has found its transcendental stabilization. At the outset, Sartre’s concept of the free subject is a reinterpretation of Descartes’ Cogito, but its development follows the tradition of German rather than French rationalism. Moreover Sartre’s book is in large parts a restatement of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind and Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit. French Existentialism revives many of the intellectual tendencies which were prevalent in the Germany of the ’twenties and which came to naught in the Nazi system.

But while these aspects seem to commit Existentialism to the innermost tendencies of bourgeois culture, others seem to point into a different direction. Sartre himself has protested against the interpretation of human freedom II terms of an essentially “internal” liberty—an interpretation which his own analysis so strongly suggests—and he has explicitly linked up his philosophy with the theory of the proletarian revolution.⁴

Existentialism thus offers two apparently contradictory aspects: one the modern reformulation of the perennial ideology, the transcendental stabilization of human freedom in the face of its actual enslavement; the other the revolutionary theory which implies the negation of this entire idealogy. The two conflicting aspects reflect the inner movement of existentialist thought⁵ which reaches its object, the concrete human existence, only where it ceases to analyze it in terms of the “free subject” and describes it in terms of what it has actually become: a “thing” in a reified world. At the end of the road, the original position is reversed: the realization of human freedom appears, not in the res cogitans, the “Pour-soi,” but in the res extensa, in the body as thing. Here, Existentialism reaches the point where philosophical ideology would turn into revolutionary theory. But at the same point, Existentialism arrests this movement and leads it back into the ideological ontology.

The elucidation of this hidden movement requires a critical restatement of some of the basic conceptions of L’Être et le Néant.

I

L’Être et le Néant starts with the distinction of two types of being—Being-for-itself (Pour-soi; consciousness, cogito) and Being-in-itself (En-soi). The latter (roughly identical with the world of things, objectivity) is characterized by having no relation to itself, being what it is, plainly and simply, beyond all becoming, change, and temporality (which emerge only with the Pour-soi), in the mode of utter contingency. In contrast, the Being-for-itself, identical with the human being, is the free subject which continually “creates” its own existence; Sartre’s whole book is devoted to its analysis. The analysis proceeds from the question as to the “relationship” (rapport) between these two types of being. Following Heidegger, subjectivity and objectivity are understood, not as two separate entities between which a relationship must only be established, but as essential “togetherness,” and the question aims at the full and concrete structure of this togetherness.

“Le concret ne saurait être que la totalité synthétique dont le consciensce comme le phénomêne [l’être-en-soi] ne constituent que des moments. Le concret, c’est l’homme dans le monde. . . .”⁶

The question thus aims at the full and concrete structure of the human being as being-in-the-world (la réalité humaine).

In order to elucidate this structure, the analysis orients itself on certain typical “human attitudes” (conduites exemplaires). The first of these is the attitude of questioning (l’attitude interrogative), the specific human attitude of interrogating, reflecting on himself and his situation at any given moment. The interrogation implies a threefold (potential) negativity: the not-knowing, the permanent possibility of a negative answer, and the limitation expressed in the affirmative answer: “It is thus and not otherwise.” The interrogative attitude thus brings to the fore the fact that man is surrounded by and permeated with negativity:

“C’est la possibilité permanente de non-être, hors de nous et en nous, qui conditionne nos questions sur l’être.”⁷

However, the negativity implied in the interrogative attitude serves only as an example and indication of the fundamental fact that negativity surrounds and permeates man’s entire existence and all his attitudes:

“La condition nécessaire pour qu’il soit possible de dire non, c’est que le non-être soit une présence perpétuelle, en nous et en dehors de nous, c’est que le néant hante l’être.”⁸

Negativity originates with and constantly accompanies the human being, manifesting itself in a whole series of negations (néantissations) with which the human being experiences, comprehends, and acts upon himself and the world. The totality of these negations constitutes the very being of the subject: man exists “comme mode perpétuel d’arrachement à ce qui est”;⁹ he transcends himself as well as his objects toward his and their possibilities, he is always “beyond” his situation, “wanting” his full reality. By the same token, man does not simply exist like a thing (en soi) but makes himself and his world exist, “creates” himself and his world at any moment and in any situation.

This characterization of the “réalité humaine” (which is hardly more than a restatement of the idealistic conception of the Cogito or Selfconsciousness, especially in the form in which the Phenomenology of Mind develops this conception) furnishes the fundamental terms of Sartre’s Existentialism—the terms which guide the subsequent development of his philosophy. There is first of all the identification of the human being with liberty. The series of negations by which man constitutes himself and his world at the same time constitutes his essential freedom:

la liberté “surgit de la négation des appels du monde, elle apparait des que je me dégage du monde où je m’étais engagé, pour m’apprehendre moi-même comme conscience. . . .”¹⁰

Human freedom thus conceived is not one quality of man among others, nor something which man possesses or lacks according to his historical situation, but is the human being itself and as such:

“Ce que nous appelons liberté est donc impossible à distinguer de l’être de la ‘réalite humaine.’ L’homme n’est point d’abord pour être libre ensuite, mais il n’y a pas de différence entre l’être de l’homme et son être-libre.”¹¹

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Introduction
• Volume Introduction
• Existentialism: Remarks on Jean-Paul Sartre’s L’Être et Le Néant
• Jean-Paul Sartre’s Philosophy of Freedom
• Sartre and Le Néant
• Sartre’s Ontology: The Revealing and Making of Being
• The Question of the Transcendental Ego: Sartre’s Critique of Husserl
• Imagination in Sartre
• A New Approach to Sartre’s Theory of Emotions
• Sartre on the Emotions
• Sartre and James on the Role of the Body in Emotion
• The Sartrean Cogito: A Journey Between Versions
• Sartre’s Words on the Self
• Sartre on the Self-Deceiver’s Translucent Consciousness
• The Failure of Self-Consciousness in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
• Two Problems of Being and Nonbeing in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
• Nothingness and Emptiness: Exorcising the Shadow of God in Sartre
• Sartre’s L’Existentialisme est un Humanisme
• The Place of Les Mots in Sartre’s Philosophy
• Praxis, Need, and Desire in Sartre’s Later Philosophy; An Addendum to Existential Psychoanalysis
• Sartre’s Linguistic Phenomenology
• Truth, Meaning, and Functional Understanding: A Post-Sartrean Meditation
• Sartre and Hermeneutics
• Acknowledgments