Jean-Paul Sartre

Christine Daigle

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134077526
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A critical figure in twentieth-century literature and philosophy, Jean-Paul Sartre changed the course of critical thought, and claimed a new, important role for the intellectual.

Christine Daigle sets Sartre's thought in context, and considers a number of key ideas in detail, charting their impact and continuing influence, including:

• 
  
  

• Sartre's theories of consciousness, being and freedom as outlined in Being and Nothingness and other texts
• the ethics of authenticity and absolute responsibility
• concrete relations, sexual relationships and gender difference, focusing on the significance of the alienating look of the Other
• the social and political role of the author
• the legacy of Sartre's theories and their relationship to structuralism and philosophy of mind.

Introducing both literary and philosophical texts by Sartre, this volume makes Sartre's ideas newly accessible to students of literary and cultural studies as well as to students of continental philosophy and French.

KEY IDEAS

1
CONSCIOUSNESS

Sartre’s existentialism rests upon a theoretical view of consciousness that is crucial to understand. “Human subjectivity is our starting point,” says Sartre, and this subjectivity is to be conceived in a way that differs from classical rationalist views such as Descartes’. Where Descartes uncovered his first truth via the experience of the cogito, “I think, therefore I am,” Sartre digs further down in the depths of subjectivity and uncovers a multi-layered consciousness for which the cogito is just one facet. An important factor that led Sartre on this path was his discovery of the German phenomenological movement.

COGITO ERGO SUM

Sartre has acknowledged the influence of Descartes on his own approach to philosophy. In his Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes sought a way to obtain certain absolute truths in order to provide himself with an unshakable foundation for future knowledge. Dismissing any idea that appeared unclear or questionable, he arrived at the one fundamental truth that he could not possibly reject or doubt: “cogito, ergo sum” (or “I think, therefore I am”). This first truth—that he exists as a thinking substance—served as a basis to admit other truths and build his knowledge. This is deemed to be a rationalist view insofar

as the subject that exists is seen as a thinking substance, i.e. a being that has reason, and that all knowledge obtained by this subject derives from reason alone—not from the external world. Sartre rejects this view as being reductive, and proposes a more comprehensive view of subjectivity as being wholly intertwined with the concrete world.

In this chapter, we will examine how Sartre adopted phenomenology, and how he devised his views about consciousness. We will examine in detail how Sartre explains the nature of consciousness and self-consciousness, and see how his views in this regard entail a rejection of the unconscious. We will also consider how one of Sartre’s literary characters, Antoine Roquentin, suffers from nausea, and what it means for him as an existing individual.

PHENOMENOLOGY

Returning from a study year at the Institut Français de Berlin, Raymond Aron explained to Sartre how he could obtain funds to study there. He also suggested to Sartre that he study the work of German phenomenologists. Dissatisfied with traditional philosophical systems and their overly rationalistic and idealistic stances, Sartre was enthusiastic to discover that there existed a type of philosophy that allowed him to talk about concrete things—about the things themselves. This is what attracted him to the philosophy of Edmund Husserl. At the end of his year’s stay in Berlin, and after investing much effort in studying phenomenology, Sartre wrote the essay The Transcendence of the Ego, in which he explores the inner workings of consciousness for the first time.

EDMUND HUSSERL (1859–1938)

Often considered as the father of phenomenology, Husserl had started his academic career in the field of mathematics. His Habilitationsschrift (akin to a postdoctoral thesis) was on a topic in arithmetic. His first comprehensive development of phenomenology was published in 1913 under the title Ideen I and underwent numerous transformations throughout his academic career. Husserl’s philosophy is quite complex and influenced many twentieth-century thinkers. Following him, different trends of

phenomenology developed through such thinkers as Heidegger, MerleauPonty, Ricoeur, and others.

Husserl’s aim was to investigate what remains when one takes the external world away from consciousness and the activity of reflecting, the cogitare. He was interested in the sphere of “absolute consciousness,” and wanted to uncover what meaning this world has when we see it as it actually exists. For Husserl, phenomenology is the science of essential being. By “bracketing off” certain things from consciousness, he hoped to arrive at the essence of things. If consciousness is always conscious of something, then when one takes away the world, one is left with a pure conscious life that is antecedent to the natural being of the world. This is what Husserl called “bracketing,” or Epoché. It is the method by which one suspends one’s judgments about the natural world in order to access things as they really are. When one is conscious of something, i.e. of the world, one finds intentionality. Using bracketing, Husserl was trying to uncover the nature of pure consciousness, i.e. pure intentionality.

Intentionality is the fundamental property of consciousness. It is consciousness that is conscious of something, consciousness as a cogito. Husserl saw that this intentionality is a movement by which consciousness moves out of itself, however. It throws itself out into the world by being conscious of something. Interestingly, that is what set Husserl apart from Descartes, who was also much concerned with the cogito. Descartes thought that the world is not necessary for the cogito to go on thinking. Husserl, on the contrary, considered that a world is needed to have a cogito, because consciousness, by its very nature, is that flow of intentionality. Both Descartes and Husserl, however, conceived of the ego as the ground that unifies consciousness. Consciousness has experiences, is conscious of, and thereby fills itself, existing as this stream of experiences. Descartes and Husserl agree that the ego is an entity that ties these experiences together, that provides a unity of experience. Sartre dismisses this idea and denies that this role belongs to the ego. Consciousness is that stream and nothing unifies it but itself; the ego is only a worldly by-product of conscious activity. He says:

The World has not created the me; the me has not created the World. These are two objects for absolute, impersonal consciousness, and it is by virtue of this consciousness that they are connected. This absolute consciousness, when it is purified of the I, no longer has anything of the subject. It is no longer a collection of representations. It is quite simply a first condition and an absolute source of existence.

(TE 105–6).

INTENTIONALITY

It was the German philosopher Franz Brentano (1838–1917) who first proposed the idea of intentionality. Husserl used it but diverged from its original Brentanian sense. Sartre’s use of intentionality is closer to the original meaning given to it by Brentano as a structure of consciousness: consciousness exists only as conscious (of) something. Thus, consciousness depends on an external world for its existence. Husserl, however, thought that there is such a thing as a pure absolute consciousness—an idea that Sartre criticized him for. Sartre conceives of all modes of consciousness as intentional: knowledge, imagination, emotion, etc. are all intentional structures of consciousness in that they all aim consciousness toward an object external to it. Consciousness is thus, by its very structure, a transcendence (see Chapter 2).

“THERE IS CONSCIOUSNESS”

In the Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre explains how he revises the traditional rationalistic conception of the human being. He also critically reappropriates Husserl. As Hazel Barnes puts it, this revision is extremely important because his rejection of Descartes and his fundamental claim about the pre-reflective cogito form the “original point of departure” for his thought. (See her discussion of the essay The Transcendence of the Ego in Barnes, Hazel, “Translator’s Introduction,” Being and Nothingness, x–xv.) In this essay, Sartre engages in a process of introspection wherein he describes the three steps to one’s self-discovery: there is 1. consciousness (as consciousness of something); 2. the non-consciousness (the world as being what consciousness is conscious of); and 3. the body, the self (what is not the world).

Although the first thing we encounter in this introspective inquiry is consciousness itself, Sartre dissociates himself from traditional idealism. Indeed, he is not claiming that reality has its foundation in consciousness, as idealism holds; rather, he says that the first thing we encounter is consciousness, but it is not consciousness that creates and sustains the world. Consciousness depends on the necessary pre-existence of the world in order to exist. Because it exists as conscious of something, this something must already be there for consciousness to be conscious of it. Sartre explains that “consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself” (BN 23). Again, the discovery that consciousness undergoes unfolds in the following manner: consciousness is conscious of something; this something is the world; the world in turn informs consciousness that it is not the world. This is an epistemological process, i.e. it speaks of the order of acquisition of knowledge, and its results are not of an ontological nature, since it does not say anything about the order of appearances of things as things that exist. It does not say that there is first consciousness, then the world. The world is primary: it is there to be grasped by consciousness. Consciousness does not create the world ex nihilo, i.e. from nothing, but rather creates what is already there by interpreting it.

Sartre proposes that consciousness is always also self-consciousness. When I am conscious, my consciousness is conscious of itself as being conscious of something. “Thus by nature all consciousness is self-consciousness” (Barnes xiv). This pre-reflective consciousness is without an ego. It is not personal, it is simply consciousness that is conscious of. It is consciousness as an act: the act of being conscious, of grasping the world as opposed to consciousness as an object, like a mind or concrete brain. Sartre will therefore want to transform the classical Cartesian formula, “I think, therefore I am,” and change it to “There is consciousness, therefore I am.” The first “truth” that one uncovers via introspection is the fact of consciousness which is not yet an “I.” Again, it is important to stress how much this position differs from that of Descartes or Husserl.

TOPOLOGY OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Sartre presents us with a complex view of consciousness as he explains that there are three levels of consciousness in the human being. The first level is that of pre-reflective consciousness, which is consciousness of something (consciousness as act). It is the rawest level of consciousness. The second level is that of reflective consciousness, and the third is that of self-reflective consciousness, where consciousness becomes its own object. Sartre illustrates the differences between them with two examples. Let us examine the example of reading. There he explains that when you are engaged in the act of reading, you are also conscious of the room you are in, the temperature of the room, the chair on which you sit, etc., all on a pre-reflective level. But you are also actively engaged in the reading, which is a reflective activity that requires the second level of consciousness. As a reflective consciousness, you are using reflection to be conscious of something in a different way. You read this book: you decipher the signs on the page, you make sense of them, you think about them. These are all reflective ways to be conscious. At the same time, you can also think of yourself as reading, which is self-reflective consciousness. As you are reflectively conscious of reading, i.e. actively thinking about your reading, you are conscious of yourself as a reading-self. You can reflect upon yourself as engaged reflectively in the activity of reading. This is the topology of consciousness that Sartre puts forth. According to him, this is how consciousness functions. Although he presents these levels of consciousness in a sequence, they should not be thought to “happen” one after the other. These are contemporaneous moments of consciousness.

Figure 1

Sartre concludes this analysis with a statement that comes pretty close to Merleau-Ponty’s view of the body-subject. He explains that, when I am engaged in any action, as in the act of reading, “I am then plunged into the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousnesses [ … ] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level.” (TE 49). Objects in the world constitute consciousness. There is a unity of consciousness, and the unifying thread is intentionality, i.e. consciousness as conscious of something. This all happens without an ego being in charge; there is no rational, personal process at work in this. There is consciousness as conscious of something in the three different modes indicated above, pre-reflective, reflective, and self-reflective.

MERLEAU-PONTY’S BODY-SUBJECT

Like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty significantly revises the Cartesian (and the Husserlian) cogito. He says: “our body is not an object for an ‘I think’, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings which moves towards its equilibrium.” (Phenomenology of Perception 153). I am my body and this embodied consciousness that I am extends beyond my body proper. The body-subject extends to the car that I drive, the musical instrument I play, or the cane I use if I am blind. These instruments become extensions of my body and as I move around the world, I apprehend the world with them, I understand it with them. Their status is the same as that of my limbs and they serve the same function for me. While I am driving, I am one with the car I drive. My body encompasses the vehicle and I am in the world as a consciousness-driving-a-car.

What then is the ego, and how is it formed? The “I” is transcendent, it is in the world and as vulnerable as other objects in the world. Sartre explains: “Instead of expressing itself in effect as ‘I alone exist as absolute,’ it must assert that ‘absolute consciousness alone exists as absolute,’ which is obviously a truism. My I, ineffect, is no more certain for consciousness than the I of other men. It is only more intimate” (TE 104). The I and the world are objects f...

Table of contents

• ROUTLEDGE CRITICAL THINKERS
• CONTENTS
• SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• WHY SARTRE?
• KEY IDEAS
• FURTHER READING
• WORKS CITED
• INDEX