Using Sartre

An Analytical Introduction to Early Sartrean Themes

Gregory McCulloch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134837588
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Using Sartre is an introduction to the philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, but it is not an ordinary introduction. It both promotes Sartrean views and adopts a consistently analytical approach to him. Concentrating on the early philosophy, up to and including Sartre's masterwork Being and Nothingness, Gregory McCulloch clearly shows how much analytic philosophy misses when it neglects Sartre and the continental tradition in philosophy.
In the classic spirit of analytic philosophy, this is a clear, simple and appealingly short exposition of the early work of Sartre. Written specifically for beginners and non-specialists, this book is sure to spark new interest in Sartre and the existentialists, while making a significant contribution to the development of analytical philosophy of mind as well.

Chapter 1

Overview

Aron said, pointing to his glass: ‘You see, my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!’

Simone de Beauvoir1¹

Our exclusive concern is with themes from Sartre'sphilosophy as set out between 1937 and 1943, a period when he undoubtedly produced his most accessible, and arguably his best, philosophical work. This work is tight and systematic overall, even though its expression tends to be loose and repetitive. Being and Nothingness, in particular, is a (flawed) masterpiece much on a par with all the other great philosophical books. It is true that Sartre wrote much more after the period of concern to us, and there are fascinating developments and changes to plot.² But to introduce the whole lot digestibly in one breath is probably impossible and would anyway, I think, obscure rather than emphasise Sartre's philosophical contribution. The idea is that anyone who works through the present book will be equipped to do battle with Sartre himself, early and late. My aim is to extract from Sartre's texts a defensible and coherent interpretation of his views on consciousness and its objects, and to present them in such a way that they too, in large part, may be seen to be defensible, even though they will appear strange to analytical readers. My guiding thought is that such readers thus have much to learn from Sartre that is directly relevant to their own interests.

Naturally, Sartre's work is a response to problems and issues that he took from the philosophical traditions to which he was exposed. And to a large extent, these overlap with those encountered by analytical philosophers in the work of the ancients, Descartes, the British Empiricists, Kant and the logical positivists. So up to a point, Sartre has to be seen as engaged in the same sort of enterprise as any other philosopher. But in making his responses to the traditional issues, Sartre also borrowed from precursors such as Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, who tend to be little regarded by analytical philosophers, and mixed his borrowings freely into responses of a more recognisably analytical nature. Consequently, much of what he says can appear bizarre or worse to the analytically trained. Moreover, sometimes Sartre's borrowings are mangled, sometimes deliberately warped, sometimes a bit of both. It can be difficult to tell under which heading a borrowing falls, and perhaps even Sartre was not always sure. But his overall presentation and treatment in the early works is more accessible than the work of those he borrowed from, and there is plenty of reason to suppose that working back from Sartre is a less painful, more illuminating introduction to their views and style than is a direct plunge, at least for analytical readers. Thus, as well as helping to correct what seem to me to be inexcusable blindspots in analytical philosophy of mind, a study of Sartre can also serve as a relatively painless introduction to what seems to have become, shamefully, a different subject altogether.

Sartre's early philosophy has three notable features: a distinctive methodology, a great metaphysical division and some sharply focused aims.

METHODOLOGY

This owes much to the Phenomenological approach of Husserl and especially to Heidegger's reaction to it, even though Sartre adapted it to his own purposes and was often critical of both authors.³ The nature of the methodology will emerge as we study the works. But crudely, Sartre is interested in giving a description of, and ruminating in an a priori, philosophical manner about, human beings and their world as they appear to consciousness, that is as they are or can be experienced. Phenomena in this sense—things-as-they- appear-to-consciousness—tend to be seriously misrepresented, if not ignored altogether, by philosophers and scientists whose aim is to account for the reality which is alleged to lie behind and be responsible for the appearances. Sartre correspondingly tends to be hostile both to types of philosophy which ape science, or consider it to be the only source of knowledge, and (especially) to scientific psychology. And we shall see how to vindicate his insistence that reflecting upon the phenomena themselves is intellectually and philosophically respectable.⁴ For even if, say, the conscious life of human beings is somehow constituted by their brains and what goes on in them, no description of the neural activity as such will tell us what it is like to enjoy a conscious human life.⁵ A description of toothache as a certain state of the nerves, for example, will not itself give any clue as to what the toothache feels like, or what it is like to know it as an ache: and this is only the tip of a very large iceberg. Moreover this —its being like something to be conscious—is arguably the most characteristic feature of conscious life, and Phenomenological reflections are thus essential to a complete understanding of it. The issue here, as we shall see at some length, is connected to Sartre's adoption of the idea that understanding persons and their world is a different sort of enterprise from the ‘objective’ study of nature. Failure to take on board this thought is arguably the principal shortcoming of analytical philosophy.

A GREAT METAPHYSICAL DIVISION

Sartre usually writes as if there are two fundamentally different kinds of being in the world, namely Being For-itself (Etre Pour-soi), or consciousness, and Being In-itself (Etre En-soi), or the non-conscious remainder. At first glance, this is highly reminiscent of Descartes' influential dualism of mind and body, according to which there are immaterial minds, whose essence is to think, and material bodies, whose essence is to be extended in space. But it is a very grave mistake to assimilate Sartre's division to Descartes’.⁶

First, one must be aware of what Sartre means by ‘being’ in phrases like ‘Being For-itself’. The word can be used to mean entity (as in ‘The world is full of human beings’), but Sartre most often uses it in the sense of way or mode or manner of being. Thus, one might describe ordinary day-to-day life as Humdrum Being, or say that beer is an integral part of Tim's very being. So in speaking of consciousness as Being For-itself, Sartre is not thinking of individual conscious agents as entities, but is adverting to the kind of conscious existence which human agents enjoy. He is interested in what is involved, from the phenomenological point of view, in existing (be-ing) consciously, rather than in what a conscious entity is (e.g. brain, biological organism, immaterial substance, or whatever).⁷ Thus, he later speaks of Being For-others (Etre Pour-autrui), and intends here another mode (or 'structure’) of conscious existence (see Chapter 8, below). Being For-others is not a distinct entity, additional to the human agent which enjoys Being For-itself, but is, rather, a way of being of such an agent which is made possible by its interactions with others of the same type. According to Sartre, feeling shame is an aspect of Being For-others, since it is only possible for persons to feel this way because others canview them as (shameful) objects in the world: ‘Nobody can be vulgar all alone!’ (B&N: 222).

A second reason for not assimilating Sartre's distinction to Descartes' dualism is that Sartre, unlike Descartes, denies that his two kinds of Being are really separable. Rather, he holds that they are ‘abstractions' from a single reality, 'man-in-the-world’ (B&N: 3-4). Third, relatedly, Sartre stresses the extent to which Being For-itself is bound up with the body, and its material history and environment (its facticity):

it is not true that the body is the product of an arbitrary decision on the part of a demiurge nor that the union of soul and body is the contingent bringing together of two substances radically distinct. On the contrary, the very nature of the For-itself demands that it be body.

(B&N: 309)

Fourth, he argues that the mind is not a thing or substance at all (see Chapters 5 -7 below). Rather, having a mind is to be understood as a way of being related to the non-mental world or environment. Humans do not ‘have’ minds in the way that they have kidneys, but they are minded in that they enjoy a particular kind of psychological interaction with their situation, an ‘engagement with the world’ (B&N: 309).⁸

AIMS

In a nutshell, Sartre seeks to describe and analyse, in a phenomenological vein, the relationships between his different modes of Being. For he holds that they are strongly interdependent: Being For-others requires Being For-itself, Being For-itself is ‘founded’ on a relationship to Being In-itself, and Being In-itself in turn has at least some of its experienced characteristics in virtue of this relationship. In all this the focus remains primarily on the nature of consciousness, and what it is to understand conscious phenomena. It will thus be helpful now to move on to some general remarks about Sartre's view of consciousness. He lays great emphasis on five distinctive theses about it in almost everything written in the period concerned. To understand this period of Sartre's work just is to understand how these theses are supposed to hang together. These theses are:

1All conscious acts have intentionality.

2Consciousness is empty.

3Consciousness is characterised by, and is the source of, nothingness.

4Consciousness is subject to extreme freedom.

5There are two fundamentally different modes of self-consciousness or self-awareness.

SARTRE’S FIVE THESES

1 Intentionality Sartre holds that all consciousness is of something— e.g. one sees a dog, believes that it is raining, imagines one's best friend and so on. The idea is that in all such conscious episodes there is something— a fact or material thing or whatever—of which one is conscious, and which thus features as the intentional object of the conscious episode. Intentional objects are the things we think about, see, imagine and so forth. Sartre makes this point by saying that conscious episodes are ‘positional’, and that they posit objects. Thus:

All consciousness, as Husserl has shown, is consciousness of something. This means that there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object, or if you prefer, that consciousness has no ‘content’... All consciousness is positional in that it transcends itself in order to reach an object, and it exhausts itself in this same positing.

(B&N: xxvii)

Versions of this doctrine are widely held by contemporary philosophers, usually in the form of the claim that conscious and other mental states have semantic or world-involving features.⁹ However, there are various complexities involved with the notion of intentionality about which Sartre says comparatively little. Some are very important in analytical philosophy, and also bear very directly on Sartre's own views about Being For-itself and Being In-itself. For example, Macbeth had a hallucination of a dagger, and the natural suggestion is that the intentional object of this conscious episode was a dagger. But there was no dagger present before Macbeth at all, nor need there have been any particular dagger, already known to Macbeth, which he took himself to be seeing. So how can Macbeth's state of mind involve a relation to an intentional object? Such matters will be discussed in Chapters 5 -7.

2 Emptiness Although he insists that all conscious episodes posit intentional objects, Sartre also maintains that consciousness itself is empty, that is has no contents, so that nothing is literally in consciousness. He does not just mean by this that phrases like ‘having x in mind’ are idiomatic, with the ‘in’ not to be taken literally (contrast ‘having x in one's pocket’). Given that ‘having x in mind’ is another way of saying 'thinking of x’, or ‘having x as intentional object’, the denial that ‘in’ here is to be taken literally would be a way of saying that the intentional object of a conscious event is not actually inside the consciousness in question. Thus

A table is not in consciousness... A table is in space, beside the window etc.

(B&N: xxvii)

But he means more than this. According to Sartre, there is nothing whatever in consciousness, not even resemblances or representations of its intentional objects. This is most striking in his treatment of visualising or mentally imaging:

We [have supposed] that the image was in consciousness... We pictured consciousness as a place peopled with small likenesses and these likenesses were the images... This [I] shall call the illusion of immanence....[the view that] when I ‘have an image’ of Peter... I... have a... picture of Peter in my consciousness... [which picture] is the object of my actual consciousness... while Peter, the man of flesh and bone, is reached but very indirectly, in an ‘extrinsic’ manner...

(PI: 2-3)

But his views on perception and other states of mind are in the same vein, as we shall see. Equally, he is adamant that there is no self or ego to be ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Overview
• 2 Emotions
• 3 Nothingness, freedom, anguish
• 4 Bad faith and self-deception
• 5 Imaging
• 6 Realism and idealism
• 7 Sartrean realism
• 8 Shame
• Index