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