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Sartre's
philosophical career 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 characterise the human condition. These are constrasted 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.
Table of Contents (Clicking on the links below will take you to that part of this article)
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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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. 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. 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. 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'. 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. 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. 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. 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. References
Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1971) transl. Philip Mairet,
Methuen, London
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.
Howells, C. (1988) Sartre: The necessity of freedom, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge
Christian J. Onof
Author Information:
University College, London