The Sartrean Mind

Matthew C. Eshleman, Constance L. Mui, Matthew C. Eshleman, Constance L. Mui

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317408161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His influence extends beyond academic philosophy to areas as diverse as anti-colonial movements, youth culture, literary criticism, and artistic developments around the world.

Beginning with an introduction and biography of Jean-Paul Sartre by Matthew C. Eshleman, 42 chapters by a team of international contributors cover all the major aspects of Sartre's thought in the following key areas:

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• Sartre's philosophical and historical context
• Sartre and phenomenology
• Sartre, existentialism, and ontology
• Sartre and ethics
• Sartre and political theory
• Aesthetics, literature, and biography
• Sartre's engagements with other thinkers.

The Sartrean Mind is the most comprehensive collection on Sartre published to date. It is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, as well as for those in related disciplines where Sartre's work has continuing importance, such as literature, French studies, and politics.

PART 1

Philosophical context

1

French influences

Bruce Baugh

Sartre, a breath of fresh air

Looking back to France in 1944, Gilles Deleuze recalled, “We were still weirdly stuck in the history of philosophy. Quite simply, we got into Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger; we threw ourselves like puppies into a Scholasticism worse than the Middle Ages. Fortunately, there was Sartre. Sartre was our Outside, a fresh breeze from the back garden…. [Phenomenology and existentialism] were already history by the time we got to them: too much method, imitation, commentary and interpretation, except for the way Sartre did it” (Deleuze and Parnet 1996: 18–19; Deleuze and Parnet 2002: 12). How is that Sartre, who certainly belonged to what Paul Ricoeur called the generation of “the three H’s” (Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger) (Ricoeur 1970: 32) could be a way out of the new phenomenological scholasticism? If Sartre’s take on Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger was always slightly off kilter, this was in no small part because it was mediated by the work of philosophers writing in French: Emmanuel Levinas for Husserl; Jean Wahl for Hegel, Kierkegaard and Heidegger; Henri Lefebvre for Hegel and Marx; and Alexandre Koyré for Hegel.

Leaving aside Husserl, I will focus here on how Sartre approached Hegel, Heidegger and Kierkegaard. Sartre’s Hegel interpretation is marked on the one hand by Lefebvre’s Marxism, with an emphasis on synthesis and totality, and on the other by Wahl’s Kierkegaardian reading of Hegel, with its emphasis on emotions and the individual, and Koyré’s conception of an open-ended dialectic that never reaches an “end of history.” A Marxist, Kierkegaardian Hegel, in short, one full of tensions and paradoxes that are never fully resolved in Sartre’s philosophy. It was also thanks to Wahl that Sartre read Heidegger through Kierkegaard and vice versa, something made abundantly clear in Sartre’s treatment of the theme of anxiety (angoisse) in Being and Nothingness. Sartre has often been reproached for not being sufficiently scholarly, but it is just this dilettantism and his reliance on French mediators of German thought that helped make Sartre a breath of fresh air.

In this chapter, I will confine myself to Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1976; Sartre 1992), as in many respects, this is the work in which the role of French interpreters of non-French philosophers (Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger) is most pronounced. Lefebvre’s conception of praxis as a synthesis of purposive consciousness and matter would profoundly influence Sartre’s own conception of praxis in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (Lefebvre 1939; Sartre 1960; Sartre 1982), but that, as they say, is another story. Similarly, Sartre’s later reflections on Kierkegaard in “The Singular Universal” (Sartre 1972; Sartre 1974), although still very much influenced by Wahl, are situated within the framework of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. I want to focus here on Sartre’s initial and formative encounters with Hegel, Heidegger and Kierkegaard, and the crucial role played by Wahl, Lefebvre and Koyré.

Wahl’s existential Hegel and “the unhappy consciousness”

Early in Being and Nothingness, Sartre makes this striking declaration: “Consciousness is by nature an unhappy consciousness, with no possible transcendence of its unhappy state” (Sartre 1976: 129; Sartre 1992: 140). He is in no way making the easily refutable claim that empirically speaking, people are always unhappy. He means “unhappy consciousness” in a very specific sense, taken from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1977: Chapter IV. B.), and particularly Jean Wahl’s interpretation of Hegel in his 1929 book, The Unhappiness of Consciousness in Hegel’s Philosophy (Wahl 1929). The unhappiness of consciousness is a structural feature: consciousness is unable to coincide with itself, is internally divided or separated from itself, and so is unable to simply be what it is.

In Hegel, the unhappy consciousness is a “shape” or “figure” of Spirit that manifests itself historically in Judaism and Christianity, when consciousness experiences itself as a finite and transitory particular, a “nothingness” in relation to the full and solid being of the absolute Other that stands over against it: God. God is universal, infinite and eternal; consciousness is finite, particular and mortal. Yet this opposition between the being outside consciousness and the nothingness inside it is in fact a division within consciousness: the opposition between the sensory and the intelligible, instinct and reason, inclination and duty; in general, the opposition between the changing and the unchangeable, or between the particular and the universal aspects of consciousness. God, then, represents an alienation of consciousness’s eternal and universal aspects into a being outside of itself. The goal of consciousness is to recover its alienated being, or to return to itself, by incorporating into itself those aspects of its own being that consciousness had projected outside itself.

Spirit’s return to itself from otherness is modeled, says Wahl, on human existence: “For in what does life consist if not in separating itself from itself and transcending itself in order to return to itself? Separation resides in the notion of man himself” (Wahl 1929: 140). Every determination of Spirit reflects the suffering of a divided consciousness that longs to return to itself and heal itself (Wahl 1929: 10, 187f): human history is that of “the unhappy consciousness of God,” “the absolute unrest, the inequality of Absolute Spirit that creates otherness” (Wahl 1929: 143).

In principle, says Wahl, Hegel holds that this process comes to an end when the philosophical concept (Begriff) brings together the duality of the sensible and the intelligible while preserving their differences and mutual determination: “the unhappy consciousness, in perceiving this separation of united elements… will have the notion of their union and will be the happy consciousness… the concrete universal” (Wahl 1929: 154). In fact, it’s not that simple. Each time consciousness tries to grasp itself as being, it is forced to do so with reference to non-being, so that it is “driven from the one to the other of these categories by the negative force of reason” (Wahl 1926: 282–83). This creates a kind of ontological insecurity: each term by which consciousness seeks to grasp itself turns into its opposite and consciousness experiences itself as absolute negativity (Wahl 1927: 448–49; see Wahl 2017: 54–89). Yet consciousness cannot be this negativity or lack of itself (Wahl 1927: 448) as it is both being and nothingness (Wahl 1927: 451), both the reality of its negating transcendence and the nullity of what it negates. Consequently, consciousness is absolute unrest and doubleness or duplicity (Wahl 1927: 444): “it is too small for itself because it is greater than itself” (Wahl 1929: 155). “Until the moment when consciousness achieves its unity, we are in the presence of a game of ‘loser wins,’ where there is a continual reversal and an incessant irony, where consciousness ceaselessly ends up with the opposite of what it sought” (Wahl 1927: 467).

This inability of consciousness to grasp itself fully and transparently, its inability to “be what it is” or attain sincerity because it is “too big for itself”—because it is always transcending and negating whatever determinate being it has attained—plays an important role in Sartre’s account of “bad faith” in Being and Nothingness, particularly the pages where he deals with the impossibility of sincerity (Sartre 1992: 99–112; Sartre 1976: 92–104). Sincerity would be possible only if I can coincide with myself and simply be what I am (Sartre 1992: 101, 105), but because I am constantly going beyond any fixed determinations of my present being toward my future possibilities, I am “a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is” (Sartre 1992: 100, 107, 112, 116). I both am and am not my past; I both am and am not my being-for-others “in a perpetually disintegrating synthesis and a perpetual game of escape from the for-itself to the for-others and from the for-others to the for-itself” (Sartre 1992: 100). “On all sides I escape being and yet—I am” (Sartre 1992: 103).

The sincere person wants to be herself, to coincide with herself, says Sartre, in the way that a table is a table, but that is impossible: as soon as I conceive of “who I really am,” by that very movement, I transcend the object I have made myself into and put it at a distance from me: I am already beyond it (Sartre 1992: 109, 120–26). On the other hand, I cannot coincide with my negative movement of self-transcendence either, since transcendence is anchored in a world (Sartre 1992: 111, 115–16). In fleeing our “inner disintegration” in sincerity, we run up against our self-transcendence; in trying to be the pure movement of transcendence, we run up against the self we transcend (Sartre 1992: 116). Because consciousness is simultaneously what it is not and is not what it is, we seem to be, in Wahl’s words, “in the presence of a game of ‘loser wins,’ where there is a continual reversal and an incessant irony, where consciousness ceaselessly ends up with the opposite of what it sought” (Wahl 1927: 467).

Consciousness is structurally unhappy, then, because “it is a lack of a certain coincidence with itself” and “is haunted by… that with which it should coincide in order to be itself” (Sartre 1992: 153). Consciousness, being always consciousness of something, can only define itself through its objects, and each object reveals itself through a series of “profiles” (Abschattungen) that are the noematic correlative of the consciousnesses that “intend” them (Sartre 1992: 5–6). Each particular appearance of the object is transcended toward the total series of appearances that would define the object, a closed and determinate totality. Inasmuch as an object’s appearances are correlative to acts of consciousness, this totality is “not the pure and simple contingent” being-in-itself of the object, but the totality of consciousness’s possibilities “congealed in the in-itself” and made determinate (Sartre 1992: 139–40). Yet the totality of an object’s appearances, its “essence,” poses a purely ideal limit to consciousness’s possibilities (Sartre 1992: 250–54), reflecting the ideal of oneness (Sartre 1992: 121), just as sincerity, or “being who one is,” is merely an ideal of being that is never attained (Sartre 1992: 101). This ideal is in fact an impossible synthesis of open-ended transcendence and determinate being; consciousness “is perpetually haunted by a totality which it is without being able to be it, precisely because it cannot attain the in-itself [closure, identity] without losing itself as [consciousness]” (Sartre 1992: 129; cf. Sartre 1992: 154). Consciousness thus experiences itself as the lack of the synthetic totality that would allow it to be what it is (Sartre 1992: 136–39, 147, 153) and suffers from that lack, driving it to seek an impossible wholeness, just as Wahl had argued (Wahl 1927: 443–44; 448).

We know that the resemblances between Sartre’s theory and Wahl’s are not coincidental. Sartre refers in Being and Nothingness (Sartre 1992: 529) to the concepts of “trans-ascendence” and “trans-descendence” (the upward movement of transcending from below to an Other and of transcending from above to an Other) which Wahl presented at a famous lecture in 1937 on “Human existence and transcendence” (Wahl 1937; Wahl 1944); Wahl 2017: 152–215). In that same lecture, Wahl interprets Husserl’s “intentionality” as exstase, existing outside of oneself in order to be present to the phenomena that appear to consciousness (Wahl 1944: 13, 27, 29n), which requires that the self be separated from itself by its own future (Wahl 1944: 31–32): “There is no consciousness save at a certain distance from itself… there are no consciousnesses but unhappy ones” (Wahl 1944: 66–70). These ideas, which both Wahl and Sartre relate to Heidegger’s maxim that Dasein is “a being of distances” (Sartre 1992: 51, 52–53; Wahl 1944: 66; Heidegger 1929; Heidegger 1969),¹ are not to be found in standard interpretations or commentary and are a sign of the distinctively French twist given to Hegel and Heidegger. Most importantly, Wahl’s influence was decisive for Sartre making Hegel’s unhappy consciousness t...