Practice, Power, and Forms of Life

Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx

Terry Pinkard

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780226813240
• eBook ISBN: 9780226815473
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Existentialism in Philosophy

Philosopher Terry Pinkard revisits Sartre's later work, illuminating a pivotal stance in Sartre's understanding of freedom and communal action.

Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason, released to great fanfare in 1960, has since then receded in philosophical visibility. As Sartre's reputation is now making a comeback, it is time for a reappraisal of his later work. In Practice, Power, and Forms of Life, philosopher Terry Pinkard interprets Sartre's late work as a fundamental reworking of his earlier ideas, especially in terms of his understanding of the possibility of communal action as genuinely free, which the French philosopher had previously argued was impossible.

Pinkard reveals how Sartre was drawn back to Hegel, a move that was itself incited by Sartre's newfound interest in Marxism. Pinkard argues that Sartre constructed a novel position on freedom that has yet to be adequately taken up and analyzed within philosophy and political theory. Through Sartre, Pinkard advances an argument that contributes to the history of philosophy as well as key debates on action and freedom.

1

Spontaneity and Inertia

1. The Background: The Form of the “I”

Sartre begins The Transcendence of the Ego (1936) with a statement of his basic and, at the time, surprising thesis—namely, that the ego, the “I” does not “inhabit” consciousness but is “outside, in the world . . . like the ego of another.”1 Sartre’s focus from The Transcendence of the Ego through Being and Nothingness all the way to the Critique of Dialectical Reason is on subjectivity, and, even more specifically in the earlier work, on self-consciousness. His guiding idea is that a substantive “I”—or what we might think of the “I” as an object of awareness—as that which underlies consciousness (or “inhabits” it) is itself unintelligible. Why? First, the idea that self-consciousness is a subject making itself the object of its awareness leads to an infinite regress. If self-consciousness consists in the subject being conscious of itself as an object, then the subject that is aware of the subject that is not itself an object is not itself self-conscious unless it has, as it were, another subject (another version of itself) conscious of it, ad infinitum.2 Or, as Sartre also puts it, “if the I is a part of consciousness, there would then be two I’s: the I of the reflective consciousness and the I of the reflected consciousness,”3 thus requiring yet another “I” to identify them.4 That is Sartre’s first step.

However, in the second step, he argues that although that model of self-consciousness is unintelligible, a form of self-relation must be at work in all thought and action for it to be thought and action. This much is established phenomenologically: if one does not know what one is doing, one is not actually doing anything; instead, things are simply happening. What holds the action together as an action and not merely a disconnected series of events is the thought of what the agent is to do, is doing, or has done. The doing is an expression of the thought, not just an event triggered by some kind of internal mental state. However, if this form of self-consciousness, which the phenomenology of self-consciousness takes as essential to itself, is necessary to all consciousness, it cannot be a form of consciousness that has the same logical form as consciousness of an object. Consciousness of an object is, in Sartre’s terms, “positional” or “thetic” consciousness: X is conscious of Y as something that transcends itself. Consciousness of self, however, would have to be non-positional (non-thetic). It would have to be aware of itself to count as consciousness, but it cannot be aware of itself as an object of awareness.5

There is thus in Sartre’s phrase an “unreflected consciousness,” that is, a consciousness that knows what it is doing but is not necessarily accompanied by a separate reflective act about what it is doing. To bolster this, Sartre draws on examples taken from absorptive activities—as in “I am trying to hang a picture” or “I am repairing the rear tire”—to bring out how it is that you know what you are doing when you are doing it, and this knowledge is brought out or made explicit when, for example, one is asked what one is doing.6 This is not a matter of explicit inference, as if being asked the question “What are you doing?” I infer on the basis of some evidence that I am trying to hang the picture. (It is neither an inductive nor a deductive inference.) Not all actions are assertions of some explicit content, but assertions share with all actions a kind of dependence on knowing what it is that I am doing as I am doing it.7 Thus, Sartre endorses the Kantian claim that the “I think” must be able to accompany all my representations, not that it does nor that it actually must accompany all of them.

Sartre’s point is about the form of the activity, which the “I think” expresses, namely, that it is already there as constitutive of human activity in terms of the self-relation that constitutes the subject as a subject (or the agent as an agent). The “I think” is not a “making explicit” of something that is already fully formed but only implicit in the activity. It is something else, on Sartre’s view, namely, a way of showing or exhibiting the meaning of an activity, which he will later refine into a conception of showing and “carrying on” the background practices that form the horizons of the activity in question. “Hanging the picture” and “repairing the rear tire” both suppose that I am part of a practice. It is not that the practice stands apart from a separate “entity” that is the activity that presupposes the practice but that the practice and the concrete activities that embody it are mutually included in each other. Each is the actualization of the other rather than being two separate things that stand in relations of having a presupposition and being a presupposition.

In the early work, Sartre concludes that the “I” is only intelligible as something that is posited by reflection as belonging to non-thetic (non-positional) consciousness but which is actually external (or “transcendent”) to such consciousness. The bare “I” does not imply or contain any mental states, desires, and so on. They, like tables and rocks, are items in the world, to which I have no more immediate—non-inferential—access than I do to the artifacts, natural objects and social formations of that world. What in fact seems like the “I” of non-thetic consciousness is thus actually nothing. It is something akin to an infinitely contracted point to which we reflectively (and wrongly) ascribe to the “I” that we encounter in reflection.8 The unreflected, non-thetic “I” is defined only by its form, and the world as I find it, before I reflect on it, has no place in it for such an “I.”9 Thus, if anything, what seems to be the “I” is just another object in the world. What Sartre claims for this is not that we are not self-conscious, but that self-consciousness cannot be fully formulated in terms of the “consciousness of an object” (i.e., in terms of “intentionality” in Sartre’s Husserlian formulation). It must be formulated in terms of something else. What Sartre is denying is that self-consciousness can be any kind of intuition of anything like an underlying substrate, a subject-thing.

The unity of the agent that finds expression in the reflectively articulated “I think” (or “I do,” etc.) is defined by the form of its unity, not by the unintelligible existence of a different I-substrate that has the properties of the agent (his projects, mental states, fears, deeds, etc.). The expression, “I,” in this usage does not refer to anything because there is nothing to which it could refer. It is, as Sartre would later say, a “nothingness,” a mere form of unity of an agent that is not meaningless but whose meaning just is this empty form.10 This unity is the result of what Sartre calls the “monstrous spontaneity” of consciousness, that is, of agency in general. In this “monstrous spontaneity,” Sartre notes that “consciousness” projects its own spontaneity into the concept of the ego as if it required for itself a “false representation of itself,” namely, as something that looks as if it would satisfy the need for “consciousness” to be its own foundation, to be purely self-instituting (a need that according to Sartre’s ontology of agency cannot in principle be satisfied).11

The idea of agency that emerges at least in its kernel in The Transcendence of the Ego continues to be developed in Being and Nothingness and finally more fully emerges in the Critique of Dialectical Reason as the conception of agency as self-consciously acting in terms of a conception of its own form (as self-conscious). Indeed, it because of its form that subjectivity is intelligible. In The Transcendence of the Ego, however, the “ego” is not intelligible outside of its pure formality, since it is an object produced by the pure spontaneity of consciousness. Being and Nothingness expands and corrects that view.12 In the two early works, the form is that of an individual self-conscious spontaneity that is expressed in terms of freedom in action that has to do with the temporality of individual agency, whereas in the Critique, it emerges as also fully social and historical.

Another Sartrean view that emerges more fully in the Critique is that the form of agency itself also determines a certain measure of what will count as good for that agent. This was prefigured by Sartre’s early work, which culminated in Being and Nothingness and which he promised to follow up with an ethics (which never appeared, although his notes for it appeared after his death).13 The failure to produce an ethics was not an accident, since the earlier work on agency as the expression of a pure spontaneity could not supply any measure other than at best the abstract standard of actualizing one’s individual freedom. Although Sartre hoped to generate some kind of ethics from out of such a pure spontaneity, still very abstractly conceived, he found he could not. To do that, he had to revise his conception of agency, so carefully worked out in Being and Nothingness, in various ways. (We shall come back to the reasons for this failure.)

Such a self-conscious agent (a being-for-itself, in Sartre’s famous, Hegel-inspired term) acts in light of its own form, that is, its own conception of itself. This form is expressed in its actions, and it also serves to explain its actions, since the form involves thetic and non-thetic self-consciousness (one explains why a moth is drawn to flame by appeal to what moths do as a species, and one explains what a human agent does by appeal to the kind he or she is—which, as Sartre conceives it, is because its peculiar self-relation is always a moving target resetting its definition). In the case of being-for-itself, its form is temporal such that, constrained by its past, it projects itself into the future in light of goals that it chooses or that it simply finds itself having.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre himself realized that the only way to explicate that conception further was to turn to the relations agents have to each other. That set the stage for the reconstruction of his theory in the Critique of Dialectical Reason.

2. “I” and “We,” Singular and Plural

On Sartre’s early view, the “I” emerges completely out of reflective consciousness in terms of the reflective subject supposing that its pre-reflective activities must (somehow) be ascribed to some enduring unity as a kind of substance that must always already be there. In Being and Nothingness, in which he recasts the self as an activity and therefore as a project, the self is both pre-reflective self-consciousness and reflective self-consciousness at one and the same time, but it remains “nothingness,” an empty form whose being is to be free in terms of being undetermined in its future. The end that unites all the other activities and choices made by this self—that of trying to become fully in-itself, passing over from nothingness to being—is not an end that emerges as the final end in a hierarchy of other ends but as constitutive of self-conscious life itself. There may be other ends, which function in deliberation as values, that may be even desirable for their own sake, but each end itself is intelligible only in terms of the way it manifests a lack in being-for-itself, namely, a lack of being-in-itself. Values are projections or promises of the subject’s becoming something (in-itself) in the future (for example, someone “who keeps his promises” or who “exhibits filial piety”). They are no more than that, and as such, they are also at odds with the nature of the self-conscious subject.

With that in place, it is unclear what, if any role at all, anything like a “we,” a first-person plural, can play in any intelligible sense, and the answer is that it cannot. There are some uses of “we” that are perfectly intelligible, such as the kind of accidental “we” that one finds in statements such as “We have all showed up wearing white shirts”—an empirical description of selves as objects in the world. There is also the sense of “we” as expressing a common project—such as “We are writing a commentary on Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy together.” There can even be something like a constitutive “we” as in “We, native speakers of English, find your statement to be syntactically incorrect.”14 For Sartre, at that point in his philosophical development, even this third type of “we-subject” does not mark out any deeper sense of shared subjectivity but only manifests the facticity, the in-itself of our subjective lives, the fact that we share a language.15 Even in that case, the form of judgment at issue remains that of subsuming myself under a concept, into being “one of many” (“a native speaker of English”). Sartre concludes that there cannot be any genuine “we-subject,” but at best only various versions of an “us-subject.” He takes Hegel (at least in the first part of the Phenomenology) to erroneously think he had resolved that in favor of a deeper form of “we-subject,” but, on Sartre’s reckoning at the time, Hegel’s alleged solution really only amounted to a restatement of the problem.

Hegel says in the Phenomenology that the result of his discussion of self-consciousness is to be “the experience of what spirit is, this absolute substance which constitutes the unity of its oppositions in their complete freedom and self-sufficiency, namely, in the oppositions of the various self-consciousnesses existing for themselves: The I that is we and the we that is I.”16 Sartre agrees that this would be the goal but claims that (like the fundamental project of wanting to be one’s own foundation) it is a metaphysical impossibility. For the “I” to really be a “we” would mean that it would give up being an “I,” since it would have to merge with the others. Or, if the “we” is really an “I,” then the “we” can only be a non-additive unity of many individual “I’s.” The “self-sufficiency” of the “I” of which Hegel speaks should in fact rule out any genuine, non-additive “we,” and in saying that it does not, Hegel (on Sartre’s account) is only presuming at the outset the absolute idealism that he is purporting to prove with the discussion of the “I” that is “we,” and the “we” that is “I.”17 How to reconcile the “I” to the “We” without absorbing the one into the other—which Sartre takes Hegel to have claimed to have done—simply is the problem, not the solution.

Hegel’s argument moves through three steps, the first two of which Sartre is willing to accept. At the first stage, self-conscious life can be modeled on a loose identity of the “I” and the “We,” as when I explain or justify an action by appeal to something like the species of which I am a member: I drink that water because that is the kind of thing we mammals do. This type of explanation/justification works for social forms as well: I dress like this because that is the kind of thing we do in this part of the world. Such explanations/justifications make intelligible something mattering to me because it matters to the kind of creature I am. At the second stage, let us imagine, using the familiar Edenic image, there is fruit for the picking, and it matters to me that there is fruit for the picking because that is the kind of thing that matters to the kind of creature I am. If another agent enters the picture to whom it also matters that there is fruit for the picking, it can be the case that the mattering itself now comes to matter to me, and I am called to explain or justify why my mattering takes any priority or no priority at all in its mattering to the other. (This leads in Hegel’s narrative to a third stage, soon to be negated and partially preserved, of a struggle for recognition that results in the statuses of mastery and servitude.) In Being and Nothingness, Sartre stops there and accuses Hegel, more or less, of pret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Spontaneity and Inertia
• 2 Spontaneity’s Limits
• 3 Ethics in Politics
• Dénouement
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index