The primary focus of this book will be the works of Sartre himself. Before delving into this, however, it is necessary to address the themes and context of Sartreās works. We will begin with a thematic introduction that gives a general overview of the topic of subjectivity and selfhood. This will be followed by a discussion of the criticism his work has received and its more recent positive reception, which will allow us to properly understand the status of Sartreās philosophy within the contemporary philosophical landscape. The final section of the introduction concerns the structure of the remainder of the book.
1 Subjectivity and Selfhood
Let us begin with the theme of subjectivity and selfhood. In this thematic introduction, we will refrain from using a lot of technical vocabulary and will avoid naming thinkers who have discussed this theme, save for a few who represent classic positions. We will turn to Sartre only at the end of this section. Instead, I will focus on what is at stake in this philosophical debate.
A subjective being is a being which has a perspective on and/or agency in the world. The things in this world are objects, and most people would agree that they have at least a certain degree of objectivity, that is, a way in which they are that does not depend on a subjective beingās relationship towards them. To give a simple example, we agree that there are trees in a park. This is a matter of objectivity: these objects exist in the world outside, regardless of what we think about them, how we perceive them, how we feel about them or how we interact with them. Some people may perceive the park to be lovely, others may find it haunting. A colour-blind person would have a slightly different image of the trees than someone with full colour vision would, etc. Everyone has a different subjective experience of the objects at hand. Everyone has a different worldview which may or may not overlap with that of others. It is because of this that we say that a journalist or a scientist may strive for objectivity, in the sense that they try to suppress their own opinions on things and describe them as objectively as possible. This is, however, a matter of objective knowledge. When we speak of objectivity here, we do not refer to knowledge but to being. We take objectivity to mean that a thing exists as an object.
The same thing goes for subjectivity. When we speak of subjectivity, we do not mean subjective knowledge but rather the being that has ā or, in the case of some theories, is ā the perspective which makes this knowledge possible. It is also important to note that subjectivity is more than a perspective on the world that approximates to some degree how things really are: many aspects of things only exist because of subjectivity, namely the meanings we give to things. A well-known example of this is love. One could say that love is nothing but a chemical reaction in the brain that that facilitates the reproduction of the species at the individual level. Of course, this does not do justice to what it is like to feel love. Another dimension of subjectivity is agency. Having a subjective view on the world allows a subjective being to perform actions in light of the meanings it perceives. In other words, a subject is autonomous to a certain degree. Even if one completely denies any form of free will, a subjective being will still behave as if it is autonomous and perceives its actions as such.
Most people would agree to some kind of distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, but, at the same time, many would disagree where the exact distinction lies and how much importance one ought to assign to either subjectivity or objectivity. This may lead to two extreme positions. On the one hand there is reductionism, which tries to reduce subjectivity to objectivity. People who adhere to this position claim that subjective experience is not real, and that love is, for example, indeed nothing other than a physical reaction in our brains. This is a form of reductionism that would reduce the subject to physical nature, but it must be made clear that in this context reductionism is an umbrella-term that can refer to any sort of position that fully reduces subjectivity to something else. One could just as easily imagine someone saying that love is nothing more than a word or nothing more than a disguised relation of power. While such statements may be considered true objectively speaking, they do not do justice to our experience of love. A reductionist view reduces everything that is meaningful to something that can be fully comprehended without taking what it feels like to love into account. This could in turn lead to positions in which subjectivity is disdained altogether. One could imagine all kinds of dystopian examples of this. You declare your love to someone, and this person asks whether you could provide a recent chemical analysis of your brain to prove this. Or, to give another example: a certain patch of land may have some kind of symbolic or even sacred value to some people, but soil samples have proven that it is in fact not different from earth found elsewhere and can therefore be repurposed. Although these are of course extreme examples, one can see that disregarding subjectivity does not do justice to the full extent of human reality. To disregard subjectivity is to fail to do justice to many of the aspects that we deem crucial to our existence.
The other extreme, however, would be to disregard objectivity. This boils down to privileging and isolating subjectivity. Such positions are known by many names, which may or may not refer to different ways in which subjectivity is overstated. Sometimes, it is simply called subjectivism, sometimes it is referred to pejoratively as idealism. It can also appear under the banner of Cartesianism, named after RenĆ© Descartes. His philosophy is the most famous case of the tendency to privilege and isolate the subject. In his effort to find a secure basis for human knowledge, Descartes first put everything in doubt, in this way he came to recognize that the only thing that could not be doubted was the fact that he was doubting (Descartes 1996). As doubting is a form of thinking, Descartes articulated his discovery with the now famous formulation cogito ergo sum ā I think, therefore I am. The subjective cogito became the foundation of knowledge, and he subsequently divided the subjective mind and the objective body into two different substances, the res cogitans and the res extensa. This produces a mind-body dualism which further isolates the subjective from the objective realm. Subjectivity as a thinking thing is regarded to be a literal thing of another other kind than objects ā as opposed to being simply the activity of having a perspective. Descartes ushered in an era in which such a Subject became the āofficial doctrineā of most philosophers.1 I use the term Subject with a capital S to denote such accounts of subjectivity, that is, accounts in which the subject is overstated, privileged and isolated. Another aspect of such accounts is that subjectivity is regarded as an indivisible whole, as we will soon see.
Let us first discuss why such accounts are widely viewed as problematic. Because subjectivity is regarded to be something completely detached from objectivity, it is difficult if not impossible to bridge the gap between the two. This could lead to solipsism, which is the idea that only a single subjectivity exists, or the slightly less extreme position called idealism in which only subjectivity exists. Such positions have problems creating any form of objectivity or intersubjectivity that relates to a shared world. In other words, while reductionism cannot do justice to the different ways we perceive the world, subjectivism cannot do justice to the ways our perceptions of the world are the same, making it difficult to relate to other peopleās views. Furthermore, it could lead to an overstatement of the autonomy of Subject. Although, as has already been mentioned, autonomy and subjectivity are inherently related, we as subjective beings are still influenced by the objective world around us in our decisions. If we filter out this factor, freedom becomes abstract, random and gratuitous.
Because of the problems concerned with the Subject, much of twentieth century philosophy can be characterized as an attack on traditional notions of subjectivity. In many different ways, philosophers have opposed the crude divide between Subject and object and have decentred the traditional Subject as the focal point of philosophical inquiry. Although many authors refer to the cogito and Cartesianism in their criticism, no univocal definition of what this doctrine entails can be given. Slavoj Žižek describes it as a spectre: āA spectre is haunting Western academiaā¦ ā¦the spectre of the Cartesian subject. All academic powers have entered into a holy alliance to exorcize this spectreā (Žižek 1999, p. 1). It is precisely spectral, in the sense that we can give a general outline of ideas related to the Cartesian subject, but we cannot give a precise account of it. The various different criticisms of the Subject all boil down to a position in which the Subject is not privileged, not isolated, not fully autonomous. Inst...