Sartre and Magic

Being, Emotion and Philosophy

Daniel O'Shiel

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350077683
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Existencialismo en filosofía

Jean-Paul Sartre's technical and multifaceted concept of magic is central for understanding crucial elements of his early philosophy (1936-1943), not least his conception of the ego, emotion, the imaginary and value. Daniel O'Shiel follows the thread of magic throughout Sartre's early philosophical work. Firstly, Sartre's work on the ego (1936) shows a personal, reflective form of consciousness that is magically hypostasized onto the pre-reflective level. Secondly, emotion (1938) is inherently magical for Sartre because emotive qualities come to inhere in objects and thereby transform a world of pragmatism into one of captivation. Thirdly, analyses of The Imaginary (1940) reveal that anything we imagine is a spontaneous creation of consciousness that has the power to enchant and immerse us, even to the point of images holding sway over us. Culminating with Sartre's ontological system of Being and Nothingness (1943), O'Shiel argues that Sartre does not do away with the concept, but in fact provides ontological roots for it. This is most evident in Sartre's analyses of value, possession and language. A second part shows how such Sartrean magic is highly relevant for a number of concrete case studies: the arts, advertising, racism and stupidity, and certain instances of psychopathology. O'Shiel shows that Sartre's magical being is important for any contemporary philosophical anthropology because it is essentially at work at the heart of many of our most significant experiences, both creative and damaging.

Part One

Magic in Sartre’s Early Philosophy (1936–43)

1

Self- and Public Bewitchment: Sartre’s Ego (1936)

In order to locate the magical dynamic at work in Sartre’s theory of personhood, I will first need to outline his general phenomenological conception of the ego as an object pole of reflective consciousness. I will then need to explicate what Sartre means by states, actions and qualities of the ego. After this I will be able to hone in on the ego’s magic. Finally, I will highlight what this means for personal reflection and interpersonality.

The ego as object pole of reflective consciousness

One of Sartre’s most important claims in The Transcendence of the Ego is that an explicit experience of one’s own ego, including dimensions of ‘I’ and ‘me’, only originally appears to reflective consciousness. If one thinks otherwise, if one thinks the ego originally operates on a more basic, pre-reflective level, this is due, as we shall see, to its magic.

In order to explicate this general movement, I will start with some of Sartre’s main arguments against an ego on the level of pre-reflection. Here Sartre goes against much of the philosophical tradition by arguing there is no transcendental ‘I’; it is neither necessary nor desirable (cf. TE: 7/98). It is not necessary because the very nature of pre-reflective consciousness guarantees its own synthetic unity without any need of, or reference to, an ‘I’. In Sartre’s words, pre-reflective consciousness ‘constitutes a synthetic, individual totality, completely isolated from other totalities of the same kind, and the I can, clearly, be only an expression (and not a condition) of this incommunicability and this interiority of consciousnesses’¹ (TE: 7/97). This means there is a basic coherence to the activity of pre-reflective consciousness that is in no need of an ‘I’. In short, being a basic conscious self (soi) requires neither an ‘I’ (je) nor a ‘me’ (moi).

In fact, positing an ‘I’ or ‘me’ on this level does great damage to any theory of consciousness; ‘this superfluous I is actually a hindrance. If it existed, it would violently separate consciousness from itself, it would divide it, slicing through each consciousness like an opaque blade. The transcendental I is the death of consciousness’ (TE: 7/98) in the sense that consciousness in its most basic, pre-reflective activity must be completely transparent, with nothing inside it. Consciousness is the condition by and through which all else is perceivable, imaginable, thinkable and the like, and yet it is nothing – precisely nothing – in itself. This is because pre-reflective consciousness is a ceaseless transcendent activity towards phenomena it itself is not; it is that condition of non-coincidence by and through which all kinds of phenomena, from things to ideas, appear to it.

To posit a kind of fundamental ‘I’ as being in or behind such an utterly transparent activity would be to introduce ‘a centre of opacity’ (TE: 8/98) that weighs down the purely spontaneous and transparent nature of our most elemental form of being. Indeed, on the pre-reflective level everything is for consciousness in such an immediate manner that there is simply no time or space for ‘I’:

When I run after a tram, when I look at the time, when I become absorbed in the contemplation of a portrait, there is no I. There is a consciousness of the tram-needing-to-be-caught, etc., and a non-positional consciousness of consciousness. In fact, I am then plunged into the world of objects … this is not the result of some chance, some momentary failure of attention: it stems from the very structure of consciousness. (TE: 13/102)

How, then, does an ‘I’ come about? In a word, through reflection. ‘Reflection’ is when consciousness makes itself an object. This is the second level or moment of consciousness. First there is always pre-reflective engagement in and with the world. This needs no reflection – and therefore no ‘I’ – to occur. On the second, reflective level, however, we always take up aspects we have experienced and make them into an explicit subject matter; we make them into objects for reflective consciousness. For Sartre this necessarily produces a notion of ‘I’ that is nonetheless never directly cognized:

The I only ever appears on the occasion of a reflective act. In this case, the complex structure of consciousness is as follows: there is an unreflected act of reflection without I which is aimed at a reflected consciousness. This reflected consciousness becomes the object of the reflecting consciousness, without, however, ceasing to affirm its own object (a chair, a mathematical truth, etc.). At the same time a new object appears which is the occasion for an affirmation of the reflective consciousness and is in consequence neither on the same level as unreflected consciousness … nor on the same level as the object of the unreflected consciousness (chair, etc.). This transcendent object of the reflective act is the I. (TE: 16/104)

This quotation shows that the ego ‘gives itself through reflected consciousness’ (TE: 15/103). It is an object pole that is constituted in and through every reflective act. These acts are always initiated by – and always take information or content from – the more spontaneous and pre-reflective level, not least our perceptions, as well as our pre-reflective affects and retentions.

The ego is very much real however. It may not be of the same reality as a chair, or even a mathematical truth, but it is nevertheless a transcendent existent (TE: 15/104) that always accompanies acts of reflection. Even so, such reality is, we have seen, only brought about in a secondary moment. Indeed, it is a grand reproach of Sartre that many theorists superimpose ‘a reflective structure … that is thoughtlessly claimed to be unconscious’ (TE: 18/105) supposedly on or beneath the spontaneous, pre-reflective level. This, Sartre says, is a completely unwarranted move when one looks to basic phenomenological experience. In such experiences, Sartre thinks it is quite evident that pre-reflective, engaged acts always come first (e.g. running for a tram). These can then, in a second moment – but in a second moment only – be reflected upon (‘I ran for the tram’).

Another one of Sartre’s own examples to prove this point is how one experiences the spontaneous desire to aid a friend. In such instances, ‘I feel pity for Peter and I come to his aid. For my consciousness, one thing alone exists at that moment: Peter-having-to-be-aided. This quality of “having-to-be-aided” is to be found in Peter. It acts on me like a force’ (ibid.). Here there exists a spontaneous, ‘centrifugal’ (ibid.) desire that ‘transcends itself’ (ibid.) in a non-ego-like manner; ‘there is no me: I am faced with the pain of Peter in the same way I am faced with the colour of this inkwell’ (ibid.). At this pre-reflective level there is an ‘intuitive grasp of a disagreeable quality of an object’ (TE: 18/106) – the whys and wherefores only come after such spontaneous feelings and desires. For Sartre, positing an ego supposedly underlying such autonomous and spontaneous behaviour is to pay ill attention to how we actually exist, feel and act on the immediate pre-reflective level.

This is not to say that reflection cannot influence one’s desires and emotions. It is still however important to note that these latter items – notably in their spontaneous form – always arise first and can then be made subjects of reflection. If reflection does influence the spontaneous level, then Sartre’s terminology for this is that reflection ‘poisons’ (TE: 20/107) pure desires in the manner whereby one takes one’s spontaneous feelings and emotions and regards them – and no longer Peter – as a third person would. Sartre describes it as follows: ‘If my state is suddenly transformed into a reflected state, then I am watching myself acting, in the same sense that we say of someone that he is listening to himself talking. It is no longer Peter who attracts me, it is my helpful consciousness that appears to me as having to be perpetuated’ (ibid.). In this manner, reflection can put desires and emotions themselves under scrutiny, and it can even will to change those one does not like. However, all of this occurs for Sartre on a reflective level that is always already preceded by more spontaneous feelings and processes.

To sum up, the ego – and by corollary the ‘I’ and ‘me’ – appears only when one reflects upon one’s pre-reflective feelings and actions. The I and me are, in fact, two sides of one and the same object pole, the ego, with the ‘I’ primarily concerned with actions and the ‘me’ with states and qualities (cf. ibid.). Just what Sartre means by these three terms – states, actions and qualities of the ego – is the next main step in his theory.

States, actions and qualities of the ego

States, actions and qualities make up the three transcendent subcategories that are all ultimately unified by the ego (cf. TE: 21/108).

States are transcendent objects that appear ‘to reflective consciousness’ (ibid.). They are real in the sense that one can partake in them through undergoing certain affective and emotional experiences. Sartre’s example is a state of hatred, where spontaneous feelings of anger, disgust, repulsion and the like towards Peter make me, upon reflection, state that I hate him, that I have for a long time, and even that I will continue to do so for all eternity:

I see Peter, I feel a kind of profound upheaval of revulsion and anger on seeing him (I am already on the reflective level); this upheaval is consciousness. I cannot be in error when I say: I feel at this moment a violent revulsion towards Peter. But is this experience of revulsion hatred? Obviously not. … After all, I have hated Peter for a long time and I think I always will hate him. So an instantaneous consciousness of revulsion cannot be my hatred. Even if I limit it to what it is, to an instantaneous moment, I will not be able to continue talking of hatred. I would say: ‘I feel revulsion for Peter at this moment’, and in this way I will not implicate the future. But precisely because of this refusal to implicate the future, I would cease to hate. (TE: 22/108–9)

At work here is an important distinction between pure and impure reflection. Pure reflection simply witnesses what one is feeling in any given moment and does not go beyond it. Impure reflection, by contrast, takes such feelings and transcends towards objective states or thoughts (in this case hatred) that claim more than what is actually found in the original, spontaneous feelings. In Sartre’s words, pure reflection ‘stays with the given without making any claims about the future’ (TE: 23/110), which means that it ‘disarms unreflected consciousness by giving it back its instantaneous character’ (TE: 24/110). With impure reflection, although it works with the same ‘givens’, it also goes beyond them by carrying ‘out an infinitization of the field’ (TE: 23/110) through creating a transcendent object (in this case a state) that serves as ‘a letter of credit for an infinity of angry or revulsed consciousnesses, in the past and the future’ (TE: 23/109).

A consequence of this is if one only ever had pure reflection, one would never have states. We do however have impure reflections and their necessary transcendent objects, states. In fact, they are probably the most common form for the vast majority of people by quite some margin. Counterintuitive as it may seem, focusing only on one’s immediate experiences all the time is incredibly hard to do, and socially it would often come across as hyperpedantic. This does then mean that our personal reflections are filled with so many states, which always state more than any one instance can ever actually claim, precisely because the latter is an instance. I may, for example, have been annoyed by a certain person three, a hundred, even thousands of times – and yet, no matter the amount of individual instances, it is always a leap to state ‘I hate so and so’ in a blanket manner. This is because states, by definition, do not allow for any subtlety. If I remain on a purer level, then the discourse would always be, ‘You annoyed me then because you’ and so on. However, to make the blanket claim of hating someone tout court is to transcend towards and into the state of hatred, which is only accessible to emotive consciousness once it is reflected upon (‘God I hate Peter so much!’).

An important consequence of this theory is that states are originally ‘passive’ precisely because for Sartre all phenomena, whether physical or psychical, are relative to the absolutely spontaneous nature of original pre-reflective consciousness. In other words, consciousness lives its own spontaneity and even though everything else in the world can be seen as active in the sense that there is stuff happening, it is precisely because such actions are law-governed and thereby non-spontaneous that the causal nexus of things and forces remains ‘inert’ with reference to the absolutely active and transcending nature of consciousness. In this manner, the ‘entire psychology of states (and non-phenomenological psychology in general) is a psychology of the inert’ (TE: 25/111). Reflective consciousness based upon spontaneous feeling builds a web of psychical states much like reflective consciousness based upon perception builds constellations of physical and natural laws. Indeed, like Hume’s problem of induction ([1739–40] 2001: 1.3; [1748] (2007): chs 4, 5 and 7), Sartre’s states automatically assume that the future will be just like the past.

The second subcategory of Sartre’s ego is that of actions. Here he states that ‘concerted action is before all else … a transcendent factor’ (TE: 26/112). Action of necessity ‘requires time in which to be carried out’ (ibid.). Corresponding to such actions are ‘active, concrete consciousnesses’ (TE: 26–7/112) that are, as usual, quite instantaneous and pre-reflective. Reflection, however, can apprehend ‘the total action in an intuition which displays it as the transcendent unity of active consciousness’ (TE: 27/112). In short, there are always spontaneous consciousnesses (cycling, writing, etc.) that through their realization can be grasped as total, completed actions in reflection (went cycling, wrote a paper, etc.). These latter are also, therefore, all transcendent reflected-upon objects belonging to the ego.

Equally succinct – and no less important – are Sartre’s comments on qualities. These can form a kind of intermediary object between the ego on the one hand and states and actions on the other (cf. TE: 27/112–13). When, for instance, one has been angry at many people a great number of times, one then tends to ‘unify these various manifestations by intending a psychical disposition to produce them’ (TE: 27/113). Such a process often culminates in statements like ‘I am an angry person’, ‘I have an angry disposition’, ‘You’re a stresshead!’ Being or having something like this is what Sartre means by qualities. They are not simply cumulative sums of all our past actual angers but are once again transcendent objects that we relate to as an angry person or as having an angry disposition. In this manner, Sartre’s qualities represent ‘the substratum of states just as states represent the substratum of Erlebnisse [i.e. spontaneities]’ (ibid.).

To sum up, a state is ‘the noematic unity of spontaneities’ (TE: 28/113) in the sense that various spontaneous feelings give rise, in reflection, to states of certain things (of hatred, of happiness, of sadness and the like). An action is then some engagement or activity that one carries out in the world and is then solidified or encapsulated through reflection (e.g. ‘I keep shouting at people’). A quality, in its own turn, is ‘the unity of objective passivities’ (ibid.). These latter can be either states (‘I am a person who is full of hatred’) or actions (‘I have hated you for a long time now’) or both (‘I have been having feelings of hatred towards you for a long time now’) – all of which lead to the idea that someone becomes or even is, for instance, a hateful person. In this manner, qualities are one conceptual step closer to the ego itself, although states and actions can bypass such qualities in unifying with the ego directly (e.g. ‘I hate you’; ‘I was shouting at him’ – cf. TE: 28/113).

States, actions and qualities make up the whole logical language of personhood and interpersonality for Sartre. In short, personal reflection is necessarily a reflective activity, and its language always – and perhaps only – involves these three elements. Indeed, a challenge here would be to think of some description of yourself, or anyone, that would not fall into some combination of these three subcategories, some description of one’s or another’s personality that cannot be explained through Sartre’s states, actions and qualities.

The e...