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Authentic Life |
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Primary:
Sartre, J. P. [1943] (1966) (tr. H. Barnes)
Being and Nothingness,
Washington Square Press:NY
Macquarrie, J. (1972)
Existentialism, Penguin:Harmondsworth
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Introduction |
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Last week we looked at the problem of personal
identity – wondering what it was that could be said to constitute the
essence of oneself – and we also looked at the problem of Free Will in a
world that many consider to be Deterministic, and in which it is
consequently felt that although Free Will would be nice it is impossible
to have. I mentioned also that there are those who reject this idea, and
insist that Free Will is possible in a Deterministic world. This week we
can develop some of these ideas further in seeing how one philosopher
defends a strong compatibilist claim. In fact, Sartre, who is the
philosopher in question, goes so far as to say that not only are we free,
but we are in fact ‘condemned to be free,’ which makes it seem like
something that we might not welcome.
Sartre is best known as the major philosopher advancing the claims of Existentialism: a style of continental philosophy[1] that was very much in vogue in the 40s, 50s, and 60s in Europe and America. Existentialism is concerned with the investigation of the nature of human existence itself, and Sartre’s claim is that that requires the development of new sorts of conceptions beyond those that the physicalist possesses. Sartre’s approach to our freedom is connected with his ideas of how it is that we, as humans, exist in the world, and in that respect he makes a strange claim about the essential nature of man being secondary to his existence.
[1]
Some time around the
XIXth-XXth
C
a division came to be recognised in Western philosophy, and this
division is confirmed now. On one side is what we (here) call
Analytic (or Anglophone) philosophy, and on the other side is what
we call Continental philosophy. As you might guess from the names,
the Anglophone is dominant in the English-speaking countries, but
is also represented in the low countries and the Baltics and in
Latin America. The Continental dominates the European continent,
and boasts such names as Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre, Habermas,
Camus, Derrida, you get the idea. Exactly what constitutes the
difference between the two is less agreed on than that there
is a difference. The way
I’d describe it is that the analytic philosophers are interested
in precise and detailed analysis of concepts and the pursuit of
truth about the world. The continentals are concerned to protest
the way that the world is and to provide the intellectual tools
for an emancipatory revolution in our way of being in the world.
Since Australia is a bastion of the Anglophones, you won’t be
surprised to learn that all the philosophers that we’ve looked at
thus far belong to the analytic tradition of philosophy.
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Traditionally, Existence Precedes Essence
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To see why this is a strange claim, consider how
some of the philosophers that we’ve already looked at thought of this
relationship. When we were looking at Plato’s theory of knowledge, for
example, we had to talk about his theory of Forms. You’ll recall that the
Forms were non-mental, non-physical entities that were necessary for us to
explain how we could judge that some object was a chair or a pen or even a
man: something could be a Man if it ‘participated in the Form of Man’. But
this Form of Man existed independently of any particular man.
You might also remember that Aristotle also had
a use for Forms, but they were understood only as the patterns that Matter
could be put into, in which case there would come into being some
Substance. Something could be a Substance if it was Matter in a Form. The
Substance of a chair or a pen, for example, was Matter arranged in the
Form of a chair or a pen. Just so the Substance of a man – what made this
particular thing in the world a man – was the imposition on Matter of the
pattern or Form of a Man. Again, we note that the Form (some sort of
abstract thing) has to be thought of as existing independently of any
particular man.
We could finally mention that when we were
talking about the Mind, we said that a very useful way to think of the
Mind and mental objects was in terms of functional definitions. Just as we
might define a chair or a pen as being anything that could perform the
proper functions of a pen or chair, so could we say that a mind was
anything that performed the proper functions of a mind; and, of course, we
could also have said that a human was anything that performed the proper
functions of a human. All of these ways of looking at things assume that there is something that must be common to all the things that have the same name. Everything which is a pen or a chair or a person has something in common with every other pen, or chair, or person. That thing which every pen has in common you can think of as being what is essential for being a pen; and you could also think of it as being the essence of a pen.[1] The same is true of a man: there is an essence of humanity that precedes every individual man. For all of these ways of looking at things then, we would say that essence precedes existence.
[1]
In fact ‘essence’ is a term from Aristotle’s metaphysics and
doesn’t mean what I’ve just said – but it’s close enough for our
purposes.
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Facticity and Transcendence
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Now Sartre agrees that so far as
most of the world goes – for
pens and chairs, for instance – this is quite true; but for humanity, it
is not true. His reason for
thinking this is related to his views about our self-hood and what makes
us ourselves. Last week, when we
were looking at personal identity, we reached a consensus (actually, I
declared a consensus whatever you might think) that the most important
aspect of a person – that which made them the person they were – was
whatever was collected together under the label of their psychology; which
is a vague term referring to those psychological facts, such as memory,
character, and personality, which we thought were not transferable to
another person without destroying the original or making that other person
a copy of the original. You’ll recall that when we proposed the experiment
of switching the consciousness of a pauper and a prince between their two
bodies we were pretty certain that the
body would not be relevant to
the presence of the person of the pauper or the prince. If we discovered
that the memories, personality, character, intelligence, consciousness,
and, in short, the psychology of the prince was in the body of the
pauper then we would address the pauper (body) as “Your Highness.” In such
cases the psychology is accepted as being the property that defines the
person and, in fact, it seems to be our essence according to this story.
This has no analogue amongst pens and chairs, for these objects have no psychological aspect. If we swap all the physical properties from a prince’s pen to a pauper’s pen then the second pen has just become that first pen – it is not a prince’s pen trapped in the body of pauper’s pen. By contrast with humans, there is no non-physical essence of pens which can survive the alteration or transfer of their physical properties. A pen or a chair is no more than the collection of all the facts about that pen or chair and its relationship to the world. This set of facts is what Sartre calls facticity. Facticity is all that there is to being a pen or a chair, but Sartre says, and the examples we’ve just looked at indicate that we would agree, that it is not all that there is to being a human. This is not to say that humans don’t have any facticity: of course we do, for we are who we are in part at least because of the social relations that we exist in, the bodies that we inhabit, the histories that we have lived, and so on, all of which are simple positive facts about us. What Sartre does insist, though, is that there is a transcendent aspect of humanity, something about us that goes beyond facticity. This transcendental aspect belongs to what we’ve been calling our psychology or our mind or our consciousness or our ‘self.’
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The Ego[1]
[1]
‘Ego’ is Latin for ‘I,’ and a technical term from the then-popular
Freudian psychoanalysis where it names the conscious, self-aware
part of the mind.
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So how does Sartre understand this
transcendence? How does it come into being for humanity? Sartre’s
understanding of this derives from a criticism that he makes of
Descartes’s ‘Cogito’ argument. Let’s just remind ourselves of what that
argument tried to show. Descartes first established to his satisfaction
that the mind and the body were different substances, because the
essential property of the body was extension in space, and the essential
property of the mind was thinking. Then, given that the mind exists when
thinking exists, it follows that the mind of the thinking person, their
ego, really does exist – because it is impossible to doubt that one is
thinking. Doubt is a kind of thinking, so the act of doubting confirms
that one is thinking – and, in fact, confirms that you just
are, full stop.
Sartre thought that that was too quick and that
Descartes had confused two different kinds of consciousness. Consider what
is happening when we are listening to a lecture, or reading a book, or
looking at a picture, or whatever. In such a case we are directly
conscious of some aspect of the world, and it doesn’t really make sense to
say that our ego is involved.
There is no ego getting between ourselves and our perceptions of the
world, we are simply aware of the act of perception. This is a mode of
consciousness that he calls the
pre-reflective cogito. So far as this mode of consciousness is
concerned there is nothing more than the blooming, buzzing confusion of
the world. We might remember something like this in Hume’s description of
what he sees when he tries to find his self through introspection. You’ll
recall that he said that
So how does Sartre understand this
transcendence? How does it come into being for humanity? Sartre’s
understanding of this derives from a criticism that he makes of
Descartes’s ‘Cogito’ argument. Let’s just remind ourselves of what that
argument tried to show. Descartes first established to his satisfaction
that the mind and the body were different substances, because the
essential property of the body was extension in space, and the essential
property of the mind was thinking. Then, given that the mind exists when
thinking exists, it follows that the mind of the thinking person, their
ego, really does exist – because it is impossible to doubt that one is
thinking. Doubt is a kind of thinking, so the act of doubting confirms
that one is thinking – and, in fact, confirms that you just
are, full stop.
Sartre thought that that was too quick and that
Descartes had confused two different kinds of consciousness. Consider what
is happening when we are listening to a lecture, or reading a book, or
looking at a picture, or whatever. In such a case we are directly
conscious of some aspect of the world, and it doesn’t really make sense to
say that our ego is involved.
There is no ego getting between ourselves and our perceptions of the
world, we are simply aware of the act of perception. This is a mode of
consciousness that he calls the
pre-reflective cogito. So far as this mode of consciousness is
concerned there is nothing more than the blooming, buzzing confusion of
the world. We might remember something like this in Hume’s description of
what he sees when he tries to find his self through introspection. You’ll
recall that he said that
For my part, when I enter most intimately into
what I call myself, I always
stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or
shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch
myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any
thing but the perception.
Hume concluded that there was just nothing more
to be seen than this, in which case this consciousness would no more go
beyond mere facticity than the body would. Sartre disagreed. Sartre
thought that there was indeed an ego or a self to be found, but that it
does not appear until we begin to reflect upon our pre-reflective
consciousness. When we do this we are exercising a mode of consciousness
that he calls the reflective cogito. When we
say, for example, that we do have an awareness of the chair that we are
looking at, this involves more than being aware of that chair: it is being
aware of being aware of the chair. It’s taking the pre-reflective cogito
to be the object of the act of
consciousness. Thus:
By the exercise of this
capacity the reflective cogito
creates an ego, since the fact of there being a pre-reflective
consciousness of a chair requires that there is a subject of that
consciousness as well as an object – there has to be something being
conscious in order for there to be a being-conscious-of-the-chair. The ego
is a unification of all the pre-reflective consciousnesses; it gathers up
all the individual particular perceptions that Hume identifies and ties
them into a neat bundle. Sartre’s complaint against Descartes is that the existence of thinking or awareness, that is inherent in doubting one’s existence may be no more than the operation of pre-reflective cogito, whereas the claim that one exists – that there is an ego – can only follow on the operation of reflective cogito. So there’s a gap in Descartes’s argument that prevents the ‘Cogito’ from proving one’s existence in the way that Descartes had hoped. For us that’s a minor point. What’s of more interest right now is that since the ego is created by the reflective cogito by operation on the pre-reflective cogito, and the pre-reflective cogito is a part of the mere facticity that is a consequence of our existence as a perceiving animal, it follows that our ego, our self, and thus our essence follows our existence.
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Nothingness and the Transcendence of the For-Itself
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So now we can make some sense
of that strange claim of Sartre’s that existence precedes essence, and
we’ve also discovered how our self comes into being (which is a worthwhile
bonus,) but we haven’t yet got to the point of establishing our
transcendence and how Sartre thinks that the self is beyond facticity, and
thus is not bound by the physical facts in a deterministic universe. In
order to understand this point we have to see how Sartre’s philosophy is
really a philosophy about Nothing – it’s a Seinfeld philosophy!
Things like pens and chairs,
Sarte says, have a kind of simple
being-in-themselves. It is
the kind of being that any non-conscious thing can have, for there is
nothing more to such things than is given in their facticity; but
conscious things, things which have any of the kinds of awareness that
we’ve been talking about, he says have
being-for-themselves, and
being-for-itself, according to Sartre, is what you get when you make
nothingness out of being-in-itself! It is through denying, negating,
making nothing of, or what Sartre calls
nihilating the facticity
which is associated with being-in-itself that the for-itself is created
and by this the self-awareness of the various cogitos comes into being.
This is pretty ‘deep’ –
almost wilfully obscure, in fact – but things become just a bit little
clearer when we see some of the ways that Sartre argues that the
for-itself nihilates the in-itself, or that awareness negates mere
facticity. Sartre notes, for
example, that when we ask a question, we are accepting the possibility
that there might be a negative answer, even if the truth is positive(, or a
positive answer when the truth is negative.)[1]
For example, if I ask ‘is it sunny outside?’ one of the possibilties that
must be present to me (or I wouldn’t have asked) is that it is
not sunny. But if it actually
is sunny, then one of the possibilities that was present to me was of
the world being other than the way that all the facts say that it is. So
in asking seriously any such question my awareness includes the
negation of the world as well as the world as it is. (And similarly,
the fact that such things are questionable, means that there are limits on
the way the world is. If it is sunny, then it is not raining, and
vice-versa. In either case the question acknowledges that there is a way
that the world is not.) As a consequence, Sartre would say that my
awareness goes beyond (transcends) the mere facts of the world, and it
does this by creating the negation of the world as it is. The for-itself
nihilating the in-itself, in fact.[2]
Another argument that Sartre
gives refers to what he experiences when he enters his favourite café at
4:15pm and perceives that his friend Pierre is not there in his accustomed
seat, although they had an appointment to meet at 4pm. This perception is
not a judgement or a reflection: it is a direct revelation of something
not being the case – i.e. the presence of Pierre not being the case. This
is to be distinguished from the absence of all the other things in the
world that are not in the café at the time, because no such perception of
their absence is given. When I was late – deliberately, and for
pedagogical purposes – arriving at this lecture today, you noticed my
absence, but you did not notice the absence of any unicorns, nor the
absence of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise, nor the absence of any of
your parents, though all of those things were in fact not here. The fact
that you noticed my absence indicates that you had perceived a world as it
was not and were disturbed by the failure of the world as it is to match
that. But never mind your disturbance; concentrate on the fact that you
were anticipating (i.e. aware of) a world that was not the world as it is.
Again, it is a matter of your awareness transcending the facts of the
world by creating a negation of the world as it is, or of the for-itself
nihilating the in-itself.[3]
[1]
You
will be pleased that I am translating this for you: Sartre
actually talks about
“the possibility of non-being of being in transcendent being” (!)
(p. 36.)
[2]
BN:34 ff.
[3]
BN:40 ff.
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Freedom
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But if we look more closely at those examples we see that there is not
just one nihilation that can be
made of the in-itself. There are an infinite number of such nihilations
that might occur. We noticed the absence of Pierre because we were
expecting Pierre, and we interpreted the world as it was in the café as
one in which there was a non-existence of Pierre. If we had been expecting
Dominique and she had not been there, we might have interpreted the exact
same world as one in which there was an absence of Dominique. And so on
for any number of other absences and differences. The point here is that
the particular way that the in-itself is nihilated (in this case, the
particular absences and differences that are perceived) depend upon our
expectations of the world. And, because the expectations are a
characteristic of our awareness and thus of the for-itself, which is
transcendent, they too are not limited by the world as it is. How could
they be?
When it comes to the question of
acting in the world, we see the same thing. If, for example, a tennis
ball were to bounce in front of you, you might have any number of
different reactions depending on how you interpreted what you had seen –
and here we needn’t be talking about hallucinations, let us stipulate that
the bouncing tennis ball could always be truly described as such. If I saw
such a thing now, I might take it as a rebuke to my lecturing style, for
I’m expecting you to pay attention and be riveted by these words, and the
ball shows that is not the case. As a result I might become angry and
shout at you to behave. Or, because this is the last lecture, I might take
it as a piece of celebratory foolishness and laugh at it (but that’s not
likely, so don’t try it.) Or, I might simply find it puzzling that there
should be a bouncing ball here, and express astonishment without any
further interpretation, Or, … and you can continue this game yourself in
your own time. The point is that the way that we interpret the world will
affect what we do in the world, and the way that we interpret the world is
not limited by the facticity of the world. In one place Sartre actually
says that “No factual state whatever it may be is capable by itself of
motivating any act whatsoever” and now we know why. At this point we can note that the transcendence of the for-itself that we have described will hold even in the case that the world is fully deterministic! So Sartre must be some kind of compatibilist, and you now have an example of a philosopher who is not just defending the possibility of Free Will existing in a deterministic universe, but actually offering a positive explanation of how that could possibly be. If you look back at what we said about Free Will, the only argument that was given there in favour of its possibility in a deterministic world was that the argument against it was probably a bad one, and probably couldn’t be repaired. That is hardly a ringing endorsement.
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Responsibility and Bad Faith
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However, Sartre’s view of our freedom has some harsh consequences. Given
that, as humans, we do have existence for-ourselves, it is always the case
that we are able to nihilate the world as it is, and we are thus always
and inevitably free. We cannot be ourselves (for-ourselves) and not be
over and above the determining facts of the world. Thus, as Sartre says,
we are ‘condemned to be free.’ On his view, the way that we interpret the
world is a choice that we must
make if we are to act at all. It is the necessary precursor and
determinant of any action that we may take. Moreover, this choice is not a
thing that we can avoid doing. Sartre is of the opinion that I
must choose how I am to perceive
the bouncing tennis ball, and that this is the responsibility of any
for-itself.
Sartre sees this as making it impossible to blame anything outside the
for-itself for the situation that the for-itself finds itself in. Never is
it the case that the world just passively
appears to anyone as having a
certain signification, it is always the person himself who decides how the
world is to be interpreted. In the case of the intrusive tennis ball it’s
entirely up to me whether I take that as an insult and a bad way for the
world to be, or as a joke and the world to be a good way, or as a mystery
and the world to be a place of wonder, or however else I may take it. The
situation that I am in is the situation that I place myself in by my
interpretation. And of course the past interpretations that contributed to
my being in the current situation were also my own doing; as will be the
future interpretations.
This can be an alarming situation, and there are those who will try to
avoid the implications. In fact, it can be more than alarming when you
consider that Sartre was writing this stuff when France was occupied by
the Germans. To say that one is responsible for one’s own situation when
one’s country has been overrun by Nazis would seem to be absurd. But if it
is absurd in that situation, then it was absurd in the example of the
tennis ball – and we didn’t
think it was absurd then, so it
isn’t absurd in the case of the Nazi occupation. In the example of the
tennis ball, however, nothing very much hangs on the way that I interpret
the situation; whereas in the case of the Nazi occupation, this
interpretation may be a matter of life or death. What seems to happen in
such situations – what Sartre saw happening all around him – was that
people, because they did not wish to face up to their responsibilities,
behaved as if they did not have
the choices that they did have. Such behaviour he thought was a case of
bad faith, and it is to be
condemned wherever it is found, since it is a denial of the freedom that
makes us human. One might as well be a pen or a chair as deny the
transcendence and the ultimate freedom of the for-itself.
There are a couple of ways that one can show bad faith. In the first
place, one can deny one’s transcendence and suppose that what you do now
is because of the things that have happened to you – whether that be your
hormones, or history, or social position. This includes, interestingly
enough, believing that you are bound to continue in a course of action
because of previous decisions that you have made. You remain in this
class, I dare say, because you decided to come this morning, because you
decided to come regularly early in the year, and so on. It’s likely that
you didn’t give much thought to your decision and whether you should abide
by it after having made it. But Sartre says that we are continually free
and we must be aware always of what we are doing and why and to realise
that nothing is fixed by anything.
Secondly, we can show bad faith by failing to properly acknowledge our
own facticity. Most of the examples that Sartre gives for this are
actually pretty objectionable, but he does talk about the case of a
waiter, who considers himself to be merely playing at being a waiter.
Really he considers himself to be something altogether different (perhaps
he’s an unpublished author or an author who has not yet written anything.)
But this is wrong, says Sartre; if you are behaving in all ways as a
waiter, and in no way as an author, then you are a waiter, and you should
cease to delude yourself on that point. If you don’t like being a waiter
then stop being a waiter, Just don’t continue being a waiter and denying
it.
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