(1905–80). Sartre's father, a naval officer, died two years after Jean-Paul was born, whereupon he and his mother went to live with her parents. Sartre thus grew up under the supervision of his grandfather Charles Schweitzer (uncle of Albert Schweitzer), who exercised a powerful and not altogether benign influence on the boy's development. He was sequestered at home, and there encouraged in precocious literary aspirations until the age of 10, when he was sent to school, to enjoy for the first time the companionship of other children. Sartre's own account of his childhood in
Les Mots (1964) is mostly negative, and his grandfather is subjected to extremely unfavourable criticism. In the course of his adolescence he studied at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure, met Simone de Beauvoir, qualified to become a
lycée philosophy teacher, and did national service in the meteorological section of the army. He nurtured strong literary ambitions and ideals, which came to fruition with the publication (1938) of his first novel,
La Nausée, the first
existentialist novel. In subsequent years he published several plays and novels, notably
Huis clos and
L'Âge de raison, in which his philosophy is given concrete dramatic expression. This work was combined with more purely philosophical productions, dealing with the imagination, the emotions, and
Husserl's notion of the transcendental ego; in this he was much influenced by the works of the German
phenomenological school. These studies culminated in his most systematic and ambitious philosophical work,
L'Être et le néant (1943), which powerfully integrated his philosophical concerns and his controlling literary themes. In later years he became increasingly occupied with political matters, both practically and intellectually, thus attracting by his outspoken heterodoxy the obloquy of both Church and state.
The subtitle of
L'Être et le néant is 'an essay on phenomenological ontology', and this aptly describes the method and content of that difficult but rewarding book, for Sartre's aim is to give a systematic descriptive account of the fundamental categories into which reality divides — an architectonic of being — and of their interrelations, by means of a phenomenological enquiry into the structures that
consciousness displays. This is designed to elucidate the basic character of man's existence in the world, and so expose the underlying principles of his various modes of conduct. The starting point and pivot of the enquiry is, in the spirit of the phenomenological tradition, an insistence upon the constitutional
intentionality of consciousness — its directedness onto outer objects — and from this Sartre's whole philosophy ultimately derives. It is first observed that consciousness is, of its very nature, consciousness
of things other than itself. These things exist independently of consciousness, and are thus transcendent to consciousness, inasmuch as their being is never exhausted by their presentations to consciousness. The objects of consciousness comprise the realm of being Sartre calls the 'in-itself'.
The in-itself, for Sartre, is wholly outside consciousness: intentional objects are not (as they were for Husserl) in any sense constituents of, or in, consciousness. But consciousness itself, by contrast, is a dependent entity in that it cannot be conceived to exist independently of the in-itself, since it is essentially intentional; it is therefore supported in its being, as Sartre puts it, by something other than itself. (His position is thus the reverse of
idealism.) Indeed, consciousness just
consists in the intentional positing of transcendent objects; it has no other being. Yet — and this is the crucial point — it does not thereby collapse into the in-itself: it remains distinct from its intentional objects, and in a special way. Consciousness is not distinct from its objects in the way the inkwell is distinct from the table, since the being of these things is independent and the relation in which they stand external. Rather, consciousness stands off from the in-itself as a kind of pure emptiness, whose concrete being, such as it is, is exhausted by the objects it cannot but intend. Sartre characterizes the structure of intentionality, and thereby of consciousness itself, by saying that the relation incorporates a kind of negation: consciousness is at a distance from its objects by
not being those objects, and at the same time what is intended constitutes all that is
positive in the being of consciousness. Sartre is thus able to conclude that, in virtue of the structure of intentionality, the being of consciousness consists in its unalloyed negativity, i.e. its intrinsic nothingness. The directedness of consciousness is then not the directedness of any
thing, since that would have to be an in-itself and hence an object for consciousness. So this evacuation of consciousness does not stop at ordinary objects of perception or memory; it includes one's character, past, body, and even one's ego, which for Sartre (unlike Husserl) is intelligible only as an object of consciousness, not as its immanent unifying and constitutive essence. In general, nothing that is an
object of consciousness can be
within consciousness. As a result of this nothingness, says Sartre, we are apt to apprehend small pockets of negativity in the world. This occurs in the attitude of questioning and is revealed in the experience of
lack, which characterizes human reality; the phenomenon is most famously illustrated by the example of the expectant man apprehending the
absence of Pierre in the café. Sartre's contention is that consciousness of negation, which is integral to human experience, is possible only on the ground of the nothingness of consciousness itself.
But consciousness is not only engaged in the world by virtue of its intentionality and correlative
nothingness; it is further distinguished from the in-itself by possessing the characteristic of
self-consciousness. Consciousness is thus a being, as Sartre says, that exists for itself. The primary mode of self-consciousness is what Sartre calls 'pre-reflective' self-consciousness, i.e. the awareness of its own directedness onto transcendent beings. It is important to Sartre that the structure of this primitive self-consciousness does not recapitulate within consciousness the intentional relation: there is not, between consciousness and itself, the kind of distance that separates consciousness from the in-itself. For if there were, consciousness, in taking itself as object, would be self-transcendent; which is impossible. Pre-reflective consciousness is what Sartre calls 'non-positional' self-awareness. Indeed, if this self-consciousness were positional there would be the threat of an infinite regress, since the positing consciousness must always be transparent to itself. Consciousness is, paradoxically enough, entirely coterminous with itself, yet at a kind of distance from itself: there is, in Sartre's phrase, an 'impalpable fissure' within consciousness. This characteristic of self-consciousness implies that whatever is a property of consciousness is a conscious property of it. Sartre's thesis now is that the properties of consciousness which are thus revealed to consciousness are not tolerable to it, and that we seek, by a variety of stratagems, to conceal these properties from ourselves. (Some of these conditions of consciousness appear also on the reflective plane, which is to say the kind of self-consciousness that is genuinely positional, as when we take up the stance of another with respect to our own being.)
We can now formulate and locate Sartre's conception of freedom: freedom is precisely the nothingness of consciousness as it stands off from its objects. Specifically, one's character or past or body — what Sartre calls one's
facticity — transcends one's consciousness of it, and is symmetrically transcended
by consciousness. Choice consists in exploiting this distance in the formation of projects: the for-itself has possibilities because it
is not its facticity. Imagining and questioning and doubting thus become models of human freedom. But, according to Sartre, consciousness is appalled by its freedom; it is therefore appalled at its own being, which is nothingness. The outcome is that consciousness tries to conceal its own nothingness from itself by denying its freedom: this is the condition of
bad faith. Bad faith is, however, doomed to failure because of the principle that what is true of consciousness is consciously true of it: there is thus no escaping the anguish that is consciousness of freedom. Moreover, insofar as bad faith represents the aspiration of the for-itself to become an in-itself, it characterizes the attitude of
sincerity as well as the attitude of refusing to acknowledge to oneself what in fact one is. In both cases bad faith consists in a denial of freedom, either by conceiving of one's choices as externally determined or by trying to collapse the transcendent for-itself into its facticity, as with sincerity. We refuse to acknowledge our actions as our own by trading upon our transcendence from them, or we represent them as inevitable by denying this transcendence. And behind this mode of conduct is the basic structure of
intentionality, now taking facticity as object. Good faith would be an undistorted conception of the relation between free consciousness and all that one
is in the way of body, character, actions, past, and so forth.
In addition to the in-itself and the for-itself, Sartre discloses, by attending to the structures of consciousness, a third category of being, namely 'being-for-others'. So far, consciousness has been characterized as a pure point of view on the world, rather than as an item within it, but the revealed existence of other consciousness alters this solipsistic picture radically. The body has hitherto been considered as
my body, as it is lived by me; but it is also the medium through which I exist for the other, and the same is true of other facets of my facticity. According to Sartre, consciousness takes on the structure of being-for-others — it becomes an object
in the world — when it is subjected, via the body, to the
look of the other. In experiencing the look I can establish a new relation to myself, as in the attitude of
shame: I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the other, and my body mediates for me the formation of this attitude. (It is to be noted that, for Sartre, the primary mode of recognition of others is affective, not cognitive: it is not a relation of knowledge.) In being-for-others consciousness presents itself to itself as an object in the field of another subjectivity, and this on the pre-reflective plane. The fundamental character of interpersonal relations is thus a confrontation of freedoms, which Sartre sees as generating relations of
conflict. As with bad faith, this arises from an inherently unstable oscillation between freedom and facticity. Thus, for Sartre, the basic modes of human relationship embody self-defeating projects. Love, he says, is the wish to possess the other's freedom, for the other to be freely enslaved, but this is not possible, so the project of love is futile. Similarly the conducts of
sadism and
masochism involve, in their different ways, the possession or appropriation of a freedom: but in the end the possession self-defeatingly implies an exercise of freedom. In sex, too, the aim is to induce the identification of the other with his or her body, but the being of the other, as an incarnated consciousness, cannot but transcend the facticity that invades the desiring consciousness.
What is not clear in all this is whether Sartre thinks that his bleak and pessimistic account of human relations is essential to them or whether, like bad faith, they are conditions of consciousness from which we might conceivably be liberated. It does not seem, at any rate, that they issue from the constitutive structure of consciousness as it relates to the subjectivity of others.
It is important to bear in mind, in coming to grips with
L'Être et le néant, that Sartre's philosophy does not take the form of a series of unconnected but insightful commentaries on the human condition; it consists, rather, of a systematically articulated body of doctrine, ostensibly derived from certain basic tenets of phenomenological ontology, and is to be evaluated as such. In particular, one should be aware that familiar terms — 'freedom', 'shame', 'nothingness', 'anguish', etc. — are employed with a specific theoretical content which can be grasped only by coming at the work as an organized whole. Nor should such paradoxical-seeming dicta as 'the being of the for-itself is defined as being what it is not and not being what it is' be taken at face value, but should be construed as dramatic expressions of thoughts whose meaning, often relatively sober, can be grasped only in context.
Next to
L'Être et le néant, Sartre's main philosophical works are
La Transcendance de l'ego (1936);
L'Imagination (1936);
Esquisse d'une théorie des emotions (1939);
La Critique de la raison dialectique (1960). Arthur C. Danto,
Jean-Paul Sartre (1975) contains a bibliography of English translations of Sartre's works.
(Published 1987)— Colin McGinn
Only the guy who isn't rowing has time to rock the boat.
