Insight Editions · No. 51
The Cambridge Companion to Sartre
Christina Howells (ed.)
Essays examine Sartre’s accounts of consciousness, freedom, ethics, literature, history, and social structure, tracing his philosophy from early works to The Family Idiot.
A study guide to The Cambridge Companion to Sartre by Christina Howells (ed.). Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
The Book in Brief
The argument in brief
- Nothingness and the making of being. Consciousness is "a nothingness" that reveals and makes being without becoming its products; the ego is "elusive but not illusive" (Barnes, ch. 1).
- Method bent by examples. Sartre transformed Husserl's intentional and eidetic analysis through role-playing examples (impersonator, waiter, Hamlet), which lead to plays, psychoanalysis and conversion (Cumming, ch. 2).
- Where the break lies. The real shift is between The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness, not before the Critique; the personal for-itself brings back solipsism (Fretz, ch. 3).
- From radical choice to "the small movement". The all-or-nothing fundamental project defeats self-determination; the later Sartre's compatibilism repairs it (Jopling, ch. 4).
- Comprehension rehabilitates the poet. Verstehen lets Sartre move from What Is Literature? to Orphée noir and Flaubert as committed writer (Goldthorpe, ch. 5).
- An ethic of liberation, always unfinished. Value, generosity, Manichaeism, need and ethical radicalism mark each attempt (Simont, ch. 6).
- History as an artwork. Event, totalization, the practico-inert and incarnation make history "a novel that is true" (Flynn, ch. 7).
- Progress demythologized. Progress is a project, not a law, and an ideology of 1848; Sartre leaves tools for negative and positive progress (Aronson, ch. 8).
- A structuralist Sartre. The practico-inert is structure sustained by praxis (Caws, ch. 9).
- The subject deconstructed, not relinquished. Sartre's divided subject anticipates Lacan and Derrida (Howells, Conclusion); his for-itself repeats Hegel's genuine infinite (Verstraeten, Appendix).
The argument map: from consciousness as nothingness to the subject deconstructed but not relinquished.
How the book is built
Howells's Introduction promises a Sartre whose diversity "was far from being mastered". Chapters 1-4 treat ontology, phenomenology, individuality and moral psychology; chapters 5-6 treat literature and ethics; chapters 7-9 treat history, progress and structuralism. Howells's Conclusion gathers the theme of the subject, and Verstraeten's Appendix reads Sartre against Hegel.
The five themes that recur across the essays, and where each is worked out.
| Ch | Title (author) | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Intro. | The "new" Sartre (Howells) | Themes later credited to structuralists were in Sartre from the start. |
| 1 | Sartre's ontology (Barnes) | Consciousness reveals and makes being; the ego is elusive, not illusive. |
| 2 | Role-playing (Cumming) | Husserl's methods transformed through examples of impersonation and conversion. |
| 3 | Individuality (Fretz) | The break falls in 1940-3; the Critique restores a social, historical cogito. |
| 4 | Moral psychology (Jopling) | Radical choice fails; the later Sartre is a compatibilist of "the small movement". |
| 5 | The committed writer (Goldthorpe) | Comprehension carries commitment from prose to poetry and to Flaubert. |
| 6 | Sartrean ethics (Simont) | From value and generosity to need and ethical radicalism. |
| 7 | Poetics of history (Flynn) | History is intelligible as an artwork is: totalization and incarnation. |
| 8 | Progress (Aronson) | Progress as project, ideology and practico-inert; "progress for whom?" |
| 9 | Sartrean Structuralism? (Caws) | The practico-inert is structure that needs praxis to live. |
| Concl. | Deconstruction of the subject (Howells) | Sartre originated the divided subject; his successors chose "parricide". |
| App. | Hegel and Sartre (Verstraeten) | The for-itself, desire and need repeat Hegel's genuine infinite. |
Depth map: where the Companion's arguments concentrate
- Ontology to history. Barnes's revealing for-itself and practico-inert → Fretz's individuality → Flynn's poetics of history.
- Role and commitment. Cumming's impersonation/self-deception → Goldthorpe's spiral from prose dogma to Flaubert engagé.
- Ethics rewritten. Jopling's small movement ↔ Simont's impossible-and-necessary ↔ Aronson's demythologized progress.
- Structure without anti-humanism. Caws's practico-inert as mature Structuralism.
- Subject after its death. Howells's pour soi as already deconstructive; Verstraeten's Hegelian genuine infinite beneath the protests.
Five argument clusters across the Cambridge Companion to Sartre.
Chapter payloads at a glance
| Unit | Author | Gist |
|---|---|---|
| Intro | Howells | Deconstruction present from 1936; heterodoxy welcomed |
| Ch 1 | Barnes | Revealing ontology; ego as healthy bulwark |
| Ch 2 | Cumming | Role-play transforms Husserl; literature inside philosophy |
| Ch 3 | Fretz | Individuality and the returning solipsism problem |
| Ch 4 | Jopling | From radical choice to the small movement |
| Ch 5 | Goldthorpe | Comprehension rehabilitates poetry and Flaubert |
| Ch 6 | Simont | Ethics impossible and necessary, phase by phase |
| Ch 7 | Flynn | History as artwork of creative freedom |
| Ch 8 | Aronson | Progress made and unmade; Verdi's adversary |
| Ch 9 | Caws | Practico-inert as mature Structuralism |
| Concl. | Howells | Pour soi already deconstructive; subject returns as soi |
| App. | Verstraeten | Genuine infinite beneath Sartre's anti-Hegel protests |
Companion spine: from ontology through history to the subject's return.
The "new" Sartre
From the 1960s Sartre suffered "the backlash of rejection that exceptional popularity and fame brings", and became the humanist target on which Structuralist, Marxist and Deconstructionist critics tested their arms. Howells argues their weapons misfired twice. First, they tried to fossilize him in classical works he had already outgrown: his Marxism was not confined to the "difficult and little read" Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), nor was his relation to Freud exhausted by the critique in Being and Nothingness (1943) or the Freud scenario, relic of an abortive collaboration with John Huston. The Idiot of the Family (1971-2) shows that evolving dialogue most clearly. Second, they did not give the classical works themselves a fair reading.
How the critics' Sartre was built: fame, backlash and a partial reading of the early works.
What was there from the start
Howells lists six notions usually credited to the next generation and finds every one in Sartre. They are not imports from the Structuralist climate of the 1960s; the Critique "would still predate most of the French Structuralists' major works".
- The decentred subject. Consciousness without an ego at its centre, from The Transcendence of the Ego (1936) onward.
- No metaphysics of presence. Consciousness is never simply present to itself, a theme developed in Being and Nothingness.
- Against bourgeois humanism. A critique of humanism and individualism that runs from Nausea to the Critique.
- The reader as producer. The reader creates the text's multiple meanings, argued even in the polemical What Is Literature? (1948).
- Language as master. Language and thought structures are "masters rather than mastered" in most acts of discourse.
- History as detotalized. A materialist philosophy of history that is fragmented, not a closed whole.
Howells's thesis: anti-humanist themes run from Sartre's early texts to his French successors, not the other way round.
The posthumous works carry the same double concern with the deconstruction as well as the reconstruction of the human: the Cahiers pour une morale (1983), the Carnets de la drôle de guerre (1983), Vérité et existence (1989), the notes for volume IV of the Idiot, the second volume of the Critique and the later meditations on ethics.
The three parts and the appendix
Part I treats mainly the works of the thirties and forties (Barnes, Cumming, Fretz). Part II continues the ethical meditation (Jopling, Goldthorpe, Simont). Part III turns to history and the later works (Flynn, Aronson, Caws). Howells's own Conclusion on the subject follows, and Pierre Verstraeten's essay on Hegel sits in an appendix because its "technical complexity" is "unlikely to be assimilable by nonspecialists". Howells openly flags one disagreement: Barnes rehabilitates the ego as healthy and necessary, while Howells aligns Sartre with Lacan's hostility to ego psychology, and she invites readers to "relish the heterogeneity".
Howells's editorial wager: deconstruction from the start
Howells's Introduction insists the Companion's themes are not late imports. Deconstruction and reconstruction of the human are present from The Transcendence of the Ego (1936), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1940), Nausea, Being and Nothingness (1943), even the polemical What Is Literature?. Posthumous works (Cahiers, Carnets, Vérité et existence, notes for Idiot IV, Critique II, late ethics) inform and sometimes focus the chapters.
Part I (Barnes, Cumming, Fretz, Jopling) centers the 1930s-40s but already reaches the Critique and Idiot. Part II (Goldthorpe, Simont, Flynn, Aronson, Caws) takes method, ethics, history, progress and structure. The Conclusion and Verstraeten appendix reopen Hegel and the subject after structuralism. Howells flags Barnes versus her own Lacanian ego reading as a deliberate heterogeneity: readers should "relish" disagreement as a sign of lively Sartre studies in the 1990s.
Howells's Companion map: three parts plus appendix.
Howells's corpus claim: deconstruction is early, not a late concession.
Sartre's ontology: The revealing and making of being
The Greek Atomists made the void real without making it a substance, but their nonbeing "does not do anything". Sartre, by contrast, "puts all signifying activity where there is nothingness". "Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being, like a worm" (B&N p. 56), and there are even "little pools of nonbeing" out in the world (p. 53). Being is "the condition of all revelation"; consciousness reveals it. Both are transphenomenal: the object shows itself in an endless series of Abschattungen (profiles) without being exhausted by them, and "consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself" (p. 23), Sartre's "ontological proof".
- A nonsubstantial absolute. Consciousness is "pure 'appearance'", "total emptiness (since the entire world is outside it)", and absolute because nonsubstantial (p. 17). "All consciousness is consciousness of something" (p. 11).
- Monistic materialism. Critics call Sartre idealist and dualist, yet he finally said he wanted a monistic materialism: no mental reality independent of matter, though conscious processes do not follow chemical and physical laws.
- A crack in being. Somehow "there emerged in the mass of being a power of withdrawal"; this splitting apart "is the activity we know as consciousness", which "enfolds its objects in a shell of nothingness".
Two regions of being
The basic opposition is not consciousness against being but two regions of being: être-en-soi (being-in-itself) and être-pour-soi (being-for-itself). Insofar as the for-itself is, it has the same being as the in-itself; it differs only by "the active negating activity we experience as consciousness". Loosely, the in-itself is nonconscious being and the for-itself conscious being, which Barnes restricts to human being: a late hint that "all living things" might share in it was "obviously not carefully thought through".
Barnes's reading of the two regions: one being, split by the nihilating activity of consciousness.
Consciousness is the activity of revealing, and it is doubly dependent on being: it needs something to reveal, and it is the activity of a being, the for-itself. A corpse "is no longer a for-itself but an in-itself". Sartre often uses the two terms by metonymy, but never interchangeably when he is precise about body or ego; and "for-itself", not "consciousness", stands for "human reality" (his rendering of Heidegger's Dasein): "Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world" (p. 59).
- Equivalent terms. Awareness, intentionality, revelation, reflection, nihilation turn out to name one act: separating a tree from its ground and revealing that the tree is not the awareness.
- Doubly negating. Every act is positionally aware of its object and nonpositionally aware of itself, written "consciousness (of) itself" with the "of" in parentheses.
- No structured subject. Prereflective consciousness has no "I" or "me"; those are products of reflective consciousness and live in the ego.
- Perpetual flight. Consciousness is never confined to a "now"; it is temporal, aware of itself "in a continuous succession of nihilations". Grasp that nihilation and intentionality are one and the question "how can nothing act?" dissolves.
Embodied consciousness
Barnes asks whether it is after all the body that acts, as with the Atomists. Yes, if that means consciousness cannot occur without a body; no, if it means an organ directs it. Consciousness "both is and is not its body", because the body is both for-itself and in-itself. "To say that I have entered into the world ... or that I have a body is one and the same thing" (p. 419). "Consciousness exists its body."
The three dimensions of the body, read by Barnes as first, second and third person.
- First dimension. The body as being-for-itself: point of view on which "I cannot take a point of view", the master instrument I cannot use "because we are it". "The body is what consciousness is ... The rest is nothingness and silence" (p. 434).
- The body as past. The body is "the past", what consciousness "surpasses"; "The in-itself is what the for-itself was before" (p. 198).
- Second dimension. The Other's body is an object I read only by reference to "a controlling subjectivity". Barnes argues this is where any genuine personal encounter occurs and where subject-object conflict can be "replaced by empathy and reciprocity".
- Third dimension. My body as known by the Other: the body that can be "diagnosed as infected", a vulnerability out of my control.
Three meanings of "being"
Sartre says consciousness does not create being, yet also that "man's relation to Being is that he can modify it" (pp. 59-60), and that the ego, an in-itself, is the product of consciousness. Rather than accuse him of inconsistency, Barnes distinguishes three referents.
| Sense of "being" | What it covers | Mark of it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 Being as such | What anything is "existentially", met through "boredom, nausea, etc." | "Being is. Being is in itself. Being is what it is" (p. 29) |
| 2 Material in-itself | The external universe as ordered by consciousness: object and ground, a "synthetic totality" and an "additive collection of all the 'thises'" | A "coefficient of adversity" (p. 619): the apple rots whatever I want |
| 3 Psychic in-itself | Worked matter, the work of art, and the ego (Pucciani's term, extended by Barnes) | Matter melded with intention: "consciousness has created it" |
- Nausea and boredom. Both disclose contingency to Roquentin in Nausea: nausea is consciousness recognizing its embodiment; boredom is "freedom without a goal".
- The lemon. Against a "Kantian taint" in late Husserl, the lemon's reality is its being, not its essence, and all of it is present in each appearance and quality.
- Destruction and potentiality. "Destruction ... does not exist except through consciousness"; the threat of rain is really in the leaden clouds, but only a temporalizing for-itself can reveal it.
- Négatités. Absence, distance, regret are the "little pools of nonbeing": in the world, revealed by consciousness.
- Between Berkeley and Descartes. Being and Nothingness seeks a position between Berkeleian idealism (to be is to be perceived) and Cartesian realism (inner representations): consciousness bestows meaning on being without creating or being determined by it.
Worked matter and the practico-inert
Worked matter, first treated in the Critique, supplies the practical engagement "missing and badly needed" in Being and Nothingness. In need of air, water and food, the organism makes itself matter; the body "made tool" fashions tool-things, a "transubstantiation" in which "the thing becomes human to the exact degree that the human becomes a thing". A gun holds intentions inscribed in it; a ticket is only pasteboard without consciousness, "but you cannot get into the theater without it".
Counterfinality: intentions inscribed in matter return as forces against their authors.
The practico-inert "may steal my action from me", used by others against me or rebounding from nature as "counterfinality"; Barnes's 1992 example is the "greenhouse effect". Objectification in matter is "a permanent threat of alienation", yet only by inscribing intentions in matter can the for-itself have a history: "It is not the act of understanding that fixes meanings; it is Being." Its most psychic layer is the objective Mind (l'Esprit objectif), the ideas and attitudes of an area and era, "reminiscent of but by no means the same as Hegel's objective Spirit".
The work of art joins the real and the unreal. In The Psychology of Imagination the aesthetic object exists only while a consciousness sustains it; The Family Idiot calls the book or canvas "a real and permanent center of derealization". Hamlet or Venus are "social imaginaries" with real effects and even counterfinalities for their makers: the death sentence passed on Salman Rushdie, or Flaubert's dismay that Madame Bovary succeeded through a realistic reading he never intended.
Three meanings of "being" and the revealing for-itself
Barnes distinguishes senses that English flattens. Being as the in-itself is full positivity, opaque, without reason or relation. Being of the for-itself is the nihilating activity that makes a world appear by introducing distance, lack and possibility. Being as the totality we never survey is the impossible synthesis of in-itself and for-itself that desire aims at (the in-itself-for-itself, God-like). Ontology's job is not to deduce the world from a principle but to describe how consciousness reveals and makes a human world inside the plenitude of being.
Embodiment is not an add-on. Consciousness is always embodied consciousness: senses, motility, and the body's being-for-others jointly situate the for-itself. There is no ghostly spectator behind the lived body. Barnes's stress here prepares her later defense of the ego as a healthy structure rather than a mere fabrication to dissolve.
Barnes: three meanings of being and the revealing for-itself.
Practico-inert: counterfinality and objective Mind
Worked matter "may steal my action from me". Chinese deforestation and Spanish mercury mines (Sartre's classic pairs) show counterfinality: intentions inscribed in matter rebound as alien exigencies. Barnes's 1992 example is the greenhouse effect. Objectification is "a permanent threat of alienation", yet only by inscribing intentions in matter can the for-itself have a history: "It is not the act of understanding that fixes meanings; it is Being."
The most psychic layer is l'Esprit objectif (objective Mind): ideas and attitudes of an area and era, "reminiscent of but by no means the same as Hegel's objective Spirit". It is culture as practico-inert, the medium in which Flaubert's century will later be read. Barnes's ontology thus already contains the social turn without abandoning the revealing for-itself of 1943.
Practico-inert loop: intention inscribed, exigency returned.
The reality and role of the ego
Sartre's independence from Edmund Husserl began with his denial of the transcendental ego, an innate I-subject structuring experience. Still less is consciousness inhabited by an empirical ego. In The Transcendence of the Ego, reflective consciousness constitutes the ego by unifying its actions, its qualities (labels for accumulated acts) and its states: love and hatred stand "midway between a vow and a latent charge", held to exist even when not "awakened". The ego is the object of consciousness, outside it, "like the world".
- Real but not what it seems. The ego is "nothing outside of the concrete totality of states and actions", the "ideal and indirect (noematic) unity" of reflected consciousnesses, yet "no less real" (pp. 52-74).
- Pebble and melody. It is opaque like a pebble seen beneath moving water, and like a melody that must be sustained by consciousness; Roquentin says the melody has being "like the mathematical circle".
- Unlike worked matter. Contrary to the Freudians, the ego "cannot take on a life of its own" or turn back on consciousness as a counterfinality; it changes only by its author.
- Access. It appears "only when one is not looking at it". Barnes argues that looking at my own ego (an old diary, describing myself to "Bob") means taking the Other's point of view, so it parallels the second and third dimensions of the body.
How the ego is made, and the two ways of living with it: Barnes's reconstruction.
An ego can be true or false, Barnes concludes. The ego is "fabricated", in both senses: really made, and, in a life of bad faith, "a fabrication of self-deception, a false ego". It is "the crystallized reflection of what consciousness considers or imagines its fundamental project to be", the project being "a plan aware of itself".
- The wrong attitude. We reverse the true order, assuming an ego-pattern "like a genetic code" generates our states and choices. "Actually, the ego does nothing."
- Bad faith (la mauvaise foi). A lie to oneself that shifts between our two ways of "being": denying transcendence (my ego made me do it) or denying facticity ("I could steal without being a thief").
- Impure reflection. If the ego is the product of impure reflection, "we are all guilty of original sin and there is no Grace". Barnes asks whether that need be so.
- Pure reflection. In a 1971 interview Sartre said pure reflection comes from "a critical praxis we perform on ourselves" that he had never described; Barnes meets it in fatigue, slight insobriety, or a sudden return to the surroundings.
Just as "the body" is "the contingent form which is assumed by the necessity of my contingency" (p. 408), consciousness need not sustain any particular ego, but it must make one to lead a normal life. In the Cahiers pour une morale authentic love respects the Other's subjectivity: "Freedom as such is not lovable ... Pure being ... is not lovable either. But the Other's body is lovable inasmuch as it is freedom in the dimension of being." What we love is the person, the ego along with the consciousness that made it. In the War Diaries Sartre dropped his identification of authenticity with pure spontaneity: "Does that mean I'm going to allow the Self back in? No ... But though the ipseity ... is not the Self, it's nevertheless the person. I'm in the course of learning ... to be a person." A consciousness without an ego would be "a sort of weather vane", and at the extreme pathological.
The ego: Barnes's heterodoxy inside the volume
The chapter's most contested section defends the ego as necessary and healthy, a bulwark against irresponsibility and meaninglessness. Howells's Conclusion aligns Sartre with Lacan's hostility to ego psychology. Barnes admits she is "departing here from what Sartre has said explicitly". Her move: the ego of The Transcendence of the Ego is an object for consciousness, but lived personal existence still needs a practical identity that can answer for projects across time. Without some ego-structure, the for-itself's freedom risks becoming irresponsible flux.
Howells (Introduction) flags the disagreement as a feature of the Companion: heterogeneity and occasional heterodoxy as signs of lively Sartre studies. The dispute over whether Sartre hypostatizes nothingness (Howells) or only gives ontological status to the nothingness an activity brings into the world (Barnes) is the same fault line.
Barnes vs Howells on the ego, a live dispute inside this Companion.
Conclusion: a creative revealing
The ontology is descriptive ("phenomenological ontology", the subtitle); it does not ask why there is being or consciousness, and in a nonteleological universe purpose appears only with the for-itself. Sartre's one metaphysical hint concerns motion, a "hybrid" being, perhaps "a first 'attempt' on the part of the in-itself to found itself", a "disorder of being" beside the for-itself as "a more profound disorder pushed to nihilation" (p. 790). Barnes looks to evolutionary biology joined with phenomenology. Consciousness is "the activity whereby a human being recasts an impersonal universe in the form of the human life world"; the interplay of structuring and free transcending gives Sartre's philosophy its unity.
Role-playing: Sartre's transformation of Husserl's phenomenology
He starts from the English distaste for method. Charles Taylor observed (1964) that questions of methodology are "usually thought to be a waste of time" in England, where philosophers prefer "the stance of the inarticulate gardener with a green thumb": "I just plants it and it grows." Sartre, author of Questions of Method, is remote from that stance.
Intentional and eidetic analysis
Intentional analysis examines consciousness in its "meaning-endowing" acts, which identify something as "a triangle", "a table", "anger"; the act aims at its object as a "target" (Husserl knew intendere also meant "to bend a bow"). The shift from L'Imagination to L'Imaginaire marks the move from imagination as a faculty to imagination analyzed by following out the reference to the imaginary object. Phenomenology is not phenomenalism: "I do not see color-sensations but colored things, I do not hear tone-sensations but the song of the singer."
Eidetic analysis rises to essences (eidos). The remembered table or my anger at government policy are only examples of the essential structure of perceiving, remembering and above all intentional reference. Gilbert Ryle quipped that the "intuition of essences" was not something "any Anglo-Saxon could boast with a straight face"; Cumming asks us to "straighten our faces". Sartre called Being and Nothingness an "eidetic analysis of self-deception".
Husserl's two procedures, which Sartre inherits: from meaning-endowing acts to invariant essences.
- The Pantheon. In Paris I can count its columns; in London, imagining it, I cannot, because my image only spends knowledge I already had. This is "quasi-observation", essential to imagining, against the bona fide observation of perception.
- Not introspection. Asking "Do I love her?" by tallying Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday is induction, like an empirical scientist. Eidetic analysis is instead an "eidetic re-duction": consciousness is "led back" from examples to what they all exemplify.
- Free variation. "In perception something is perceived, in imagination, something imagined ... in love, something is loved." Eliminating the variable leaves the invariant: intentional reference.
- The geometer. As with a triangle drawn on a blackboard, the wobbles of each drawing must be eliminated in favour of what the triangle ideally exemplifies.
The impersonator
Sartre's longest example in L'Imaginaire is one Husserl never used: "On the stage of the music hall, the impersonator [fantaisiste] is doing impersonations." Franconay is impersonating Maurice Chevalier; I judge "It really is Chevalier" or "It doesn't come off". A portrait's material "solicits" the synthesis by "complete resemblance"; the impersonator's material is "a human body. It is rigid, it resists". Cumming finds the claim of "complete" (parfaite) resemblance implausible, a sign that Sartre pushes the differences until they become an opposition.
The impersonation as Sartre analyzes it: perception, signs and reawakened feeling produce a metastable image.
- Signs and formulae. "I stop perceiving, I read these signs." The model "has already been thought through and reduced to formulae ... schemata: the rakish angle of the straw hat, the jut of the jaw."
- Affective meaning. Into the formulae "an imaginative intuition" must "flow": my original affective reaction to Chevalier is "reawakened", projecting an "indefinable quality which might be called his 'meaning'". For Husserl an indefinable meaning is a contradiction in terms.
- An essence of a person. Sartre speaks of "the essence, as it were, of Chevalier"; for Husserl phenomenology "knows nothing ... of my experiences or those of others", so a particular person has no essence. Sartre drops "eidetic reduction" and keeps only "eidetic analysis".
- The hybrid state. "This dark hair, we do not see as dark", yet it still represents Chevalier's hair. "A hybrid state develops, neither altogether perceptual nor altogether imaginative ... These unstable and transitory states are obviously what is most entertaining."
Criteria and metastability
Husserl states his criteria for examples: "Outer perception ... provides clear and stable examples"; anger "may dissipate" when reflected on and "is perhaps not what should be investigated". Sartre did investigate the emotions; his Sketch is the part he salvaged when he discarded the rest of a phenomenological psychology as "pure Husserl". Sartre's subject matter is fluid: "The image is not given to us as a piece of wood which floats [flotte] on the ocean, but as a wave [flot] among waves."
| Issue | Husserl | Sartre |
|---|---|---|
| Favoured examples | Outer perception: clear and stable | Imagination, emotion, impersonation |
| Criteria | Clarity, distinctness, stability | Fluidity: "a wave among waves" |
| Meaning | Cognitive: the act identifies and defines | Can be affective and "indefinable" |
| Essence | Separate level from particular facts | "The essence, as it were, of Chevalier" |
| Opposition | No room for "Widerstreit, Schein, Anderssein" | Metastable, dialectical structures |
| Deception | "We shall always presume sincerity" | An eidetic analysis of self-deception |
| Philosophy | A rigorous science | That idea is "a crazy idea"; close to literature |
Metastable, one of Sartre's few technical terms not borrowed from another philosopher, names "the kind of mental structure" that is "precarious and liable to disintegrate"; self-deception "vacillates constantly between good faith and cynicism". In his book Starting Point Cumming generalizes: every full-fledged Sartrean phenomenon is a "contradictory composite", ambiguous, then contradictory, then unstable, which is why he calls Sartre's analysis "dialectical" rather than purely phenomenological.
Cumming's general form of a Sartrean phenomenon, with the examples that share it.
Self-deception and play-acting
The impersonation concerns the audience's consciousness; self-deception is reflexive. In L'Imaginaire the hated person I imagine is "out of reach"; to strike him I use "phantom hands that administer unreal blows ... I must double myself, make myself unreal." That doubling is where the phenomenology becomes "existential": the question shifts from identifying Chevalier to who I really am, my "choice of myself". Hence Cumming translates mauvaise foi as "self-deception": in a lie to another my intention is "play-acted, mimicked [jouée, mimée]", the intention of a character who "does not exist", but in self-deception "it is from myself that I am hiding the truth".
- The waiter. He imitates "the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton" while carrying his tray "with the recklessness of a tightrope walker", in a "perpetually broken equilibrium". "He is playing at being a waiter." More "is at stake than social conditions": "I am aiming at myself as an imaginary café waiter."
- The woman about to be seduced. The man's intentions are held fixed; she "knows very well" them. She plays two roles, sex object and spiritual self seeking "admiration and esteem", and "her aim is to postpone the moment of decision as long as possible".
- Generality of a role. Franconay impersonates not an ordinary person but a personnage created by Chevalier's repeated performances. A role carries "more general and more persistent significance" than one's particular activities.
Psychoanalysis: Genet and Flaubert
Instead of the promised moral philosophy, Sartre followed Being and Nothingness with Saint Genet, comédien et martyr. The title echoes a seventeenth-century play about the legendary actor-saint converted during a mock baptism in Rome, martyred, and made patron saint of actors. Jean Genet too is "the legend whom he imagined himself as being", sanctified by playing the passive sexual role, and Sartre's pun saint/seins gives him "breasts".
The Idiot of the Family, Sartre's longest work, is presented as "the sequel" to L'Imaginaire, one of his few claims of continuity. "If Flaubert was in love with Princess Mathilde, it was in fact, in order not to possess her": her real, "somewhat shopworn" body (the Goncourts' phrase) served as analogue for "the abstract, unrealizable image" of woman and aristocracy as such.
Flaubert's 'personalization' as a chain of role shifts, in Sartre's own section titles.
- Escaping a shaky persona. Acting met Flaubert's "need to escape from his own persona, which was shaky and tiresome, by substituting for it the being of a role". He tries "to impersonate himself".
- The elderly actress. We do not see her wrinkles; we "see" the youthful beauty, yet old age remains as "a sort of sadness, a 'that's all it amounts to'". So "the masculinity of little Gustave colors the object ... with a certain hermaphroditism": "I would like to be a woman, in order to be able to admire myself."
- Derealization. Flaubert "fucks to render himself imaginary" (baise pour s'irréaliser), trying "to identify himself with the woman he is possessing". Cumming notes Sartre "is a little short of empirical evidence" and leans on his own reflexive shifts.
Marxism as a question of method
The Critique keeps "the methodological principle which holds that certainty starts with reflection" and claims it "in no way contradicts" Marxism, provided reflection "throws us back immediately among things and men". Where a Marxist starts with the lever, the wheel, the stirrup, the pulley, the steam engine, Sartre starts with the moment an individual leans on a lever. Factory girls "ruminating a vague dream" are "traversed by a rhythm external to them": "it is the semiautomatic machine that is dreaming through them."
- Possession. "Originally, an impersonator is someone possessed": an absent Chevalier "chooses ... the body of a woman". The factory girl likewise gives herself "to the machine" until "she discovers herself the object of the machine", but she cannot slip out of her role.
- Intentions and consequences. Against "self-styled Marxists" whose use of Marx is "superficial and dishonest", Sartre refuses to call the Brissotins' Roman pose a mere mask. The actor crossing the stage to kill Polonius also crosses "to earn his living"; "their way of calling themselves Cato is their manner of making themselves bourgeois".
- Philosophy is dramatic. "Philosophy is concerned with man, who is at once Agent and Actor ... A play ... is the most appropriate vehicle for showing man in action."
Franconay, Chevalier, and the hybrid state
Sartre's longest L'Imaginaire example is one Husserl never used: the music-hall impersonator Franconay doing Maurice Chevalier. Perception gives a short, plump, dark woman; affect reawakens Chevalier's "meaning"; the judgment "It really is Chevalier" marks the image achieved. A portrait solicits by complete resemblance; the impersonator's material is "a human body. It is rigid, it resists". Cumming finds Sartre's claim of "complete" (parfaite) resemblance implausible: a sign that differences are pushed until they become opposition.
Three Husserlian breaks follow. Affective meaning flows into imaginative intuition as an "indefinable quality"; for Husserl an indefinable meaning is a contradiction. Sartre speaks of "the essence, as it were, of Chevalier"; Husserlian phenomenology "knows nothing of my experiences or those of others", so a particular person has no essence. And a hybrid state develops, "neither altogether perceptual nor altogether imaginative", "what is most entertaining": dark hair "we do not see as dark", yet it still represents Chevalier's hair.
Cumming: Franconay impersonation as Sartre's break with Husserl.
From impersonation to self-deception and Kean
Impersonation concerns the audience's consciousness; self-deception is reflexive. In L'Imaginaire the hated person I imagine is out of reach; to strike him I use "phantom hands" and must "double myself, make myself unreal". That doubling is where phenomenology becomes existential: the question shifts from identifying Chevalier to who I really am, my choice of myself. Cumming therefore translates mauvaise foi as "self-deception": in a lie to another the intention is play-acted, but in self-deception "it is from myself that I am hiding the truth".
The actor case tightens the screw. Playing Hamlet, the actor may "really cry" yet know the tears as "the tears of Hamlet"; he "renders himself imaginary" (s'irréalise). In the adaptation of Dumas's Kean for Pierre Brasseur, Sartre promises you will not know if you are seeing Brasseur playing Kean or Kean playing Brasseur. Kean acts out his life until he "is no one". Rotrou's Le Véritable Saint Genest (Genesius) supplies the classical martyr-actor foil Cumming's notes slightly misname.
Psychoanalysis, Marxism, conversion: literature inside the philosophy
Cumming refuses to discuss Sartre's philosophy apart from his creative literature. Existential psychoanalysis (Genet, Flaubert) reads a life as a choice of being expressed in roles, images and works. Search for a Method then asks how that choice is mediated by class and history without dissolving into them. Conversion and affectivity close the arc: affective meaning, already at work in the Chevalier example, becomes the hinge for changing a project. The chapter's reminder stands: role-play is not a side topic but the transformation of Husserl that lets bad faith, acting and political commitment speak one language.
Cumming's arc: from eidetic analysis to committed role-play.
Waiter, Kean, Genet: three grades of rendering oneself imaginary.
Conversion and affectivity
Sartre's interest is less in roles than in role shifts: Franconay steps into the role of impersonator before we know whom she will play; the revolutionary bourgeois slide into the role of Romans. In The Respectful Prostitute the heroine glimpses solidarity with the black man, "another victim", then is duped into respecting Southern mores; the Moscow staging cut this because "they could not accept her having a glimmer of consciousness and then becoming completely duped". "A glimmer of consciousness" is "a Sartrean specialty rather than a Marxist one".
Conversion is the most significant role shift; philosophy has entailed one since Parmenides and the "turning around" (periagoge) in Plato's Cave. Sartre had three: to Husserl before the war, to Heidegger during it, and after it to his own Marxism. Of Capital he said: "I had understood everything clearly, and I understood nothing at all. To understand is to transform oneself." His novels and plays turn on sudden decisions: "A moment ... is long enough for Orestes to carry through a conversion"; "I transform a tranquil evolutionism into a revolutionary and discontinuous catastrophism." The most exuberant passage of Being and Nothingness describes the moments "when the previous project collapses into the past", "in which we let go in order to grasp and grasp in order to let go".
The first conversion was total: "Husserl had captured me ... I was 'Husserlian'"; Simone de Beauvoir reports he "turned almost pale with emotion". Yet the higher-level shift in L'Imaginaire is "the role of affectivity", "affectivity taking the place of the strictly intuitive elements of perception". Against "the primacy of representation" (Husserl: the intentional act first provides "represented objects"), Sartre says "Nothing is more false": yesterday's offensive gesture by Peter returns first as indignation or shame, and only then as an image; a precise desire may not yet know whether it wants "something cool and sweet", sleep or sex. Love of "the long, delicate white hands of some woman" projects "the affective meaning of this delicacy". Heidegger's Befindlichkeit, "equiprimordial" with understanding, reinforced this.
- Stendhal at the climax. "I cannot see the way things look ... I see images. I remember their effects on my heart." Sartre placed this line at the climax of his dissertation on L'image, written at twenty-one, before he read Husserl.
- Fiction and truth. The Flaubert study is "a novel that is true"; "Husserl's idea of Philosophy as Rigorous Science seems to me ... a crazy idea".
- Proportion. In the Schilpp volume Sartre wondered why, of twenty-eight articles on him, "there was only one on literature". Read the philosophy with that sense of proportion.
Individuality in Sartre's philosophy
- Why it matters. Sartre allows no strict division between ontology, epistemology and anthropology, so a shift in one changes the others.
- The Cartesian thread. All three works start from the individual seeking apodictic certainty along Cartesian lines, but the evidence for the cogito "is of a different type in each".
- Three questions. Why does solipsism, eliminated in the conclusions of The Transcendence, return in Being and Nothingness? Why did Sartre never publish the ethics he promised? Is there a causal link between the two?
The Transcendence of the Ego: three degrees of consciousness
The central proposition is in the title: "The Ego is not located within, but outside of consciousness." Sartre reaches it by following Descartes's methodical doubt and Husserl's epoché. Husserl radicalized Descartes, so that consciousness is no longer a res cogitans; Sartre radicalizes Husserl's intentionality: if consciousness is "completely directed-at", the transcendental Ego "no longer has any existential right" and evaporates. Kant's "I Think must be able to accompany all our representations" names only "the set of conditions" for empirical consciousness, not a reality; Husserl's Ego, however formal, is "a center of opacity". Unity comes from the transcendent object ("it is in the object that the unity of consciousness is found"), individuality from consciousness's own inwardness.
Fretz's reconstruction of the three levels of consciousness in The Transcendence of the Ego (Peter sees a tree).
- First degree. Peter sees a tree: positionally conscious of the tree, nonpositionally conscious of "himself", where "himself" means only the tree-positing activity. Roquentin: "I was the root of the chestnut tree. Or rather I was all consciousness of its existence."
- Second degree. The Cartesian and Husserlian cogito is a reflexive operation, "consciousness of consciousness". It objectifies first-degree self-consciousness without explicitly positing it; "The I is nothing but the reflected self-consciousness of the first degree." Its status is "extremely problematic", both prereflective and reflective.
- Third degree. "All reflecting consciousness is ... in itself unreflected, and a new act of the third degree is necessary in order to posit it", but there is no infinite regress. Here the I is thematized as a Me.
- Two memories. Remembering "that I perceived the landscape" (reflective) and remembering only the landscape (nonreflective) are both apodictic; but the I appears only in the first, as an object, so it is as open to doubt as any other object.
Intermezzo: the turnaround of 1940
In the Carnets entry for "Monday, March 11, 1940" Sartre confesses that he and Gide share a tendency to negate reality. His consciousness had been a refuge: "my person was no more than a transitory incarnation of that consciousness ... like a captive balloon." The same escapism "inspired ... my article on the transcendence of the Ego, where I frankly put the I at the door of consciousness, like an indiscreet visitor." Now "It is the war and Heidegger who have put me on the right path; Heidegger by showing me that there was nothing beyond the project." Hence: "The selfness or totality of the for-itself is not the I yet it is the person."
The 1940 relocation of consciousness: from a captive balloon above the world to a hole in being.
Sartre read Heidegger in Berlin in 1933, but only at the end of the decade did that reading change his intuitions. Unlike Heidegger, who tries to overcome the dualism of being and consciousness through Dasein, Sartre "remains true to the Cartesian tradition of the cogito". Relocating the cogito in the world, as "a hole [trou] in being", turns the line between consciousness and world from vertical to horizontal and entwines consciousness and person. Heidegger's Letter on Humanism rejected Sartre's use of him, and Fretz agrees: one must either revise the Cartesian tradition creatively or return to the pre-Socratics; "a combination of these two alternatives ... cannot avoid shipwreck".
Being and Nothingness: the personal for-itself and the look
The second conclusion of The Transcendence said solipsism becomes "inconceivable" once the I loses its privilege. Being and Nothingness rejects that: even "a transcendental field without a subject" leaves my affirmation of the Other requiring "the existence beyond the world of a similar transcendental field". Fretz locates the personification in sections III and V of the Introduction. In 1936 consciousness was "a being whose essence implies its existence"; in 1943 "its existence implies its essence". The inversion is not arbitrary: the prereflective cogito is now second-degree, and so personal. Two levels the early essay kept apart are telescoped.
- Bad faith. Each person is facticity and freedom; "precisely because he is free" he is prone to bad faith (cannot bear the tension) and capable of it (can reduce himself to one pole). Self-deceit is a belief (foi), "a semiknowing, a pseudoknowing", a second-degree consciousness.
- Two believers. The thief identifying with his "thievishness" (facticity) and the gambler identifying with his resolution never to gamble again (freedom) are equally in bad faith.
- Toward others. Reducing oneself to object while converting the other to subject, or the reverse, ends in masochism and sadism, the model that "governs" all relations.
- A philosophy of resistance. The "overstrained concept of freedom" bears the mark of the war; Sartre told Fretz Being and Nothingness "was also a book against the Germans".
Sartre's shame argument against solipsism, and Fretz's reply: the proven Other is only an absence.
Sartre's second criterion for refuting solipsism demands "the concrete, indubitable presence of a particular concrete other", not an a priori structure. The look, set out over fifty-four pages of the French edition, reveals the Other "on the table, on the wall"; the Other-as-subject is the one who can make me an object; and physical presence is unnecessary (a moving curtain, a creaking branch). "The Other's look hides his eyes." Sartre answers the objection that no one was in the hall by saying that shame is evident and that discovering my error increases it.
The result is "a pale ghost" of the flesh-and-blood other, "a fleeting shadow". Looking and being looked at leave no room for relations in which equal subjects respect each other's ambiguity: "looks really kill". If morality involves solidarity, an ethics needs an ontology that shows solidarity is necessary, "leaving no room for a solipsistical position".
Critique of Dialectical Reason: the historical cogito
The Critique seeks proof of dialectical rationality and the ontological basis of alienation described by Marx. Its route is Cartesian (apodictic evidence), materialist (consciousness bound to matter) and historical (valid for "our world with our history"), which Fretz calls "historical-transcendental". As Kant measured analytical reason, Sartre seeks "the limits, the validity, and the extent of dialectical Reason". Book I runs in four steps: individual praxis, human relations, scarcity and counter-finality, and reciprocity as seriality; Fretz treats the first two.
- Step 1: praxis as totalization. "The entire historical dialectic rests on an individual praxis insofar as it is already dialectical." Need (besoin) is "the first negation of a negation": lack threatens the organism; consuming matter preserves it.
- Work, not functioning. Unlike animal functioning, human action goes beyond any given situation and is conscious of its functioning, so Sartre reserves "work" (travail) for it.
- Step 2: the window. From his hotel window the philosopher (Ph) sees a road-mender (R) and a gardener (G) separated by a high wall. They do not know each other, a negative reciprocity that exists "through me to the extent that I become what I am through them": a "petit bourgeois intellectual" on holiday.
Fretz's Diagram I redrawn: the philosopher at the window and the two workers, a relation among relations.
"The concept of man is an abstraction which never occurs in concrete intuition." There is a relation among the relations: G-R depends on Ph-G and Ph-R, and Fretz's Diagram II extends this endlessly, since Ph is "anyone" (n'importe qui): every laborer could reflect on Ph. People are linked not by a Platonic idea of Man but by the dialectics of work. The scene is chosen with care: vertical division of labor (the intellectual above), the broken-glass wall as bourgeois private property and horizontal division of labor, reflection as the intellectual's privilege.
Critique Livre I: from series to group, and the historical cogito
Fretz limits his Critique discussion to parts of Livre I, Tome I, where individuality is rewritten as historical. The path runs:
- Individual praxis. The organism totalizes its environment under need.
- Practico-inert. Worked matter returns exigencies that steal the agent's ends (Chinese deforestation, Spanish mercury).
- Series. Waiting for the bus, listening to the radio: interchangeability, impotence, otherness as structuring relation.
- Pledging / the group-in-fusion. The storming of the Bastille as the moment when seriality dissolves into a common praxis; the oath tries to stabilize that fusion.
- Organization and institution. Structure returns; sovereignty and authority threaten to seriality again.
The "historical cogito" is not a pure I think but the agent's grasp of herself as already in these ensembles. Solipsism is not so much refuted as relocated: the problem becomes whether a plural history can be intelligible without a superorganic subject. Fretz's conclusion: Sartre never fully closed the solipsism file; each stage reopens it at a new level (ego, look, series).
Livre I ensembles: individuality rewritten as historical.
Conclusions
Fretz sums up the three phases under three headings: the status of transcendental consciousness, the place of the Other, and the prospects for an ethics.
| Work | Transcendental consciousness | The Other | Ethics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Transcendence (1936-7) | Impersonal, individuated, Ego outside | Solipsism "inconceivable"; no problem posed | "Absolutely positive" ethics and politics promised; base "rather frail" |
| Being and Nothingness (1943) | Personal for-itself: levels telescoped | The look: Other as absence, a ghost | Blocked by antagonistic intersubjectivity |
| Critique (1960) | Homme historique: dialectical cogito | Avec-autrui through work | Foundation laid, "yet to be constructed" |
- Where the break lies. If there is a coupure, it lies between The Transcendence and Being and Nothingness. Better still to see a dialectical process in which opposed views are aufgehoben: the homme historique is a synthesis of the two earlier kinds of transcendental consciousness.
- Cartesian method, solipsist risk. A Cartesian route to the cogito meets solipsism unavoidably; intentionality guarantees a nonconscious reality but not the Other-as-subject. One either leaves the framework (Heidegger) or revises it creatively, as The Transcendence and the Critique do. The 1943 synthesis of Cartesian and Heideggerian methods "failed and obstructed the way to a philosophical ethics".
- Why no ethics. Sartre blamed postwar Europe; Fretz adds that the solipsistic position "is not overcome until the Critique". The closing sentence of The Transcendence ("No more is needed in the way of a philosophical foundation of an ethics and a politics which are absolutely positive") is true only of the Critique.
Transcendence of the Ego, Part II: constitution of the Ego
Fretz stresses that after the three degrees of consciousness, Part II inventories "The constitution of the Ego". The ego is not an inhabitant of consciousness but an object for consciousness, constituted across time:
- States (hatred, love) as transcendent unities of erlebnisse.
- Actions as further unities that the ego is said to produce.
- Qualities as potentialities inferred from states and actions.
- The Ego itself as the pole that unifies these, always outside the translucent field.
A series of moments of consciousness does not knit itself by an inner I; the I appears when reflection objectifies. This is why the 1936 conclusions could declare solipsism "inconceivable": if there is no occupant of consciousness, there is no privileged inner sphere sealed against others. The later return of solipsism in Being and Nothingness is, on Fretz's reading, the price of repersonalizing the for-itself.
Fretz: from Ego-less field to the look that reopens solipsism.
Four criteria for a valid refutation of solipsism
Before offering his own account via the look, Sartre judges Husserl, Hegel and Heidegger against four criteria a refutation must meet. Fretz highlights the second: the Other must be given as subject, not merely as an object among objects. The look is meant to satisfy that demand by making me experience myself as looked-at: an eclipse of my possibilities, a hemorrhage of the world toward the Other. A. J. Ayer (1945) already objected that feeling watched does not logically justify belief in other subjects. Fretz keeps the objection alive: the look may be phenomenologically powerful and still fail as a refutation.
Fretz's three degrees of consciousness before the Ego appears.
Sartre's moral psychology
Moral psychology "begins with the inner person", and the moral psychologies of Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Hume, Kant and the existentialists analyze acquired virtues such as integrity, courage, sincerity and authenticity. Our folk psychology and legal systems embed a model of rational moral autonomy: people who have reasoned their way to their own outlook, practice self-criticism, and know "with some acuity" what they are doing with their lives. The sciences that say we are "not really masters of our own house" raise four questions.
- Control. The first asks how far we can determine our way of life and fundamental moral outlook, and how much of it is rational.
- Grounds. The second asks on what grounds we are responsible for our character.
- Blame. The third asks whether we can blame people whose destructive traits come from heredity or environment they never controlled.
- Unity. The fourth asks how a human life "hang[s] together" as more than a flux of events.
Hard determinism and self-determination
Sartre accuses hard determinism of bad faith and "seriousness" (BN p. 40). On that view our makeup is "the tip of a massive causal iceberg" reaching deep into our prehistories; even the reflexive power to alter ourselves is caused, so we cannot do otherwise and praise and blame are senseless. Against it, Kant and Sartre hold that we determine ourselves "from the inside". Kant: "man himself must make or have made himself into whatever, in a moral sense ... he is"; his favourite saying was "Think for yourself".
The hard determinist chain that Sartre rejects, as Jopling reconstructs it.
- Reflexivity. We do not have our traits simpliciter, as eye color or brain size (facticity); we have a relation to them. A bit of wood is exhausted by its properties; people are also constituted by their possibilities.
- A rupture with the given. Asking "What do I really want to do with my life?" steps back and forms higher-order evaluations, variously called strong evaluation (Taylor), second-order desire (Frankfurt), reflexive knowledge (Hampshire), radical choice.
- Sartre and Heidegger hold the strongest: we "have ourselves to be", through a décalage between existent and existence.
- Not chance. Sartre denies the radical libertarian view of choices as random breaks in the causal network (BN p. 437); the chain of explanation ends in the agent itself.
Radical choice and the fundamental project
Our identities are neither ready-made nor products of conditioning, genes, neurophysiology or unconscious drives; they are chosen as an ultimate end and realized as a project. Sartre likens this to a sculptor and a block of marble: order from material that underdetermines the form, but does not permit complete arbitrariness. All our acts "derive their meaning from an original projection" (BN p. 39). Merleau-Ponty: "One day, once and for all, something was set in motion ... [and] the world received a fresh layer of meaning."
Sartre's explanatory regress ends in the agent's own groundless choice, not in facticity.
- Transcendental claims. The project is "the original relation which the for-itself chooses with its facticity and with the world" (p. 457), concerning "my total being-in-the-world" (p. 480).
- Absolute responsibility. We are totally responsible even for what befalls us (pp. 553-6); "there are no accidents in life"; we have the lives we deserve.
- Holism. Profession, tastes, friends and habits share "a thematic organization" (p. 468); one case of jealousy signifies "the total relation to the world" (p. 563). Unity comes from the relations between aspects, not from a transcendental ego.
- Constructed meaning. The environment acts on us "only to the extent that he comprehends it" (p. 572). "I cannot be crippled without choosing myself as crippled": I choose whether my disability is "unbearable", "humiliating", "an object of pride", "the justification for my failures" (p. 328).
- No foundationalism. The choice "by which all foundations and all reasons come into being" (p. 479) is itself unfounded, not "the purest crystal" (Wittgenstein), but "contingent in its very being" (p. 82).
Moral reasoning, and the young man
Within a way of life, deliberation about means works. But it presupposes a prior commitment to a whole way of life that is not itself reached by reasoning. The choice of self is a choice of what will count as reasons (pp. 461-2), "a prelogical synthesis" that "decides the attitude of the person when confronted with logic", so "there can be no possibility of questioning it in conformance to logic" (p. 570). Jopling relates this to Carnap's internal and external questions, Popper on the commitment to rationality, Hare and Wittgenstein's "it is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language-game". Etymology makes the point: deliberation is "de-liberation".
Self-knowledge: lived but not known
"One can't take a point of view on one's life without one's living it." Self-inquiry is a "reflexive feedback loop": like a traveller in a countryside "altered by his or her very advance", self-knowledge is both discovery and creation. The project is "a mystery in broad daylight" (p. 571), too close to see, the forest missed for the trees, yet fully experienced: we need not seek it "as one can go to look for the source of the Nile or the Niger" (p. 569).
Why the fundamental project resists self-knowledge, and the escape Sartre only promised.
- Too little and too much. Prereflective self-awareness is tacit and nonthetic, yet presents everything "all at once", "without shading, without relief".
- Conscience versus connaissance. Knowledge reveals the project only from an external point of view: "precisely because we are wholly present, we cannot hope to have an analytical and detailed consciousness of what we are" (p. 463).
- Poincaré's sphere. Beings travelling from the centre to the cooling surface contract until "they are separated by an infinite distance" (p. 286): Sartre's image of the futility of self-apprehension.
- Purifying reflection. A nonobjectifying "spelling-out", "the moment when knowledge becomes decision", remains "a kind of promissory note rather than a theory".
- A narrow model of knowledge. Sartre's knowledge is thetic, dualist, structured by "reliefs, levels, an order, hierarchy" (p. 155). It ignores tacit knowledge, know-how and moral knowledge, and the fact that experience is often conceptually mediated (Harré).
The problems of the early theory
Like Kuhn and Feyerabend on paradigm change, the project makes life changes discontinuous and unjustifiable. Its clearest case is radical conversion (p. 464), in "extraordinary and marvelous instants" when the prior project "collapses into the past" (p. 476). Iris Murdoch called this "a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments"; Sartre later called it "a revolutionary and discontinuous catastrophism", admitting he made Orestes convert in a moment "in my own image; not as I am, but as I wanted to be".
- Too rigid and too fragile. No middle ground between change and constancy; the price of change is too high, since "if anything is to change, everything must change" (p. 454).
- Determinism by the project. Once chosen, we are "virtually locked into our project"; even hoping for conversion expresses the current project. Merleau-Ponty made the same charge: "There is no difference between saying that our life is completely constructed and that it is completely given."
- Unintelligible self-determination. "What is best for me?" becomes rationally undecidable; our life changes are brute facts, and we cannot tell good from better choices.
The later work: totally conditioned, still responsible
"Human history does not walk on its head" (Marx). Saint Genet (1952) introduced social conditioning and took childhood seriously, where Being and Nothingness had the pour-soi emerge "fully formed". The Critique stresses estrangement by "uncontrollably powerful social forces" and practical freedom to change our situation. "One makes oneself a bourgeois ... But in order to make oneself bourgeois, one must be bourgeois"; individuals "have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class" (Marx), a fundamental attitude and "a determinate provision of material and intellectual tools" (p. 232).
| Question | Being and Nothingness (1943) | The Family Idiot (1971-2) |
|---|---|---|
| Source of agency | Radical choice of self, transcendental | Praxis, socially conditioned and material |
| Given material | Plastic: we confer its meaning | "Already sculpted", insurpassable in part |
| How we change | Sudden radical conversion | Reworking and integrating dispositions |
| Responsibility | For having chosen ourselves | For taking up what was made of us |
| Childhood | Underemphasized | "We are lost during childhood" |
| Closest model | Kant | Compatibilism: Hume, Marx, Engels, Mill |
The Family Idiot adds the constitution of the body, kinesthetic experience and the ego; Flaubert cannot transcend his constitutional passivity, his "deep, always hidden wound": "You will be the family idiot. If the child wants one day to find a way out of this, he must accept the sentence." Yet "a man can always make something out of what is made of him. This is the limit I would today accord to freedom: the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him. Which makes of Genet a poet when he had been rigorously conditioned to be a thief."
- The skeptical reply. If conditioning goes "all the way down", the small movement may itself be caused. "One gets rid of a neurosis, one doesn't get cured of one's self"; "in choosing, one will not attain what one has chosen. It is what I call the necessity of freedom."
- The sorites fallacy. "There must have been a first contribution" we did not control, so none is ours. By parity there could be no Homo sapiens, since each has Homo sapiens parents (Dennett's example). The false premise: "unless we were absolutely responsible ... we could not be responsible at all".
- Mill's compatibilism. Character is "formed for him" yet "in part, formed by him as one of the intermediate agents"; "his own desire to mould it ... is one of those circumstances".
Jopling's reading of the later Sartre: agency as an achievement built from conditioned material.
The contribution we make is organizational and bootstrapping, "the reordering and transformation of an already given material with and by means of that very material". Engels's quasi-Spinozist model fits: social forces act "blindly, forcibly, destructively, so long as we do not understand" them; the difference is that "between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning of the storm, and the electricity under command in the telegraph and the voltaic arc". Responsibility turns not on whether our traits are self-caused but on whether we have taken responsibility for what has already been made of us.
Foundationalism refused, and the Maginot line of choice
The early theory refuses foundationalism twice. First the project that brings "all foundations and all reasons" into being is itself unfounded: not Wittgenstein's "purest crystal" but something "contingent in its very being" (BN, p. 82). Second, the project cannot be justified by an appeal to values that would precede it, because values are constituted by the project. Jopling presses the cost: if every reason is downstream of the choice, the agent who asks "Why this project rather than another?" has no noncircular answer.
Sartre's own image for the difficulty is a Maginot line: the fortifications of reflective deliberation protect only the front the agent has already chosen to defend. The young man who weighs Resistance against filial care can invent criteria, but inventing them is already inside one of the two ways of life. Deliberation "is always fake" when it pretends to stand outside the project that makes some reasons count (BN, p. 451). Jopling's friendly amendment later will be that second-order identification (Frankfurt) and strong evaluation (Taylor) can rework a project without claiming a view from nowhere.
Jopling's Maginot line: deliberation stays inside the project it pretends to judge.
Four problems of the early theory, spelled out
Jopling isolates four structural problems that the all-or-nothing project creates for the very self-determination it promised:
- The regress of higher-order choice. If I choose my project, do I also choose the disposition to choose that way? An infinite ascent threatens, or else a brute stopping point that looks like the given Sartre denied.
- Discontinuity of conversion. Radical conversion is "extraordinary and marvelous" (BN, p. 476): the prior project "collapses into the past". Iris Murdoch mocked this as "grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments"; Sartre later admitted he made Orestes convert "in my own image; not as I am, but as I wanted to be", and called his early view "a revolutionary and discontinuous catastrophism".
- Opacity to self-knowledge. The project is lived but not known. Pure reflection is rare; impure reflection reconstitutes an ego and misses the project. Self-knowledge becomes almost as hard as the hard-determinist says it is.
- All-or-nothing responsibility. Either I am responsible "all the way down" or not at all. That premise feeds the sorites objection Jopling answers with Dennett: responsibility can be graded and still real.
The Family Idiot's moral psychology in detail
The Family Idiot reconstitutes the body, kinesthetic experience and the ego that Being and Nothingness had underplayed. Flaubert's "constitutional passivity" is not a choice but a sentence: "You will be the family idiot. If the child wants one day to find a way out of this, he must accept the sentence." The mother who wants a daughter, the father who wants a surgeon-son, and the early failure at reading jointly sculpt a passivity that later writing both flees and exploits.
Jopling's compatibilist reading uses three Anglo-American tools Sartre never names:
| Tool | Author | What it does for Sartre |
|---|---|---|
| Strong evaluation | Charles Taylor | Distinguishes mere preferences from evaluations that define who I am |
| Second-order desire | Harry Frankfurt | Lets the agent identify with some first-order wants and reject others |
| Reflexive knowledge | Stuart Hampshire | Self-knowledge as practical, revisable, tied to what I am prepared to do |
The "bootstrapping" picture: nonagential material (constitution, class, family sentence) becomes something the agent can assume, integrate, and answer for. Lightning becomes telegraph. The skeptical reply still stands ("One gets rid of a neurosis, one doesn't get cured of one's self"), but Jopling treats that as the necessity of freedom, not its refutation.
From radical choice to the small movement: Jopling's arc across Sartre.
Counterarguments Jopling keeps in view
Hard determinists say the small movement is itself caused; libertarians say graded responsibility is not enough; Kantians say inventing values collapses into decisionism. Jopling's reply is comparative: the early Sartre overshoots into decisionism, the later Sartre underwrites a responsibility without excuse that folk psychology and law already use. The chapter's conclusion is not that Sartre solved free will, but that his late formula "You can always make something out of what is made of you" is the right level for moral psychology.
Hampshire's scar and the young man's two lives
Stuart Hampshire's point, which Jopling leans on, is that some choices leave the agent feeling a part of him has been "killed or repressed". That is not a failure of calculation; it is what incommensurable ways of life do. Christian doctrine, Kantian duty and utilitarian calculus underdetermine the Resistance/mother case because each already belongs inside one profile of virtues. Feeling cannot break the tie without a prior choice of which feelings count. Hence Sartre's abrupt "You're free, choose, that is, invent" is less a shrug than a recognition that invention is what remains when criteria run out.
Incommensurable choice: why criteria fail the young man.
Understanding the committed writer
The spiral is "fascinating, frustrating, and exemplary": fascinating for its tenacity, frustrating because the arguments reach no conclusion, exemplary because that inconclusiveness belongs to the problem: "Sartre's open-ended writing itself enacts an open dialectic". The posthumous texts that qualify the standard view are the Carnets de la drôle de guerre (written 1939-40, published 1983), the Cahiers pour une morale (1947-8, 1983) and volume II of the Critique (1958-62, 1985).
What Is Literature? and its gaps
Language extends the revealing power of consciousness: "The 'committed' writer knows that words are actions; he knows that to reveal is to change, and that one cannot reveal unless one has the project of changing" (Sit II, p. 73). The medium is the transparency of prose, whose words carry a signification. For poets words are opaque objects embodying a sens, "anguish transformed into a thing" (p. 61); the prose writer should "call a spade a spade" (p. 304). The poet's only engagement is a negative témoignage (bearing witness): "Poetry is a case of loser wins ... the man who commits himself to losing" (p. 87).
| Term | Meaning in Sartre |
|---|---|
| Embarquement | Passive involvement in a situation |
| Engagement | Raising involvement "from immediate spontaneity to reflection" (p. 24) |
| Embrigadement | Militant party membership, which stifles freedom and communication |
| Témoignage | Bearing witness, at first the poet's defeatist form of commitment |
| Signification / sens | Transparent reference of prose / embodied meaning of poetry |
| Écrivant / écrivain | Technical communicator / writer who bears witness to the whole (Plaidoyer, 1965) |
| Compréhension / intellection | Grasping lived subjectivity / grasping abstract structures such as class |
From involvement to commitment in What Is Literature?, with the party alternative Sartre rejects.
- Intelligibility begged. The essay never says how intelligible the situation is to the embarqué individual, however enlightened; effective action depends on it, but Sartre offers no method.
- Optimism by assertion. "A lucid view of the darkest situation is already, in itself, an act of optimism" (p. 289): opacity is recognized and intelligibility "simply asserted, against all the odds".
- Action or appeal? Sometimes the writer should act on the reader; elsewhere "authors do not act upon their readers; they simply appeal to their freedom" (p. 197).
- Tautology. The praxis that synthesizes "historical relativity" and "the moral and metaphysical absolute" (p. 265) is described circularly, and committed action seems to presuppose the freedom it should promote.
Questions de méthode: the progressive-regressive method
The family is the key mediation through which a child internalizes class, group, economy and ideology. The method synthesizes Marxist and psychoanalytic approaches and moves to and fro (va-et-vient) between levels, so that conditioning is both "surpassed" and "preserved" (CRD I, p. 68).
The progressive-regressive method of Questions de méthode, applied to Flaubert.
- Regressive phase. Back to the circumstances internalized "in the opacity of childhood", revealing "historical singularity" (p. 92), with each level "differentiated" at the next.
- Progressive phase. The project builds an être-dans-le-monde as "an objective but not definitive totality".
- The singular universal. "Having been totalized, and thus universalized, by his epoch, the individual retotalizes it through the singularity of his own projects."
- Alienation. "The final objectification may not correspond exactly to the original choice" (p. 93), and the method is itself detotalized: "the knower is implicated in the known".
- The limit. It shows how the interpreter understands the agent, but not how the agent comes to understand and change his situation.
Comprehension: Dilthey, Aron and the Kaiser's arm
Compréhension comes from the German split between Erklären (explanation by mechanistic or biological models) and Verstehen (understanding human meanings as wholes). Its exemplars: Max Scheler; Karl Jaspers, whose Allgemeine Psychopathologie (1913) Sartre "helped to translate" in 1928; Max Weber; and above all Wilhelm Dilthey, known to Sartre from 1938 through Raymond Aron. Freudian analysis is "a study based on comprehension that is hidden beneath an analytic and explanatory myth" (CM, p. 287). Historical materialism and psychoanalysis show "a rigorous parallelism": both reduce the superior to the inferior. "To explain is to elucidate in terms of causes; to understand is to elucidate in terms of goals."
- Dilthey's method. Cultural products are signs of lived experience (Sartre's vécu), read through literature, diaries, autobiographies; a "hermeneutic circle" moves between wholes and parts, "nothing to do with cause and effect".
- Objective mind. Dilthey's Esprit objectif (institutions, customs, law, language, art) differs from Hegel's stage of Spirit; it is mediated through the family, and becomes Sartre's term in Idiot III.
- The 1914 war. In the Carnets Sartre seeks "a relationship of comprehension between that English policy and this withered arm" of Wilhelm II (CDG, p. 365), reliving (nacherleben) the Kaiser's resentments through Ludwig's biography.
- History unknowable as a whole. "What makes Truth impossible is that man makes history, and that he makes it anew through the act of knowing it" (Vérité et existence, p. 133).
Three attitudes to another's goal in the Cahiers: only the third is authentic comprehension.
In the Cahiers comprehension becomes "an original active intention" that engages me in the other's action, a form of "sympathy", apparently renouncing Being and Nothingness. I must not seize the other's goal; I change the situation so he can act. The example is homely: helping a would-be passenger catch a moving bus. My help becomes "passion, incarnation" (CM, p. 297): "the greater the freedom, the greater the 'passion'", so passivity is rehabilitated, a problem Sartre had called "so essential in modern philosophy". Even The Transcendence knew that "consciousness takes fright at its own spontaneity".
Orphée noir: committed poetry
"Orphée noir" (1948), the preface to an anthology of francophone Black poets, applies comprehension to a collectivity. The white European worker must use "technical, scientific, practical weapons"; his pragmatic language tends toward "the more and more rigorous elimination of the subject", a "mutilation" (p. 239). Class is grasped by intellection, race by "ce que Jaspers nomme compréhension" (Sit III, p. 280). The limits of poetry are therefore relative to a moment in the class struggle, not absolute.
Sartre's dialectic of negritude in Orphée noir, which Fanon contested.
- Entering history. "The black man enters into history in that the intuition of suffering confers upon him a collective past and a future goal" (p. 276); negritude "bears the seed of its own destruction" (p. 280).
- Exile and Orpheus. The body's exile is "the magnificent symbol" of exile from the spirit of Africa, an imaginary continent of "mystical geography"; the Orphic myth links the quest to Western culture.
- Indirect language. Forced to write an alien language, the poets subvert it, evoking "in deliberate shadow, the silenced object" (Mallarmé, Sit III, p. 246). "For once, at least, the most authentic revolutionary project and the purest poetry flow from the same source" (p. 285).
- Emotion rehabilitated. Emotion is no longer self-deceiving evasion but "as much of a project as any voluntary act" (p. 262), and témoignage and engagement converge.
What Is Literature? gaps Goldthorpe presses
Beyond the prose/poetry split, Goldthorpe lists gaps that "Questions de méthode" and the posthumous texts are meant to repair:
- Embarquement versus engagement. Involvement is passive; engagement raises it "from the level of immediate spontaneity to the level of reflection" (Sit II, p. 24). The distinction begs how far the embarqué individual can make the situation intelligible.
- Party versus commitment. Embrigadement in a party (by implication Marxism and the Communist Party) stifles freedom and communication; Sartre rejects parties as "repositories of historical wisdom" yet offers no alternative method that would validate his intuitions about 1947.
- Pluridimensionalité of the event. Multiple point of view suits the novel, but Sartre does not explore what that complexity means for reflection, interpretation and action by the writer or the historical agent.
- Impasse of reflection. A lucid view is "already an act of optimism" (p. 289), yet the move from reflective awareness to practical action eludes him. Thesis and antithesis confront; synthesis does not arrive.
- Literature as condition, not act. Authors "appeal to the reader's freedom" (p. 197); literature is "the moment of reflective consciousness", a necessary condition of action, not action itself. Elsewhere perception and language are forms of action: the texts pull both ways.
- Freedom presupposed. Committed action sometimes seems to presuppose the sociopolitical freedom it is meant to promote. Alienation that attenuates freedom is "not adequately confronted".
- Conflicting times. Being and Nothingness gives consciousness as creating its own temporality; What Is Literature? adds an extra-historical Utopia as ideal context and the relativizing force of History. The three are not integrated until the progressive-regressive method.
Goldthorpe's spiral: from What Is Literature? gaps to the Idiot's open dialectic.
Progressive-regressive method: three levels and alienation
The regressive phase moves back to formative circumstances internalized in the opacity of childhood, revealing "historical singularity" (p. 92). It works at three levels of significance:
| Level | Example | What it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Universal significations | Capitalism as abstract structure | Period-wide pressures |
| Specific social group | Petit-bourgeois family | How the universal is lived locally |
| Individual member | Flaubert | "Concrete reality as a lived totalization" (p. 88) |
Within regression a constant va-et-vient moves between period, group and singularity. The progressive phase then shows synthetic, goal-directed relations: the individual, through the project, transcends and preserves conditioning to create an être-dans-le-monde as an objective but not definitive totality. The "individual" should yield to the "singular universal": totalized by the epoch, the person retotalizes it through singular projects.
Alienation enters twice. The project under pressure may yield "an alienated form of self-objectification" in which "the final objectification may not correspond exactly to the original choice" (p. 93). And the method itself is "totalizing" yet "detotalized": unification is never fully accomplished. Goldthorpe treats that open-endedness as inherent in the problem, not a defect to hide.
Progressive-regressive va-et-vient across three levels.
Mallarmé, Plaidoyer and Critique II
Saint Genet (1952) fails to integrate Genet's experience with history, though his sterile beauty still "demoralizes" bourgeois readers. In L'Engagement de Mallarmé (1948-52, published 1979) the pure poet's nihilism is transcended by a critical consciousness; Mallarmé reconciles "the Singular and the Universal" "on behalf of all". Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels (1965) reserves clarity for the écrivant and gives the écrivain a totalizing mission conveyed through "silent nonknowledge" (Sit VIII, p. 437) and style: "the flavor of the epoch, the taste of the historical moment" (p. 450).
- Critique II. Dialectical comprehension transcends "positive" and "analytic" reason; progress is "an object of comprehension" (CRD II, p. 413) and "oriented change" (p. 417); comprehension is itself a form of praxis.
- The artist's progress. "The progress of an artist is absolute" (p. 411): finishing Madame Bovary is "its totalization together with all the totalizations of totalizations" (p. 416).
- Notion, not concept. A concept is "externally constructed and atemporal"; a notion "comprehends within itself not only the time of the object ... but the time of its own act of cognition" (Sit X, pp. 95-6).
The Kaiser's arm: comprehension as Nachleben
In the Carnets de la drôle de guerre Sartre wants "a relationship of comprehension between that English policy and this withered arm" of Wilhelm II (CDG, p. 365). He works through Emil Ludwig's biography to nacherleben (relive) the Kaiser's resentments: the congenitally disfigured left arm; succession after a generation gap from his grandfather's ruling groups; autonomy staged against the liberalizing influence of his English mother; the personnel of the Crown and Bismarck's legacy. Parallel levels of explanation and comprehension converge when the personage is grasped as a "human totality" in the unity of his "historicization".
Goldthorpe's point is methodological: Dilthey's ambition to write a "critique of historical reason" prefigures the Critique de la raison dialectique. Freudian analysis remains "comprehension hidden beneath an analytic and explanatory myth" (CM, p. 287); historical materialism and psychoanalysis share a "rigorous parallelism" that reduces the superior to the inferior without validating the end-point of regression (CM, p. 449-50).
Mallarmé, silence, and the Plaidoyer revision
Goldthorpe's short Mallarmé section is the hinge between Orphée noir and the Idiot. Sartre's Mallarmé chooses silence and failure as a way of bearing witness when prose commitment is blocked; poetry's loser-wins becomes a positive politics of the negative. The Plaidoyer pour les intellectuels revises the 1947 language theory: the intellectual's words are no longer pure transparent signs; they work in a field of ideology and practico-inert meanings. Critique II then supplies the historical ontology (incarnation, enveloping totalization) against which a writer as "uncommitted" as Flaubert can still be read as engagé: he totalizes his age by giving it the imaginary it was already choosing after 1848.
From poetic témoignage to Flaubert's commitment by totalization.
Flaubert as committed writer
In 1960 Sartre said Flaubert's "pure art" hid strong social and political views; in 1971 he described a deeper engagement "through which he attempts to save his life": "This circularity is totalization ... a profound commitment", "a true passion, in the biblical sense" (Sit X, pp. 112-13). The Cahiers had linked failure to the Passion: "The failure of Christ is the incarnation of the Universal in the Particular" (CM, p. 454).
Sartre's spiral from Flaubert's fall at Pont-l'Évêque (1844) to Saint Julien (1875-6).
- The fall understood. Driving his elder brother home from Deauville, Flaubert collapsed at his feet. Sartre reads it as an intentional escape from his father's bourgeois demands (he could abandon law and stay home to write) and as a lived prophecy of the fall of the Bourgeois Monarchy in 1848 and the rise and defeat of Louis Napoleon (IF III, pp. 430-1). His illness is "a full expression of his freedom" (IF II, p. 2136).
- Style as praxis. The fall "embodies" language: the body "says the unsayable", signification gives way to sens; imagination becomes "a rigorous technique" (p. 1936), and "Art for Art's sake" expresses the "art-as-neurosis" of a generation.
- Two versions of loser wins. Jules in the first Éducation sentimentale (1845) is "rationalized"; the "profound and original" version (p. 2135) is in Saint Julien l'Hospitalier (written 1875-6), whose stained-glass legend attracted Flaubert in 1845.
- Parricide and sainthood. For Julien the murder of his father leads to sainthood (Sartre "brushes aside" that Julien also kills his mother). Through Julien Flaubert weeps "the tears that he wishes his father had ... wept for him" (p. 1902).
- The told and the lived. At the level of the lived we suffer with a sadistic hero; at the level of the told we share the Artist's or God's love, so we "love an abject parricide". This is "the great ontological law, the law of love which rules us all" (p. 2133); Sartre also cites Bernanos's country priest.
Reading, too, has three forms. It can be an atomized series of individual totalizations; or a reading governed by a pledged group, as when a young party member reads Marx's 1848 manifesto, both of which make the work inert and destroy reciprocity (IF III, p. 55). Or it can be dynamic, heightening the contradictions of the Esprit objectif toward "a 'constantly developing totalization'" (p. 56): "the Esprit objectif tells us in contradictory but imperative ways, who we are: in other words, what we must do" (pp. 57-8). Sartre's notes on Madame Bovary show his frustration: "Why write the first three volumes if they cannot be found on every page of the fourth?" The process of writing and reading stays "as open-ended as L'Idiot de la famille itself".
Sartrean ethics
Being and Nothingness: lack, value, moral perspectives
The for-itself is lack of being: it fails to be the in-itself. Only this ontological lack, aiming at a totality, makes any concrete lack intelligible: without it hunger would be "blind, inexpressible panic". The totality is "the lacked of all lacks" (BN, p. 69), an impossible in-itself-for-itself; reaching it, I would already face "another horizon of possibilities" (p. 77). "The being of the self is value" (p. 68).
How value arises from lack in Being and Nothingness, and how the spirit of seriousness petrifies it.
- Ethical value is thetic. Value haunts every lack non-thetically; it becomes ethical only as the object of a reflexive position, understood through the "supreme value" of self-coincidence.
- The duality of value. Treated as fact (sociology), value loses its character as "a free appeal to human freedom"; treated as pure ideality, "it will collapse for lack of being" (p. 69). Its constraint is not "that of a road sign" but a call to free invention.
- Contingency and necessity. Value implies "a total contingency of being-for-value ... and at the same time a free and absolute necessity" (p. 70).
- The spirit of seriousness. It treats values as "transcendent givens" and moves desirability into matter: bread is desirable "because it is necessary to live ... and because bread is nourishing" (p. 544). This is bad faith, "an ethics which is ashamed of itself", the ethic of the notables of the Bouville museum.
Sartre leaves open whether alienation comes from value as such or only from an inauthentic understanding of it.
Notebooks for an Ethic: the bewitchment of freedom
"Values reveal freedom and at the same time alienate it" (CM, p. 16), yet there is now a hierarchy with "at the top: generosity". Value itself is not compulsion: its "having-to-be" means "everything depends on me" (p. 259). The alienated reversal is obligation, which "comes to the for-itself through the Other" (p. 269).
- The soldier. As in BN (p. 234), the soldier advancing in mined enemy territory knows his acts "will be interpreted, reclassified into a broader picture" (CM, p. 271).
- The colonel and the sentry. A colonel who forgot the morning's password is barred by his own sentry. The sentry is not a rival look but "an inert receptacle of order": the colonel's will "has become an essential structure of the universe" (p. 273).
- The sorcerer's apprentice. Freedom is petrified by the material field of its inscription, a "bewitchment" that prefigures the Critique's practico-inert and counterfinalities. The sentry's praised "values" (discipline, courage) are really obligations.
- A shift of emphasis. BN stresses the active transcendence of the for-itself; the Notebooks stress the in-itself side, "a monstrous mix" of the two. Simont denies this means BN sinned by subjective idealism.
Three real roads of freedom in the Notebooks, all of which alienate freedom in matter.
- The engineer. He makes the world "an instrumental reservoir", to "remove from the universe the last square inch of uselessness" (p. 555). But "I have created a machine" (p. 556): the connecting rod's finality "constantly disappears into causality" (p. 557). "By attempting to found things in terms of freedom, one succeeds only in turning freedom into a thing" (p. 562): "a fluttering of being between the mechanical and the spiritual".
- The primitive. The "universe of desire" (p. 364) awaits a perpetual gift: "There is or there is not fish in the river ... desire is desire for the immediate" (pp. 364-5). "Desire is an Other" (p. 366); Sartre insists there is no difference in nature between civilizations without history and technical ones.
- The artist. A "frontiersman", he shares the primitive's choice of the imaginary and the engineer's consciousness of his operation, making new being "spring up out of Nothingness" (p. 566); the real object is only the analogon. His freedom is "mystification" (p. 567).
- Pre-oppression. Fundamental alienation comes "prior to all conflict" from freedom's upsurge in matter; "it is because freedom is already other than itself that it can treat another freedom inhumanely".
No exit? The slave and generosity
Sartre refutes Hegel's optimism about slavery (pp. 397ff.). The slave's "intrasubjective freedom" (p. 400) is stoicism, which perpetuates oppression. A second-generation slave cannot relive the original anguish, and the product of his work is unreal: "This tunic he is weaving will take on its meaning and value only when worn by the master" (p. 403). Hunger is the true element of liberation, "absolute subjectivity" that reveals a world where master and slave are equal (p. 404). Yet "the conditions of a slave revolt are not present"; theft confirms the master's property, and "Everything turns against the slave" (p. 405): alienation perpetuates oppression and oppression perpetuates alienation (p. 398).
Sartre's reworking of Hegel's master and slave in the Notebooks.
At the individual level, generosity brings "a new and fresh optimism". It reveals the other's being-in-the-midst-of-the-world, his "fragility" and exposedness: "I love if I create the contingent finitude of the Other as being-in-the-midst of the world by assuming my own subjective finitude. ... This vulnerability, this finitude, is the body" (pp. 516-17). "This dancer is first of all dance. But the trembling of her breasts is not dance; it is inertia" (p. 518). I see a stone falling toward a man from behind; I save him "not just ontically ... but ontologically". The reversal of BN's look seems complete.
- Love as a work of art. "The true relationship to the Other [is] never direct: [it must pass through] the intermediary of the work" (p. 487); generosity, like art, needs "a 'matter to be formed'" (p. 514), conferring imaginary finality on the in-itself.
- Why Sartre dropped it. If generosity escapes alienation, it does so "at the price of the 'mystification'" of the artist; Sartre later called it "a writer's ethic for writers" (Sit IX, p. 33).
Saint Genet: ethics impossible and necessary
Sartre never abandoned positive love. Genet loves Jean Decarnin "even in his viscera": "one loves nothing if one does not love everything. True love is salvation and protection of the whole of man in the person of one man" (SG, p. 532). In 1965 he told Francis Jeanson that only in Saint Genet had he described love as "the acceptance of the total person - including his viscera". But this gives no Ethic.
- Manichaeism. The cleavage of Good and Evil is alienation itself: Evil is what "men of substance" cast out of their own freedom; "Le mal, c'est l'Autre".
- Ethics impossible today. "Any ethic which does not explicitly consider itself to be impossible today contributes to the alienation and the mystification of man" (SG, p. 186). Mutual respect between enemies, or the prostitute's indifference, is "an instant betrayal" (p. 215).
- Two totalities. "We do not yet have the right to love all men" (p. 215). Love grasps an intensive, ontological whole ("the whole of man"); ethics aims at an extensive totality ("all men"), blocked today by quantity.
The Critique: scarcity, need and value
The quantitative factor becomes scarcity: "there is not enough for everybody", and comprehensive reciprocity turns antagonistic. "Scarcity is lived in practical terms through Manichaean action" (CRD, p. 244). A second alienation, counterfinality, would survive even "a hypothetical reign of abundance" (CRD I, p. 235). The Critique thus has two faces of alienation: the Notebooks' bewitchment becomes the practico-inert and seriality; Saint Genet's conflict is explained by scarcity. The "impossible-and-necessary" splits: "Either the liberation is effective but then it is not moral, or there is morality but then it is alienating."
Simont's map of where alienation comes from, work by work.
- The group-in-fusion. The Apocalypse forms against scarcity and dissolves seriality: "a flight of a hundred pairs of legs". It is "total even in its partiality", involving neither utilitarian selfishness, nor moralism, nor "altruism", since the other "has already disappeared" in sameness.
- Lack versus need. Lack can never be fulfilled ("a useless passion"); need "can and, better, must be satisfied" as "the imprescriptible right to satisfaction". Simont suggests BN's casual treatment of eating and drinking may reflect "an unconscious class-position": philosophizing about "a glass of beer".
- Everything revealed in need. Need is cultural and conflictual, a decision about "the level of intolerability at which revolt can be justified". Man is "a being from afar" not through "some prenatal choice, as Being and Nothingness might lead one to believe erroneously" (CRD, pp. 337-8).
| Issue | Notebooks (1947-8) | Critique (1960) and 1964-5 |
|---|---|---|
| Value | Internal, the proof of freedom; generosity at the top | "The alienation of praxis itself" (p. 356 n.), the most deceptive internalization |
| Obligation / imperative | Sedimented value, source of alienation | External, conflictual, so closer to liberty |
| Typical bearer | The sentry who obeys | Values: dominant classes; imperative: revolt, group-in-fusion |
| Way out | Generosity, authentic love | Ethical radicalism, an "immaterial materiality" (p. 293) |
The worker idealizing "highly qualified work" in anarcho-unionism (CRD, p. 355) does not see his exploitation; another works only under the imperative of survival. An unpublished text pairs "imperative - radicalism - revolt - refusal of destiny" against "values - evolution - acceptance of Destiny ... dominant classes". Value is no mere superstructure: it is "a false transparency", shown by "the profound moralism of Russian society".
Rome Lectures and Cornell Notes: ethical radicalism
The Rome Lectures (1964, Gramsci Institute) and Cornell Notes (1965, prepared for a lecture Sartre cancelled after learning of U.S. escalation in Vietnam) are, for Simont, the most coherent late ethical texts. They radicalize the Critique's ontology of need:
- Need as right. Need is free action and an imprescriptible right to satisfaction; it continues the liberating force hunger had in the Notebooks, now historicized.
- Rooted norms versus abstract morality. An ethic that floats above practico-inert structures is mystification; norms must be rooted in the struggle against scarcity without collapsing into the given.
- Pure and impure reflection revisited. Pure reflection, still rare, would assume the project without the ego's alibis; impure reflection remains the everyday moral psychology of seriality.
- Historical agents. The ethical subject is no longer the solitary convert of Being and Nothingness but the grouped praxis that can, briefly, dissolve serial impotence.
Simont stresses that these texts do not deliver a system. They deliver an ethical radicalism: morality is the demand that need not be crushed by counterfinality, issued from inside history rather than from a city of ends already secured.
Late ethical radicalism: from Notebooks generosity to Rome need.
Engineer, primitive, artist: three destinies of freedom
The Notebooks' trio (already listed in the chapter) deserves the full contrast Simont draws. The engineer turns the world into an instrumental reservoir and ends by turning freedom into a thing: connecting-rod finality "constantly disappears into causality". The primitive lives desire for the immediate; civilizations without history differ from technical ones in degree, not in nature. The artist is the frontiersman who shares the primitive's choice of the imaginary and the engineer's consciousness of operation, making new being "spring up out of Nothingness"; the real object is only the analogon, and artistic freedom remains "mystification". Ethics has to pass between these destinies without settling in any one.
The Rome Lectures and Cornell Notes: ethical radicalism
In the 1964-5 manuscripts desire is "need lived in impotence" by "the son of man", fed by the Other and marked by "alienation and a fundamental culpability". What the child cannot have is transmitted as ideal value: "to the son of man, who cannot own property ... property will be transmitted as a value". Ethics becomes "a poisonous emanation of impotence", "the rottenness of the parental bond".
- Not despair. "Fierce opportunism" itself needs value systems as cover. Sartre calls for an "ethical radicalism": not a normative code but "the refusal of all preestablished, normatively privileged, and inertly valorized patterns".
- Torture and the Resistance. Some resisters made suffering "an inevitable fact of no significance"; some chose death; one used a moment of suffocation in the bathtub to recover himself; another, weak after a night with his mistress, held out because he was questioned three weeks later.
- Unconditional deconditioning. Ethical radicalism is "the unconditional deconditioning of those conditions that are obstacles" to the chosen end, a minimal ethic, a right of fact.
- Need and humanism. Sartre wavers between "To breathe for a buried miner is a practical necessity, never a duty" and "On this postulate (of need) we shall build a humanism" (CRD, p. 351); compare "Out of need a humanism is being born" (IF, p. 433).
- Detotalized radicality. The group falls back into organization; the Resistance may have had little weight in the Allied victory (Sit III, p. 30). Still, radicality exists "only as detotalized, absolute as singular": "I would refuse to be a God if it were offered to me" (L'Engagement de Mallarmé), so "man is not such a useless passion after all".
Slave, hunger, and why everything turns against him
Simont's Notebooks reading of the master-slave relation is a direct refutation of Hegel's optimism. Hegel treats the slave's work as liberating because the slave holds concrete mastery over things and, by repressing immediate desire, learns to face the anguish the master fled. Sartre calls this abstraction: it ignores slavery as "the weight of an enduring institution". Enjoyment of the manufactured object is "absolutely unreal" for the slave; the product remains the master's.
What can still liberate is hunger: "absolute subjectivity" that escapes the master's power and reveals a world in which master and slave share a condition. Perfumes, rituals and art objects may be "incomprehensible to the slave", but hunger is his. Yet revolt's conditions are not present. What remains is theft, which is easy and which confirms the rule: hidden theft recognizes the master's property; the stolen object retains "like the host, the presence of the Other" (CM, p. 405). "Everything turns against the slave" because original alienation is not mainly violence but the fact that "man is from the beginning present to himself as Other" (p. 398). Alienation perpetuates oppression and oppression perpetuates alienation: a vicious circle.
Simont's Notebooks: from Hegel's hopeful slave to Sartre's closed circle.
Generosity: individual optimism against historical pessimism
If history looks dark, the individual and interindividual register gets a new instrument: generosity, ranked at the top of the Notebooks' moral values. Individually, generosity accepts the in-itself and assumes the deperdition of freedom in incarnation. Toward the Other, it grasps his "being-in-the-midst-of-the-world": finitude, facticity, fragility, exposedness. The in-itself revealed by generosity becomes positive mediation between myself and the Other. Sartre even bonds generosity to the artwork: the true work reveals and creates contingent facticity. Simont's caution: Sartre never fully converted the concept into a finished ethic; it remains the substance of an ethic still to come, later displaced by need and scarcity in the Critique.
Saint Genet: ethics impossible as system, necessary as writing.
Sartre and the poetics of history
The image and the work of art
Sartre's history ends with struggle and the impossible reconciliation of fraternity and violence, yet its root is aesthetic, and "committed" history makes sense only beside committed literature. The image is not a thing but a form of consciousness: "an act that intends an absent or nonexistent object in its corporality by means of a physical or psychical content that is given not for its own sake but only as an 'analogical representative' of the intended object" (L'Imaginaire, p. 45).
- Imaging versus perceiving. Imaging posits its object "as a nothingness" (absent, nonexistent, elsewhere), is spontaneous rather than passive, and "derealizes" the perceptual object while still aiming at my friend "in flesh and blood".
- The analogon. A carving, printed letters or eye movements in hypnagogic images; the carving is "simply a piece of polished wood" until derealized into the aesthetic object.
- The parallel. For the early Sartre the historical event is an analogon for history: history is no more "a concatenation of brute facts" than an artwork is a linkage of perceptions, and both carry a moral dimension.
Flynn's core parallel: the analogon in art and the event in history are both totalized by a free act.
The challenge of history: the War Diaries
The usual split before and after the discovery of "History, Marxism, and the collective dimension" is Sartre's own, but the Carnets show historical interest by the late 1930s: "[H]istory was all around me. ... Aron had just written his Introduction to the Philosophy of History and I read it" (CDG, p. 227). Sartre rejects Raymond Aron's "skeptical moderation": "the complexity of the historical world responds to a pluralist anthropology" (Aron, p. 349), with interpretations that never converge.
- Three regions of being. The in-itself (inert, opaque, "sticky"), the for-itself ("a hole in being") and being-for-others, our liability to have our projects "stolen" by the look.
- The event. A conversation exists beyond each speaker though not independently of them: "This fact exists-for no one ... it simply is" (p. 253). It is "a veritable absolute", whose content is human but whose unity "is radically nonhuman" (p. 363).
- Against relativism. The absolute event lets us distinguish the interpreted from the interpretation, avoiding "a Nietzschean eternity of interpretations of interpretations". Yet "the profound ambiguity of historical research lies in the need to date this absolute event" (p. 363).
The three planes on which the historian must move, according to the War Diaries (March 1940).
In March 1940 Sartre set the strategy of thirty years: elucidating the epoch and the agent together. Reading Emil Ludwig's biography, he seeks "an internal relation of comprehension" (p. 365) between Germany's English policy and Wilhelm II's withered arm, as "an example of method", "a metaphysics of historicity" (p. 366). "History is understood only by the recuperation and the assumption of monuments" (p. 365), reversing in advance Foucault's call to turn documents into monuments. The facts marshalled (empire, family, Bismarck's legacy, a generation gap, autonomy from his English mother) converge in the unity of the Kaiser's "historicization" (p. 386). Sartre admits of his own bad eye: "My own way of being my [bad] eye is certainly my way of wishing to be loved by seduction of the spirit" (p. 371).
The Cahiers: event, action, dialectic
The Cahiers contain an aphorism against history, "Existentialism against History by affirming the irreducible individuality of the person" (CM, p. 31), and yet some of Sartre's richest reflections on it.
- Ambiguity of the event. Like human reality, collectivities are "detotalized totalities": "In History too existence precedes essence" (p. 38). The event is "intermediary between physical fact and free Erlebnis" (p. 42): a carrier pigeon may be killed by a predator.
- Two types of account. A "Marxist-determinist" account of impersonal forces and an "existentialist-moral" one that finds who is responsible; "responsibility can be ascribed ... in most any case".
- Probability. "Freedom moves in the sphere of the probable, between total ignorance and certitude" (p. 348), with "a threefold historical contingency": "the instrument, the body and the other" (p. 59); "the manner of living the event is part of the event itself" (p. 40).
- Material event and historical object. The fall of cannon balls is the analogon; the battle of Waterloo is "at one and the same time material, organic, and spiritual" (p. 35).
- Action. Action is "interiorization of exteriority and exteriorization of interiority"; the exteriorized act is the work (l'œuvre). A collective "we" offers "a density of being that saves me the agony of being responsible for my Ego" (p. 138), sliding toward the anonymous "they".
- Grasping another's freedom. The artwork "addresses itself to my pure freedom and thereby reveals to me the pure freedom of the Other" (p. 516). Comprehension of an appeal produces "a certain type of interpenetration of freedoms that could well be the human reign" (p. 302), and "this recognition is in no way an alienation" (pp. 291-2).
- History is the Other. "History will always be alienated" (p. 54); "To act in History is to accept that the act become other than one's conception" (p. 53). I kill my wife's lover and find I have beheaded a party about to seize power.
- Historical time. "Historical time is at once thing and spirit ... while the time of the individual is entirely consciousness" (p. 115), torn twice: "that of the Other (which is reciprocal) and that of the Past (which lacks reciprocity)" (p. 97).
Read against Kojève and Hyppolite, Sartre's "dialectic", "the synthetic unity of a totality spread out in time" (p. 472), generates otherness and resists synthesis: alterity "is larger than dialectic and englobes it" (p. 61). There are totalities, not a totality, and dialectics, not one dialectic.
| Feature | Hegel's dialectic | Sartre's dialectic (Cahiers) |
|---|---|---|
| Contingency | Overcome in necessity | Pervasive: spontaneous upsurge and hazards of the in-itself |
| Components | Ultimately homogeneous | Irreducible heterogeneity of in-itself and for-itself; no ultimate synthesis |
| Imagination | No special role | Projects the totalizing goal; creative moment of choice |
| Freedom | "Spinozistic necessity transferred into temporal succession" (p. 480) | Creation; still "the only method conceived to explicate freedom" (p. 482) |
| End of History | Achieved, so dialectic closes | Unfinished, so dialectic is a hypothesis and existence an absolute |
"If ... a man can conceive the whole ... either History is finished or we can grasp the dialectic only partially" (p. 483). Life in uncertainty becomes "the absolute of the lived", and "if each human is a risk, so too is humankind in its entirety". Meaning (sens) is created, not discovered: "The virtue of the historical agent is generosity", and among combatants "it is the other who is in the same" (p. 54), a foretaste of the combat group.
Search for a Method: comprehension, totalization, method
"Do we have today the means to constitute a structural, historical anthropology?" Truth in anthropology "must be a truth that has become, and it must make itself a totalization" (SM, p. xxxiv), against the positivists' "several Histories and several Truths". The Critique must answer both the quaestio juris and the quaestio facti, like Dilthey, Rickert, Simmel and Weber.
- Comprehension. Aron: understanding is "the decisive problem ... of the logic of history". For Sartre it is "the translucidity of praxis to itself" (CDR, p. 74), a lingering Cartesian ideal, yet prereflective, so we may know an agent better than he knows himself. Examples: a boxing match and someone walking toward the closed window in a stuffy room (SM, pp. 157, 153).
- Sens and signification. Signification is conceptual and static; sens is the ongoing unity of a lived process, "the incarnation of a reality that surpasses it" (Sit IV, p. 30), as Rebeyrolle's paintings present the Cold War or Michelangelo's David the Renaissance; sens equals the singular universal.
- Totalization. "A man ... totalizes his age to the precise degree that he is totalized by it" (IF III, p. 426). Leconte de Lisle's monocle "signifies the unsayable and lived sens of the epoch" (p. 432). Totalization is synchronic (structural, regressive) or diachronic (temporalization): "History is a totalization that temporalizes itself" (CDR, p. 54).
- Micro and macro. Organic micrototalizations and the social macrototalization of significations are mediated by the concrete universal, such as bourgeois "respectability"; Madame Bovary is "a 'singular universal'" (IF II, p. 1503).
- Three-stage method. Phenomenological description, then a regressive move to conditions, then a progressive spiral explaining why Flaubert could say "Madame Bovary, c'est moi". Sartre credits Henri Lefebvre (SM, p. 52 n.) but had used the method earlier.
- Avoiding two errors. Without existential psychoanalysis we get "general particularities" like "the petite bourgeoisie"; without micro-macro interplay "history would dissolve into biography". "Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry" (SM, p. 56).
Critique I: praxis, practico-inert, mediating third
This "prolix and repetitive volume" argues regressively from class to its conditions, and answers Merleau-Ponty's Adventures of the Dialectic: "praxis" counters the charge of a philosophy of consciousness, the "practico-inert" the lack of objective possibility, and the "mediating third" the merely psychological social whole.
The formal structures of Critique I that Flynn treats as the mechanics of Sartre's history.
- Praxis. Purposive activity in a material field, the heir of consciousness: "human labor, the original praxis by which man produces and reproduces his life, is entirely dialectical" (CDR, p. 90).
- Practico-inert. "Antidialectical", negating praxis "not by destruction or dissolution, but by deviation and inversion" (p. 340): Chinese deforestation brought floods, Spanish hoarding of New World gold under Philip II brought inflation. It is "simply the activity of others insofar as it is sustained and diverted by inorganic inertia" (p. 556), the philosophers' "trace", and "fundamental sociality" (p. 318).
- Class and objective spirit. "Class-being ... comes to men through men" (p. 238); "objective class spirit" is a "milieu for the circulation of significations" (p. 776). Under scarcity such mediation is violence, "the sentence of things upon persons" (IF III, p. 632).
- Violence. "The violence of matter is the 'midwife of History'" (CDR, p. 181); violence is "interiorized scarcity" and "human violence is meaningful" (p. 815). Scarcity's contingency gives hope of "a socialism of abundance".
- (p. 541), the "serial rationality" of systems, the situated totalizer, and the group's failure to reach organic unity.
- The mediating third. The close-knit group is the subject of history: "Our History is intelligible to us because it is dialectical" (p. 805). In reciprocity "my partner's praxis is, as it were, at root my praxis, which has broken in two by accident" (p. 131). Althusser called Sartre "the philosopher of mediations par excellence".
Critique II: incarnation and enveloping totalization
Volume II, "The Intelligibility of History" in its editor's subtitle, reconstructs Stalin's "socialism in one country" as the totalization of a dictatorial society, moving from two boxers to Soviet class conflict.
Incarnation in Critique II: a singular event condenses the whole it belongs to.
- Incarnation. Not a symbol: "it is realized really and practically as the totality producing itself here and now. Every boxing match incarnates all of boxing as incarnation of all fundamental violence" (CRD II, p. 36). "A punch like a dance is indissolubly singular and universal" (p. 50), Hegel's concrete universal without organic social wholes: "dialectical nominalism", "there are only men and real relations between men" (SM, p. 76).
- Enveloping totalization. "Fluid and incomplete" (editor, p. 462), it names praxis-process and returns to the question of "totalization without a totalizer". "Totalizing compression" (Sartre's way) is set against Marxist "decompressive expansion"; "sens is not relative to the historian who knows it" (p. 308).
- Stalin. "If the October Revolution was the incarnation of the workers' struggle, Stalin was the incarnation of that Revolution" (p. 238); Sartre found the full project too great for a single scholar.
The Family Idiot and an existentialist theory of history
Madame Bovary answers what the Second Empire can teach. French "objective spirit" ("culture as practico-inert", IF III, p. 44) left the would-be writer only "neurotic art" (l'Art-Névrose): detachment, derealization, failure, misanthropy, nihilism. Against the positivist, utilitarian Louis-Philippe France of Flaubert's father, the son's crisis of 1844 anticipates France's own option for the unreal in Napoleon III, fleeing the massacres of 1848: "The unreal was addressing the unreal."
Sartre's spiral of Flaubert's personalization in The Family Idiot.
Personalization is "the surpassing and conserving ... of what the world has made - and continues to make - of [the individual]" (IF I, p. 657). Over "three thousand pages" Sartre shows how one gifted person totalized his age; Flaubert later refused to wear the Legion of Honour rosette after Sedan. Flynn lists five marks of the resulting theory:
- Moral responsibility. The primacy of individual praxis finds "the oppressive action behind impersonal, exploitive relations": "we are without excuse".
- Dialectical intelligibility. Self-translucid praxis grounds the intelligibility of series, groups and institutions.
- The specificity of the social. The mediating third steers between methodological holism and individualism; no Durkheimian superorganism.
- Collective bad faith. The late-nineteenth-century bourgeoisie masked oppression "under the ideology of the rights of man".
- Committed history. Writing the Flaubert during 1968 was justified as "a 'socialist' theory of biography"; the "true" reading is the one that gives hope and purpose to the oppressed.
Five differences from Hegel, and five marks of the theory
Flynn's Cahiers table against Hegel (already in the chapter) can be read beside the five marks of the finished existentialist theory of history in the Critique and Idiot:
| Mark | What it preserves | Signature device |
|---|---|---|
| Moral responsibility | "We are without excuse" inside impersonal processes | Primacy of individual praxis; mediating third |
| Dialectical intelligibility | Concrete social knowledge beyond analytical reason | Self-translucid totalizing praxes |
| Specificity of the social | Against reducing social to psychological | Group as synthetic enrichment; no Durkheimian superorganism |
| Collective bad faith | Dividedness extrapolated to classes and ideologies | Objective spirit as practico-inert culture |
| Committed history | Analysis that also advocates | Socialist biography; hope for the oppressed |
The sustaining question remains: Can there be totalization without a totalizer? Dialectical nominalism seems to exclude any larger unity that is neither praxis nor a relation among praxes. Practico-inert counterfinalities tempt a "larger logic"; Flynn's Sartre refuses that temptation and accepts the cost: historical sens is the actualization of an enveloping totalization that still reflects organic praxes in interaction.
Critique II: boxing as incarnation
Volume II's most worked example is the boxing match: "Every boxing match incarnates all of boxing as incarnation of all fundamental violence" (CRD II, p. 36). A punch, like a dance, is "indissolubly singular and universal" (p. 50). This is Hegel's concrete universal without organic social wholes: only "men and real relations between men" (SM, p. 76). Enveloping totalization is the historian's (and the agent's) grasp of such part-whole circuits as they are lived, not a World-Spirit behind them.
Incarnation without World-Spirit: Flynn's dialectical nominalism.
Poetics: analogon, generosity, hope
Facts, events and institutions "serve only as an analogon" for historians' history, as the artwork's material serves the aesthetic object. The historian's act, like the artist's "act of generosity", creates a narrative "not out of whole cloth" yet not Ranke's wie es eigentlich gewesen ist either. Of Genet caught thieving Sartre writes: "That was how it happened ... in that or some other way. ... It does not matter" (SG, p. 17). The same "as if" covers Flaubert's "(epileptic?) seizure" at Pont-l'Évêque. The maxim of this history is hope: "You can always make something out of what had been made of you" (Sit IX, p. 101). Flynn's own sequel volumes set this poetics against Foucault's archaeology; the companion chapter only gestures that way.
A poetics of history
The facts, events and institutions "serve only as an analogon" for the historians' history. Like the artist's "act of generosity", the historian creates a narrative "not out of whole cloth", but not "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist" either. "Incarnation" and "totalization" remain aesthetic categories: an imaginative part-whole grasp. Of Genet caught thieving: "That was how it happened ... in that or some other way. ... It does not matter" (SG, p. 17); the "as if" carries over to Flaubert's "(epileptic?) seizure" at Pont-l'Évêque. The Idiot is "a concrete application of the abstract principles" of the Critique (ORR, p. 77) and "a novel that is true". The maxim of this history is hope: "You can always make something out of what had been made of you" (Sit IX, p. 101).
War Diaries: historicization before the Critique
Flynn starts from the War Diaries (1939-40), where Sartre already refuses "scientific" history that would explain 1914 by impersonal forces alone. The Kaiser's withered arm, English policy, Bismarck's legacy and the generation gap must be grasped in the unity of historicization: the way a person appropriates facts and becomes the totality he is. Three features already point to the mature theory:
- Epistemic and moral primacy of the individual. Later called totalization and personalization.
- Recalcitrance of the historical event. Facts resist; they are not soft wax for narrative.
- Datable unity. The event's datability binds levels of explanation that would otherwise scatter.
Being and Nothingness still leaves only a philosophical anthropology: the looking/looked-at model does not yet yield a social philosophy. Many doubted an existentialist philosophy of history was possible. The Cahiers seem to agree with a Nietzsche-like line: "Existentialism against History by affirming the irreducible individuality of the person." Yet those same notebooks hold Sartre's most sustained early thoughts on historical event, action and dialectic.
Flynn's path: from War Diaries historicization to a poetics of history.
Cahiers: three sources of the event's ambiguity
Flynn groups the Cahiers remarks under event, conditions of activity, and dialectic of understanding. The historical event is ambiguous for three reasons:
- Detotalized totality. Human reality never fully coincides with its predicates; races, nations, classes, sexes, exigency and duty are shot through with the same presence-to-self. "In History too existence precedes essence" (CM, p. 38).
- Intermediary ontology. The event sits "between physical fact and free Erlebnis" (p. 42): carrier pigeons and predators on one side, purposeful action on the other. Hence two accounts: Marxist-determinist (system, force of circumstance) and existentialist-moral (agents accountable). Responsibility can be ascribed "in most any case".
- Necessity inside contingency. Success comes both because initiative overcame obstacles and because obstacles were not greater. "Freedom moves in the sphere of the probable, between total ignorance and certitude" (p. 348). A "threefold historical contingency" runs through instrument, body and the other (p. 59).
The Cahiers also reverse the Diaries' accent: earlier Sartre stressed the fact as being-for-others recouped by being-in-itself; now he finds "necessity in the heart of contingency but recouped by contingency" (p. 65). Lack of necessity, not brute occurrence, becomes the interesting problem.
Mediating third: between serial impotence and superorganism.
Sartre on progress
A paradox and an unlikely guide
No serious thinker now defends J. B. Bury's world advancing in "a definite and desirable direction" toward "a condition of general happiness". Postmodernism shows "incredulity toward metanarratives" (Lyotard); negative metanarratives flourish (Allan Bloom, Christopher Lasch); Adorno: "No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb." Yet there has been genuine improvement: science, medicine and hygiene, productivity, the democratization of culture, education, and opportunity, and arguably progress in social morality, as people "insisted through struggle" on better treatment. Condorcet's Sketch (dated 1794 here) forecast more than came, but not nothing.
- Few texts. A mention in the 1945 lecture, a note in Search for a Method (1957), one reflection in The Family Idiot (1972), brief passages in the Cahiers (1947-8), and notes from 1961-2 appended to Critique II.
- Apparent dismissal. "Progress is betterment. Man is always the same. The situation confronting him varies" (Existentialism Is a Humanism): siding for or against slavery in the Civil War is like siding with the MRP or the Communists.
- A premature postmodernist? He rejected faith in science and technology, transcendent norms and any "hyperorganism" not reducible to individual praxis.
| Text | Date | What it says about progress |
|---|---|---|
| Existentialism Is a Humanism | 1945 | "We do not believe in progress": man is always the same |
| Cahiers pour une morale | 1947-8 | Made and unmade; must be lived to be real; science the one lived case |
| Search for a Method | 1957 | "Progress" implies a homogeneous milieu, distorting true temporality |
| Notes appended to Critique II | 1961-2 | Progress as oriented change in praxis; science as accumulation; scarcity and violence |
| The Family Idiot III | 1972 | Progress as bourgeois ideology born of the June Days of 1848 |
The Cahiers: progress made and unmade
Sartre sets "Hegel's myth" of history as a totalized totality showing "direction, therefore progress" against history "alienated from itself by the nothingness that traverses it". Oppression persists (proletarian and capitalist as slave and master, more suicides), yet "the slave was a thing; modern man is only alienated" (CM, p. 31). Neither aspect is ranked above the other.
- Given and transcendence. "The transcendence of the moment is ... a means of progressing" (p. 32), but each consciousness is a new upsurge; firearms beat wild animals but intensify human struggles.
- No one capitalizes. "The given is always problematic. Nothing is learned from it [On ne capitalise pas] ... Others' experience never helps us" (p. 32). History is "ideal continuity perpetually broken by real discontinuity" (p. 33): "Made and unmade" like the web Penelope wove by day and unpicked by night, broken by death and birth, yet "a return is impossible".
Why progress is made and unmade from generation to generation in the Cahiers.
- Lived, not imposed. "Christianity is not progress for the last pagans, it is decadence" (p. 47). A law of progress not lived by men "becomes an obligation-object ... It therefore kills History"; it must "descend into History as lived, willed, and suffered progress". Imposing it is "dupery, an essential mystification that steals their lived temporality from them".
- A project, not a fact. "For the totality of events to be interpreted as progress, it must be judged and lived as such by a present society" (p. 48). The past becomes progressive "by the hypothesis-project of present progress".
- Science as the lived case. Science lets us "know more and to adapt his techniques of knowing to reality" (p. 49); its equality before the truth "prepares the democratic ideal", though costly weapons let states hold their people at bay.
- Deprogressive progress. Progress "becomes inert thing for one group, while being lived as oriented activity for another" (p. 49): conservatives deny it, proponents make it a law. The whole is "real but indeterminate progress" (p. 50), "a deprogressive progress".
- History is the Other. "Whatever one does ... the enterprise becomes other" (p. 51): we "will lead men to the threshold of the promised land and ... stay on the threshold watching them go off".
- Order and the single Mind. Progress as "the development of order" (pp. 80, 445) needs a subject: "it is necessary to assimilate humanity to one consciousness to conceive progress as one" (p. 446). Hence progress is built "on the ruins of the cogito": "either progress is necessary ... or indeed progress is perpetually contested, lost, aberrant" (p. 447).
In Search for a Method Marxism glimpsed true temporality when it destroyed the bourgeois notion of "progress", which implies "a homogeneous milieu and coordinates", but then "preferred to make use of 'progress' again for its own ends" (SM, p. 92).
The 1961-2 notes: changing to stay the same
These pages "under his own title of Progress" are the only sustained treatment. Progress has meaning only "lived in interiority, as practical organization of totalization": "It is an act - meaning above all the act of an individual" (CRD II, p. 411). "Only a praxis can recognize progress" (p. 413); put simply, progress is labor.
Progress as oriented change in Sartre's notes appended to Critique II.
- The contradiction. "Progress = a contradiction between permanence and change" (p. 413). "Foresight ... foresees that it will be retotalized but not how", so "we arrive other at the pursued end" (pp. 416-17); "progress is never restitution. If it exists, it does so as oriented change" (p. 417).
- Improvement and becoming other. Progress can mean "better relationships" between a new self and a new field (p. 418), but slavery reshapes family structure and Europeans bring "progress but also destruction" to Eskimo life. A southern Italian migrates to Milan, as in Rocco and His Brothers: "uprooting. Unforeseen transformation" (p. 419). "I buy one machine ... If I buy several, I beat my competitors but I find myself owning a large business ... I become wholly other" (p. 420).
- Repetition and change. Apprenticeship repeats the father's role, yet the child "will affirm his possibility of being other insofar as he is beyond his father" (pp. 420-1). I am not even the basis "of its social predeterminations": "socialized facticity" (p. 422).
- Catastrophic progress. After the May 1945 massacre following a nationalist uprising, young Algerians could no longer pursue their parents' goal of integration with France: "catastrophic progress" (p. 422). Progress is "movement toward self but an endlessly receding self".
- Circularity. Social progress begins in individuals in progress, yet personal progress needs social progress: "society of repetition without technical progress = suppression of progress" (p. 423).
- Verdi's Don Carlos. Threatened by Wagner, chamber music and internationalism, Verdi keeps vocal predominance while integrating harmony and the orchestra: "to save his interest is to integrate the contradiction in the work: Don Carlos. Therefore progress" (p. 424). Progress is "to interiorize the adversary".
Social progress, science, scarcity
Societies "without history" or with stalled production "cannot progress. Progress can only be installed on their ruins" (pp. 424-5). Sartre presses: "who determined the goal initially?" and "who benefits from progress?" From slavery to capitalism, do people experience human progress? Beneficiaries and victims may differ, so the question becomes political: "Progress for whom?" and "Progress controlled by whom?"
- Why science accumulates. Science is "the exploration of exteriority in exteriority" (p. 426), "the permanent dissolution of the practico-inert in its element of pure inertia", "the non-dialectical remedy for the antidialectic" (p. 427). It does not totalize, so: "Accumulation - no scientific counterfinality" (p. 429).
- The man of scarcity. Scarcity is displaced until a minority become "rare ones" with an exclusive right to scarce goods: "One is what one has" (p. 431). This needs "exploitation, oppression, mystification. In a word, violence" (p. 432), and profit's inadequate consumption means "progress toward abundance is hindered".
How scarcity is displaced into privilege and violence that block progress toward abundance (Critique II notes).
Aronson judges these notes "even more inconclusive" than the Cahiers: Verdi's case shows interiorized tension, not progress "over" anything; the machine example is deviated by counterfinality, "domination by their products".
Progress as ideology
In The Family Idiot III (1972), technical progress is the "directing principle of all bourgeois ideology" (p. 282). Before power the bourgeoisie was universalist, concrete, critical, optimistic. After the February revolution of 1848 and the massacre of workers by the bourgeois national guard in June, "the interest of the patron and the worker had fatally diverged".
Sartre's genealogy of the bourgeois ideology of progress after June 1848.
The owner lives "a double alienation: to the others by manufacturing, to manufacturing by all the others" (p. 276). Class interest becomes "an infinite imperative" (p. 283), and scientism presents bourgeois hatred of man "as sacrifice to the Ideal" (p. 284). Aronson's gloss: "Technological progress occurs, we might say, to head off social progress."
Generation to generation: Same becomes Other
Aronson quotes at length the Cahiers anticipation of the practico-inert. Each generation's result "falls outside the subjective into the objective Mind and gives itself without defense to a new transcendence" (p. 446). Goal becomes starting point; mediation becomes obstacle; the Same becomes the Other. Christianity as subjective liberation becomes, for the next generation, crystallized government. Everyone returns to the other the charge of "disorder": established order is disorder for newcomers; living disorder is subjective order.
Ideologies that look more inclusive (ancient society to Marxism) imprison more people once they cease to be active projects and become givens. Apparent progress is "progress and marking time" (piétinement, p. 32). If progress is still conceivable, it is built "on the ruins of the cogito": either progress is the order of the Other to which consciousnesses submit, or it is "perpetually contested, lost, aberrant" (p. 447).
Verdi's Don Carlos as interiorizing the adversary
The 1961-2 notes' set piece is Verdi under threat from Wagner, chamber music and internationalism. His interest: "national representative of Italy as bel canto and theatre" (p. 423). He keeps vocal predominance while integrating harmony and orchestra, avoiding Wagner's submission of voice to instrument. Stages along the way: Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Otello, Falstaff, crystallizing in Don Carlos as "total opera" that is modern and Italian. Aronson's verdict: the case shows interiorized tension, not progress "over" anything; paired with the machine example's counterfinality, the notes remain "even more inconclusive" than the Cahiers.
Verdi's progress by changing to stay the same.
Progress demythologized, and what remains
Sartre is "perhaps the century's preeminent philosopher of individualism, action, and experience". Progress can only be a human project, never a law, because freedom remains "the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him". "There are only individuals and particular relations among them" (SM, p. 162); the fused group degrades into institution and bureaucracy; trends like public opinion or "the Top Ten" are seriality. Progress is an ideology putting the best face on alienated collective power, "controlled by a handful, imposed on the rest, policed by a few": every fetishism of technology, "from steam power to nuclear power".
Aronson quarrels that individuals "are themselves always social": the social plane deserves co-priority, and society is "a sum of practices, customs, rules, and available praxes" that must still be sustained at every moment by individual praxes. He then draws four bases for understanding progress from Sartre:
Aronson's four Sartrean bases for understanding real progress beneath the myth.
- Inside a project of progress. Almost everyone now seeks to improve "relentlessly, restlessly, constantly", beyond mere productive fetishism.
- Going beyond. Negation, praxis and project all show "there is no human existence that does not go beyond".
- Negative progress. Spain bankrupted by New World bullion, China stripped of trees: "Necessity appears in experience when we are robbed of our action by worked matter" (CDR, p. 224); "antiprogress", "the dehumanization of the humanized world".
- A positive practico-inert. Generations inherit specific problems and tools. Add common needs ("food, shelter, and the pacification of existence") and practices built to meet them, and Sartre's late idea of "guided circularity", controlling counterfinality, suggests that "practico-inertia is not hell".
Progress as Other: infinite alterity
In the Cahiers Sartre links progress to the claim that "history is always other than itself" (p. 52). Whatever we create becomes other than intended: History is "infinite alterity". We never return to the starting point because we make "material progress toward unity", yet beyond each more structured unification lies "the same diversity, the same alterity", so "there is no progress" (p. 55).
The passage foreshadows the Critique: "History is the Other. Whatever one does, whatever one makes, the enterprise becomes other, it is by its alterity that it acts and its results are other than those that have been hoped for" (p. 51). The only possible attitude is the unnamed source's line: we lead men "to the threshold of the promised land" and stay watching them go into the distance. History escapes its makers.
Aronson's Cahiers: progress made and unmade like Penelope's web.
Progress as development of order
Order was first only partial, braked by a passivity gathered as essence: "the novel becomes what it was" (p. 51). Returning to the idea, Sartre treats essence as the meaning of order: the "real and oriented evolution of certain realities toward their essences" (Greek, French, Roman tragedy; any "perfecting of an object or tool", p. 80). Progress as order means (1) an object achieving its potentiality, and (2) a tighter organization of the practical field that suppresses initial disorder.
The notion affirms "the ontological priority of order over disorder" (disorder is constituted as such by order) and "the ontic priority of disorder" (disorder is, order is in potentiality) (p. 445). Circularities in Hegel, Comte and Engels are escaped by referring to human reality: humans distinguish given disorder from projected secret order. "Action and progress are one and the same" (p. 445). But a single path of progress still seems to need one consciousness or Mind behind it. For human progress one must "assimilate humanity to one consciousness" (p. 446), or imagine generations with an unchanging goal handing on functional work. Reality is a plurality of individuals; each person's order is not everyone else's.
Aronson's two Cahiers formulas for progress and their limits.
Sartrean structuralism?
The curve of the epoch
By Sartre's death in 1980 Structuralism had evaporated; at the start of his career it was just beginning, in places "remote from Paris" such as technical linguistics in Prague. The two lives run in parallel, a tempting thought given Sartre's theory of the "curves" of epochs (Idiot III). Contat and Rybalka judged the oppositions "artificially inflated by journalists" yet "essential" and "insurmountable", but Sartre told Bernard Pingaud (L'Arc, 1966): "I am in no way hostile to Structuralism when the structuralist remains aware of the limits of his method."
- Orthogonal reciprocity. Caws's term for two quantities on different axes that vary inversely. The Liberation marked "the limit of the swing toward existence at the expense of structure", and Sartre was "its prophet, its embodiment".
- Sartre's own candidate. He contributed to each structuralist domain (existential psychoanalysis, What Is Literature?, history, and the "structural anthropology" of Search for a Method). But "anthropology" there is philosophical, and "structural" is structurelle, connoting activity rather than system.
- Structure versus system. A system is a set of elements related for a functional end; a structure is a set of relations holding among possible elements. Given relations and an intending point of view, elements become intentional objects.
- Marx's "for me". The young Marx: "Real dollars have the same existence imagined gods have." Property and wage labor are disguised relations between people; Sartre agrees: "there are only men and real relations between men" (SM, p. 135). Such relational categories are "structuralist objects par excellence", since "the reality of the objects of the human or social sciences is relational rather than substantial".
Caws's orthogonal reciprocity: as existence rises, structure falls, and Sartre's career tracks the swing.
What Sartre could not stomach was "a theory of the human world that dispenses with humans": Barthes's "act of knowledge without a knowing subject" (L'Empire des signes) and Lévi-Strauss's myths that think without subjects. The risk, Caws admits, is "a Structuralism that is not Structuralism, subscribed to by a Sartre who is not Sartre".
History, language and the dialectic
Two red herrings go first. Althusser, the Marxist structuralist, "privileges structures in relation to history" and lets himself be used, unlike Marx, who "was never used by other people". And the famous dialectical-reason quarrel, opened by "History and Dialectic" at the end of La Pensée sauvage and answered in Sartre's interview with Pierre Verstraeten ("Lévi-Strauss does not know what dialectical thought is ... he is incapable of knowing"), has little to do with Structuralism as such.
The consequential exchange is at the end of L'Homme nu, replying to the Pingaud interview, where Sartre said the structuralists avoid the Marxist imperative, credited the success of Foucault's Les Mots et les choses to revulsion against Marxist history, and said Lévi-Strauss "has contributed a great deal to the contemporary discrediting of history". Sartre's positive view of language:
Sartre's two levels of language (L'Arc, 1966), the passage Lévi-Strauss attacked in L'Homme nu.
Lévi-Strauss, impatient with subjectivity (in Tristes tropiques he disclaims individual status because "there are many different things under his skull"), says philosophers protect "personal identity, a sorry prize", and "prefer a subject without rationality to rationality without a subject" (L'Homme nu, p. 614). Structuralism "reintegrates man into nature" and lets us disregard "that intolerable spoiled child", the subject. Against Sartre's denial of oppositions in nature he objects that male and female, positive and negative, left and right ("since 1957" known to exist objectively) are inscribed in nature (p. 616).
| Question | Lévi-Strauss | Sartre (and Caws) |
|---|---|---|
| Oppositions in nature? | Yes: sex, charge, left and right | Nature has only exterior connections; oppositions are constructed into "signiferous" systems |
| Dialectic of nature? | Ideas may approximate organic or physical truths (Engels) | Dialectic belongs to discourse and intentionality, not nature |
| Subject and rationality | "Conjointly impossible" | "Conjointly necessary": rationality is a disposition of subjects |
| Who acts? | Myths "think themselves through us" | Structures need intending agents; "the system uses" is misplaced agency |
- Caws sides with Sartre. Materialism and a dialectical view of history are consistent, but a dialectical view of materialism is "a fairly simple mistake". Language needs sound waves and larynxes but belongs to a domain of intentionality. We find in nature "the material for oppositions"; the structuralist insight, anticipated by Cassirer's symbolic forms, is that natural differences become templates for cultural oppositions.
- Unnecessary baggage. Lévi-Strauss is "a splendid structuralist" with confused underpinnings, like Althusser's ideological and Barthes's semiological baggage.
- Dialectic before analysis. "Thought must have been dialectical before it became analytic", but it "cannot be analytic without knowing that it is so".
Structure and meaning
Lévi-Strauss enrolled Sartre as early as 1954, in a UNESCO essay, citing his remark that in "the sociology of primitive peoples ... we study meaningful wholes [ensembles signifiants]". In the Cahiers (1947-8) Sartre analyzes the potlatch, after Mauss's Essai sur le don: the gift has "i) deep structure of solidarity; 2) secondary and manifest structure of reciprocal subjection", so it leaves open "whether it is a proposition of friendship or of defiance" (CM, p. 389). Its structures ("gratuitousness, protest, to destroy-to create") are intelligible to the other non-thetically.
- Structure from the subject. Structure is projected by subjects: "if there is a law ... it is because there is the thought of a law, but reciprocally ... because there is a law in the world" (p. 456), the "bootstrap" that marks the upsurge of the for-itself.
- Kantian coloring. For structuralism the human mind structures the human world (Lévi-Strauss in 1953: the mind as "the uninvited guest"), but it stresses synchrony and fixity. Sartre objects to accounts that "suppress the human agent, making of him or her simply the transmission belt the system uses": Caws's "fallacy of misplaced agency".
Structure and praxis
In the Critique structures are "both organized and organizing": "both inorganic ossature and everyone's definite powers over everyone else, in short, both fact and right" (CDR, p. 480). Interiorized and reworked by the group, they are "the necessity of freedom" (p. 489). Compare Saussure's stacked deck: "We say to language: 'Choose!' but we add: It must be this sign and no other". In "Erostratus", Paul Hilbert resents words that "have dragged through I don't know how many consciousnesses", yet chooses to use them rather than keep silent.
The double character of structure in the Critique, matched with Caws's two kinds of internal model.
- Canonical statement. "Structure ... as knowledge, is simply the idea which the group produces of itself" (pp. 499-500), conditioned by the common organization.
- Silent knowledge. "The group has a silent knowledge of itself through each common individual": complex knowledge in "underdeveloped societies" is lived practical structure, not theory from observation (pp. 500-1).
- Lévi-Strauss's mediator. Practices "are not to be confused with praxis", but between them stands "the conceptual scheme" (The Savage Mind, p. 130). All three positions are "recognizably structuralist".
- Structure made by others. "Structure imposes itself upon us only to the extent that it is made by others" (L'Arc, p. 89): behind it lie predecessors whose legatees and beneficiaries we are.
The practico-inert as structure
Caws calls the practico-inert "one of the most useful additions to the conceptual repertoire of social philosophy in the last century at least": everything ready-to-hand put in place by others' praxis (tools, buildings, parks, books, customs, traditions and language). It is oppressive but also liberating and facilitating. Railways include "finished, 'crystallised' work" and "the actual work of the railwaymen, from engine-drivers to ticket-collectors" (CDR, p. 480). Sartre stands to late Structuralism as Cassirer did to early: each "has the essence of the central doctrine", neither sees its centrality.
- Objective Mind. "Objective Mind ... is nothing but Culture as the practico-inert" (IF III, p. 44). Language "confers names and hardens under the form of definite structures" what was implicit in work, so that fragments of knowledge are "suddenly falsified", lived as "the subjectivity of class".
- Mineralized thought. "Written words are stones. To learn them ... is to introduce into oneself a mineralized thought" (p. 47); la pensée sauvage et immédiate is "nothing but the practical behavior of the worker", a deliberate nod to Lévi-Strauss. Yet: "Matter mediates between men just to the extent that, through their praxis, they make themselves mediators between different states of matter."
- Chicken and egg. Sartre could think of a text as a writer's way of "making" a reader; for doctrinaire structuralists "a reader/writer is a text's way of making another text". Long collective construction confers no autonomy on a structure.
Circularity in Critique II: dissolving an inherited practico-inert produces a new one (man is the son of man).
Individual and social structure
The anthropology of Questions de méthode is "essentially singular". In Critique II structures permeate society and change less than agents would like; circularity, "at once dialectical and recursive" (recurrentielle), becomes spirals of temporalization (pp. 288-9). In the Idiot agency gains ground: writing is "recomposition", following "objective rules" and "idiosyncratic disposition of a singular interiorization" (daydreams, associations, bad faith, ideological interests) (IF III, p. 55). "Only a perverse Structuralism would demand more."
- Barthes. "Structuralism, I do not renounce the word, but it has become uncertain" (1971). Barthes predicted a Sartre revival "in a completely natural way"; Sartre: "I hope so."
- Lavers. "The dispute between structuralists and existentialists was not inevitable". Sartre said "geology" fitted Foucault better than "archaeology", and he had meant to use structural approaches on Flaubert, but "controversy made him harden his positions".
- Caws's wager. Structuralism, "too quickly abandoned by its own exponents in their rush to the new and 'post-'", could play the role Sartre gave Marxism: the philosophy for our time.
Individual and social structure: Caws's closing wager
The practico-inert as structure lets Caws keep both the subject's lucidity and the objectivity of relations. Seriality is structure lived as impotence; the group-in-fusion is structure reworked as common power; institutions threaten to freeze praxis back into ossature. Caws's wager against the caricature: a Structuralism that still needs humans, subscribed to by a Sartre who still needs structures. The risk he admits remains ("a Structuralism that is not Structuralism, subscribed to by a Sartre who is not Sartre"), but the Critique's double character of structure is his evidence that the risk is worth running.
Caws's reciprocity: no structure without praxis, no praxis without structure.
Structure and praxis: necessity of freedom
Caws's key Critique quotation makes structures "both organized and organizing", "synthetic products of a practical totalization" and objects of analytical study, "inorganic ossature" and everyone's powers over everyone else: "both fact and right". Insofar as their inorganic materiality has been freely interiorized and reworked by the group, Sartre calls them "the necessity of freedom".
Saussure's stacked deck is the linguistic analogue: we say to language "Choose!" but add that it must be this sign; the community cannot control a single word. Sartre's tourniquet: structures constrain and liberate at once. Paul Hilbert in "Érostrate" resents soiled words that have dragged through other consciousnesses, yet by writing he has freely chosen to interiorize them rather than keep silent. Structures of language, kinship and political practice ensure solidarity by the exchanges they mediate; Sartre almost sounds canonical for Lévi-Strauss, then goes further by building praxis into structure.
Caws: structures as necessity of freedom, praxis inside the ossature.
Fallacy of misplaced agency
Structuralism's synchronic stress is inevitable (every thought is contemporaneous with itself) but becomes schematic if it juxtaposes states without the human activity that produced the later from the earlier. Sartre's charge against neopositivist historical pluralism: it "suppresses the human agent, making of him or her simply the transmission belt the system uses". "The system uses": Caws names this the fallacy of misplaced agency, violating "There are only men and real relations between men." Structures without praxis are unintelligible; praxis without structures is equally so. That reciprocity is Caws's mature Structuralism, which he finds in the practico-inert "more adequately than its more notorious exponents".
Orthogonal reciprocity across Sartre's career, on Caws's reading.
Conclusion: Sartre and the deconstruction of the subject
The return of the subject, and its vocabulary
Thinking on Auschwitz and Heidegger has made the subject "a burning one once again", "through flame or ashes, but ... inevitably" (Derrida, De l'Esprit). The "death of man" (Foucault) and the "ends of man" (Derrida) lacked the finality claimed. Recent titles show the change: Penser le sujet aujourd'hui, Sur l'Individu, Après le sujet, qui vient?, L'Individualisme: le grand retour, L'Ultime raison du sujet (the French title of Manfred Frank's Die Unhintergehbarkeit von Individualität), Hors Sujet.
- Two camps refuse a "return". Those blamed for the death (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze) say the subject can be rethought only after its deconstruction; others say the death was a polemical myth. Both trace the concept from Descartes to Husserl and Heidegger.
- Individual versus subject. Ricoeur (after Louis Dumont) separates an empirical sense ("an indivisible sample") from a moral one ("an independent, autonomous, nonsocial being"). The individual can stand against "faceless, mass-production", or be celebrated as an atom in a subjectless flux, "a specter haunting space after the death of the subject".
- Etymology. The individual is undivided; the subject is hypokeimenon, ground, and as subjectus subject to laws or oppression.
Howells's map of the subject before Sartre: two polarizations of the Cartesian and Kantian splits.
- Descartes. He never uses "subject" in this sense, but the cogito grounds knowledge; the Regulae and Meditations support individualist and impersonal readings, and the passions of the "vrai homme" suggest a split subject avant la lettre.
- Kant. The subject is itself dual. The paralogisms treat "the subjective conditions of thinking as being knowledge of the object"; "beyond this logical meaning of the 'I' we have no knowledge of the subject in itself". Philosophy can only "comprehend" this "incomprehensibility".
- Husserl. The transcendental ego of the Cartesian Meditations claims to close the gap but yields "an unsatisfactory collage". Self-consciousness is "an everyday thing presenting no difficulties"; the "pure self" falls prey to two of Kant's three illusions, simple and personal, though not substantial.
- Nietzsche. The subject is "a popular prejudice", the "grammatical custom that adds a do-er to every deed", "that little changeling, the 'subject'"; Zarathustra asks "How shall man be overcome?"
- Heidegger. Accepting Nietzsche's undermining of selfhood but staying transcendental, he may fall into rational psychology generalized to a nonpersonal Dasein.
Sartre against the transcendental ego
Sartre's 1960s eclipse has a cause: his 1930s-40s work was absorbed into the doxa that formed his detractors, who preferred to return to the Germans and suppressed his radicalism, accusing him of the bourgeois humanism he attacked. A 1988 review by Margaret Atack judged Sartre's critique of humanism, with its "anticipation of the debates around orientalism", more far-reaching than Structuralism. Howells's texts: Nausea against humanist individualism, The Transcendence of the Ego on the self as imaginary construct, Being and Nothingness against human nature, the Critique: "Man does not exist" (CRD, p. 131).
- Transcendent, not transcendental. The ego is "unified not unifying", "an ideal totality of states, qualities, and actions"; only consciousness is transcendental, "originally impersonal or at least prepersonal" (TE, pp. 19, 79). A transcendental ego would be "a center of opacity" and "the death of consciousness" (pp. 23, 25).
- No I on the unreflected level. "There is no I on the non-reflexive level" (p. 32): reading, or running for a train, I am conscious of the book or the train. "The Ego appears only when we are not looking at it" (p. 70).
- No privileged self-knowledge. I know myself as I know others, by observation and interpretation: "the intuition of the Ego is a perpetually deceptive mirage" (p. 69).
Sartre's ego (1936) and Lacan's mirror stage converge on the self as an alienating imaginary synthesis.
Lacan's mirror-stage paper, first given in 1936 and published thirteen years later, argues that the infant's "jubilant assumption of his specular image" precipitates the I as fiction and "alienating destiny" (E, pp. 94-5), "the eventual armor of an alienating identity" (p. 97), a méconnaissance. Aggressivity springs from "the division of the subject against itself" (p. 344). Lacan said Sartre was misled by "an illusory notion of individual autonomous selfhood" (pp. 98-9), "not quite an accurate view", though Sartre does not root aggressivity in the divided self (he roots it, as Simont shows, in freedom's alienation in matter). Hence Lacan's attack on ego psychology: strengthening the ego sanctifies "formal stagnation", and "the ego ... is frustration in its very essence" (p. 250).
The pour soi as a riven relation
As Fretz shows, Being and Nothingness shifts emphasis: the transcendental subject is "useless" and "harmful", consciousness "a transcendental field without a subject" (EN, p. 291), yet "it is as Egos that we are subjects in fact and subjects in law" (p. 209). Subjectivity is "consciousness (of) consciousness" (p. 29), the "instantaneous cogito" (p. 83), whose reflexivity personalizes it (p. 148). The soi is "an ideal, a limit", "out of reach", "in the form of lack", a "detotalized totality"; there is no "moi profond" (p. 520). "If it is present to itself, that means it is not entirely itself" (p. 120); it is "diasporique" (p. 182).
How the self-presence of the pour soi anticipates Derrida's différance, on Howells's reading.
- Against Derrida's charge. Derrida enlists Sartre in the metaphysics of presence, saying that for him "being in itself and being for itself were both being" (M, p. 137). But "the en soi cannot be present" (EN, p. 165), and the pour soi has "no other reality than being the nihilation of being" (pp. 711-12), "a hole in being at the heart of Being".
- Anticipation. Sartre's analysis prefigures La Voix et le phénomène (1967): "If the present of self-presence is not simple ... all Husserl's argument is threatened in its principle" (VP, p. 68). Derrida relegates Sartre's critique of humanism in Nausea to a footnote (p. 138).
- Escape from fixity. For both Sartre and Lacan non-identity is "less a curse to be disguised than an escape route from a noxious fixity". "Even sincerity is a form of bad faith" (EN, p. 103); Lacan's "happy fault of life, where man, in being distinct from his essence, discovers his existence" (E, p. 345). Sartre's integration of pour soi and en soi is impossible, which "protects us from the worst ravages of alienating self-identity".
- The 1940s disagreement. Sartre's subject cannot grasp itself "because it has no self to grasp"; for Lacan "the truth of the subject lies elsewhere", in the unconscious. Sartre insists on "a mystery in broad daylight" (EN, p. 658): consciousness is not knowledge, and "Finitude is an ontological structure of the pour soi which determines freedom" (p. 631).
The later Sartre: vécu, gap, and dissolution
By 1969 Sartre had replaced consciousness with le vécu, marked by forgetting, opacity, unselfconsciousness: "the equivalent of conscious-unconscious" (Sit IX, pp. 108-11), "a constant totalization ... that cannot be conscious of what it is". He accepts Lacan's unconscious as "a counterfinality of speech": verbal structures, a practico-inert, "express or constitute intentions that determine me without being mine" (p. 97). But "Man can only 'be spoken' to the extent that he speaks - and vice versa" (IF II, p. 1977), against the later Lacan's "pawn in the play of the signifier" (E, p. 468). The sticking point is determinism.
The later Sartre's subject as 'the little gap' between internalized conditioning and re-externalized act.
- The infant structured. "His own mother, engulfed in the depths of his body, becomes the pathetic structure of his affectivity" (IF I, pp. 57-8); apathy is "the family experienced at the most elementary psychosomatic level" (p. 54). Yet structures orient rather than determine: "Passive action becomes a tactic".
- Freedom redefined. "The little movement that makes of a totally conditioned social being a person who does not reproduce in its entirety what he received from his conditioning" (Sit IX, pp. 101-2). Subjectivity is "the little gap in an operation by which what has been internalized is reexternalized as an act"; "subjectivity" and "objectivity" now seem "entirely useless".
- Not recognizing oneself. "Each of us spends his life engraving on things his baleful image" (CRD, p. 285); the project is "a mediation between two moments of objectivity" (pp. 67-8), amid "acts without an author". Yet "failure shows that it exists absolutely" (Sit IX, p. 166).
- Against humanism, not against man. "Humanism is the counterpart of racism: It is a practice of exclusion" (CRD, p. 702), yet Sartre seeks "the true humanism of man". "There is no isolated individual" (p. 642): "I am dissolved practically in the human adventure" (pp. 142-3), echoing "Je est un autre" (TE, p. 78): "Marx has taken over from Rimbaud as master of alienation."
Foucault's Herméneutique: sujet, soi, and new forms of subjectivity
In 1966 Les Mots et les choses announces "the disappearance of man" as a recent invention, the empirico-transcendental doublet since Kant. By 1976 Foucault wanted knowledge of "what makes it escape itself". The 1982 Collège de France course was titled "Herméneutique du sujet"; the written résumé became "Herméneutique de soi". Howells reads the shift as deliberate: soi avoids the totality objections tied to English "self" and to a substantial subject. The Greek soi is other-centered, closer to Sartre's ego (object for consciousness) than to the pour soi as lack.
Foucault's late aim is "new forms of subjectivity", not a return of the old humanist subject. Howells grants the benefit of the doubt that Peter Dews and others sometimes refuse: the attempt may fail, but it is an attempt to think subjectivity without the metaphysics of presence Derrida had attacked. Sartre's pour soi, already a "hole in being", is her bridge: non-identity as escape route rather than curse.
Lyotard, Lacan, Althusser: three discourses, one lesson
Howells's closing cast:
| Discourse | Gesture against the subject | Howells's Sartrean rhyme |
|---|---|---|
| Lacan | Truth of the subject in the unconscious | Sartre's mystery in broad daylight; no self to grasp |
| Althusser | Ideology interpellates individuals as subjects | Practico-inert and serial otherness |
| Foucault | Disappearance of man; later care of soi | Ego as object; new subjectivity without Man |
| Lyotard | Two inhumanities; childhood as poverty and promise | Pascalian paradox; pathos Howells finds uneasy |
The conclusion's claim: Sartre belongs inside the deconstruction of the subject, not as its humanist residue. The companion's chapters on ontology, individuality and ethics have already supplied the evidence; Howells only has to refuse the caricature.
Subject since Sartre: four discourses Howells aligns with the pour soi.
The subject since Sartre
Polarization made Sartre more anti-structuralist than his positions allowed. In 1966 he praised Lacan (Sit IX, p. 97) yet in L'Arc attacked the structuralist "decentering of the subject", "man does not think, he is thought". In Le Monde (1971) he accepted that his Flaubert's moi matched Lacan's "imaginary construction, a fiction with which one identifies afterward" (p. 99). His complaint: "History is never shown producing structures" (p. 86). Lévi-Strauss made Sartre "the prisoner of the Cogito" (PS, p. 249), while taking over from existentialism a discontinuity of self and keeping "the unconscious activity of the human mind" (p. 329): Ricoeur's "kantism without a transcendental subject".
| Thinker | The 1960s-70s | Later position |
|---|---|---|
| Foucault | "The disappearance of man" (1966), "a recent invention" | "New forms of subjectivity" (1982); course "Herméneutique du sujet", résumé "de soi" |
| Derrida | "The ends of man" (1968); attacks Corbin's "monstrous translation" réalité humaine | Subject "reinterpreted ... not liquidated"; "the subject is a fable" (1989) |
| Lacan | "The true center of the human being is no longer in the same place" | Never abandons the subject; exile saves it from imaginary capture |
| Deleuze and Guattari | L'Anti-Œdipe (1972): "it shits", desiring machines | Eccéités, "preindividual singularities"; the subject is past |
| Lyotard | Slow to drop the subject | L'Inhumain: two "inhumanities"; "the soul is at stake" |
- Foucault's history of man. "Man" is a narrow, historical figure, "the empirico-transcendental doublet" since Kant. By 1976 he sought knowledge of "what makes it escape itself"; the Greek soi is other-centered, closer to the Sartrean ego than to the pour soi.
- Deleuze. Asking whether desiring machines are subjects is "to pour good new wine into bad old bottles"; in Francis Bacon representation expresses "the organic life of man as a subject", so Bacon paints "heads" not "faces", and the body without organs resists any subjecthood.
- Lyotard. Childhood is both "initial poverty" and "eminently human"; Howells finds the essay "a somewhat unhappy blend of postmodernism and sentimentality", "not so much a question of aesthetics ... as of pathos".
- Derrida's turn. The subject of writing is "a system of relationships between the layers in the magic writing pad, the mind, society, the world" (ED, p. 335). At Cerisy (1980) the question of man had to be asked again "as a question of ends". Humanist teleology remains "the price to pay for the ethical and political denunciation of biologism, racism and naturalism" (De l'Esprit). To Jean-Luc Nancy (1989): "the relation to oneself can only be one of différance", and the subject might be "the finite experience of non-self-identity".
That last formula, Howells says, "could well be a description of the subject of Being and Nothingness". Derrida "still seems unwilling to acknowledge that Sartre is not merely a forerunner but a real originator". Sartre made "a valiant attempt to grapple with the problems inherent in any theory of subjectivity", and "the present climate ... may now perhaps enable us to reread Sartre and not merely take him as read".
Preliminary reference points: Pascal, Ricoeur, the subject's return
Howells opens by placing the "return of the subject" against the 1960s-70s "death of man". French philosophy seemed to repent at leisure. She refuses a simple pendulum. Reference points include:
- Pascalian paradox. Does the subject fill all space between extremes, or lie elsewhere? Later she hears the same note in Lyotard's L'Inhumain: "the soul is at stake."
- Ricoeur after Louis Dumont. "Individual" splits into an empirical sense (indivisible sample) and a moral sense (independent, autonomous, nonsocial). The individual can resist faceless mass-production, or haunt space "after the death of the subject" as an atom in a subjectless flux.
- Those held responsible for the death. Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser: Howells will reread them as closer to Sartre's non-self-identical subject than the polemics of the 1960s allowed.
Sartre, long before Foucault, could write "Man does not exist"; the concept of man is an abstraction. Polarization made him more anti-structuralist than his positions allowed.
Howells: the subject's death and return as a single problematic.
From death of man to care of soi: Howells's timeline.
Hegel and Sartre
Sartre's Hegel
Hegel is absent from the early works and appears with Being and Nothingness, beside Kant, Husserl and Heidegger, among "chosen interlocutors and adversaries". The key texts are the two Logics and the Propédeutique. Sartre's grasp of "these dry texts" suggests more than academic acquaintance; contact with Kojève's pupils, Jean Wahl, Hyppolite or Maurice de Gandillac is "possible, but as yet unproven". The essay covers being-for-itself and being-for-others; on nothingness it defers to Juliette Simont's "Sartre et Hegel: le problème de la qualité et de la quantité".
- The Cahiers. Hyppolite's commentary and translations shaped the Cahiers, with "no fewer than eighty references to Hegel", tied to history and to master and slave, whose analysis "will change entirely in meaning in the Critique".
- Later works. Saint Genet uses "the animal reign of the spirit"; the drama and Idiot use the figures of individualism (desire, the law of the heart, virtue), the beautiful soul, and "evil and its forgiveness".
- The Critique. An "overwhelming refusal (which I would call ideological)" of idealism coexists with "an implicit undercurrent" that "borrows from, is inspired by, or simply reinvents Hegelian thinking", on need, action and the universal concrete.
The limit and the unlimited
Both reject the usual sense of limit: a limit exists only for a free being, who "could equally well not take it into account". Freedom limits itself yet is tempted to escape its own mobility "for fear of anxiety". Hegel: "If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness" (PhSp, p. 51). The finite that names its limit has "already overstepped its limits".
The dialectic of the limit that Verstraeten finds common to Hegel and Sartre.
Sartre: "Man cannot affirm without denying: If he poses a limit, it is necessary to infringe it ... it is one and the same thing to give oneself laws and to create the possibility of disobeying them" (SG, pp. 29-30). Hegel: "A being capable of containing and withstanding its own contradiction is the subject"; finite reason "reveals itself infinite owing to the very fact that it determines itself as finite" (Enz, §359). Living beings have "the privilege of pain" (§60): "To call a thing finite or limited proves by implication the very presence of the infinite and unlimited". Hegel's "infinite" thus equals Sartre's "unlimited", "the in-itself-for-itself, the Value, the Lacked". This is the first convergence: for both thinkers the infinite lies inside the finite act of setting a limit, not beyond it.
Genuine and bad infinite
The projected in-itself reveals the lack and also fantasizes its removal: "the dynamic fecundity of the unveiling, and the fetishistic disaster of reified essentiality". Hegel has the same tension. For anticipation: "The living thing does not let the cause come to its effect" (ScL, p. 562). For alienation: the "bad infinite" he charges against Kant and Fichte, a "real" dualism of finite and infinite, "the perpetual repetition of one and the same content, one and the same tedious alternation" (ScL-1812, p. 84), so that "the infinite is itself finite" (p. 85).
Two fates of the projected in-itself: Verstraeten's genuine and bad infinite in Sartre.
- Bad faith as bad infinite. Sartre's critique of the in-itself-for-itself in bad faith ("betting on immanence, while aiming to reach transcendence") matches Hegel's "displacements" of finite and infinite in the moral vision: "At the very moment after their unification has been alleged to be the truth ... the two elements ... are only true and actual in their state of separation" (Enz, §60).
- Infinitizing wrongly. Seeking to turn the for-itself's contingency into necessity, "through the passion of being God", is the wrong way; "it is within its finitude that the for-itself is infinite", always re-placing its bet and inventing its rules. "For nobody is allowed to say these simple words: I am me. The best ones, the most free, can say: I exist. It is already too much" (SG, p. 85).
- The unhappy consciousness. "Human reality therefore is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state" (BN, p. 90). But since consciousness has no nature, "a fillip suffices" to pass from the "ugly" unhappy consciousness, satisfied with its own dissatisfaction, to the "beautiful" one. Hegel's history of this figure is Christianity (the Crusades, landed nobility, ascetic self-mortification), reinterpreted "by Hegel, who annihilates it by saving it". "What is reflected history or thought genesis for Hegel becomes unfurled ontological actuality for Sartre."
Sartre's denial of the Hegelian infinite, and two paradoxes
In Being and Nothingness the only use of "infinite" criticizes Hegel's account of the reflection-reflecting as "a return upon itself, as the veritable infinite", which "fixes the phenomenon and obscures it" (BN, p. 76). Two paradoxes follow.
- First paradox. Sartre opposes Hegel with "a duality which is unity, a reflection which is its own reflecting", but his objection to "real oppositions" that never pass into each other is Hegel's own. The "phantom dyad" (belief is consciousness of belief, and each term "passes into the other", BN, p. 75) is exactly Hegel's genuine infinite.
- Second paradox. In Hegel's Logic the infinite brings forth being-for-itself, the stage "that has the most in common with the Sartrean for-itself". "Being-for-itself is self-related negation" (ScL-1812, p. 91); its "ideality" is "the same thing as infinity" (p. 95). Sartre: "The for-itself has no reality save that of being the nihilation of being ... it constitutes itself as the privation of this being" (BN, p. 618).
From desire to need: the structure of action
Verstraeten affirms "the identity between desire in Being and Nothingness and need in the Critique". Desire fetishizes Value; need rehabilitates the object under scarcity ("Satisfy people's needs and you will have social peace"), needs being sociohistorically defined. What saves need from "positivistic and utilitarian prosaicness" is that desire is "in quest for itself" (Enz, §428): "self-consciousness is Desire in general" (PhSp, pp. 104-5). Hegel praises the dog that simply seizes its prey; Sartre: "Thirst ... is never sufficiently thirst ... it is haunted by the presence of the Self, or Thirst-self" (BN, pp. 100-1).
| Stage of desire | Hegel (Enz, §428) | Sartre (Being and Nothingness) |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Lack | Self-consciousness as desire | "The existence of desire as a human fact is sufficient to prove that human reality is a lack" (p. 87) |
| 2. Reproduction | Desire "in its satisfaction is destructive" and in quest for itself | "A filled emptiness ... as a mould shapes the bronze" (p. 101) |
| 3. Recurrence | "Desire generates itself again in its own satisfaction" | "With another horizon of possibilities" (p. 101) |
The genuine infinite for both means desire, project, and action: reproducing "freedom as freedom", "the possibility of the infinite creation of its relationship to the world". It compares with Marx's reproduction of labour power through socially necessary goods: "there is no requirement external to its conditions". The bad infinite would be endless object-replacement. Hegel overcomes it when the Notion turns "not against an outer actuality, but against itself" (ScL, p. 822); Sartre through "pure reflection" still to come.
Being-for-others and recognition
Sartre attacks Hegel's "ontological optimism", "rather that of his commentators": Hegel "places himself at the vantage point of truth - i.e., of the whole" (BN, p. 243). Spirit is "'I' that is 'We' and 'We' that is 'I'" (PhSp, p. 110). Hyppolite shows the ambiguity: recognition is the a priori of desire, yet "the condition of self-consciousness is the existence of other self-consciousnesses", which leaves room for contingency. Sartre refuses both an a priori essence (Christian humanism) and an a priori intersubjective network: "a synthesis whose totality is inconceivable" (BN, p. 301).
Sartre's a posteriori recognition: from the hotel window to the group in fusion, read by Verstraeten as Hegel's 'I that is We'.
- Identity of difference. "We are all identical in that we all differ from each other, 'no common nature, communication always possible'" (CRD, p. 126). The field is unified "as many times as there is plurality of unifications" (p. 217).
- Shifting recognition. Hegel's optimism vanishes if recognition is "for him as for Sartre - a shifting recognition". In Hegel it is tested by the risk of death; in Sartre by "the lived ordeal of the other as nihilation effected against me", felt as shame or pride.
- Both works open. Love, revolution, the constitutional state, art, politics and philosophy are "great moments of substantial universalization common to both authors", and "the future of both works ... remain[s] identically open".
Being-for-others and recognition: convergences Sartre underplayed
On recognition Verstraeten again finds convergence beneath Sartre's stress on difference. Hegel's struggle for recognition and Sartre's look both make the Other's freedom the mediation of self-consciousness. Sartre refuses the optimistic dialectic that would end in mutual recognition as Spirit; conflict, shame and objectification remain endemic. Yet the structure (selfhood via the Other's freedom) is Hegelian. Saint Genet's "animal reign of the spirit", the drama's beautiful soul, and the Idiot's figures of individualism and forgiveness continue the borrowing. The Critique's "overwhelming refusal" of idealism coexists with an undercurrent that reinvented Hegelian thinking on need, action and the universal concrete.
Convergences Verstraeten tracks against Sartre's own stress on difference.
Genuine versus bad infinite: the finite that oversteps
Verstraeten's hinge is Hegel's distinction. The bad infinite is endless going-beyond that never arrives: object replaced by object, desire that only relocates lack. The genuine infinite is the finite that oversteps itself and returns to itself as relation: freedom reproducing freedom, "the possibility of the infinite creation of its relationship to the world". Sartre's for-itself, desire in Being and Nothingness, and need in the Critique repeat that structure even where Sartre rejects the Hegelian infinite by name.
Desire fetishizes Value; need rehabilitates the object under scarcity ("Satisfy people's needs and you will have social peace"), needs being sociohistorically defined. What saves need from positivistic prosaicness is that desire is "in quest for itself": "self-consciousness is Desire in general" (PhSp, pp. 104-5). Hegel praises the dog that seizes its prey; Sartre's thirst "is never sufficiently thirst", "haunted by the presence of the Self" (BN, pp. 100-1). Marx's reproduction of labour power through socially necessary goods is the social analogue: "there is no requirement external to its conditions".
Verstraeten: bad infinite versus genuine infinite in Sartre's desire and need.
Hegel texts Verstraeten privileges beside Sartre's career.
Main Points
Twenty-two takeaways
- The ego is made, not given. Consciousness is impersonal and pre-reflective; the ego is a construct of reflection, "elusive but not illusive", and still needed for a responsible life (1, 3, Conclusion).
- The subject is divided, not abolished. The for-itself is a riven relation to itself, never self-coincident; Sartre thought the divided subject before Lacan and Derrida, who chose "parricide" over acknowledgement (Conclusion).
- Freedom is conditioned but not cancelled. The later Sartre makes us "totally conditioned" yet responsible; freedom is "the small movement" that reworks what has been made of us (4, 6).
- The practico-inert is structure. Worked matter and institutions carry past praxis as inert demands; structure is real but lives only through present praxis (1, 7, 9).
- History is intelligible like an artwork. Totalization and incarnation let a single event, or a life, condense its epoch; The Family Idiot is "a novel that is true" (7).
- Progress is a project, not a law. Sartre demythologizes progress as a bourgeois ideology of 1848 while keeping the question "progress for whom?" and the idea of negative progress (8).
- Consciousness reveals and makes being. It adds nothing to being yet makes a world of meanings and worked matter out of it, without becoming its products (1).
- Examples steer method. The impersonator, the waiter and Hamlet show Sartre bending Husserl's intentional and eidetic analysis toward role-playing and conversion (2).
- The break may fall early. Fretz locates the real shift between The Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness, where the look brings back solipsism (3).
- Radical choice defeats itself. An all-or-nothing fundamental project cannot be chosen by a self that does not yet exist, so the early theory undercuts self-determination (4).
- Self-knowledge is lived, not known. The project is conscious but not known; existential psychoanalysis reconstructs it, and le vécu names this opaque self-presence (4, Conclusion).
- Comprehension widens commitment. Verstehen, absent from What Is Literature?, lets Sartre rehabilitate poetry, passivity and affect, and call Flaubert committed (5).
- The progressive-regressive method links life and epoch. A singular universal is read back through period, class and family and forward through its project (5, 7).
- Every major work spawns an ethics. The Notebooks follow Being and Nothingness; the Rome and Cornell texts follow the Critique; none was finished (6).
- Value starts in lack. The for-itself pursues an impossible in-itself-for-itself; ethics begins when freedom stops chasing it and wills itself as freedom (6, Appendix).
- Need grounds the later ethic. In the Critique era, need and scarcity, not lack, ground value, and "ethical radicalism" aims at an integral humanity (6).
- Scarcity makes others a threat. Under scarcity reciprocity becomes antagonistic and the other becomes "the counter-man", a possible mortal danger; violence is "interiorized scarcity" (6, 7).
- Groups are fragile. The fused group dissolves back into series through pledge, organization and institution, unless praxis renews it (7, 9).
- Sartre and structuralism share an object. Their quarrel is over the ontological status of structures and the place of the subject, not over whether structures exist (9).
- Hegel returns under another name. The for-itself, desire and need repeat Hegel's genuine infinite, the finite overstepping itself, even where Sartre rejects it (Appendix).
- Recognition is never final. Being-for-others stays conflictual in Sartre, where Hegel's master and slave move toward mutual recognition (6, Appendix).
- The posthumous Sartre is notes. Texts Sartre withheld carry much of the argument, so their "development" is partly the contributors' reconstruction (all chapters).
How the strongest takeaways connect: from an ego that is made to a history read as structure.
Frameworks and mental models
These are the reusable tools the essays draw from Sartre, each a way of holding freedom and structure in one view.
| Name | What it says | Use it when |
|---|---|---|
| Bad faith | Fleeing freedom by playing a role as if it were a fixed nature | People say "that is just my job" to avoid a choice |
| Fundamental project | A life is unified by an original choice of being | Explaining a pattern across someone's many decisions |
| Progressive-regressive method | Read a life back through its conditions and forward through its project | Writing a biography, case history or post-mortem |
| Practico-inert | Past action, set in matter and rules, makes demands on the present | Old systems or rules shape what people can do now |
| Series and group | Isolated people bound by an object versus people united by shared praxis | Telling a queue of users from a team with a common aim |
| Totalization | Meaning is an ongoing unifying of parts by action, never complete | Making sense of an event without claiming a final story |
| Singular universal | One life incarnates its epoch | Using one case to understand a whole period or institution |
| Genuine infinite | The finite becomes itself by overstepping its limit | Thinking about growth that keeps, not cancels, what it surpasses |
Who's who
| Person | Role in the book |
|---|---|
| Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80) | Subject of every chapter |
| Christina Howells | Editor; Introduction and Conclusion on the subject |
| Hazel E. Barnes, Robert Denoon Cumming | Ontology and the ego (1); Husserl and role-playing (2) |
| Leo Fretz, David A. Jopling | Individuality and the break (3); moral psychology (4) |
| Rhiannon Goldthorpe, Juliette Simont | The committed writer (5); Sartrean ethics (6) |
| Thomas R. Flynn, Ronald Aronson | Poetics of history (7); progress (8) |
| Peter Caws, Pierre Verstraeten | Structuralism (9); Hegel (Appendix) |
| Edmund Husserl, G. W. F. Hegel | The two great sources Sartre transforms (2, 3, Appendix) |
| Gustave Flaubert, Jean Genet | Subjects of Sartre's existential biographies (2, 5, 7) |
| Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Foucault, Derrida | Successors whose themes Sartre is said to anticipate (9, Conclusion) |
| Raymond Aron, Wilhelm Dilthey | Sources for comprehension and the critique of historical reason (5, 7) |
Extra takeaways from the DEPTH pass
- Barnes/Howells ego split is the Companion's internal critical engine: healthy bulwark versus Lacanian dissolution.
- Comprehension, not the 1947 prose/poetry rule, is what finally lets poetry and Flaubert count as committed.
- Generosity (Notebooks) and need (Rome) are two phases of one ethical demand, not a replacement of morals by politics.
- Totalization without a totalizer remains Flynn's open question; dialectical nominalism accepts the cost.
- Progress as Penelope's web (Aronson) pairs with Verdi's interiorized adversary: local gains, no World-Story.
- Structures as necessity of freedom (Caws) is the cleanest one-line bridge between Sartre and Structuralism.
- Genuine infinite (Verstraeten) names the Hegel Sartre performed while denying.
- Small movement (Jopling's late Sartre) is the moral-psychology formula that survives hard-determinist and decisionist extremes.
Who to read first in this Companion, by reader aim.
A closer look on the whole Companion
About this book
The Cambridge Companion to Sartre by Christina Howells (ed.), 1992. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
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- The ego is made, not given. Consciousness is impersonal and pre-reflective; the ego is a construct of reflection, "elusive but not illusive", and still needed for a responsible life (1, 3, Conclusion).
- The subject is divided, not abolished. The for-itself is a riven relation to itself, never self-coincident; Sartre thought the divided subject before Lacan and Derrida, who chose "parricide" over acknowledgement (Conclusion).
- Freedom is conditioned but not cancelled. The later Sartre makes us "totally conditioned" yet responsible; freedom is "the small movement" that reworks what has been made of us (4, 6).
- The practico-inert is structure. Worked matter and institutions carry past praxis as inert demands; structure is real but lives only through present praxis (1, 7, 9).
- History is intelligible like an artwork. Totalization and incarnation let a single event, or a life, condense its epoch; The Family Idiot is "a novel that is true" (7).
- Progress is a project, not a law. Sartre demythologizes progress as a bourgeois ideology of 1848 while keeping the question "progress for whom?" and the idea of negative progress (8).