Sartre and Analytic Philosophy (Routledge Research in Phenomenology) [1 ed.] 9781138316058, 9781032626215, 9780429455919, 1138316059

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Sartre and Analytic Philosophy

This book explores the relevance of Sartre’s work in various areas of contemporary philosophy, including the imagination, philosophy of language, scepticism, social ontology, logic, film, practical rationality, emotions, and psychoanalysis. Unlike other collections focused on Sartre, this book is not intended as a book of Sartre scholarship or interpretation. The volume’s contributors, trained in analytic philosophy, engage with Sartre’s work in new refreshing ways, which does not require seeing him as primarily belonging to the continental philosophical traditions of phenomenology or existentialism. Instead, this book aims to make available and fruitfully explore the unheralded insights of Sartre, to creatively re-appropriate or rationally reconstruct certain fruitful ideas or approaches of Sartre and confront them with or make them available to contemporary philosophy in general. Sartre thereby emerges from this book as a versatile philosopher with a stake in a large variety of philosophical concerns. Sartre and Analytic Philosophy will appeal to Sartre scholars who are interested in his relevance to contemporary philosophical debates, as well as philosophers who are interested in exploring new ways of doing philosophy, which are neither stereotypically “analytic” nor “continental.” Talia Morag (PhD, Sydney University) lectures in philosophy at the University of Wollongong. She works on philosophical psychology and ethics, especially liberal naturalism, psychoanalysis, emotion, and social psychology. She is the author of Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason (Routledge, 2016), and received the Annette Baier Prize (2020).

Routledge Research in Phenomenology Edited by Søren Overgaard University of Copenhagen

Denmark, Komarine Romdenh-Romluc University of Sheffield, UK

David Cerbone West Virginia University, USA The Bounds of Self An Essay on Heidegger’s Being and Time R. Matthew Shockey Towards a Phenomenology of Values Investigations of Worth D.J. Hobbs Mechanisms and Consciousness Integrating Phenomenology with Cognitive Science Maren Pokropski Phenomenology as Critique Why Method Matters Edited by Andreea Smaranda Aldea, David Carr, and Sara Heinämaa Contemporary Phenomenologies of Normativity Norms, Goals, and Values Edited by Sara Heinämaa, Mirja Hartimo, and Ilpo Hirvonen Merleau-Ponty and Contemporary Philosophy of Perception Peter Antich Sartre and Analytic Philosophy Edited by Talia Morag For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Research-in-Phenomenology/bookseries/RRP

Sartre and Analytic Philosophy Edited by Talia Morag

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Taylor & Francis The right of Talia Morag to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-1-138-31605-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-62621-5 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-45591-9 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919 Typeset in Sabon by SPi Technologies India Pvt Ltd (Straive)

To my parents, Michael and Varda Morag

Contents

Notes on Contributors ix Acknowledgements xii Introduction: Analytic vs. Continental from an Imaginative and Psychoanalytic Perspective

1

TALIA MORAG

1 Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation: Sartre with Frege (and Badiou)

18

PAUL M. LIVINGSTON

2 Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience

42

STEPHEN L. WHITE

3 Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”: Sartre and Anscombe

65

VALÉRIE AUCOUTURIER

4 Peculiar Access: Sartre, Self-Knowledge, and the Question of the Irreducibility of the First-Person Perspective 89 PIERRE-JEAN RENAUDIE AND JACK REYNOLDS

5 Some Problems of Other Minds

109

KATHERINE J. MORRIS

6 Scepticism as Nihilism: Sartre’s Nausea Reads Cavell DAVID MACARTHUR

128

viii Contents

7 The Secret Passion: Sartre, Huston, and the Freud Screenplay 166 ROBERT SINNERBRINK

8 Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO

185

TALIA MORAG

9 Anguish and Anxiety

212

ANTHONY HATZIMOYSIS

10 Sartre, James, and the Transformative Power of Emotion 225 DEMIAN WHITING

11 Sartre and Political Imagining

243

GENEVIEVE LLOYD

12 Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality in the Critique of Dialectical Reason 260 SEBASTIAN GARDNER

Index 286

Notes on Contributors

Valérie Aucouturier is Professor of Philosophy at Université Saint-Louis, Brussels, and a member of the Centre Prospéro. Langage, Image, Connaissance. She got her PhD in philosophy from Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, and the University of Kent. Her research mainly focusses on the philosophy of language, mind, and action (Anscombe, Austin, Wittgenstein) and the philosophy of psychology and psychoanalysis. She has published extensively on the work of Elizabeth Anscombe. Sebastian Gardner is a Professor of Philosophy at University College London. He has published on Kant and German Idealism, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, and Sartre. His books include Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (2009), Art and Morality (Routledge 2003), Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (Routledge 1999), and Irrationality and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (1993). Anthony Hatzimoysis is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Athens, and a Visiting Professor at Pepperdine University, California. He is cofounder of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions. He works on metaethics, philosophy of emotions, and Sartre. He is the author of The Philosophy of Sartre (Routledge, 2011) and the editor of Self-Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2011) and Philosophy and the Emotions (Cambridge University Press, 2003). Paul M. Livingston lives in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico and teaches philosophy at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of several books, most recently The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism (2012); The Problems of Contemporary Philosophy (co-authored with Andrew Cutrofello, 2015); and The Logic of Being: Realism, Truth, and Time (2017). His current project is an investigation of several logics of the one and the

x  Notes on Contributors many, primarily as these appear in the traditions of Platonism, Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophy, and twentieth-century analytic philosophy, and of their implications for contemporary life and practice. Genevieve Lloyd is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. She has published on history of philosophy, especially Spinoza; on feminist philosophy; and on the relations between philosophy and literature. Her most recent books are Providence Lost (2010), Enlightenment Shadows (2013), and Reclaiming Wonder: After the Sublime (2018) David Macarthur (PhD Harvard) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He has published widely in academic journals and books on liberal naturalism, metaphysical quietism, Wittgenstein, pragmatism, scepticism, common sense, perception, ordinary language, and philosophy of art – especially architecture, photography, and film. He edited Hilary and Ruth-Anna Putnam’s Pragmatism as a Way of Life (2017) and with Mario De Caro co-edited: Naturalism in Question (2004), Naturalism and Normativity (2010), Hilary Putnam: Philosophy in an Age of Science (2012), The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism (Routledge, 2022), and Hilary Putnam: Philosophy as Dialogue (2022). Living Skepticism (2022) is co-edited with Stephen Hetherington. Talia Morag (PhD, University of Sydney) lectures in philosophy at the University of Wollongong. She works on philosophical psychology and ethics, especially liberal naturalism, psychoanalysis, emotion, and social psychology. She is the author of Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason (Routledge, 2016), and received the Annette Baier Prize (2020). Katherine J. Morris is a fellow in philosophy at Mansfield College, Oxford University, United Kingdom. Her books include Descartes’ Dualism (with Gordon Baker, Routledge, 1996), Sartre (2008), and Starting with Merleau-Ponty (2012). She edited a collection of Gordon Baker’s later articles on Wittgenstein entitled Wittgenstein’s Method: Neglected Aspects (2004), and she has published widely on Descartes, Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Pierre-Jean Renaudie is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Lyon, France. He is the author of a book on Husserl’s theory of knowledge (Husserl et les catégories. Langage, pensée et perception, 2015), and co-edited two volumes, on meaning and intentionality (Sens, intentionnalité, antipsychologisme, with D. Pradelle, 2022), and on the phenomenological approaches of matter (Phénoménologies de la

Notes on Contributors  xi matière, with C. V. Spaak, 2021). He is preparing a book on the relationship between experience and meaning in the phenomenological, neo-Kantian, and hermeneutic traditions, and his current research analyses the articulation between phenomenology, narrative theory, and self-knowledge in Sartre. Jack Reynolds is Professor of Philosophy at Deakin University and Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities. He has written five books, including most recently Phenomenology, Naturalism and Science: A Hybrid and Heretical Proposal (Routledge 2018). He is co-editor, with Felicity Joseph and Ashley Woodward, of the Bloomsbury Companion to Existentialism (2023, 2nd edition) and Sartre: Key Concepts (2013), with Steven Churchill. Robert Sinnerbrink is Associate Professor of Philosophy and former Australian Research Council Future Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of New Philosophies of Film: An Introduction to Cinema as a Way of Thinking, 2nd expanded edition (2022), Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher (2019), Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (Routledge, 2016), New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (2011), Understanding Hegelianism (Acumen, 2007/Routledge 2014), and is a member of the editorial boards of the journals Film-Philosophy and Film and Philosophy. He has published numerous articles on the relationship between film and philosophy in journals such as Angelaki, Film-Philosophy, Necsus: European Journal of Media Studies, Screen, and Screening the Past, and is Deputy Chair of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy. Stephen L. White is Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University. He has published papers on philosophy of mind, epistemology, moral psychology, and aesthetics, and a book on mind, moral psychology, and personal identity titled The Unity of the Self. He is currently finishing a book involving themes from the theory of meaning and the phenomenology of perception, which he develops within an analytic philosophical framework, as well as a defence of the viability and contemporary relevance of transcendental arguments. Demian Whiting is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Hull, United Kingdom. He works mainly in the philosophy of mind, with a special interest in emotion theory, moral psychology, and phenomenal consciousness. He is the author of Emotions as Original Existences: A The­ ory of Emotion, Motivation, and the Self (2020), and is currently working on his second book provisionally titled The Phenomenal Nature of Mind.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Winston Leung for his excellent job creating the index for this book. Thanks also to the Routledge editorial board who changed the title of this book from Thinking with Sartre to Sartre and Analytic Philosophy. The change in title motivated the writing of the introduction for this book as a reflection on the Analytic-Continental divide, and of this book’s place in relation to this divide. I also want to thank Genevieve Lloyd, who at crucial points of this project provided me with inspiration and confidence to bring this project to fruition. Her approach to philosophy and to reading philosophy has been an important source of inspiration for the conception of this book. Finally I thank my partner David for his unrelenting support and for our philosophical conversation of many years.

Introduction Analytic vs. Continental from an Imaginative and Psychoanalytic Perspective Talia Morag* The title of this collection, Sartre and Analytic Philosophy, might sound puzzling from a rational point of view. Historically, Sartre had little to do with analytic philosophy or with the project of logical analysis. Nonetheless, a previous generation of Anglo-American philosophers found inspiration and insight in Sartre’s texts. Among the most well-known admirers are Stuart Hampshire, Iris Murdoch, Arthur Danto, and Mary Warnock.1 Since then, there has been relatively little engagement with his work within mainstream Anglo-American philosophy – with some notable exceptions, such as Richard Moran and Ian Hacking.2 The slide in this last paragraph from “analytic” to “Anglo-American” is not exactly between synonyms, though this slide is often made. No matter what specific view one may hold about the nature and origins of analytic philosophy, a minimal notion of it, say as a collection of texts bound together by references to certain central figures and characterized by mutual influence, would include some prominent philosophers who wrote in other European languages. These are, most notably, Frege, Wittgenstein, and the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle, many of whom fled the Nazis to go to the United States as they were accused of their so-called Jewish “logicality, mathematicality, [and] formalism,” which the Nazis declared opposed a “Christian German State.”3 The history of analytic philosophy also incorporates Polish and Scandinavian philosophers.4 Today, many prominent Anglo-American philosophers do not engage in anything resembling a project of logical analysis, including Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, Christine Korsgaard, John McDowell, Hilary Putnam, Richard Rorty, and Bernard Williams. In fact, defining analytic philosophy today, or what the project of “analysis” amounts to in contemporary philosophy, is far from evident, as can be seen in the multiple ways philosophers have approached this task.5 And yet, we somehow know analytic philosophy when we see it, or at least so most of us think. Moreover, the philosophers we bother to label as *  Many thanks to Jack Reynolds and especially to David Macarthur for their comments.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-1

2  Talia Morag “Anglo-American,” even when they do not partake in a project of analysis, seem related, somehow, to analytic philosophy. Take Iris Merdoch, for example. We would be more willing, it seems fair to say, to group her with analytic philosophers than in any other group of philosophers. Although she was dissatisfied with analytic philosophy, she was nevertheless trained in that environment, and her philosophy can be seen as a response or as an opposition to it, and in that way still defined by it.6 The title of the present collection evokes the idea of the well-known divide between analytic and continental philosophy. When we label one of the aforementioned philosophers an Anglo-American philosopher we are placing them on the analytic side of this divide. For convenience, I will simply refer to this philosophical division henceforth as “the divide.” Most of us do not doubt that the divide exists as a social fact today. As Reynolds and Chase say, Academic philosophers, journals, conferences, publication series and even entire publishing houses, all now often live entirely within one or the other tradition. In some cases, the result is that continental philosophers have effectively been consigned to other disciplines, like comparative literature. More usually, philosophers simply inhabit their own tradition without really attending to the other – perhaps looking at or attending occasional papers from the other side out of collegial politeness or personal loyalty, and often regretting it when they do.7 The social fact of the divide comes hand in hand with stereotypes for each group to disparage or even mock the other. The “continentals” see the “analytics” as playing “a faux-neutral and ahistorical game”8 or as having math or science envy. The “analytics” reject the “continentals” as being engaged in “nonsense, mysticism or literature.”9 These hostile stereotypes exemplify the aggression that famously characterizes the divide. Reynolds and Chase’s expression, “the philosophical other,” captures that aggression well, given how the term “the other” has been used in the twentieth century to discuss the hostility that characterizes racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia. Unlike some of the philosophers of the divide,10 Reynolds and Chase do not have illusions about a future reconciliation between the traditions. Nevertheless, they envision their book as describing the traditions to one another, encouraging philosophers to understand themselves and philosophy at large through the perspectives of their “other.”11 In that sense, their work can be seen as a modest step towards mutual engagement, a prospect others hope for as well.12 The present collection, in contrast, does not see itself as partaking in the mission of “building bridges” between the analytic and the continental traditions. Unlike other collections which couple a continental philosopher with “analytic philosophy,”13 this book is not aiming to present a

Introduction  3 comparative study of a well-known continental philosopher, in this case Sartre, by detailing their similarities and differences from, or historical connections with, analytic philosophy. This is not to say that the present collection aims at fuelling some sort of war between analytic and continental philosophy. This collection neither builds a bridge nor entrenches a rift, as I shall explain. In this “Introduction,” I shall briefly provide a novel account of the antagonism between analytic and continental philosophy and the significance of our use of stereotypes in characterizing them. It is worth noting that most philosophers who research the divide do not take these stereotypes seriously. Philosophers disregard stereotypes of “analytic” and “continental” philosophers not just because they are disrespectful “caricatures” but because they are hasty “generalizations,” which do not actually apply correctly to the stereotyped groups.14 Take, for example, the stereotype of analytic philosophy as a-historical. It is true that many analytic philosophers distinguish what they do from the history of philosophy, as can be seen by various job descriptions and department structures. And there have been some vocal exemplars from the history of analytic philosophy, such as Quine and Harman.15 But it is simply not the case that all, or even most, analytic philosophers lack historical sensibility; just think of Elizabeth Anscombe, or Bernard Williams, or Robert Brandon or Arthur Danto, to mention four prominent examples. At the very least, now that analytic philosophy itself recognizably has a history, which is being taught in various philosophy departments, it seems strange to continue talking about analytic philosophy as divorced from history. Nor is it the case that continental philosophers suffice in the scholarship of previous philosophical texts without caring to give new answers to both new and old questions. For example, Jean-François Lyotard provides close readings of Kant’s Third Critique to contribute to his postmodern philosophy.16 Or take the stereotype of continental philosophy as literature. It seems correct to say that at least some famous French philosophers have distinctive styles of writing, which they cultivate. Sartre is a paradigm here, illuminating his ideas through examples that are so salient and memorable, like a piece of literature ( – who does not have some image in their minds of the Parisian waiter from Being and Nothingness?). Plausibly, contemporary continental philosophers try to develop their own literary-philosophical style as well, for example, Derrida. But to generalize that tendency is clearly false. How is Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological philosophy supposed to count as literature? It would also be false to claim that prominent analytic philosophers have no identifiable style of their own. Think of Hilary Putnam’s light touch in complex logical matters, Richard Rorty’s catchy phrases, Cora Diamond’s poetic gravitas, and Naomi Scheman’s writerly feminist-inflected epistemology.

4  Talia Morag Philosophers have appealed to categories such as historicity, a-historicity, literary sensibility, affinity to logic, amongst others, to characterize the divide. But such categories are clichés; they do not make good rational sense of the divide either including too much or too little, respectively. They do not map onto actual doctrines and methods of philosophy and provide no clear basis to separate analytic from continental philosophers in a way that matches our initial sense of where to draw the line in particular cases. If they did, we would not have a debate about the divide and its nature, and yet we do. As Reynolds and Chase outline, philosophers writing on this topic fall into two main groups. First are essentialists, for whom analytic and continental philosophies have clear and distinct definitions to demarcate them, even if allowance must be made for vague boundaries.17 Deflationists are the second group, for whom the differences between the traditions are largely stylistic, a distinction without a difference, as Bernard Williams says.18 Reynolds and Chase offer a middle way, as it were, to conceive of the difference. They acknowledge the diversity of each tradition, as well as areas of overlap between analytic and continental philosophy, but still insist that each of them exhibits a “quasi-unity.”19 They explain, Analytic and continental philosophers frequently employ distinct methods, and disagree as to their worth and proper field of application. Each tradition exhibits distinct stylistic preferences, norms of engagement and discussion, and harbours distinctly different attitudes as to what are the more significant philosophical issues and questions.20 Chase and Reynolds do justice to the richness and complexity of the factors involved in identifying more or less local trends within analytic or continental philosophy. Frequently enough, however, these distinct methods and norms are shared across the divide, as their book shows, time and again. The term “quasi-unity” allows for quite a lot of similarities amongst the traditions. Indeed, Chase and Reynolds do not offer a middle way so much as they provide a very detailed expression of the difficulty in conceptually demarcating the divide – even if, in some sense, we want to acknowledge that the divide exists. What the invocation of “quasi” in this debate means, I suggest, is that the methodological and stylistic trends that characterize, to some extent, each of these groups do not account for the divide or sustain its existence. The themes and trends Reynolds and Chase identify, in other words, have little effective weight in explaining the divide. In view of that, I want to suggest, alternatively, that the divide is not a matter of separate doctrines or methods of philosophizing. That is, the divide is not governed or explained by appeal to reason.

Introduction  5 Such a statement may sound absurd to philosophers who see themselves as rationally responding to other philosophers, or that see philosophy as primarily the study of the nature scope, and limits, of reason.21 I do not want to deny that there are rational connections to be found amongst philosophical texts – within the two traditions as well as across the divide. Philosophers, no doubt, argue with one another constantly. But if reason were the source of the divide, that is, if a philosophical doctrine or method of reason, or a set of such, could provide us with the defining features of both traditions, then we would not have the difficulties we in fact do have in characterizing each tradition. In light of this aporia, let us consider the illuminating suggestion that the analytic-continental divide is at bottom imaginative. Genevieve Lloyd proposed this compelling idea in her talk at the Centennial Celebrations for the Australasian Association of Philosophy. There she describes how continental philosophy is associated with conversations in Parisian cafes, and with subjectivity, especially in the form of emotion and imagination. She also suggests that philosophical analysis is a way of imagining philosophy, and calls the imagined dichotomy between analytic and continental “mythical.” As insightful as Lloyd’s position is, her emphasis on the imagination is arguably in tension with a historicist rational reconstruction of the divide which she also endorses. As she puts it, “A story can be told of a continuous trajectory from Cambridge philosophical analysis to present-day analytical philosophy.” Doing that historical work at least sustains the idea of two different “traditions.” Difference need not become dichotomy, Lloyd says. But in each tradition, there are nevertheless core figures and styles and methodologies, even if there are outliers, vagueness, and some overlap. On this view, each tradition might be a family-resemblance concept, in Wittgenstein’s sense. This softened difference between the two traditions is similar to the quasiunified vision of each tradition, sketched by Reynolds and Chase. Lloyd describes the historical dissatisfaction with what has become known as “analytic” philosophy, in terms of its attempt at “de-contextualising” philosophy, its “methodological or strategic disengagement,” as well as its obsession with objectivity. She also appears to endorse certain views about how analytic philosophy was actually done without regard to its history, or if it was considered, then without taking history seriously from a philosophical perspective. For analytic philosophers, on this line, the history of philosophy is largely a history of philosophical errors. Such a claim is not just a matter of imagination but of practice. And at the end of her talk, her call for a philosophy that focuses more on emotion and imagination is a call for mainstream analytic philosophy to be more continental. Lloyd thinks, then, that the differences between the traditions – on matters of context, history, objectivity, emotion, and imagination – have theoretical weight.

6  Talia Morag In this “Introduction,” I refuse to engage in, or endorse, any such historical reconstruction or any rationally based understanding of a divide between two traditions. I focus only on the sense of a philosophical dichotomy, its imaginative nature and affective consequences. I contend that the divide is as real and as powerful as the imagination that causally explains and sustains it. The imagination is causally operative in our minds, both individually and collectively. Psychological reality, as Freud says, is just as real as physical reality.22 More specifically, I suggest that we rethink the clichés that we use to characterize analytic or continental philosophy – namely, terms such as “historical” or “a-historical,” “literary,” “scientific,” “logical,” and take seriously that they are used to characterize imaginative stereotypes, even if they don’t function well as rational criteria of demarcation. That is, these terms do not function as plausible theories about the nature of analytical or continental philosophy. What these terms designate, I suggest, are what Wittgenstein calls “pictures.” What are “pictures”? David Macarthur explains, Pictures are not empirical hypotheses; rather they are simplified imaginative schemas or models that we use as heuristics to help us understand the highly complex and diverse phenomena that confronts us in everyday life and in the sciences. Like an architectural model of a building, they are, themselves, neither true nor false; that is, unless and until we apply them to the world in some way, such as by an act of comparison.23 A picture cannot be defined or described specifically and in detail because it is something sketchy and nebulous. It is an imaginative construct, which organizes reality in a certain way, and brings out certain salient aspects of reality. The image of the mind inside the head, the image of gas as made up of invisible particles bouncing off each other in perfectly elastic collisions, or the image of earth as a giant ball floating in space: these are all pictures in this Wittgensteinian sense, ways of imagining how some aspect of reality is. So, too, we can have pictures of a person or a group of persons. The social stereotype of black people as being good at basketball or Australians as liking Vegemite are pictures. Once we try to provide further details and say more specific things about such pictures, we are effectively converting the stereotype into a social-scientific theory – but then as a theory, it can be true or false, justified or unjustified, and allow multiple versions compatible with the picture. An important feature of pictures is that they can be implicit, not something we are aware of or explicitly endorse. This unawareness comprises another typical feature of the Wittgensteinian picture, which he describes as glasses through which we see reality, without being aware that we are wearing them.24 We can also have pictures that provide schemas of what philosophy is, or of how philosophy should be done, that make certain aspects of philosophizing salient and thereby give us orientation in our philosophical

Introduction  7 endeavours. The very idea of philosophical analysis, present well before the term “analytic philosophy” came into widespread use, comprises a picture, a way of imagining philosophy, as Genevieve Lloyd notes. For example, Russell’s idea of logical “atomism” is based on an analogy between logical analysis of concepts and “breaking down the complex structures of the physical world into their simplest constituents.” This was not the only way to imagine analysis. “For the early Wittgenstein, the constituents of ‘philosophical analysis,’ rather than being discrete, like atoms, ‘fit into one another like the links of a chain.’”25 And what is a metaphor for reality if not a kind of a picture, an imaginative construct through which we can see one thing in terms of another? Historicity and a-historicity can be pictures too.26 Cavell gives salient expression to two such pictures of philosophy represented by Wittgenstein and Heidegger, respectively. The first reads nothing, the second everything.27 Of course, it is not literally true that one reads nothing and the other reads everything. These statements are not true about anyone in the Western tradition. They are pictures of a-historicity and historicity, ways of imagining how philosophy relates to its history, and they align with the analyticcontinental divide. Cavell turns these pictures into stereotypical caricatures, making use of paradigm figures. We can just imagine Wittgenstein in an empty office with a whiteboard drawing the duck-rabbit and pacing around the room reflecting on it.28 We can imagine Heidegger sitting and writing by his desk with a huge pile of open books marked everywhere, the walls of his study covered entirely with books. Stereotypes that disparage the a-historicity of analytic philosophers, for example, basically take a picture that is part of the self-image of analytic philosophers, a picture that philosophers across the divide associate with analytical philosophy, and give it a negative spin. The picture of the philosopher-poet/writer associated with continental philosophy, and Sartre in particular, is a picture that sees writing style and content as intertwined, a picture from which expressing one’s point is not merely a matter of argument but also of word choices and rhetorical devices, such as provocation through the embrace of paradox – as in the dialectic which is a picture of Hegel’s. It is a picture of philosophy as imaginative and emotional as well as rational.29 Analytic philosophers give this picture of the continental philosopher a negative valence – as pretentious and deliberately obscure, the philosopher as frustrated poet, or, in France in particular, the philosopher as celebrity. When analytic philosophers disparage continentals as frustrated poets, they are endorsing the value of their own picture: that argument should be purified from rhetoric and embody sheer clarity, a picture that is related to the old picture of analytic philosophy as a matter of logic, examining the nature of formal arguments, divorced from time-bound circumstance and specific content. Today, the most dominant picture in analytic philosophy

8  Talia Morag is that of philosophy as continuous with science, a picture borrowed from Quine.30 From this perspective, one sees oneself as part of a collaborative effort in search of the truth, and nothing is more disparaged than a philosopher who seeks to express themselves in their own personal style and voice. The same picture, in other words, can function as one’s (ideal) perhaps unconscious self-image, and at the same time, as a negative stereotype for others. A stereotype or picture provides a way to see the “other” and interpret them. Both affectively charged ways of taking the picture – the positive and the negative – do not function as theoretical categories or doctrinal commitments which rationally divide philosophers into continental and analytic varieties. But as pictures, they nevertheless have effects on how philosophers see themselves and others, what they value, and what is salient to them in what they do. These imaginative pictures, then, give us critical orientation in our philosophizing – what we see as good or as bad philosophy. The difference between analytic and continental philosophy is largely a matter of each being associated with different pictures or stereotypes within philosophy (and to a lesser extent society) as a whole. In the present context, I cannot discuss every imaginative stereotype, or every so-called cliché, about the divide. Nevertheless, the current suggestion is that such clichés or stereotypes are pictures in Wittgenstein’s sense and that articulating them is of philosophical interest, in order to understand contemporary Western philosophy and its various orientations. Imaginatively, the divide is explicable through association with different pictures. But the affect that characterizes the use of stereotypes, especially the aggression towards the philosophical other, still requires explanation. Why disparage and mock rather than make what we might think of as reading and writing choices? I now turn to psychoanalysis for a possible answer to this question. There might be other explanations available (including other psychoanalytic explanations) but given that we are explaining the workings of the social imaginary, psychoanalysis is uniquely well placed to do so. The explanation I shall provide might be a contributing factor rather than the whole story. And in any case – the claim that the divide has its origins in the imagination in the sense explicated earlier is independent of this further elaboration. I propose we explain the affective aspect of the divide in terms of unconscious “projection” – namely, the ascription of aspects one dislikes in oneself – and prefers to ignore or deny – to other people.31 That is, instead of acknowledging one’s own faults – one sees them in another thereby, without realizing it, addressing their self-hatred at the other (understood as the externalized and projected inner). It is worthwhile mentioning here that “projection” does not comprise a theoretical invention of psychoanalysis. Projection is familiar from everyday life. Just think about how we tell people to “take a good look in the mirror” when we think they criticize us for

Introduction  9 faults or behaviours they exhibit themselves or when they blame us for something in order to distract themselves from their own responsibility. The demand to “take a good look” suggests a certain blindness about oneself. Projection can also occur at the social level, as an aspect of in-group and out-group psychology.32 Let me explain this suggestion and how it may apply to the divide through an example. Consider the term “a-historical” regarding analytic philosophy as an aggressive stereotype used by continental philosophers as a criticism of analytic philosophers. The negative judgement of the a-historical picture reflects how continental philosophers value their own picture of philosophy as historical. But who can actually “read everything” in the history of philosophy let alone understand it all? That is an overly demanding ideal, one which philosophers inevitably fall short of. Some continental philosophers may suffer from feelings of incompetence or anxiety about their own historical sensibilities, overwhelmed by the task of becoming familiar with such a vast tradition, or a worry they might be inaccurate or anachronistic in understanding texts of the past. Let us suppose this self-dislike remains unacknowledged, and instead, the aggression gets expressed through stereotyping the out-group of analytic philosophers as having an ignorant and crude attitude towards the tradition in which they work. For this explanation to work, it need not be true that all or even most analytic philosophers disregard the history of philosophy in their philosophizing. Consider, again, the negative picture of the continental philosopher as a poet/writer. Analytic philosophers turn that picture into a negative stereotype of the pretentious, obscure, and self-obsessed continental philosopher. But analytic opprobrium for continental philosophy reaches its apogee in the form of French philosophy. It is on full display in this Open Letter to Cambridge University (1992) signed by a group of prominent analytic philosophers to deter the university from awarding Jacques Derrida an honorary degree:

Sir, The University of Cambridge is to ballot on May 16 on whether M. Jacques Derrida should be allowed to go forward to receive an honorary degree. As philosophers and others who have taken a scholarly and professional interest in M. Derrida’s remarkable career over the years, we believe the following might throw some needed light on the public debate that has arisen over this issue. Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some of the marks of writings in that discipline. Their influence, however, has been to a striking degree almost entirely in fields outside philosophy – in departments of film studies, for example, or of French and English literature.

10  Talia Morag In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour. We submit that, if the works of a physicist (say) were similarly taken to be of merit primarily by those working in other disciplines, this would in itself be sufficient grounds for casting doubt upon the idea that the physicist in question was a suitable candidate for an honorary degree. Derrida’s career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s and his writings continue to reveal their origins in that period. Many of them seem to consist in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns (“logical phallusies” and the like), and M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets. Certainly he has shown considerable originality in this respect. But again, we submit, such originality does not lend credence to the idea that he is a suitable candidate for an honorary degree. Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for silent embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule. Derrida’s voluminous writings in our view stretch the normal forms of academic scholarship beyond recognition. Above all – as every reader can very easily establish for himself (and for this purpose any page will do) – his works employ a written style that defies comprehension. Many have been willing to give M. Derrida the benefit of the doubt, insisting that language of such depth and difficulty of interpretation must hide deep and subtle thoughts indeed. When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, it becomes clear, to us at least, that, where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial. Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university. Yours sincerely, Barry Smith (Editor, The Monist)33

Introduction  11 Here are all the tropes of the derogatory (“ridiculing”) picture of French (hence, continental) philosophy: it “does not meet accepted standard of rigor and clarity,” “translat[es] into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or concrete poets,” shows an artistic “originality” that falls well short of philosophical innovation; and “a written style that defies comprehension.”34 Consider the stereotype of artistic originality. Seen as a product of projection, as an expression of one’s own unacknowledged self-dislike addressed to another, this negative caricature may come from hidden feelings of inadequacy of analytic philosophers regarding their own originality. This anxiety about originality arguably also regulates the Anglo-American internal terms of criticism such as “pretending to be more original than they really are” or “re-badging” known views. Analytic philosophy began with a mythology of a break from the history of philosophy, and so is itself obsessed with the ideal of originality. Originality, in fact, is itself a picture (as becomes clear if one tries to theoretically define it). It is a picture that seems to unconsciously structure the philosophizing of analytic philosophers, who see themselves as doing philosophy rather than history of philosophy – a distinction that is hard, if not impossible, to make clear sense of. Originality, too, is an overly demanding ideal. For the analytic philosopher, the picture of originality conflicts with the picture of the philosopher-scientist, who works collaboratively as part of a community of inquirers, and whose own personality is meant to be abstracted away from their work. This psychoanalytic account has the benefit of explaining the affective component of the divide, and how this affect may come to characterize some philosophers more than others. Explaining this affective component is important since aggression can, in turn, help understand the persistence of the divide, despite the multiple failures to agree on its theoretical characterization. Pictures on their own may not be strong enough to explain the persistence of the divide, given how they can be elaborated into a multitude of theories when one attempts to detail and specify their content. Think of naturalism, which Macarthur interprets, inspired by Wittgenstein, as a world-picture.35 This explains why analytic philosophers typically say that naturalism is vague or ill-defined. That is, analytic philosophers tend to see naturalism as a theoretical doctrine which mysteriously escapes clarification. If its true source is the imagination, then it is little wonder that no one can agree on a true definition of the term and that there are endless internal disagreements about it. Such disagreements might compromise the cohesion of the analytic in-group except that everyone wants to call themselves a “naturalist.” The affective component of the divide, the aggression towards the out-group, can help explain the entrenchment of the divide as a social fact.

12  Talia Morag Freud recognizes the relative weakness of what binds in-groups together. The positive cohesive power of an in-group is usually the presence of a charismatic leader, or religious beliefs (themselves notoriously unclear and arguably also the expressions of an underlying picture, as Wittgenstein more or less says36), or something much more arbitrary from a rational point of view, such as geographical locations or family relations. In fact, the groups who dislike each other the most are often quite similar to one another.37 In-group cohesion, according to Freud, requires sharing an aggressive attitude towards an out-group: “It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.” 38 Philosophical tribalism did not begin with the divide. Tribalism started with philosophy itself, in Ancient Greece, an origin which is arguably imaginative as well, a kind of a founding myth blended with some historical truth. Philosophy was characterized in affective terms, as the love of wisdom, and by the existence of an “other,” rivals that were almost indistinguishable from philosophers: the sophists. The main difference, as Plato saw it, was that only philosophers care properly about the truth and aspire to reveal it, whereas sophists are only concerned about making persuasive arguments (yielding seeming truths), whether or not their arguments are objectively good or their conclusions genuinely true.39 Sophism is the dark side of philosophy, co-existing with it, and the sophists still exist amongst us – especially if one cannot draw the distinction in a way that stands up to criticism.40 The philosophical picture here is of argument yielding truth. It is a picture since it is not at all clear what counts as argument nor that it yields truth simpliciter as opposed to conditional truth. A very difficult ideal to live by, and a delicate balance to keep, to have a job – with all the related financial and political implications – whose description is the discovery of the truth. And when pursuits are governed by ideals that are difficult to attain, partly due to their inherent unclarity, many will feel they fall short and may project their discontent onto others. The figure associated with the name Sartre often functions as an affectively charged picture, imagined as a talented and charismatic philosophical charlatan with a distinctive squint (perhaps imagined as a sign of genius) smoking Gauloises cigarettes in a Parisian café surrounded by young admirers. Consider this remark by the distinguished analytic philosopher Bernard Williams: As so often with Sartre, I find myself left at the end dazzled but doubtful. The cleverness and imagination are enormous, and sometimes one is convinced. But even where one is, there is a doubt about what one has been convinced of.41

Introduction  13 This is a classic example of damning with faint praise.42 Sartre “dazzles”; he is enormously “clever” and “imaginative,” but one rightly remains doubtful whether he has any philosophical content. This image is used by analytic philosophers to deny Sartre the title of philosopher, replacing it with the image of a man given over to sensual pleasures and the creation of “bon mots” for a captive audience of students and admirers. The contributors to this collection are “analytic philosophers” who refuse this negative image of Sartre, preferring instead to engage with him as a serious philosopher, thereby side-stepping the affective aspect of the divide. More on this engagement follows. A word about my use of the expression “analytic philosopher” here. Our contributors do not engage in philosophical analysis in the Russellian sense, but, then that is true of most analytic philosophers. What unites them is a training in analytic philosophy, even if it is one that they have moved away from. This collection does not take upon itself the task of building a bridge across the analytic-continental divide since from its point of view it is unclear what kind of bridge is needed, if any. The image of building a bridge is an image where the two sides are distinct but connected, a connection that diminishes the hostility and softens the borders, yet maintains the pre-established difference. I have argued, on the contrary, that there is no convincing theoretical division separating the traditions. This book takes seriously the existing pictures of continental and analytic philosophy, accepting their opposition to one another. But this opposition is imaginative, much like literary oppositions, such as “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” (part of the title of a novella by Robert Louis Stevenson) or “Ice Cream for Crow” (an album and song title by Captain Beefheart), and in that sense, it connects the pictures that together give us the image of Western philosophy as stuck in a bitter antagonism. The goal of this book is to break these oppositional pictures by creating new pictures for philosophizing. In Wittgenstein’s practice, we get rid of a bad picture by replacing it with a better one (e.g. the misleading picture of meaning-as-object is replaced by the more fruitful picture of meaning-as-use). One cannot exactly remove one’s glasses, to speak metaphorically, but one can replace them with different glasses. I want to draw attention here to a different, Freudian way of producing a new picture whilst retaining the old picture – a way that is familiar from our dreams. It can happen, in a dream, that an image of a person seems to be composed of two or even three people from our everyday life. Freud calls this kind of imaginative synthesis “condensation.”43 The aim of this book is to see what happens when these two images – Sartre and the analytically trained philosopher – are condensed into a new picture. Or, to further elaborate the glasses metaphor, the aim is to see what happens when we put one pair of glasses on top of the other. The title of this book, then, treats “Sartre” and “analytic philosophy” as pictures

14  Talia Morag that structure our way of imagining philosophy, putting them on top of each other, as it were, to create new pictures. I will not here summarize the content of each chapter. I prefer to end this “Introduction” by presenting a vision of philosophy that I believe governs this volume. The analytically trained philosophers presented here have found ways of engaging with a philosopher from the past that is neither the mere scholarship of the stereotypical continental philosopher nor the mere fault-finding of the stereotypical analytic philosopher. The current norms of philosophizing seem to demand that Sartre could only be discussed within the continental tradition that he is associated with, or at least any discussion of him must seriously engage with the vast secondary literature in continental philosophy that is devoted to him. Philosophers are put under severe constraints here, as if not allowed to read and respond to Sartre from various perspectives within the wide world of philosophy, as if it is somehow forbidden to treat Sartre as one would a contemporary philosopher to see how he bears on a certain topic or a certain field of philosophical inquiry. The analytically trained philosophers who contributed to this volume were given the freedom to use Sartre’s texts in any way they found philosophically fruitful. These philosophers show that taking Sartre seriously need not mean understanding him in his own terms, or against the body of his whole corpus of work. We all know and appreciate the importance of what we call “primary texts,” and yet our current norms of engagement seem to neglect new creative ways of reading them in order to yield further or different insights for current debates, a capacity to stay relevant that arguably makes them “primary” in the first place. Sartre, in this collection, is no longer frozen in time or fixed in a certain philosophical tradition, such as existentialism or phenomenology. His texts come back to life by looking at them anew through new lenses – panoramic, tightly focused, out of focus, perspective altering, and so on – making available fresh insights for contemporary philosophers of whatever cast. The Sartre that emerges from this volume is not seen as, primarily, a phenomenologist and existentialist, but rather an unorthodox philosopher with a presence and a voice in surprisingly many philosophical domains and debates. In the age of professionalization, specialization, and “gatekeeping” in philosophy on both sides of the professional divide, Sartre emerges as an atypically versatile philosopher who can fruitfully engage in philosophical discussions well outside of the “isms” under which his work is typically categorized. The aim of this book, to sum up, is to provide a space for new ways to imagine how to do philosophy inspired by Sartre.

Introduction  15 Notes 1 Hampshire (1975), Murdoch (1953), Danto (1975), and Warnock (1965). 2 Moran (2000) and Hacking (2002). 3 Quoted in Kirsch (2020). The Vienna Circle included Jews and Christians, but they were all accused by the Nazis of promoting Jewish thought (ibid.). 4 See a survey of these influences in Chase and Reynolds (2010: 2). 5 Beaney (2021). 6 And the same can be said of Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, and Philippa Foot, see MacCumhaill and Wiseman (2022) and Lipscomb (2022). 7 Chase and Reynolds (2010: 4). 8 Ibid., 3. 9 Ibid., 3. 10 e.g. Baghramian and Marchetti (2017) 11 Chase and Reynolds (2010: 9). 12 e.g. Arnold (2020) and Vrahimis (2022). 13 e.g. Cobb-Stevens (1990), Hanna (2001), and Redding (2007). 14 Reynolds et al. (2010: 3). 15 See discussion in Chase and Reynolds (2010: 143–4). 16 Lyotard (1991). 17 e.g. Levy (2003). 18 Williams (2002, 4; 2003, 23–4). 19 Chase and Reynolds (2010: 7) 20 Ibid. 21 Such views have been suggested primarily for analytic philosophy, e.g. Cohen (1986), but the use and study of reason and its limits is a characteristic of Western philosophy in general. 22 See, for example, Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, S.E. volume 16, Lecture 23, 368–9, and also Freud, “Our Attitude towards Death,” S.E. volume 14, 297. S.E. refers throughout the footnotes to The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by James Strachey, which was originally published in 1966. This version is from 1995. 23 Macarthur (2018). 24 Wittgenstein (1953: 103). 25 Lloyd (2022). 26 When we try to articulate exactly what historicity means, we get many theories and qualifications e.g. Glock (2008). 27 Cavell (1989: 19). 28 This is much like the way Jim Jarmusch imagined Wittgenstein lecturing in his film Wittgenstein (1993). 29 This picture may also come with another picture of philosophy as a personal quest. As Lloyd says, “‘Continental,’ to the ‘analytically’ inclined, readily took on associations with subjectivity – with Imagination and Emotion” (Lloyd, 2022). 30 Quine (1986: 430–1). 31 Laplanche and Pontalis ([1973] 2018: 351). 32 Laplanche and Pontalis also mention racism as an instance of projection: “the racist, for instance, projects his own faults and unacknowledged inclinations on the group he reviles” (ibid.). 33 The letter was countersigned by Hans Albert (University of Mannheim), David Armstrong (Sydney), Ruth Barcan Marcus (Yale), Keith Campbell (Sydney),

16  Talia Morag Richard Glauser (Neuchâtel), Rudolf Haller (Graz), Massimo Mugnai (Florence), Kevin Mulligan (Geneva), Lorenzo Peña (Madrid), Willard van Orman Quine (Harvard), Wolfgang Röd (Innsbruck), Karl Schuhmann (Utrecht), Daniel Schulthess (Neuchâtel), Peter Simons (Salzburg), René Thom (Burs-surYvette), Dallas Willard (Los Angeles), Jan Woleński (Cracow). 34 Another example: the revolution of ideas emerging from nothingness that Badiou (1988) – a disciple of Sartre – talks about might seem to the unsympathetic analytic philosopher to be Badiou’s way of positioning himself as a radically original post-Sartrean thinker. 35 Macarthur (2018). 36 Wittgenstein says in Culture and Value: “Christianity is not based on a historical truth, but presents us with a (historical) narrative & says: now believe! But not believe this report with the belief that is appropriate to a historical report, – but rather: believe, through thick & thin & you can do this only as the outcome of a life. Here you have a message! – don’t treat it as you would another historical message! Make a quite different place for it in your life. – There is no paradox about that!” ([1977], 1980: 37). See Macarthur’s discussion of the religious picture and its comparison with the naturalist picture in Macarthur (2018). 37 Freud, S.E. 18, 101, 102. 38 Freud, S.E. 21, 114. 39 Sophists are the bullshitters of the ancient world in the theoretical lexicon of Harry Franfurt’s On Bullshit (2005). 40 We might call the sophists today “careerists,” who in turn might mock the “purists” and their limited impact in the ivory tower. 41 Reviews, 39. 42 In another example of the same, Williams writes, “We need not suppose that the [philosophical] reputation of Sartre was entirely well-founded.” Reviews, 295. 43 See, for example, Freud [1900]. The Interpretation of Dreams, S.E. 5, Chapter 7.

References Arnold, J. Across the Great Divide: Between Analytic and Continental Political Theory. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (2020). Badiou, A. L’être et l’événement. Paris: Editions du Seuil. (1988). Baghramian, M. & Marchetti, S. Philosophy in the Twentieth Century: The Mingled Story of Three Revolutions. In M. Baghramian and S. Marchetti (eds.), Pragmatism and the European Traditions: Encounters with Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology before the Great Divide, pp. 1–20. New York and London: Routledge. (2017). Beaney, M. Analysis. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/analysis/. (2021). Cavell, S. The New Yet Unapproachable America: Essays After Emerson After Wittgenstein. Albuquerque N.M: Living Batch Press. (1989). Chase, J. & Reynolds, J. Analytic vs Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy. Durham: Acumen. (2010). Cobb-Stevens, R. Husserl and Analytic Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. (1990). Cohen, L. J. An Analysis of Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1986). Danto, A. Sartre. New York: Viking Press. (1975).

Introduction  17 Freud, S. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. J. Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press. (1995 [1966]). Glock, H. J. Analytic Philosophy and History: A Mismatch? Mind, 117(468), (2008). 867–897. Hacking, I. Making Up People. In Historical Ontology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (2002). Hampshire, S. Freedom of the Individual. London: Harper & Row. (1975). Hanna, R. Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press. (2001). Kirsch, A. Philosophy in the Shadow of Nazism. The New Yorker, (2020). Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxon: Routledge. (2018 [1973]). Lipscomb, B. J. B. The Women are Up To Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics. New York: Oxford University Press. (2022). Levy, N. Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Explaining the Differences. Metaphilosophy, 34(3), (2003). 284–304. Lloyd, G. Panel on Analytic and Continental Philosophy at the Centennial Celebrations for the Australasian Association of Philosophy. (2022). Lyotard. J-F. Leçons sur l’analytique du sublime. Paris: Galilée. (1991). Macarthur, D. Wittgenstein’s Liberal Naturalism of Human Nature. In K. Cahill and T. Raleigh (eds.), Wittgenstein and Naturalism, pp. 33–55. London: Routledge. (2018). MacCumhaill, C. & Wiseman, R. Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life. London: Chatto and Windus. (2022). Moran, R. Authority and Estrangement. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (2000). Murdoch, I. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist. London: Harvester Press. (1980 [1953]). Quine, W. V. Reply to Putnam. In L. E. Hahn and P. A. Schillp, (eds.), The Philosophy of W. V. Quine, pp. 427–431. La Salle: Open Court Press. (1986). Redding, P. Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. (2007). Reynolds, J., Chase, J., Williams, J. & Mares. E. Introduction. In J. Reynolds, J. Chase, J. Williams, & E. Mares (eds.), Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, pp. 1–6. London: Continuum. (2010). Vrahimis, A. Political Philosophy, Political Theory, and the Analytic-Continental Divide. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 30(1), (2022). 86–101. Warnock, M. The Philosophy of Sartre. London: Hutchinson Press. (1965). Williams, B. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (2002). ——— Truth Contemporary Philosophy: A Second Look. In N. Bunnin and E. P. Tsui-James (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, 2nd ed., pp. 23–34. Oxford: Blackwell. (2003). Wittgenstein, L. Culture and Value 2nd ed., London: Blackwell. (1980 [1977]). ——— Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. (2009 [1953]).

1 Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation Sartre with Frege (and Badiou) Paul M. Livingston

In this chapter, I consider the relationship between Frege’s logical account of negation and Sartre’s phenomenological/ontological one, and present and argue in brief outline for a hybrid account combining what are (as I argue) the best features of both. Admittedly, at first glance, the two philosophers’ accounts of negation can appear to be deeply, perhaps irreconcilably, opposed. For whereas Sartre treats negation as founded in a more basic nothingness, which itself has a ground in the structure of subjective consciousness, Frege’s account treats (logical) negation as a structure characterizing the total space of judgeable contents, quite independently of the fact of their actively being judged or even considered by a subject of consciousness. I argue, however, that (i) far from excluding it, Frege’s account of negation as a logical truth-function positively requires a phenomenologically and ontologically motivated account of what Sartre calls the being of negation, and (ii) conversely, Sartre’s own account of consciousness, presentation, and above all the problematic and non-synthetic relationship between the “in-itself” and the “for-itself” can be clarified by bringing out its own formal foundations in a total and truth-functional logic of negation of the sort Frege develops. Both these commonalities and the possibility of a hybrid account combining features of both are verified, I argue, by the common priority both conceptions accord to the possibility of questioning with respect to the totality of what is as such. This priority points, in both cases, to the formal relationships of the phenomena of totality, reflexivity, identity, and predication, which plausibly underlie and formally explicate the (indifferently logical or phenomenological) structure that characterizes the relationship of nothingness and negation to the totality of positive being. Whereas the metalogical structure underlying the possibility of (logical) negation as Frege treats it can be shown, most directly, by considering the formal structure of Russell’s paradox of the set of all sets not members of themselves, a parallel and formally similar structure also plausibly underlies the relationship (thought by Sartre in terms of a “detotalized totality”) between the “in-itself” and the DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-2

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  19 function or conduct of negation, which is for Sartre the phenomenological and ontological root of the “region” of consciousness or the “for-itself.” One consequence of bringing out this unitary underlying structure is that it indicates how negation and the for-itself can be seen as “entering” into the (wholly positive) world of beings in themselves, without requiring for this entry a prior foundation in a being of consciousness or subjectivity that is simply assumed. Another consequence (from the other direction) is that it shows how negativity and negation can characterize the phenomena of the world in themselves and as such, rather than simply the relationships of judgeable contents or propositional truths. In closing, we briefly consider how the present account is related to that suggested by Alain Badiou in Being and Event, which similarly treats the “for-itself” being of freedom and subjectivity by means of a set-theoretical formalization. 1.1 Frege In an obvious and determining sense, Frege’s conception of negation is very differently motivated from Sartre’s. For while Sartre introduces the topic of negation, in the opening section of Being and Nothingness on its “origin,” by upholding the claim that “negation appears on the original basis of a relation of man to the world,”1 relative to expectations, and as such depending on a specific “conduct in the face of nothingness,”2 Frege’s deeply held anti-psychologism impels him, in all of his discussions of negation and other logical operators, sharply to distinguish its structure from that of any essentially human, subjective, or even temporal act or process of judgment, comportment, or awareness.3 In the 1918–19 article “Negation,” for example, Frege distinguishes sharply between acts, for instance of judging or asserting, and the contents that are (for instance) judged or asserted.4 The distinction, in the modern form in which it influenced Frege and Husserl, goes back at least to Bolzano and was subsequently employed by Lotze. It has earlier roots in the Stoic conception of the lekton, or what is said in the utterance of a sentence or term. For Frege, the judgeable contents of sentences are not acts or activities of the subject, intellect, or any other actor; rather they are, in Frege’s terminology, “thoughts,” and can essentially be grasped as one and the same thought by different thinkers at different times. On Frege’s account, furthermore, it must be possible to entertain or grasp thoughts prior to judging them true or false. Indeed, the whole process of inquiry largely consists in the advance from the grasp of a thought to this judgment. It must thus be possible to recognize the thought as such, prior to the determination, and it must be possible to grasp a thought even if it is false. Frege accordingly argues that it is incorrect to hold that the “being” of a thought consists in its truth; for false thoughts must also be available to be grasped in order for propositional inquiry to be possible.5

20  Paul M. Livingston As Frege acknowledges, one might recognize the distinction between act and content and still think of negation as a kind of act, perhaps one negatively correlative to the act of judging or of asserting. But the recognition of thoughts as contents that can in principle be judged either true or false itself shows that this conception of negation cannot succeed. For the negation of a thought is true if and only if the thought itself is false, but it must be possible to have both a thought and its negation available to one before either is judged to be true or false. For example, in asking the interrogative question “Is the Sun bigger than the Moon?” it must already be possible to understand the sense of both the (true) “yes” answer and the (false) “no” one. In this respect, “A propositional question contains a demand that we should either acknowledge the truth of a thought, or reject it as false.”6 Thus, the understanding that one already has of both thoughts (both the “positive” and the “negative” one) in posing the question does not involve any special act of negation or denial applied to one and not the other. Similarly, if what is added to a sentence by the word “not” or by other linguistic markers of negation was the expression of an activity (for example, an activity of denial, negatively correlative to (positive) assertion or judgment), then its inclusion in an uttered or inscribed sentence would express that this activity had actually taken place. But it must be possible to utter a negative sentence (for instance, as the antecedent of a conditional) which includes the word “not” without, thereby, affirming or denying anything.7 These considerations lead Frege to the view that the negation expressed in language by “not” and similar expressions is not a kind of judgment, assertion, denial, or indeed any kind of act. Rather, what is expressed by the “not” is a “possible component of a thought [möglichen Bestandteil des Gedankens]” and is not to be identified with anything exterior to this content.8 How, then, is what is expressed by “not” actually “contained in the thought” for Frege? The analogy that Frege draws in answer to this question, is, as usual, that between the structure of a thought and the sentence that expresses it. Thus “[t]he world of thoughts has a model [hat ihr Abbild] in the world of sentences, expressions, words, signs” and “[t]o the structure of the thought [Dem Aufbau des Gedankens] there corresponds the compounding of words into a sentence, and here the order is in general not indifferent.”9 However, with respect to the question of what is specifically expressed by the word “not” in English or “nicht” in German, the analogy is, at best, strained. For as Frege points out, one and the same thought may be expressed by two sentences, one which involves an expression of negation and one which does not (e.g. “Christ is immortal”; “Christ lives forever”).10 In particular, the unity of both “positively” and “negatively” expressed thoughts which verifies that negation is not to be opposed to assertion, judgment, or composition as a correlative but negative act, also implies that it is not generally possible to recognize a distinctive range

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  21 of thoughts as individually including any constituent corresponding to the “not” or to negation. All that can be said is that for each thought there is an “opposite” – that is, a thought which is related to it in such a way that if the first thought is true, the second is false, and vice versa. This conception of negation underlies the (later) designation of negation as a “truth-function,” though the sense of “function” here must not be that of any kind of act, process, or occurrence. Rather, because of the separation of negation and the other “truth-functions” from any such act or activity and because of the unitary possibility of any propositional contents figuring in the logical relationships they allow, they are not conceived as having any representational meaning but are rather structurally characteristic of the system of possible contents and their rational relations as a whole. Accordingly, on this picture, negation and the other truth-functions are characteristic of the constitutive structural and logical relations of the domain of (judgeable) contents as a whole, without themselves naming, designating, or referring to any content, act, or object. They characterize, in the structural relations they introduce, the structure of what can be asserted using the referential and quantificational devices of (Fregean) logic, without themselves referring or quantifying. Frege’s picture is in this respect already well on the way to Wittgenstein’s atomistic theory in the Tractatus, whose fundamental insight is, as Wittgenstein says, that the truth-functional “connectives” do not represent.11 Rather, they characterize structurally the inherent logical relationships among possible contents, here conceived as those that can be expressed by means of names, variables, and predicative terms, along with the truth-functions in a quantificational language. This last consideration is closely related to another one, possibly original with Frege, which follows, as he argues, from the special connection of thoughts to the dual possibility of truth and falsity and from the peculiar kind of unity that they therefore (according to Frege) exhibit. In particular, for Frege, although a thought is certainly in some respect a compositional whole, it is not to be identified simply with the aggregative or synthetic unity of several constituents separately bearing individually representable contents. This unity provides the basis for his further argument, in “Negation,” that (just as the unity of a thought is not to be understood as a matter simply of synthesizing its constituents) negating a thought is not to be understood as an activity of separating or dissolving. The negation of a thought is still a thought and still bears the specific kind of unity characteristic of thoughts; negation itself is accordingly not to be understood as a separation or division of what is supposed to be united or composed in a “positive” thought. In particular, neither the separation of parts of sentences from one another, nor that of parts of a unitary thought, nor that of “things in the outside world,” nor that of “mental images in the interior world of the person who negates…” will suffice to produce the content of

22  Paul M. Livingston a judgment expressible in part using the word “not,” for instance, the verdict that the accused is not guilty.12 Frege goes so far, indeed, as to hold that the traditional distinction between “affirmative” and “negative” thoughts is, logically speaking, “wholly unnecessary,” and can only be grounded, if at all, on a non-logical basis.13 He then draws the radical consequence that there can be, logically speaking, no such thing as an act of negating at all: Perhaps the act of negating, which maintains a questionable existence as the polar opposite of judging, is a chimerical construction, formed by a fusion of the act of judging with the negation that I have acknowledged as a possible component of a thought, and to which there corresponds in language the word “not” as part of the predicate – a chimerical construction, because these parts are quite different in kind. The act of judging is a mental process, and as such it needs a judging subject as its owner; negation on the other hand is part of a thought, and as such, like the thought itself, it needs no owner, must not be regarded as a content of a consciousness.14 1.2 Sartre Early on in Being and Nothingness’s opening discussion of the “Origin of Negation,” Sartre considers and ultimately rejects a view according to which being in-itself, as it is “full positivity,” cannot contain in itself any negation, and it is, accordingly, subjective acts of essentially synthetic judgment that introduce negation into the world.15 On such a view, he suggests, both the affirmative and negative acts of judgment each amount to a synthesis, the one operative “in the manner of the copula ‘is,’” as a “manual operation of assembling (union)” and the other “in the manner of the copula ‘is not,’” as a parallel “manual operation of sorting out (separation).”16 Thus negation would be “‘at the end’” of the second type of operation, while nevertheless not actually ever itself “being ‘in’ being”: it would then remain existentially dependent on the “concrete psychic operations” that carry it out and would have no existence independently of them.17 On such a view, Sartre suggests, negation would have only, at best, the existence of (what Husserl called) the “noema-correlate” of a negative subjective act of judgment, and nothingness itself, as “the conceptual unity of negative judgments,” would not enjoy any positive being of its own, “save that which the Stoics confer on their ‘lekton.’”18 Here, then, both specific negativities (the contents of negative judgments as well as non-beings) and indeed “nothingness” itself would, being exhausted as esse by their percipi, have no “real” being and accordingly no entry into the world as such, beyond that of the psychic acts of separation which support them.

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  23 Sartre then poses the question whether (as on the view under consideration) “negation as the structure of the judicative proposition” is “at the origin of nothingness” or whether, rather, “Nothingness as the structure of the real” … is the “origin and foundation of negation.”19 With this question, he says, we are referred to the problem of the “being of negation.” After some discussion, he answers the question in favor of the latter view (i.e. that nothingness is the origin of negative judgment, rather than conversely): “Nothingness stands at the origin of the negative judgment because it is itself negation. It founds the negation as act because it is the negation as being.”20 This is, of course, the nothingness which, for Sartre, defines the being of consciousness and is intimately related to the “definition” of consciousness or the for-itself as the “being such that in its being, its being is in question” for it and that which must be what it is not, etc. Just as significant to its actual structure, though, is the essential relationship Sartre describes between it and the world as such. “Nothingness can be nothingness,” he holds, “only by nihilating itself expressly as nothingness of the world; that is, in its nihilation it must direct itself expressly toward this world in order to constitute itself as refusal of the world.” In this respect, Sartre says, “Nothingness carries being in its heart.”21 The being of nothingness, on which is supported both the existence of consciousness and the real being of negation as an act, is thus no mere function of judgments or noematic correlate to subjective acts; it is, rather, this being which, as “the nothingness of the world” as such, originally grounds and supports the very existence of (something like a) subject itself. How, though, are these purportedly essential and definitive connections between nothingness, the world, and consciousness motivated on the level of phenomenological argumentation and demonstration? We can see the connections here in more concreteness by considering a passage from Sartre’s War Diaries from February 1940, in which he considers the relationships among negation, nothingness, and what he here begins to call the for-itself.22 The problem of negation has always been veiled like that of being, since “not being” seemed the judgement of a mind conjuring two objects up before it and asserting their alterity. If, for example, I say that paper is not porous, [I] do not ascribe this negation to the paper, which in itself has no relation with porosity but to my mind. Let’s be clear about this: isn’t negation a mode of being of my mind, which in negating performs a plenary act of judgement – and which, for most philosophers, is pure act, plenitude of existence, at the very moment in which it negates. Thus negation becomes a lekton, a nothing. It is neither mind, nor in the mind, nor in paper, nor in porosity, nor a relationship that exists like a repulsive force between paper and porosity. It is basically just a

24  Paul M. Livingston category that allows the mind to make a synthesis between porosity and paper – from a distance, without altering their nature in the slightest, without changing their respective positions, without either drawing them closer together or driving them farther apart.23 In the case of a conceptual judgment about the properties of an entity, such as the judgment of the non-porosity of the paper, although the negativity which licenses the judgment is assuredly neither itself mind nor wholly “in the mind,” it is nevertheless thus the synthesis accomplished by means of a “cooperation from my consciousness” between the paper and porosity that allows the negation to appear and the judgment to be licensed.24 However, as Sartre immediately points out, things stand differently with respect to a judgment about the essential properties of consciousness itself, as, for instance, when we say (with Descartes) of consciousness that it is essentially not extended. Here, although consciousness is again required to contribute to the constitution of the judgment, it is here judging about itself: thus, by contrast with the case of the non-porosity of paper, there is (as it were) no “third party” to observe of the two opposed terms – consciousness and extension – that they “have no relationship of inherence.” Rather, since it is “in the being of consciousness not to be extension,” the “not” here is an “existential characteristic”; indeed, it is, Sartre says, “neither observed nor judged,” but rather “is been” [est été] as an essential aspect of the being of consciousness itself. Through this aspect, “negation explode[s] in the homogeneity of one and the same existence,” and “the negated refer[s] back from itself to that whereby it was negated” – namely, consciousness itself, which is in this peculiar sense “now what it is not.” By contrast, then, with the case in which (as with the non-porosity of the paper) negation can indeed be treated as a lekton, or the synthesis of an external and purely “categorial comparison, which leaves the objects entirely intact,” in the case of the judgment of the essential properties of consciousness, the judgment itself presupposes and requires a deep and unitary relationship of being between the two opposed terms (consciousness and extension) themselves: In a word, for consciousness really to be able – of itself and by its nature, without the contemplative intervention of a third party – not to be extension, it is necessary for it to secrete in the innermost depths of its being a unitary relation with the extension which it is not. …The unity of consciousness and extension is such that consciousness is not extension only insofar as it is not itself, is nothing. Nothing positive comes to make up for not-being-extended. It’s because it is its own nothingness that consciousness is not extended.25

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  25 The mode of the self-relation of consciousness which is, in this case, responsible for the negation in the judgment is, Sartre says, essentially such as to distinguish it from the being of what exists in-itself, which is simply what it is. For while consciousness, if it were only what it is and did exist in the mode of the in-itself, would indeed be extended, it is able not to be extended only in that it “escapes from itself … by not being what it is.”26 In this, it is itself a “nihilation of extension,” which can only be accomplished “in the guise of consciousness of” the thus nihilated extension. More generally, it is possible to accomplish the annihilation of any existent only through the apparition of such a nihilating consciousness of that existent. As Sartre makes clear in the next entry, dated 1 February, when situated in the context of a broader interrogation of the “intentional” relationship between mind and object, this verifies the underlying structure of the “foritself,” in its essential involvement with nothingness, as the basic structure of this relationship and underscores its characteristic requirement both to presuppose and to distinguish itself from the “in-itself” being of what simply is what it is. For instance, in the perception of a tree, Consciousness exists for-itself beyond that tree as what is not that tree; the nihilating connection between reflection and the reflected ensures that consciousness can be for itself only by reflecting itself as being, precisely, nothingness of the world where there is that tree. Which means it is non-thetic consciousness of itself as thetic consciousness of that tree; the tree is the transcendent theme of its nihilation. Thus, for example, intuitive knowledge is irruption of the nothing into immanence, which transforms the immanence of the in-itself into the transcendence of the for-itself. Thus the pure event which ensures that Being is its own nothingness makes the world appear as totality of the In-itself transcended by self-nihilating being.27 In this way, according to Sartre, the particular mode of being exhibited by the for-itself, which forms the basis both for negativity and for intentionality, is essentially characterized by its relationship to the in-itself, which it essentially is not. In this respect, the “for-itself retains the in-itself before and around it, as what it is not”; it “nihilates itself with respect to the totality of the in-itself.”28 This nihilating (self-) relationship, however, is not to be understood simply as a mere withdrawal or separation of the foritself from the in-itself. For it is rather grounded in the distinctive mode in which the for-itself has the particular kind of being that is marked by its being self-related: the mode, that is, in which it is simultaneously reflection and reflected, and thereby capable of being related to the totality of the in-itself – the totality of the world, or of what is – but also as making itself absent (as not being) from that very world as such.29

26  Paul M. Livingston 1.3 Frege with Sartre: Metalogical Negation It cannot be doubted that, had Sartre and Frege ever had the opportunity to compare their accounts of negation, each philosopher would have been able to formulate, on the basis of his own theory, deep and central objections to the other’s. To begin with, as we have seen, it is essential to Frege’s entire conception of negation, as well as the broader theory of content it supports, that negation as a truth-function be distinguished in principle from any aspect or feature of subjective consciousness. As Frege sees it, this separation is requisite for a genuinely logical account explicative of, and guided by, the essential structural possibility for a content of thought to be (objectively) true or false, as well as by the specific kind of non-synthetic, and non-subject dependent, unity this possibility appears to require of such contents. As we have seen, of course, Sartre also clearly distinguishes his phenomenological account of the being of negation from any grounded simply in the “psychic activities” of a psychologically conceived subject. But both the essential link he nevertheless preserves between negation and the awareness of it, and the broader ontological claim of the dependence of negation and negativity themselves on the “nothingness” introduced by consciousness itself, maintain an essential and definitive connection between negation and subjective attitudes or comportments. And as we have seen, for Frege, while a subject’s affirmation or denial of thoughts, or a subjective attitude grounded in such an affirmation or denial, may certainly express contents that are related to one another by logical and truth-functional relationships, the logical articulation of contents remains primary and cannot be reduced to, or treated as having any foundation in any kind of intuition, act, or comportment of a subject. For this reason, the essential relation that Sartre draws between subjectivity and negation must apparently be considered untenable within any attempt to understand the logical structure of negation as essentially conditioned by that of (objective and subject-independent) truth; such are the terms, at any rate, in which Frege would almost certainly have criticized Sartre’s view, given the opportunity to consider it. Conversely, although Frege’s view is not identical with the (Husserlian) view that Sartre rejects in the opening sections of Being and Nothingness (according to which negativities, being understood as the correlates of negative subjective acts, have “only” the abstract being of an abstract content, noema, or lekton), his arguments here nevertheless bear in several respects against Frege’s conception of negation as primarily a logical operation on sentential or propositional contents. To begin with, Sartre objects, negation is not only a quality or aspect of judgeable contents at all. When one poses a question, for instance, one does not necessarily frame a sentential content which must be either affirmed or negated. One can question, for instance, by means of a look or a gesture. Along the same lines, when

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  27 a piece of machinery breaks down, it is the machinery itself which is interrogated, and what is required is not a judgment but rather “a disclosure of being,” including essentially the possibility of a non-being or absence – on the basis of which I may then make a judgment.30 Second, there are, Sartre argues, various non-judicative contexts and situations in which negation is directly operative, without any need for explicitly formulated judgments: the activity of destruction, for instance, is one such context, in which judgment may certainly be employed but does not need to be in order for the negativity of nihilation and its effects to manifest themselves directly in the world.31 Finally and (Sartre thinks) decisively, there is the phenomenological example of the absent Pierre. In this case, the explicitly formulated and truth-evaluable judgment “He is not here” is, Sartre argues, essentially dependent upon a more original “nihilation,” presented to me directly as I experience the café from which Pierre is missing, and actually given, to my intuition, prior to any actual judgment, on the ground of an original nothingness arising from my “original nihilating conduct.”32 In light of these arguments in both directions and the broadly different motivations they embody, the two accounts might seem simply irreconcilable. One might naturally conclude, for instance, that Frege and Sartre treat under the unitary heading of “negation” what are in fact simply two distinct phenomena, Frege theorizing the “logical” negation that bears on sentential or propositional contents of thought in relation to objective truth, while Sartre theorizes by contrast a broader but less readily formalized “phenomenological” negation that (although not simply psychological in character) always essentially has reference to subjects and subjective activities. But to rest with this conclusion would actually be to deny the relevance of the arguments each position effectively formulates against the other, all of which tend toward a unitary account. It would also be to fail to satisfy what are in fact important desiderata of a theory of negation for both philosophers. One of these is the desire, held as deeply by Sartre as by Frege, to characterize negation and negativity as having an objective significance, such that (as Sartre says), my discovery of Pierre’s non-presence can be a discovery of something that is no mere figment of my imagination but really and objectively the case. Another is the requirement both theories share, in relationship to what is for both the prior structure of the possibility of a questioning that precedes and bases that of negation itself, of an account of the essential relationship of negativity to the totality of the structure of the world, or of what is as such. In fact, we can begin to see at least the broad outlines of a positive account of negation which reconciles at least some significant features of Frege’s account with Sartre’s by considering in more detail how both theoretical demands appear essentially in, and are problematically satisfied by, both theories.

28  Paul M. Livingston For Sartre, as we have seen, the negativity essentially introduced into the world by consciousness or the for-itself can be understood only through a clarification of the relational structure that it (the for-itself) essentially bears to the in-itself as a whole or to the totality of this very world. The totality involved here is rooted in the basic possibility for consciousness to question with respect to any being or entity and is furthermore (since the for-itself does not stand simply outside the world) as such also in part a self-relation, allowing the for-itself to put itself into question as one such entity. The essential and constitutive relationship of the for-itself with the in-itself – whereby the for-itself is, as Sartre says, both a term and the relation itself – is thus structured as the peculiar relationship of a being, existing within the world, to the whole of the world in which it exists such that it can in principle negate anything in the world on the basis of its own essential negativity. Even if this whole is, as Sartre argues, itself first introduced as such by the for-itself rather than “already” existent in the in-itself alone, the structure that conditions it thus verifies its intimate and definitive connection with this negativity itself. Thus it appears that, for Sartre, the “being of negation” which is to be found in the essential “nothingness” of consciousness is to be understood in its own phenomenological and ontological basis only by means of an elaboration of this (complex and problematic) relation of the reflexivity of the for-itself to the totality of being as such. In the case of Frege’s account, the constitutive and essential connection between negation and totality may appear less evident at first glance. But it is readily shown by considering the overall structural presuppositions of the truth-functional behavior of negation, as Frege understands it. As we have seen, on the Fregean conception, the possibility of negation characterizes the domain of logically judgeable contents or of thoughts in a basic, structural sense. Here, in particular, negation is a kind of reversibility of such contents such that the negation of a content is understood to reverse its truth-value. The universality of this possibility throughout the whole domain of judgeable contents is an aspect of the basic connection of such contents to the possibility of being true or false and results immediately from the general intelligibility of propositional questions which may have a “yes” or “no” answer. Negation is thus a characteristic structurally grounded possibility with respect to the totality of judgeable contents, and as such plausibly constitutively linked to the constitution of this totality itself. Although this implicit reference to the totality of contents is given no further positive ontological explanation in Frege’s account, it is thus apparently requisite to his understanding of the logical force and nature of negation itself.33 Moreover, given Frege’s distinction between sense and reference, this requisite involvement of the totality of contents in the idea of negation also

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  29 involves an equally essential reference to the totality of objects of possible predication, the referents of the expressions whose composition into sentences produces sentential expressions of thoughts. After articulating the distinction between sense and reference in the 1890s, Frege generally holds that the referent of a complex expression is determined by the referents of its constitutive terms; this implies that the truth-value of a sentence is determined by the referents of the concept- and object-terms composing it. There are questions to be raised here about the nature of the referents of concept-terms, as well as about the apparent tension between this principle of compositionality and Frege’s notorious context principle (which appears, when applied to referents, to suggest conversely that the referents of parts of sentences are determined by the referents, i.e. the truth-values, of these sentences as wholes).34 But in the present context, what is important to note is just that the picture of negation outlined in “Negation” involves that sentential senses be situated within a broader totality in which each one has a negation with an opposite truth-value and that this involves that the realm of referents also be structured in such a way as not to permit the (true) attribution to a single referent of contradictory properties or to several of contradictory relations. With this, the total realm of (sentential) senses is coordinated with the totality of referents in such a way as to assure that each sentence has exactly one truth-value, and the universal applicability of the law of non-contradiction to entities is assured. But both the coordination and the assurance are possible only on the assumption of the pre-givenness of both domains, that of the totality of senses partitioned into truths and falsehoods and the totality of referents determined in such a way as to allow just this partitioning.35 For both Frege and Sartre, negation must be understood in its specific structure and functioning (however else this is conceived of) in essential relation to the possible “prior” givenness of a totality of entities, or of the world as such. This “prior” givenness must further be such as to allow for the general possibility of questioning with respect to (including asking about the existence or non-existence of) any entity or referent, and the problem of the basis of this givenness is nothing other than the problem of the world-entry and positive existence of negation as such. This problem can be thought, in Fregean terms, as that of the “prior” availability of a total space of senses, strictly correlative to the totality of possible referents. Or it can be thought, in Sartrean terms, as the problem of the relational being of the for-itself and its constitutive nothingness, which introduces the possibility of non-being into the world of beings which is at first innocent of it. Either way, the differences in terminology and surface motivation can no longer obscure the significant homologies in the interlinked structures of totality, sense, reference, and negativity that both philosophers’ pictures effectively propound.

30  Paul M. Livingston Furthermore, in each case, the inherent complications and problems that arise in the course of the further attempt to characterize the structure and basis of this pre-givenness point to further homologies of structure, this time verifying in each case determinate structures of paradox and constitutive antinomy at the structural basis of this possible givenness, and hence of negation itself. In the case of Frege’s theory, the underlying paradox is none other than the notorious one discovered by Russell in 1901 (and independently by Zermelo in 1899) which historically vitiated Frege’s logicist attempt to ground mathematics in logic along with naïve set theory. This is the paradox of the set of all sets that are not members of themselves; if it exists, such a set – the so-called Russell set – is a member of itself if it is not, and is not a member of itself if it is. As Russell and Frege both quickly recognized, the formulation of the paradox spoils the assumption of universal comprehension which Frege had presupposed – namely, that for every linguistically well-formed predicate, it is possible to form a set consisting of just those entities bearing the property it designates. This leads, in the context of the now-standard ZF (ZermeloFraenkel) axiomatization of set theory, to axiomatic devices designed to preclude the paradox from arising: in particular, the imposition of a more restricted comprehension principle, as well as a fundamental, axiomatically guaranteed prohibition of the reflexivity that would permit the formation of (for example) a set of all sets. More broadly, and relevantly to the particular problems that Frege takes up in the “Negation” article, the existence of the Russell paradox may be seen to introduce a critical dissymmetry between intension and extension such that it can no longer be assumed, immediately and in the absence of further restrictions of comprehension principles, that a well-formed intensional designation of an entity corresponds to a unique and non-inconsistent referent. In manifesting an entity – the Russell set itself – which appears (intensionally) well-defined but cannot have a (noncontradictory) extension, the paradox thus directly problematizes the assumption of the total correspondence between the space of contents and the total space of referents which Frege’s picture of negation essentially presupposes. The problem thereby posed can be resolved or precluded in various ways within a theory that preserves consistency overall. For instance, one can, along with Russell himself, assume an inherent and unavoidable incompleteness of any “actually formed” totality of entities, thereby blocking the possibility of a total set, or set of all sets, and hence a fortiori of the Russell set itself. Or, alternatively or conjointly, one can block the impredicative “definition” of sets in terms of themselves, thus precluding the reflexivity that is also essential to the formation of the paradox. Either way, however, the imposition of such restrictions as an ad hoc device, invoked only to block contradiction, with respect to what otherwise appears as an original structure, is capable of significantly illuminating the original relationships of the logical, ontological, and semantic phenomena involved.36

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  31 Indeed, we can gain greater clarity about these original relationships by considering the specific way in which the Russell set is itself defined by reference to the constitutive conceptual “elements” of reflexivity, totality, and negation themselves. All three of these are essential to its definition: thus, the Russell set is specifically the set of all [totality] sets that are not [negation] self- [reflexivity] membered. All of these features moreover can, and should, be mobilized in the context of an “ontological” reflection on the significance of the possible formulation of the paradox itself: from this perspective, it is thus possible to suggest that this possible formulation itself bears witness to important and constitutive relationships among these conceptual elements themselves. More specifically, the paradox itself bears witness to the (necessarily contradictory) result of their combination, and then the contradictory status of the result bears witness to their constitutive and problematic relations. In the Russell set, we have at hand, in other words, a reflexive being whose being is negation in relation to totality, thereby yielding the contradiction of something which is only if it is not, and vice versa. Nothing more than a transferral of terms is needed to see this structure in Sartre’s characterization, in the long chapter of Being and Nothingness on “Transcendence,” of the for-itself as a “detotalized totality” in relation to the whole of the in-itself which it presents: Totality can come to beings only by a being which has to be its own totality in their presence. … The presence of the for-itself to being as totality comes from the fact that the for-itself has to be – in the mode of being what it is not and of not being what it is – its own totality as a detotalized totality. In so far as the for-itself makes itself be in the unity of a single upsurge as all which is not being, being stands before it as all which the for-itself is not.37 The negation involved in this “is not” that distinguishes the for-itself from the all, each member of which it must be able to negate, of the in-itself, is for Sartre an original and “radical” one: The original negation, in fact, is a radical negation. The for-itself, which stands before being as its own totality, is itself the whole of the negation and hence is the negation of the whole. Thus the achieved totality of the world is revealed as constitutive of the being of the unachieved totality by which the being of totality comes into being. It is through the world that the for-itself makes itself known to itself as a totality detotalized, which means that by its very upsurge the for-itself is a revelation of being as a totality inasmuch as the for-itself has to be its own totality in the detotalized mode.38

32  Paul M. Livingston Here, Sartre draws on the same conceptual elements of reflexivity, totality, and negation, to present the problematic structure of a being which is capable of presenting all of being as such. This presentation is possible, only insofar as the for-itself, in presenting this all, also presents it as all that it, itself, is not. This presentation is, as such a presentation of the whole for which it is responsible, then also the reflexive self-presentation of the foritself, itself. At the same time, as the presentation of the all, it is also a presentation of the (problematic) whole formed by the for-itself together with the in-itself that it (problematically) presents. Finally, because it presents this, “its” proper totality, by means of negating distinction from itself, the totality presented is necessarily “detotalized,” consigned to the “perpetual incompleteness” of an “all” that is at the same time non-all through and by virtue of its very constitution. In this way, Sartre sees in the “not” that distinguishes the for-itself from the totality of what is, while at the same time relating them, a “radical negation” which is accordingly the most fundamental basis of the possibility of negation and negativity in the world. If, then, the structural parallels indicated here to the structure of Russell’s paradox can be seen as actual homologies (and not merely analogies) with respect to the fundamental features of totality, reflexivity, and negation itself, then we might apparently see Russell’s paradox itself as witnessing or figuring the structural origin of negation in a basic and radical sense. To see things in this way would be, in a clear sense, to provide Frege’s logical picture of negation with an essential element which is, as we saw earlier, lacking in Frege’s own treatment – namely, an account of the structural and ontological basis of the truth-functional behavior of negation in connection with the constitution of the totality of referents which it presupposes. In this way, it would also underlie a metalogical clarification of the original basis for the total possibility of the presentation of this totality, or of what Frege himself theorizes (through the identification of senses with modes of presentation) as the total realm of sense. The “metalogical” structure thus seen to be explicative of both Sartre’s “phenomenological” and Frege’s “logical” negation would then be seen as essentially a unitary one, underlying what would now appear as a single and unitary phenomenon of (indifferently “logical” or “phenomenological”) negation itself.39 Against this, it might be objected that the structure of Russell’s paradox (as, indeed, that of Sartre’s for-itself) cannot found the structure of negation since in an obvious sense it requires negation for its very formulation. Thus, of course, the Russell set is defined (as the set of all non-selfmembered sets) in part by using negation, which must apparently then be operative in advance of the definition. And in a parallel way, Sartre describes the for-itself as defining itself by distinction from the totality of the in-itself, which it is not. How, then, can either structure “ground” or

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  33 explicate the “original” foundation of negation if both indeed require negation for their definition? In response to this, it should be noted that, while the involvement of negation in defining the structures that are here supposed to ground it is not in dispute, this involvement takes, in both cases, a particular and indicative form. This form binds it, in each case, irreducibly to reflexivity, and thereby clarifies the sense in which it may indeed be considered “radical” with respect to the subsequently presented totality of referents within which negation (in a broader sense) operates. In particular, in the formulation of the Russell set, the negation that is required is precisely that of a set’s not being self-membered; similarly, in Sartre’s formulation of the for-itself, what is at issue is the negation by which the for-itself presents its “own” totality as nevertheless that which is not itself. In an obvious sense, what is at issue in both cases is not a negation that operates only within an already-presented field of contents or positive beings, but rather one that plausibly articulates the very possibility of the presentation of such a field by exhibiting the structure underlying it. This is, in both cases, a negation that, as Sartre says, is internal to the reflexivity of the totality of being in relation to itself, having no external source or determinant, but rather “secreted” (as it were) by its own positive being. This is why both structures are able to capture these relations in the form of a paradoxical or contradictory being that fundamentally relates them, thus clarifying what can accordingly be seen as the being of negation itself. What consequences follow for the arguments of the Sartrean and Fregean pictures against one another if negation can indeed be seen as an essentially unitary phenomenon, grounded in a unitary metalogical structure of this sort? To begin with, since the underlying structure is a metalogical one, formulable in terms of the usual truth-functional operators as well as (naïve) set theory, there is no direct sense which the origin of negation is simply subjective, experiential, intuitive, or otherwise “minddependent.” Negation and negativity (along with the other truth-functions) can then be seen, as Frege would urge, as objective features of the contents of thought as such, publicly shared and accessible to anyone in principle, having the kind of objectivity and subject-independence that is indeed definitive, for Frege, of truth, and thereby of relationships that are genuinely “logical” in his sense. On the other hand, though, since the underlying structure that is here seen as homologous between the two accounts is also plausibly seen, as I have argued, as an explicative basis for the possible presentation of the totality of beings as such (and not simply as conditioning the formation of sentences, propositions, or judgments), Sartre’s own arguments against a simply judicative construal of negation can here be admitted and indeed affirmed.40 Not only the truth of arbitrarily formulated contents (whether or not explicitly involving a “not” in their formulation) but also and equally the actual presentation of being that are

34  Paul M. Livingston not – Sartre’s absent Pierre, as well as Pegasus, which does not exist – can then be seen as unitarily grounded in a single structural phenomenon and relational context. While the experienced intuition of absence can no longer be considered by itself decisive, the underlying structure explicates the possibility of such an intuition in a more fundamental set of relationships, themselves indifferently (as we have seen) phenomenological and logical. The result is a unitary structural account of the origin of negation which, cross-cutting “realism” and “idealism” in their traditional forms, might be seen as unitarily underlying both its operation within the presented world (as, for instance, in destruction) and the basis of the possibility of this presentation (for instance, in the “intuition of absence”) in the being of (what is called) a subject. Of course, on its face, the Russell set is nothing like a conscious subject. If the structure which I have argued is nevertheless homologous between them is to be taken seriously as foundational, much further work must be done to clarify the mode or modes in which it can be seen as actually “operative” in producing the phenomena of sense and conscious intentionality themselves. Perhaps above all, what would have to be somehow clarified is the deep problem of the temporality of this operation: what kind of temporal structure could link the temporality of an abstractum like the Russell set with that of a concrete, functioning, and temporally situated subjectivity? Closely related to this is the question of the concrete (factual or empirical) conditions for the actual temporal emergence of a being capable of embodying the reflexive structure and relationship to the totality of being that we have seen as characteristic of what Sartre calls the foritself. Though I have not attempted to address these (admittedly formidable) questions within the present analysis, though, its result might be seen at least as formulating important formal constraints on any possible answer to them. 1.4 Ontological Dualism and the Univocity of Being: FregeSartre after Badiou Near the end of the penultimate section of the “Conclusion” of Being and Nothingness, considering the problem of what is for him the chimerical possibility of the combination of the in-itself with the for-itself into the unity of a single whole, Sartre poses the finally “metaphysical” (rather, he says, than ontological) question of the specific form of obstacle which prevents such a totality from existing: In the case of the internal negation for-itself-in-itself … the relation [between the terms] is not reciprocal, and I am both one of the terms of the relation and the relation itself. I apprehend being, I am the

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  35 apprehension of being, I am only an apprehension of being. And the being which I apprehend is not posited against me so as to apprehend me in turn; it is what is apprehended. Its being simply does not coincide in any way with its being-apprehended. In one sense therefore I can pose the question of the totality. To be sure, I exist here as engaged in this totality, but I can be an exhaustive consciousness of it since I am at once consciousness of the being and self-consciousness. This question of the totality, however, does not belong to the province of ontology. For ontology the only regions of being which can be elucidated are those of the in-itself, of the for-itself, and the ideal region of the “self-cause.” For ontology it makes no difference whether we consider the for-itself articulated in the in-itself as a well-marked duality or as a disintegrated being. It is up to metaphysics to decide which will be more profitable for knowledge (in particular for phenomenological psychology, for anthropology, etc.): will it deal with a being which we shall call the phenomenon and which will be provided with two dimensions of being, the dimension in-itself and the dimension for-itself (from this point of view there would be only one phenomenon: the world) … or, on the other hand, will it remain preferable despite all to preserve the ancient duality “consciousness-being.”41 Since ontology limits itself to the description of the “regions of being” themselves, it cannot settle the question of how they are to be seen within the totality in which they take part: whether as perpendicular “dimensions” of being within an essentially unitary world or rather by reinstating the traditional dualism of being and appearance (which underlies, of course, Descartes’ substance dualism of res extensa and res cogitans). Though metaphysics can propose the two hypotheses, neither, according to Sartre, can be directly validated or invalidated by it since metaphysics, having no distinctive content of its own, can only contemplate the various ways in which these “givens of ontology” can indeed be unified. By contrast with this, however, the development of the underlying formal structure at the unitary basis of phenomenological and logical negation which I have sketched here suggests a basis for resolving the question of the proper relationship of the for-itself and the in-itself, on metalogical (rather than metaphysical) grounds, in favor of the first (non-dualistic) alternative. The most basic reason for this is that the unitary structure presented in common, as I have argued, by Russell’s paradox and the Sartrean for-itself, is not essentially one that invites or invokes a distinction of distinct or bordering “regions” of beings at all. Though it has, as we have seen, essential reference to the totality of being in itself, as well as to the essential reflexivity and primary negation that characterize the for-itself for

36  Paul M. Livingston Sartre, it does not distinguish these as regions or provide grounds for marking them off as distinct types of beings within the whole of the world, but rather plausibly manifests the pervasive and unitary basis of (presented) beings themselves, or (as Sartre suggests under the heading of the first “metaphysical” alternative) of the world as such.42 The suggestion gains specificity and contemporary relevance through its marked contrast with another recent project of synthesizing formal structures with Sartrean ones – namely, Alain Badiou’s in Being and Event. Here, Badiou’s project, which he has indeed described as centrally motivated by the desire to reconcile Sartrean structures with the rigor of mathematics, takes the form of a careful exposition and highly suggestive interpretation of axiomatic set theory in its canonical ZF (Zermelo-Fraenkel) formulation.43 Beginning with a programmatic declaration of the non-existence of the “One-All,” or the total universe of all that is, and treating being in itself as “pure inconsistent multiplicity,” Badiou next develops an account of the axiomatic structure of ZF as modeling the more restricted domain of “ontology,” or being insofar as it can be said, which constitutively obeys the principles and strictures formulated by the axiomatic theory. This includes the essential prohibitions of reflexivity (self-membership) and totality (a set of all sets and other “too-large” sets) which were built into the axiomatic theory in the wake of Russell’s paradox in order to prevent it from being formulated. For Badiou, it is nevertheless possible for a certain kind of self-membered set structure, that of what he terms the “event,” to institute a local break with ontology, introducing through its structure a new kind of being into the otherwise ontologically homogenous situation in which it takes place. It is then the rigorous situational tracing of the event’s consequences by what Badiou terms a “subject” which can lead to the radical and foundational transformation of the limits and ontological “givens” of the particular situation in which it intervenes. On each of these points, Badiou’s formalism echoes or even directly realizes the major divisions and relations of Sartre’s picture in Being and Nothingness.44 Whereas what is for Badiou the “situation” of ontology is structured, as with the Sartrean in-itself, in such a way as to preclude both reflexivity and totality, the direct reflexivity and possibly transformative and total situational consequences of the Badiouian event model what are, as we have seen, the essential formal features of the for-itself for Sartre. Here, again, the faithful activity of the “subject,” directly and constitutively suspended from the event whose consequences it realizes, is again formally understood as based in an elemental nothingness (for Badiou, the proper “void” of the situation) and in terms of its negative power of manifesting this nothingness within the otherwise homogeneous being of the situation. Even Badiou’s replacement of Sartre’s language of “consciousness”

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  37 with that of the “event” (and characterization of it as a typically intersubjective phenomenon of transformation in the domains of art, science, politics, and love) does not represent any fundamental change in the formal structure of the account. Indeed, Sartre already often describes the foritself and its “upsurge” as an “absolute event” with respect to the in-itself that it interrupts. In all of these respects, Badiou’s development of set-theoretical formalism must be considered faithful to the Sartrean ontological structures. The dualism it develops between being in itself (as ontology) and what appears (as the event), a dualism which is developed in greater rigor and detail in Badiou’s more recent Logics of Worlds, is certainly one way of answering Sartre’s question of their relationship. Yet as we have seen, it is eminently possible, from the current perspective, to wonder whether this is the only way, even within a framework of set-theoretical modeling itself. If the for-itself and its primary negation are to be understood, in its problematic total relationship to the totality of what is, rather as suggested by the current framework, then a variety of consequences appear to follow, each at variance with Badiou’s own conclusions but also formally and substantively consistent with Sartre’s ontological distinctions. First, the “detotalized totality” of the world as such would not, here, be simply denied (as with Badiou’s programmatic decision against the “OneAll”) but rather seen as, though assuredly existent, constitutively and pervasively rent by the paradoxical structure of inconsistency which the existence within it of the for-itself demands, and which would indeed inscribe a basic negativity in the world as such. Second, “ontology” would then no longer be understood as a situation or domain among others, but as taking in everything in an unqualified sense. And third and finally, the critical or transformative activity of a subject, founded on the primary negativity of its own self-relation, would then be understandable as its witnessing within this whole the systematic structural effects of the inconsistency that constitutively structures it along with the world itself, against the standing and ever-renewed efforts of ideology to efface and obscure these effects.45 In all of these respects, it appears at least formally possible to contemplate a development of the Sartrean structures that is rigorously alternative to Badiou’s, reinstating, by contrast with his approach, the rights of ontological (or metalogical) theory over the totality of being as such, which here again gains an essentially unified sense. This is not to say that the alternative suggested here is necessarily the uniquely correct one, or indeed that it is better than the other one in all respects. But the apparent possibility of its posing in its distinction from Badiou’s picture may nevertheless have a broadly indicative significance, with respect to the leading questions and unresolved issues of ontological thought today.46

38  Paul M. Livingston Notes 1 Sartre ([1943] 1984: 38). 2 Ibid., 40. 3 Ibid., 38, 40. 4 Frege (1919). 5 Ibid., 348. 6 Ibid., 346–47. 7 Ibid., 357. 8 Ibid., 355. 9 Ibid., 351. 10 Ibid., 353. 11 Cf. Wittgenstein (1921: 4.0312). 12 “What then are these objects, which negation is supposed to separate? Not parts of sentences; equally, not parts of a thought. Things in the outside world? They do not bother about our negating. Mental images in the interior world of the person who negates? But then how does the juror know which of his images he ought to separate in given circumstances? The question put before him does not indicate any to him. It may evoke images in him. But the images evoked in the juror’s inner worlds are different; and in that case each juror would perform his own act of separation in his own inner world, and this would not be a verdict. It thus appears impossible to state what really is dissolved, split up, or separated by the act of negation” (Frege 1919: 352). This contrasts with the conception articulated by Plato’s Eleatic Visitor in the Sophist and further suggested by Aristotle, on which a positive sentence, as composing a name for a subject and a verb which is conceived as the name of a property or “action,” is thought of as such a compositional unity, and a negative sentence is thought of as the result of an activity of differentiation or separation of what is named in the subject term from what is named in the predicate. In fact, both traditional claims – that a “positive” sentence is a compositional unity of separately referential parts and that its negation results from the separation of what is thereby composed – are to be rejected, according to Frege, on the basis of the specific unity of the thought as a possible bearer of truth or falsity. 13 Ibid., 353. 14 Ibid., 355. 15 Sartre (1943: 37). 16 Ibid., 37. 17 Ibid., 37 18 Ibid., 37–38. 19 Ibid., 38. The issue posed here is similar to, but not identical with, the question at issue in Carnap’s somewhat notorious criticism of Heidegger’s “Das Nichts selbst nichtet” (“The nothing itself nothings”) in the 1932 article “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language.” Here, Carnap held Heidegger’s sentence to be broadly representative of metaphysical thought in committing the logical error of using “nothing” in a designative or referential sense, rather than as a quantificational construction involving (logial) negation (i.e. “there are not any …”). More broadly, as many commentators have noted, the attack posed the problem of the relative priority of logical vs. phenomenological approaches to negation, as well as that of the priority of a “nothing” set over against the totality of beings over negation (Heidegger’s view) vs. that of the priority of logical negation over any such (nothing).

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  39 For trenchant recent commentaries on the Heidegger-Carnap dispute and the thematic, as well as methodological and programmatic issues involved, see, for example, Friedman (2000), Stone (2006), and Conant (2001), and for a broader consideration of the underlying issues from a “language-analytic” point of view but considering also Plato and Hegel’s views of negation and nothingness, see Tugendhat (1970). The issues here, however, are different for at least two reasons: first, that Sartre also criticizes Heidegger’s view of nothingness as simply set off against the totality of beings and thus beyond the world, holding that any such view fails to account for those “little pools of non-being which we encounter each instant in the depth of being” (Sartre 1943, pp. 51–53) and, second, that Frege views the structure of logical negation as grounded, like all logical functions and operators, in the inherent structure of truth rather than (with Carnap) as based simply in conventional or stipulative rules of use for a language. As I shall argue below, this allows for at least the possibility of a more substantive construal of “nothing” and its relation to the truth-function of negation as such than Carnap can countenance. 20 Sartre (1943: 52). 21 Ibid. 22 I am indebted to John Bova for suggesting the relevance of these passages from the War Diaries to the current problematic. 23 Sartre (1940: 176). 24 Ibid. 25 Sartre (1940), p. 178. 26 Ibid., 179. 27 Ibid., 180. 28 Ibid., 179. 29 Ibid., 179–80. 30 Sartre (1943), p. 38. 31 Ibid., 39–40. 32 Ibid., 40–4. 33 There is, it is true, the “model” provided by the compositional structure of a language, which might be thought (in part) to provide an ontological “being” for this totality as such and thus help account for the ontological structure of negation. But (i) the totality of contents that is involved in the idea of logical negation is explicitly not identifiable with the totality of sentences of any natural language, and (ii) it must be part of Frege’s conception that the individual contents that comprise it exist prior to and independent of the creation and existence of any such language, so it does not appear that reference to the existence of a natural language is alone sufficient to account for the ontological status of negation and the totality of contents it structures, on Frege’s picture. 34 For discussion of these tensions, see Beaney (1997: 17–18) and Dummett (1981), chapter 15. 35 In a broader (non-Fregean) context of reflection, there is, of course, also the question of failures of linguistic reference and of the possibility of truth-value gaps which appear to follow, on the level of sentences, from it. Since Frege himself considered his logical discoveries to apply primarily to well-formed languages in which failures of reference do not occur, the issue and possibility do not arise directly for him. Nevertheless, they are closely examined by Dummett in the course of the latter’s reflections on the possible bases and motivations for the application of an intuitionist logic or one that does not allow the general affirmation of the law of the excluded middle.

40  Paul M. Livingston 36 For more detailed developments of this point, and further discussion, see Priest (2002), chapters 9 and 10, and Livingston (2012), chapter 1. 37 Sartre (1943: 250). 38 Ibid., 250–51. 39 For a closely related (although not identical) structure of radically “metalogical” negation, see Bova (2010). 40 The “totality of beings” in the relevant sense, that of the totality of possible objects of reference, is to be understood as expressly inclusive of “non-existent” beings such as the Centaur. 41 Sartre (1943: 794). 42 Indeed, going even farther with the set-theoretic conception I have suggested in relation to the Sartrean structures, it appears we might see the problem of the non-symmetric relationship between the in-itself and the for-itself exactly as the problem of the relationship of a set of all sets to the Russell set (i.e. the set of all non-self-membered sets). Of course, within the axiomatic context of standard (well-founded) set theory, this problem has no meaning, since the existence of both sets is simply precluded in order to preclude contradiction. However, from the current perspective, this axiomatic solution goes too far in effectively denying the existence of the world as such on the ground of the necessary paradox involved in the possibility of its presentation. 43 See Badiou (2005a: 242). 44 For a trenchant development of many of the parallels I note here between Sartre and Badiou, see Fraser (forthcoming), and for an overview of Badiou’s own argument, see Livingston (2008). 45 For a development of some of the possible critical and ideological consequences of this, see Livingston (2012), chapter 10. 46 I wish to thank John Bova for his essential and determinative contributions to the conception and writing of this chapter, without which it would not have been possible. Bova had developed some points essential to the current paper (written in 2016) already in posts in 2010 (Bova, 2010) and 2016 (Bova, 2016). See also his article “Minimal Sartre: Diagonalization and Pure Reflection” (Bova, 2018) as well as his 2016 Villanova University dissertation on Plato, Sartre, and Badiou.

References Badiou, A. Being and Event. Trans. O. Feltham. London: Continuum. ([1988] 2005a). ——— Can Change be thought? A Dialogue with Alain Badiou (interview by Bruno Bosteels). In G. Riera (ed.) Alain Badiou: Philosophy and its Conditions. Albany: SUNY Press. (2005b). Beaney, M. Introduction. In M. Beaney (ed.), The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. (1997). Bova, J. Negation and Incommensurability: On the Metalogical Kernel of Platonic Dialectic. https://www.academia.edu/224135/Negation_Incommensurability_ Abstract_. (2010). ——— Negation Could all Functions be Concepts? A Note on the Dialectic of Logicism (Frege/Sartre). https://metalogike.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/couldall-functions-be-concepts-a-note-on-the-dialectic-of-logicism-fregesartre/ (2016).

Logical, Phenomenological, and Metalogical Negation  41 ——— Minimal Sartre: Diagonalization and Pure Reflection. Open Philosophy 1(1), (2018). 360–379. Conant, J. Two Conceptions of Die Überwindung der Metaphysik: Carnap and Early Wittgenstein.” In T. McCarthy and S. C. Stidd, (eds.), Wittgenstein in America. Oxford: Oxford U. Press. (2001). Dummett, M. Frege: Philosophy of Language, 2nd ed. London: Duckworth. (1981 [1973]). Fraser, Z. L. Nothingness and Event. Forthcoming in MonoKL special issue on Alain Badiou and available at https://www.academia.edu/858888/Nothingness_ and_Event. (forthcoming). Frege, G. Zweiter Teil: die Verneinung. In Frege. Kleine Schriften, herausg. von Ignacio Angelelli (HildesHeim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1967). Trans. P. Geach as “Negation”. In M. Beaney (ed.) The Frege Reader. Oxford: Blackwell. (1919 [1997]). Friedman, M. A Parting of the Ways: Carnap, Cassirer, and Heidegger. Chicago, IL: Open Court. (2000). Livingston, P. Alain Badiou: Being and Event (Review). Inquiry, 51(2), (2008). 217–238. ——— The Politics of Logic: Badiou, Wittgenstein, and the Consequences of Formalism. New York: Routledge. (2012). Priest, G. Beyond the Limits of Thought, 2nd ed., Oxford: Clarendon. (2002). Sartre, J.-P. War Diaries: Notebooks From a Phoney War: November 1939–March 1940. Trans. Q. Hoare. London: Verso. (1940 [1985]). ——— Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. H. E. Barnes. New York: Washington Square Press. (1984 [1943]). Stone, A. Heidegger and Carnap on the Overcoming of Metaphysics. In S. Mullhall (ed.) Martin Heidegger. London: Ashgate. (2006). Tugendhat, Ernst. Das Sein und das Nichts. In Vittorio Klostermann (eds.), Durchblicke: Martin Heidegger zum 80. Geburtstag, pp. 132–161. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. (1970). Wittgenstein, L. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London and New York: Routledge. (2001 [1921]).

2 Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience Stephen L. White

2.1 Introduction Gregory McCulloch has characterized what he terms Sartre’s “activitybased model of experience”1 as follows. Writers in the Cartesian and analytical traditions tend to think of experiencing as a passive affair, in which the world imprints ideas on the contemplating mind.2 … [Sartre’s] considered view is that experience is richer than this, and in particular has an active dimension, in that it is a way of interacting with the world and not a way in which we merely contemplate it … 3 This is intended as a general point about being conscious of intentional objects. Not only is such consciousness, typically, wholly absorbed in its worldly objects (i.e. it is ‘unreflecting consciousness’, rather than reflective self-consciousness), but it is all of a piece with acting on the things in our surroundings (unreflecting consciousness is a form of activity).4 (My italics) McCulloch’s book is, to a large extent, a defense of Sartre’s position, as of Being and Nothingness,5 in the context of contemporary analytic philosophy. McCulloch thinks of Sartre as offering primarily “phenomenological” arguments for his views and defends Sartre by endorsing their phenomenological superiority over typical analytic alternatives.6 This strategy underestimates the depth and variety of Sartre’s arguments, and, as we shall see, is vulnerable to skepticism regarding Sartre’s phenomenological starting point. In what follows, then, I shall focus on Sartre’s activity-based model of experience through the consideration of a range of analytic arguments (including transcendental arguments) that I think support it. The goal is to show that there are powerful analytic arguments (not all phenomenological) that support the superiority of some of Sartre’s most central views over most of the current analytic alternatives.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-3

Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience  43 2.2 Direct Realism and Phenomenology McCulloch’s analysis of the activity-based model of experience or conscious mental life has three components. 1 Direct Realism/Direct Perception of Ordinary External Objects. Our normal experience is an experience of ordinary external objects – tables, chairs, other people – as opposed to the impressions and ideas of classical Empiricism or the sense-data of early to mid-twentieth-century sensedatum theories. And this is to say that we perceive these things directly: We perceive them, and there is nothing more basic that we perceive (or that we are given) in virtue of which we do so. As McCulloch says, [I]t is “the world of objects”, the things with which I interact, which helps to constitute the phenomenology of my experience. Blackbirds and streetcars, and not little mental pictures of them, feature directly in my conscious mental life: experience “goes right up to” its intentional objects. So to say what it is like for me to enjoy these experiences, you have to say (at least) what things I am confronting.7 2 Direct Perception of Affordances/Direct Perception of Functionally Relevant Properties. To be given affordances (J. J. Gibson’s concept)8 is to be given a world in which things are “doable.” Rock formations are given not in the first instance as things with certain geometric shapes and solidity but as potential obstacles or potential aids, such as bridges across a stream, stairways, or shelters, things that afford the possibility of hiding (either oneself or a predator), and so on. What we are given in such instances is not an interpretation of a more primitive experience of the geometric solids. Rather, the latter experience, if we have it, is an abstraction from the rich experience. According to McCulloch, To understand me is to see me “in a situation”… because I am an agent, with preferences and plans, I experience the things I confront as having certain potentialities (“nothingnesses”). I experience doors and bottles as openable, bicycles as ridable and so on. Again, then, for an account of my experiences to convey what they are like, it must get across this aspect of them.9 3 Direct Perception of Values. We are given things directly as being nonneutral with regard to value. As McCulloch says, [M]y activities lead me to value and have other attitudes towards the things I confront. I see things as dangerous or enticing, to-be-avoided or to-be embraced. Once again, these aspects of my experience strike me, according to Sartre, as part of the scene confronted.10

44  Stephen L. White This is often treated, as McCulloch treats it, as an independent feature of our experience, but I believe this is a mistake. For the perception of things as having functionally relevant properties is already a perception of things that are given as non-neutral in axiological terms. This may seem like a fine point, but it is not. For there is a large empirical psychological literature that supports the perception of affordances and much less literature that purports (explicitly) to support the perception of values or value properties. Some find, as I do (and as McCulloch obviously does), these phenomenological descriptions compelling. But not everyone does.11 And many who have no specific philosophical commitments feel confident in reading the phenomenology of visual perception (what the character of their subjective visual experience is like) off (what they take to be) the organs of visual perception. Such people are quite confident that there is no such thing as the direct perception of ordinary external objects and argue instead for a conception of the given in visual experience that has strong analogies to the image on the retina. To leave the defense of Sartre’s views at the level of phenomenological description, then, is to leave those views vulnerable to an entrenched skepticism regarding both the directness of perceptual experience and the richness of its contents. It is to leave them vulnerable as well to skepticism regarding any of the more specific features of the various Sartrean analyses. Sartre does have, however, a well-articulated justificatory rationale for his phenomenological starting point and for the ontological arguments and claims that he develops over the course of Being and Nothingness. The assessment of a project developed on this scale and with this level of ambition, particularly in the framework of an alternative philosophical tradition, however, is not a feasible undertaking here. What I propose as an alternative is much less ambitious, though more ambitious than what McCulloch and others have attempted, and it takes its inspiration in broad strokes from Sartre, though it differs in its details and represents just a fraction of what Sartre attempted. The arguments will be a priori and in some cases transcendental in nature, and I make no claims that they can be found in their present form in any Sartrean text. I do think, however, that it is beyond serious doubt that Sartre offered a number of transcendental arguments in Being and Nothingness. These include one based on the conditions of the possibility of our asking questions about the world, and one based on the conditions of the possibility of our having conscious experience.12 And since my own transcendental arguments will, as have most transcendental arguments in the second half of the twentieth century in analytic philosophy, be based on the conditions of our having a meaningful language, I think it can be claimed that they are mostly, if not entirely, Sartrean in spirit.

Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience  45 Let us turn, then, to the defense of direct realism and direct perception. And, on the face of it, one might suppose, the defense should be easy. For it just seems obvious that the things we see under normal circumstances are ordinary external objects – tables, chairs, other people – and not any sort of intermediary and/or mental entity. But things are not so simple. In the empiricist tradition, variants of what has been called the sense-datum theory in the twentieth century have dominated the thinking from Locke to A. J. Ayer. Since the second half of the twentieth century, the general assumption among analytic philosophers has been that the sense-datum theory is dead. But this is far from being the case. What is true is that philosophers who hold views in very important (perhaps the most important) ways similar to classical sense-datum theories do not “self-identify” as sense-datum theorists. But this requires some explanation. Classical sense-datum theorists hold that far from seeing ordinary external objects directly, we see them, if we do, only indirectly in virtue of our seeing something else directly – mentalistic entities not located in external, physical space. If one sees a penny from an oblique angle in normal light, one sees it in virtue of seeing an elliptical brown area of one’s subjective visual field – i.e. an elliptical, brown sense-datum. Such sense-data, we might say, actually have the “visual” properties that external objects seem to have. Why, in the face of the direct realist intuition, does the sense-datum theory seem as resilient as I have claimed it is? The question is complicated, and I can only touch on a few salient points. First, many would regard the thesis that sense-data are irreducibly mental entities as an essential feature of the theory. Thus, although they may hold a theory that is in other respects just like a sense-datum theory, the fact that they believe that the entities that play the same role as sense-data will have a physicalistically acceptable explanation or reduction prevents them from regarding themselves as sense-datum theorists. This prevalent theoretical tendency combines with an even more prevalent theoretical tendency to accept a completely causal theory of the mind – of action, perception, consciousness, and qualitative experience. Together these tendencies produce a powerful obstacle to the appreciation of any theory of direct perception. For example, in the characterization of direct perception given earlier, the direct perceptual experience is unmediated by the perceptual experience of anything more basic. And this is completely compatible with its being mediated by a complex range of antecedent causal conditions that do not comprise or amount to anything further at the level of perception. This distinction, however, is often ignored. Moreover, the whole idea of direct perception might seem profoundly problematic to causal theorists who hold, as many do, some version of methodological solipsism – the thesis that mentality – at least the qualitative content and narrow propositional content of our mental states – supervenes on what is inside the brain.

46  Stephen L. White Other reasons for the rejection of direct realism include the deep entrenchment of camera metaphors for visual perception in the empiricist tradition starting with Locke. They also include, as we have seen, the related and entrenched assumption that one can read the phenomenology of visual perception off the structure of what is allegedly the organ of perception – the eye – rather than recognizing that the “organ” of visual perception must include the brain. And the fact that sense-data provide us with a way of representing and characterizing our visual experience – however distorted that characterization might actually be – is another source of their appeal. If the argument for direct realism and direct perception cannot be a simple appeal to an unprejudiced description of seeing ordinary objects, what could it look like? The answer I shall propose takes the form of a transcendental argument. And couched in this way, the approach may not seem very distinctly Sartrean. But the argument is part of the larger investigation of the so-called activity-based model of experience. And the question behind this larger investigation is actually quite well expressed by Sartre when he asks, “What must man and the world be in order for a relation between them to be possible?”13 Moreover, given that Sartre is imagining an irreducibly intentional relation and one that allows us to pose discursively articulated questions about the world,14 this is a question that, it seems, demands a transcendental response in terms of the conditions of our having an intentional relation to anything. The transcendental argument I propose grows out of Hume’s argument for epistemological skepticism regarding the external world.15 Focus first on the intrinsic character of your current conscious perceptual experience – experience that purports to be, say, of a room, other people, desks and chairs, etc. Now consider that keeping the intrinsic subjective character fixed – keeping fixed the experience as it is given to you “from the inside” – you can vary your hypothesis as to its external causal source. Though you have been operating on the basis of the common-sense hypothesis that the experience was in fact produced by a room, other people, and desks and chairs, it could have been caused, it seems, by an hallucination, a dream, an evil demon, your being in a virtual reality, your being a brain in a vat, or your being in the Matrix. What, then, justifies your favoring the common-sense hypothesis over these apparently equally good alternatives? There seems to be a logical gap between what we are given in perception and any a posteriori proposition about the external world. What could close such a gap? Since we have exhausted the contribution of perception, the only thing to which we could appeal to bridge the gap, on Hume’s view, is an inference. But what kind of inference? It cannot be an a priori inference, since we cannot infer causes from effects a priori – at least in the ordinary case of effects that could be produced in a number of

Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience  47 different ways. But neither could the inference be a posteriori. For an a posteriori inference from what Hume takes to be given in experience – perceptions and images or (in the more modern terminology) sense-data – to ordinary external objects would have to be grounded in an a posteriori generalization connecting the two domains. But such a generalization could only be justified on the basis of experience. And, according to Hume, we could in principle never have the relevant experience since all we can experience, in principle, is more and more sense-data. Thus we could, in principle, never have any justification for any hypothesis over any other about the external sources (if any) of our sensory experience. What Hume’s argument depends on is a distinction in kind – an absolute dichotomy – between what could be given in perception or perceived directly and ordinary external objects. (If an ordinary external object could, even in principle, be given in experience or perceived directly, then there would not necessarily be a logical gap between what is given in such an experience and any a posteriori proposition about the external world. Hence we would not necessarily need an inference to bridge the gap between what is given in perception and any a posteriori proposition about the external world. And, if so, the Humean argument for epistemological skepticism about the external world would collapse.) Furthermore, the distinction between what can and cannot be given in perception could not be an arbitrary one. For it corresponds to the domain of things our knowledge of which is being called into question – in this case the external world – and another domain – call it the counter domain – of things our knowledge of which can be taken as unproblematic. (There must be such a counter domain, since a version of skepticism that tried to take literally everything as open to skeptical doubt simultaneously – including, for example, the most basic logical truths – would be incoherent.) And it seems that by both these criteria, perceptions and images or sensedata are ideally suited to constitute the counter domain that the skeptical argument requires. First, there is a difference in kind between ordinary external objects and sense-data. Whereas external objects have real and apparent properties – the white cup viewed in red light is actually white, but it looks red – the corresponding sense-datum really is red. As we have seen, the sense-datum actually has the visual properties that the external object seems to have. Do sense-data satisfy the second requirement on the elements of an appropriate counter domain – that they should be in some sense unproblematically knowable? Again, the answer seems to be yes. Our relation to our own sense-data, on the version of the theory most congenial to Hume, is not one of perception, but of acquaintance. They are, in other words, given directly: We don’t have a viewpoint on them, because there is nothing more to them than is given in direct acquaintance. For sense-data, it seems true

48  Stephen L. White in the strictest sense that “to be is to be perceived.” And it seems that where sense-data are concerned, there is no room for mistakes. Thus from the point of view of Hume’s argument for skepticism, this way of drawing the domain/counter domain distinction seems well motivated. Hume’s position is an example par excellence of a theory of experience that takes the passive case as basic. And no one can doubt the importance of the position (skepticism included) in the analytic or the Sartrean context. So-called New Humeans in the analytic context embrace the conclusion that the Humean skeptic cannot be answered.16 And Sartre sometimes suggests that Berkeley is a target of his, and he often seems to treat Husserl as if he were a sense-datum theorist and a phenomenalist on a par with Berkeley.17 The first step of the transcendental argument requires that we drive a wedge between the concept of one’s own sense-data and the concept of the sense-data with which we are acquainted. This is possible because our own past sense-data (in contrast to our own present memories of them) are not objects of acquaintance at all, and our access to them is just as problematic as our access to external objects. Just as one can wonder whether one’s memories of objective things and events are accurate, and Hume’s argument tells us that one can never be justified in supposing that they are, so one can have the same doubts about one’s memories of one’s past sense-data, and the same skeptical argument applies. So far this may look like an argument not against skepticism but for an even more thorough-going skepticism than Hume’s. But since we are considering transcendental arguments that proceed from premises about the necessary conditions for our having a meaningful language, the question arises whether the Humean skeptic can give an adequate account of what cannot be coherently denied. We might think the answer is yes. How, after all, do words and sentences acquire their meanings? Word-to-word connections of the kind that underpin the lexical definitions of words and the inferential roles of sentences can only take us so far – indeed no further, really, than the uninterpreted languages of formal logic. What we need in addition are connections between language and the world, unmediated by any further language or linguisticdescriptive content. In other words, there cannot be an infinite backward regress of linguistic-descriptive contents. Language, we might say, must be grounded in a connection to the world that could provide the basis for an ostensive definition (“this is a chair,” “this is what red looks like,” …) of the kind we might resort to in conveying the meaning to someone with whom we shared almost no background of linguistic understanding. Grounding language is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for meaning. Bare connections between words and the things they stand for or refer to seem insufficient to capture meaning, since co-referring expressions can have different meanings, as the Frege problems demonstrate. You can, after all, believe what you would naturally express by saying “Hesperus is

Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience  49 inhabited” and fail to believe or disbelieve what you would express by saying “Phosphorus is inhabited,” even though “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” refer to the very same planet. And you could be perfectly rational (though not very well informed) if you did so. The upshot seems to be that “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” differ in meaning, or – to use a slightly more technical term – differ in their cognitive significance. And this is something of which any theory of what it is that makes a language meaningful must give an account. Solutions to this problem have most often alluded to the fact that we associate different descriptions with “Hesperus” (“the first heavenly body visible in the evening”) and “Phosphorus” (“the last heavenly body visible in the morning”) – descriptions that are not coreferential a priori. But in the present context, this move simply reintroduces the backward regress of description contents that we have been at pains to avoid. It will be useful, then, to focus explicitly on the demonstrative version of Frege’s problem. In Gareth Evans’ example,18 the subject points out the right-hand window at the bow of a ship and says, “That ship was built in Japan.” The subject then points out the left-hand window at the stern of a ship and says, “That ship was not,” without exhibiting any irrationality, despite having (unknowingly) pointed to the bow and stern of the very same (very long) ship. And in this context, sense-data come into their own. For suppose we ask what the two different ways under which the ship presents itself (two different modes of presentation) are such that one could in this case rationally suppose that one was speaking of two different ships. And suppose that an appeal to different descriptive contents is ruled out. Then the thought that the ship is presented in virtue of two different sets of sense-data seems difficult to resist. The idea of doing a semantics of natural language by associating our ordinary terms for external objects like “table” and “chair” with stable patterns in our sense-data is a natural extension of this thought. And this is not merely an abstract possibility. We have at least one attempt at a substantive and detailed working out of this project in the writing of C. I. Lewis.19 What, then, is the objection to the claim that the Humean skeptic can make sense of our having a meaningful language? The objection turns on the notion of acquaintance, the role of which, in this context, has not been sufficiently emphasized. Recall that Hume’s argument depends on there being an absolute dichotomy that (1) separates what we can and cannot be given in perceptual experience and (2) distinguishes between the counter domain with regard to which doubt is unintelligible (things like something looking red or a particular sense-datum being red) and the domain about which we can only make inferences based on what is given (perceptually) in the counter domain. And now the point to recall is that sense-data in general do not satisfy these two criteria. This means

50  Stephen L. White that the sense-data to which empiricists and positivists (like C. I. Lewis) appeal in support of the claim that they can give an account of our having a meaningful language are not the sense-data that satisfy (1) and (2). Attempts such as C. I. Lewis’s to account for the meanings of our ordinary terms like “table” in terms of stable patterns in our sense-data gain whatever plausibility they have through an appeal not just to one’s own actual sense-data past, present, and future, but to one’s possible sense-data and one’s counterfactual sense-data. For example, to capture the independence one takes the table to have with regard to one’s experience of it, one would appeal to the (possible) sense-data one would have if one were to walk around it clockwise, the (possible) sense-data one would have if one were to walk around it counterclockwise, and the (possible) sense-data one would have for all the other ways one might go on to experience the table. One’s own possible sense-data, however, are far from sufficient to capture our ordinary notion of independence. Equally important, it seems, would be one’s counterfactual sense-data (the sense-data one would have had if one had been on the other side of the table right now). And true independence might well require the actual, possible, and counterfactual sensedata of other people and perhaps of possible and counterfactual people as well. All of this seems to be in line with Mill’s idea of external objects as “Permanent Possibilities of Sensation.”20 None of this is available, however, to the proponent of the Humean skeptical argument regarding the external world, whose counter domain consists in the sense-data with which one is oneself acquainted. These, as we have seen, are one’s actual sense-data of the present moment – things that taken together we might compare to an instantaneous “snapshot” of the world that exists for the merest fraction of the time that it would take to begin to describe it. And this, it seems clear, is too thin an experiential base to ground a meaningful language of any kind. If the argument for Humean skepticism has the consequence that we cannot have a meaningful language, then it is literally incoherent. As a result, we are entitled, on the basis of the transcendental argument, to whatever is necessary to block the meaning-skeptical conclusion. And the Humean argument itself tells us what this is – we must have direct perception of at least some external objects in Hume’s sense – things that are not themselves just more sense-data with which we are acquainted. This conclusion may seem weak since even our own past sense-data would qualify as external by this criterion. It will, however, be incumbent upon us to explain how we could perceive directly things with which we are not acquainted. And once we see how this is possible, we shall see that there is no reason not to include ordinary external objects, such as tables and chairs, among the things we perceive directly – i.e., among the things we perceive and do not perceive in virtue of anything we perceive more directly.

Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience  51 2.3 The Interdefinability of Perception and Action The previous section gave us an analytic argument for the direct perception of things other than those with which we are acquainted – an argument that has at least strong Sartrean overtones. Direct realism, however, has its supporters among contemporary analytic philosophers, particularly among so-called disjunctivists.21 The activity-based model of conscious experience, by contrast, seems to have very little support in this context, at least if we take it in its most radical Sartrean form. Indeed, the view can seem startlingly unintuitive if we consider it in the light of contemporary discussions of the notion of “direction of fit” in the context of perception and action. According to a widely accepted view, beliefs embed propositions with word-to-world direction of fit. That is, if the proposition fails to match the world, it is incumbent upon the believer to change the belief. A desire, by contrast, has world-to-word direction of fit. If the propositional content embedded in the desire fails to match the world, it is incumbent on the subject (other things being equal) to change the world.22 And if we add two of the most influential theories of perception and action – George Pitcher’s theory that perception is just a certain kind of belief acquisition and Donald Davidson’s theory that action is behavior caused by an appropriate belief-desire pair – then it can seem that the idea of an activity-based model of experience is virtually a contradiction in terms.23 Rather, through perception, we come to appreciate the world as it is, and through action, we attempt to change it. What, then, would an argument for the most radical part of Sartre’s theory look like? Let us start with some of the problems that have plagued and continue to plague causal theories of perception and action. In the case of perception, Paul Grice has argued, famously, that causal factors may trump descriptive content in establishing the object of perception (i.e. the thing that is perceived).24 In an example of the kind to which Grice appeals, one seems to see a candle at a distance of approximately 50 feet in front of one, and this descriptive content is in fact true of a candle at that distance and in that direction. Though one is unaware of it, however, there is a mirror approximately 25 feet in front of one, and one’s visual experience is actually caused by a candle behind one reflected in the mirror. Grice claimed, and most would agree, that what one sees is not the candle that satisfies the descriptive content of one’s visual experience (which it does merely by coincidence), but the one that is causally responsible for it, even though one is seriously mistaken as to its location and possibly its character as well. And to the idea that the object perceived must cause the experience, David Lewis has added the requirement of counterfactual dependence.25 Lewis appealed to counterfactual dependence to distinguish genuine

52  Stephen L. White perception from veridical hallucination in which a perceptual experience matches the scene which does in fact cause it, but which is not thereby perceived. Imagine, for example, that one is watching a volcano that is about to erupt. As the eruption starts, one inhales noxious fumes, and one hallucinates an eruption exactly like that in East of Borneo (remade by Joseph Cornell as Rose Hobart). And imagine that by sheer coincidence the actual scene, as viewed from where one is standing, matches the images running through one’s head. (In other words, the scene causes the inhalation, which causes the sequence of images stored as a result of having seen the films, which by coincidence match the subsequent development of the scene.) Lewis makes the case that one does not see the actual eruption, even though it caused one’s experiences and matches them. This is because, had the actual eruption been different, the images would not have matched it but would instead have remained just as they were. Hence there is not the counterfactual dependence that, according to Lewis, perception requires. Like Grice’s argument, Lewis’s has been found convincing. But Lewis’s account is importantly incomplete, as he himself acknowledges. The reason is that although Lewis purports to tell us which are the cases in which we see, he refrains from any attempt to say which things we see, among all those on which our experience depends counterfactually. And this is a problem for any causal theory. For if the subject’s experience is counterfactually dependent on what we would ordinarily take to be the object perceived – e.g., a candle viewed in the ordinary way – then it will be counterfactually dependent on an indefinitely large set of other things as well. This includes all the intermediate stages of the causal chain that leads from the object to the experience (such as the bundle of light rays reflected by the object), as well as the sets of causal factors that lead up to the existence and character of the object itself. The notion of counterfactual dependence, then, gives us no reason, it seems, to pick one point rather than another in this long causal sequence. Is this a stumbling block for a causal theory or for Lewis? Consider an example that I have used before – that of a high-tech paintball game.26 Imagine that although paintball weapons have remained more or less unchanged, paintball defenses have come to the fore and evolved rapidly in two different directions. In the hologram defense, one projects a hologram of oneself to a location at some distance from one’s actual one with the goal of drawing one’s opponent’s fire and thereby learning his or her position, etc. The light-bending defense has the same goal, and in employing it one creates a similar illusion that one is at a location that one does not actually occupy. Imagine, then, that you are looking down a long corridor, which is intersected at right angles by corridors at various distances from you. Your opponent seems to be standing directly in front of you at a distance of

Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience  53 about 30 feet. Now imagine two cases. In both, you fire and miss. In the first case, you are misled by the hologram defense, in the second by the light-bending defense. The question is, in which case, if either, do you see your opponent? People’s intuitions are quite strong that in the light-bending defense, we see the opponent and in the hologram defense we do not. But why? We can imagine that one’s opponent is in the same place in each case – out of one’s (normal) line of sight in one of the perpendicular corridors. And in both cases, there is the same counterfactual dependence of one’s experience on one’s opponent. Furthermore, in both cases, one shoots and misses, so it is difficult to see how we could appeal to agency to distinguish between them. Why, then, the strong intuition? There is a temptation to say that the light-bending case is simply more like the normal case of seeing than the hologram case. But this, it seems, cannot provide the explanation we want. In the first place, there are an indefinite number of ways in which each case resembles the normal case and indefinitely many ways in which each one differs from it. And what is it that tells us which of those ways count and which do not? Apart from this very general point, there are several more specific reasons for skepticism as to whether causal theorists can account for the difference in intuitions. First, even if we put aside the general problem of deciding which are the relevant features of the ordinary causal chains connecting our perceptual experiences with the external events on which they are counterfactually dependent, there is the fact that Lewis, at least, wants to allow that we could see in virtue of very different causal processes than the normal ones. He wants, for example, to allow that we could see in virtue of prosthetic vision, where the causal processes underlying the prosthetic vision could be quite different from the normal ones. Secondly, we can easily recast the example so that the hologram defense will be clearly superior to the light-bending defense along a range of dimensions that seem highly relevant to sight. For example, the holographic image might be much higher in “resolution” and might provide an experience much richer in informational content than the bent light. And it might, as a result, provide a much more robust illusion that one is seeing in the normal way than the light-bending defense. The light-bending defense, for example, might work only in dim light, or the illusion of normal sight might be fleeting – just long enough to draw the fire of players who recognize the need to make split-second decisions. Or both might be true. Nonetheless, it is the light-bending case that seems to have the best claim to being sight. What seems to distinguish the two cases in the relevant way is what we might call agentially transparent access. In the case of perception, I can interact with the object directly as a basic action. That is to say, I can do

54  Stephen L. White it, and there is nothing else I have to do in virtue of which it is done. I am present to the object, and my most fundamental relation to the object in the case of my presence to it (or its presence to me) is not knowledge but know-how. This, and it seems only this, is what breaks the original circle and explains the original datum. But does it really explain the original datum? After all, in the original case, one shoots and misses in interacting with both paintball defenses. Why does one case seem to be, or to be more like, a case of sight? The concept of agentially transparent access does in fact provide the explanation if we look in the right place. And in this case, the place to look is not at the access we have to our opponent in the light-bending case in virtue of our ability to launch a projectile in his or her direction (what we might call “ballistic access”). Rather, it is in virtue of our ability to launch ourselves. For if instead of shooting we actually run toward the subject, we will be guided by the bent light in a curved path and so reach our opponent in what we might call transparently “guided access.” No such transparent access exists in the hologram case. The holographic image functions as a “block.” We have more or less agentially transparent access to the hologram, but there the agential access stops. The person who produced the hologram could be anywhere, and one would have (normally) no capacity to “work back from” the hologram to one’s opponent via the causal process in virtue of which one’s opponent produced the holographic image. Thus the perspective of agentially transparent access does in fact explain the difference that was our original datum The upshot, then, of the discussion is that in such cases, we see (roughly) that to which we have transparent and agential access. And this gives us our first fundamental point in favor of Sartre’s activity-based model of conscious experience – the point that action and perception are not conceptually independent. Rather, as we have just seen, we need the concepts of action and agency to characterize the fundamental perceptual concept of sight. And, as we shall see shortly, the dependency goes in the other direction as well. Perception and action are conceptually interdependent. To see the dependency of agential notions on perceptual concepts, consider Davidson’s original causal theory of action and the objections he himself made to it. Davidson’s theory was, as we have seen, that an action was a piece of bodily behavior caused by an appropriate belief-desire pair. I plug in the coffee maker because I want coffee, and I believe that this is the first step in the most appropriate way of obtaining it. In a somewhat later paper, however, Davidson acknowledged the following kind of counterexample.27 One climber, clinging to a rockface, holds the rope to which his partner, who dangles in mid-air below, is tied. As he feels his grip on the rockface weaken, the thought runs through his head that he could save himself by dropping his partner, and he finds the thought so shocking and

Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience  55 unnerving that he accidentally lets go of the rope in what we might think of as a kind of “startle reflex.” There is, then, an appropriate belief-desire pair – the desire to save his own life and the belief that he could do so by dropping his partner, and they cause the piece of bodily behavior that is the letting go of the rope. But it is, by hypothesis, an accidental occurrence – something akin to a knee-jerk response and not at all like an action. Hence the theory as it stood was inadequate. It might be replied that a causal theory could work if it specified that the bodily movement be caused in the “right way.” Davidson was skeptical about such a possibility, and, as we shall see, the skepticism was justified. What, then, is the alternative? It might be suggested that we should consider the idea that actions are the product of acts of practical reasoning, but this seems to lead to an infinite regress. And, in any case, it seems that we can and do simply act spontaneously in many, and indeed in most, instances. A more attractive suggestion is that we consider what I have called elsewhere “nondiscursive reasons” based on the concept of rich perception to which we appealed in the transcendental response to Hume. Phenomenological considerations suggest that our most basic experience, as we have seen,28 is not of sense-data or even of external objects conceived as the objects of an objective science. Rather, it is of things given in their functional relevance – i.e., in terms that are not normatively neutral. The suggestion, then, is that we can characterize action in terms of the rich perception that (as we have seen) the transcendental response to Hume supports. More specifically, we characterize it in terms of the nondiscursive reasons provided by our perceptual experience of things as affording us certain opportunities (Gibson) and things as “to be done” (Sartre)29 Such experience is assumed to be basic and irreducible. And to the extent that action is necessary to our having a meaningful language (we “do” things with words), this assumption is supported by another transcendental argument. This gives us, then, the first argument for the interdefinability of action and perception. And the resulting position is an attractive one. But it might be thought that although it is sufficient for an account of perception and action (adequate at least in the respects under consideration), it is not necessary and that conventionally reductive accounts (indeed causal theories) would be both viable and preferable. This is because the claim that the theory according to which action and perception are interdefinable is the only viable theory is inherently difficult to support since it is difficult to prove that we have eliminated all the alternatives. What we can do is show how extremely strong the constraints are on such theories and how difficult they are to satisfy simultaneously. I shall close this section then, with a sketch of the relevance of this approach to the demonstrative version of Frege’s problem.

56  Stephen L. White Recall the example of Evans’s ship. Though the temptation to revert to sense-data was strong, the first transcendental argument ruled it out. But we now have an alternative. The different modes of presentation of the same ship are neither linguistic-descriptive nor grounded in sense-data but are agential and a matter of know-how: Our relations of access to the bow and to the stern are via packages of basic action possibilities, but they are different packages. With regard to the bow, we can point to it, trace its outline in the air, move toward it or around obstacles to get a better look at it, direct someone loading containers on it with a crane, and so forth. And we have similar agential possibilities with regard to the stern. But these are different possibilities. Moreover, in each case, they give us the ship directly. The actions are basic, and they give us the ship directly in a sense that might be called de re: had the ship not existed, there would have been no complete thought mediating between us and the world. 2.4 The Incommensurability of the For-Itself and the In-Itself As we have seen, there are a number of transcendental arguments, the upshot of which is that we have to do justice to the concept of agency. But to say this fails to acknowledge the depth of the difficulties involved. Consider the error theory of agency currently being defended by Sam Harris.30 The claim is that agency is an illusion – that agency does not exist – and the argument for the claim is presented as an empirical one that rests on the deliverances of cutting-edge neuroscience.31 Harris himself admits, however, that the empirical argument is unnecessary.32 And he falls back on an a priori argument of a very familiar sort: If we dig deeply enough, everything that one might have regarded as an action (including such mental “acts” as making a decision) will have a complete causal explanation (possibly with indeterministic elements) that undermines any claim to authorship that one might have made.33 Harris, however, never really engages with the compatibilist who disputes precisely these claims. Whereas Harris claims that whatever we have done we could not have done otherwise on the grounds that the behavior in question was fixed for all time (disregarding indeterminacy, which he does not regard as any help in accounting for agency), the compatibilist holds that we could indeed have done other than we did on the grounds that we would have done so if we had so desired. Such a response by the compatibilist reflects a very different understanding from Harris’s of what our having been able to do otherwise involves, and it is not obvious that Harris’s understanding is superior.34 In a similar way, the compatibilist is likely to point out that the claim that if we dig deep enough we will always find a causal explanation of our behavior and that this shows that we are never free – never exercise

Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience  57 genuine agency – simply begs the question. Compatibilism is, after all, precisely the thesis that such causal explanations do not necessarily undermine freedom or agency. The dispute between Harris and the compatibilist, then, could easily be regarded as a standoff. This way of describing the situation can make it seem as though Harris has added little to a long-standing philosophical debate. But Harris’s points can have the salutary effect of shifting the focus of the debate about free will and agency so as to bring it in line both with J. L. Mackie’s error theory of value and with what are currently known as “placement problems.” Mackie says, for example, that there is no room, among the things we regard as objectively real, for entities with “objective moral qualities” such as goodness or “to-be-pursuedness” somehow built in. Such entities would be “utterly different from anything else in the universe” and their relations to natural features would be mysterious, as would our apprehension of them. Hence, according to Mackie, there is no place for objective values, either in our conception of what exists or in our conception of how we come to know about existents, and the theory according to which such values exist is false.35 More generally, this kind of argument can be extended to such things as meaning, mathematical truth, causation, physical modality, and various aspects of mentality, as Huw Price has pointed out.36 And although different people will offer different lists of such placementproblem generators, the application of this form of argument to free will or agency on the basis of considerations like those cited by Harris is straightforward. The compatibilist, of course, need not concede In the face of this claim alone. For the compatibilist slogan might well be that free or genuine actions need not be uncaused; it is simply required that they be caused in the right way. Of course, the difficulties with the notion of causation in the right way (some of which we have seen) should make us reluctant to accept this slogan on faith. But suppose the compatibilist attempts to support it in the following (or a relevantly similar) fashion. Suppose the compatibilist notes that there is a world of difference between a causal chain that proceeds from Green’s being pushed by someone else so that he loses his balance, stumbles into Jones, and knocks him down a flight of stairs and a causal chain that originates with Green’s belief that Jones is a rival and Green’s desire to eliminate rivals, goes through the rational decisionmaking subsystem, causes an intention to knock Jones down, which causes the bodily movement that results, as in the first case, in Jones being knocked down the stairs. The intuition that there is a world of difference between the two cases is not mistaken. Moreover, suppose that we specify that Green has a longstanding history of aggressive treatment of rivals, forms the intention on the basis of a rational assessment of the personal costs and benefits, and a

58  Stephen L. White complete disregard for moral considerations (manifesting another longstanding tendency). Then it would not be misguided to think that the Davidsonian worries about causation in the right way might be less pressing than in the Davidson climber example. And if so, it would perhaps not be unreasonable to think that holding Green responsible could be justified. And this is all, it seems, that a compatibilist could or should want. The problem is not with the causal connections between the events mentioned – the occurrent introspective judgment that Jones is a rival, the existence of introspectively available background beliefs and desires, a sequence of beliefs and desires that could be construed as a process of practical reasoning, etc. Indeed, if we specify enough such occurrences, we might wonder whether we need causation in the right way at all. Perhaps any causal connection, or any reliable causal connection, or any connection that would generate a counterfactual dependency, would suffice, a point that Lewis made with respect to prosthetic vision.37 The problem, rather, is with the specification of the occurrences themselves. For every such specification itself presupposes that we have already solved the placement problem in a form at least as difficult as the one under consideration. That the ascription of beliefs and desires is subject to a minimal rationality constraint is a point on which there is very little disagreement, even among those who approach the ascription of propositional attitudes from very different perspectives.38 Moreover, the argument for it is simple: If we cannot count on a subject to draw any appropriate inferences from his or her beliefs or appropriate practical inferences from his or her beliefs and desires, then nothing could count as evidence for any ascription of beliefs and desires over any other. Anything that looked like evidence against such an ascription could simply be written off as irrationality. Rationality, however, is a normative notion and hence subject to the same placementproblem worries as freedom, agency, or action. Other normative notions apparently presupposed by the compatibilist response include the concept of an inference (necessary to give us the concept of the inferential role of the propositions embedded in the propositional attitudes ascribed in the response), practical reason, and the concept of a rule (necessary to give us the concepts presupposed by the propositional attitude ascriptions), among others. If compatibilism is difficult to defend in the face of the placement problem, is the error theory a viable alternative? Is the error theory really even coherent? Error theorists seem to want a robust concept of value or agency to be coherent and to be grounded in a coherent practice because they want to be able to answer the deflationist (the noncognitivist in metaethics, the compatibilist regarding agency) – i.e. the person who says that all values come down to are pro-attitudes or that all agency comes down it is causation in the right way. And they want to be able to answer the

Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience  59 deflationist by saying that he or she does not capture the ordinary (nondeflated) notion of value or agency. And, indeed, it seems that there are such coherent (nondeflated) concepts and coherent practices, so error theorists do not want to be saddled with the task of arguing that there are not. On the other hand, their arguments are completely a priori in character – they are not at all the kinds of arguments that we would use to establish, for example, that witches do not exist. Thus it seems the error theorist is in danger of having to have it both ways. The error theorist needs a coherent concept of the phenomenon in question while holding that it can be ruled out on a priori grounds. Is there a better way of accounting for the power of skepticism regarding agency and value, while acknowledging the apparent coherence of our practices of ascribing actions and responsibility and finding things valuable – i.e. a way that is better than an error theory? We can begin by asking why, if we have a well-grounded practice of ascribing agency and responsibility, they should have a place in the objective scientific picture. (Recall that agential ascriptions are grounded in rich perception of such things as affordances (Gibson) or the streetcar’s being something to be caught (Sartre).)39 We can begin to answer the question if we recall another theorist whose views are grounded in a notion of rich perception – Thomas Kuhn. Kuhn’s notion of theory-laden perception, which he shared with N. R. Hanson, grounds his notion of the incommensurability of theories on opposite sides of a paradigm switch.40 This is because each theory generates, as it were, its own evidential base, precluding the possibility of a nonquestion-begging experiment that would decide between them. Are the agential perspective and the objective perspective similarly related? The Kuhnian picture is a useful starting point, but the agential and objective perspectives are both more radically incommensurable and more intimately related than incommensurable Kuhnian theories. On the side of a more radical incommensurability, there is the fact that each perspective, if “totalized” (something which, as we shall see, is not possible) undermines the other. Start with the fact, not really registered by Harris, that it is a part of our agential practices that we tend to take actions and inactions out of the agential domain as we acquire the ability to explain them in causal and nonintentional terms. A greater understanding of various kinds of drugs and medications, mental illness, and physical trauma to the brain are obvious examples, and the advent of sophisticated brain scan technology has made the latter area a particularly fruitful domain in which to reconceptualize our understanding of what has gone wrong when something has. And there seems to be no limit, fixed in advance, to how far this process could proceed. Thus it seems that if the objective perspective were “totalized,” or “completed,” the agential perspective would be undermined. This, it seems, is a given with which the defender of agency (not necessarily to be equated with the compatibilist) has to come to terms.

60  Stephen L. White What does it mean, though, to say that the agential scheme, if totalized, would undermine the objective scheme? We might, for example, think of the way in which Pragmatism fails to capture objectivity and truth, at least by the lights of the anti-Pragmatist or (Scientific) Realist.41 Another way, complementary to this, is to see science through the lens of the sociology of knowledge. From this perspective, science is a human activity practiced for a range of human motives, including career advancement, many of which do not seem guaranteed to produce the ultimate truth, even in the long run. One can see an analogy here with postmodernist discussions of science and knowledge that focus on the relations between knowledge and power – most importantly, political power. And there is an analogy with evolutionary accounts in epistemology that characterize objective truth as the product of a system that rewards fitness. In these contexts, it seems, the characterization of science in agential and/or pragmatic terms seems to preclude its characterization in terms of ultimate objective truth. This is because it provides no resources for such a characterization of objective truth and no guarantee that the closest pragmatic/agential analogue (of objective truth) would, even if we could define objective truth, provide anything like a close approximation. In its most general form, the argument is that what we define in agential/pragmatic terms can only be supposed to coincide with an objective ideal like objective truth if we consider an idealized version of the agential or pragmatic notion in question. And the problem is that the only plausible idealizations will presuppose precisely the objective ideal we have in mind. The other side of the equation – the claim that each perspective grows naturally out of the other – can be dealt with fairly quickly. It is easy to see how deep and important a contribution the objective perspective makes to the agential perspective when we try to improve our performances as characterized agentially. Sports examples should suffice for this simple point since we can use every kind of mechanical recording device to represent our performances and every sort of physical, biomechanical, and chemical characterization to characterize the performances – all with a view toward improving them. On the objective side, we analyze the languages of our theories and our practices that give meaning to those languages. On Kuhn’s analysis, at the foundations of our scientific practice is our shared sense of what counts as a legitimate or appropriate scientific question or problem, what counts as a successfully solved problem suitable for imitation, what counts as suitable and legitimate methods, etc. The scrutiny and analysis of our practices allow us to refine them and increase the extent to which we can claim that they are justified – and in the process improve our objective picture of the world.

Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience  61 The relation between the agential and objective perspectives, then, is unstable and dialectical. There is no stable boundary between them, and the consideration of either one ultimately leads to the other. This is the basis for the claim that although each one, if totalized or completed, would undermine the other, neither could be totalized. The objective worldview of physical science, if totalized, would be unable to give an account of itself as the product of a rational inquiry, as justified, or as couched in a meaningful language. And the agential view, if we leave out any consideration of truth for its own sake and independent of what it is expedient to say or believe, seems similarly self-undermining, as it seems to cut off reasons from objective circumstances in the world and, indeed, undermine their status as reasons. And if agency collapses into the expression of mere subjective desire, devoid of any reference to reasons, then, arguably, it is no longer agency at all. And these ideas of nonintegrability, incommensurability, and instability in their relation substantially parallel the relation Sartre described between the for-itself and the in-itself – at least insofar as it is the determinate initself of a concrete situation about which we can pose and answer meaningful questions. Being-in-itself, as determinate and insofar as we can pose questions about it, points us toward or presupposes nothingness and the human reality that is its source.42 But that human reality is defined as being what it is not and not being what it is – i.e., it is defined in terms of freedom. And as Sartre says, consciousness is haunted by the in-itself, as that with regard to which it defines itself by contrast.43 In both these cases – the analytic and the Sartrean – the claims regarding the incommensurability and the unstable relation between the agential and the objective are grounded in transcendental arguments. In the analytic case, they are grounded in arguments aimed at establishing the conditions of the possibility of our having a meaningful language. In the Sartrean case, they are grounded in arguments aimed at establishing the conditions of the possibility of certain types of human “conduct,” in particular the linguistic conduct involved in posing and answering meaningful questions.44 Certainly, the details differ, and the precise nature and the meaning of the parallels remain to be spelled out. But the answer to the question of whether Sartre is relevant to contemporary analytic philosophy, both as regards some of his most important core concepts and his detailed arguments, is, I think, simply and unequivocally, yes. Notes 1 McCulloch (1994: 19). 2 Ibid., 13. 3 Ibid., 13 4 Ibid., 14

62  Stephen L. White 5 Sartre (1958). 6 McCulloch (1994: 2–3). 7 Ibid., 14 8 Gibson (1979: 127–8, 134). 9 McCulloch (1994: 14). 10 Ibid. 11 Mary Warnock claims that Sartre’s phenomenological starting point provides his general account of the world “no rationale” in Warnock (1965: 89), and Michael Hammond, Jane Howarth, and Russell Keat claim that Sartre’s phenomenological method involves a number of presuppositions whose legitimacy is open to serious doubt in (1991: 125–6). 12 See Hammond, Howarth, and Keat (1991: 114) for a discussion of the first argument and ibid. (110) for the second. The authors, however, do not use the terminology “transcendental arguments.” 13 Sartre (1958: 34). 14 Sartre (1958: 33ff). 15 Hume (1975: 152–3). 16 Williams (1996: 10–17). 17 Sartre (1958: 9–10, 119). 18 Evans (1982: 84). 19 Lewis, C. I. (1946). 20 Mill, (1865: Vol. IX, 183). 21 See Martin (2006). 22 See Searle (1983: 7). See also Searle (1979). 23 Pitcher (1970); Davidson (1980a). 24 Grice (1965: 462). 25 Lewis (1986: 281–3). 26 White (2007). 27 Davidson (1980: 79). 28 Gibson (1979: 134). 29 Sartre (1960: 49) 30 Harris (2012). 31 For Harris’s appeal to the work of Benjamin Libet, see (2012: 8–9). 32 Ibid., 9. 33 Ibid., 5–17. 34 Harris suggests at the outset that the superiority of his understanding is based on an empirical claim about the understanding by “most people” of the meaning of “free will” (ibid., 16), but this goes over almost immediately into a sequence of rhetorical questions and seemingly unsupported assertions about what the expression means (ibid., 17–19). 35 Mackie (1977: 38–42). 36 The placement problem terminology is due to Price (2004). 37 Lewis (1986: 279-280). 38 To cite just the most obvious examples, Quine (1960: Chapter 2); Davidson (1984: 147); Lewis (1983: 113–14); Dennett (1978: 5–7). 39 Gibson (1979: 127–8, 134) Sartre (1960: 49). 40 Kuhn (1962: Chapter 10). 41 See, for example, Russell (1994). 42 Sartre (1958: 249 ff). 43 Ibid., 134, 131–53. 44 Ibid., Part 1, Chapter 1, 33–85; Cf.,120.

Sartre’s Activity-Based Model of Experience  63 References Davidson, D. Actions, Reasons, and Causes. In Davidson, D. (ed), Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1980a). ——— Freedom to Act. In Davidson, D. (ed), Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press, (1980b). ——— Belief and the Basis of Meaning. In Dennett, D. (ed), Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1984). Dennett, D. Intentional Systems. In Davidson, D. (ed), Brainstorms. Montgomery, Vermont: Bradford Books. (1978). Evans, G. The Varieties of Reference. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1982). Gibson, J. J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. London: Routledge. (1979). Grice, H. P. The Causal Theory of Perception. In Swartz, R. J., (ed.), Perceiving, Sensing, and Knowing, pp. 438–472. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. ([1961] 1965). Hammond, M. A., Howarth, J., & Keat, R. Understanding Phenomenology. ­Oxford: Blackwell. (1991). Harris, S. Free Will. New York: Free Press. (2012). Hume, D. Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ([1777] 1975). Kuhn, T. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1962). Lewis, C. I. An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation. La Salle, IL: The Open Court Publishing Company. (1946). Lewis, D. Radical Interpretation. In Lewis, D. (ed), Philosophical Papers, Volume I, pp. 108–118. New York: Oxford University Press. (1983). ——— Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision. In Lewis, D. (ed), Philosophical Papers, Volume II, pp. 273–286. New York: Oxford University Press. (1986). Mackie, J. L. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, UK: Penguin Books. (1977). Martin, M. G. F. On Being Alienated. In Gendler, T. S. and Hawthorne, J. (eds.), Perceptual Experience. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (2006). McCulloch, G. Using Sartre: An Analytical Introduction to Early Sartrean Themes. London: Routledge. (1994). Mill, J. S. An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. In J. M. Robinson (ed.), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ([1865] 1963–91). Pitcher, G. A Theory of Perception. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1970). Price, H. “Naturalism Without Representationalism.” In M. De Caro & D. Macarthur (eds.), Naturalism in Question, pp. 71–88. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (2004). Quine, W. V. O. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (1960). Russell, B. “Pragmatism.” In Russell, B. (ed), Philosophical Essays, pp. 79–111. New York: Routledge. (1994). Sartre, J.-P. Being and Nothingness. Trans. H. Barnes. London: Methuen. ([1943] 1958).

64  Stephen L. White ——— The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness. Trans. Williams, F. and Kirkpatrick, R. New York: Noonday Press. ([1936] 1960). Searle, J. (ed.), Expression and Meaning, pp. 1–27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1979). ——— A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts. In Searle, J. (ed), Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1983). Warnock, M. The Philosophy of Sartre. London: Hutchinson & Co. (1965). White, S. The Transcendental Significance of Phenomenology. Psyche, 13(1), (2007). available at http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/ Williams, M. Unnatural Doubts. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1996).

3 Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I” Sartre and Anscombe Valérie Aucouturier

3.1 Introduction: Sartre and Philosophy of Action Sartre is well-known for being an advocate of what we might call, coining Vincent Descombes’ phrase, “philosophies of consciousness.” A philosophy of consciousness is a post-Cartesian, post-Lockean philosophy, which takes (self-)consciousness to be a key feature of humanity and a point where to start philosophy from. Such philosophies of consciousness have been subject to intense debates and criticisms, questioning notably the idea of a subject that would be fully transparent to herself (thereby following Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud’s ideas of an unconscious). These criticisms gave birth to la querelle du sujet: is there such a thing as a fully conscious and responsible subject? If not, how are we to think of ourselves as human (and moral) agents? In what sense are we determined by psychological (e.g. unconscious) or sociological factors? Sartre himself took a critical stance in this dispute, claiming that the human’s condemnation of freedom forces us to be responsible agents; in spite of any kind of determination liable to influence our actions, these actions are bound to remain ours. However, according to Vincent Descombes, the most radical criticism of these philosophies de la conscience is not to be found in the literature related to the querelle du sujet, but rather in Ludwig Wittgenstein.1 Indeed, Wittgenstein is the one who genuinely allows us to trade a philosophy of the self (une philosophie du moi) for a philosophy of the first person (une philosophie de la première personne). A philosophy of the self is an egotist philosophy;2 it is written in the first person (at least until the “I” pronoun becomes a “Self” of whom we can talk in the third person). While a philosophy of the first person tries to shed light on the specificity of the first person: What could we not do if we did not have the use of the first-person pronoun? What would it imply regarding our form of life? As we shall see a philosophy of the first person simply undermines the possibility of a philosophy of consciousness, understood as a philosophy which speaks of oneself in the first person but somehow treats the self as an abstract third person.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-4

66  Valérie Aucouturier If Sartre really is a philosopher of consciousness in this sense, it may appear very surprising that contemporary philosophers, such as Béatrice Longuenesse or Richard Moran, have seen in the work of Sartre echoes of Wittgensteinian accounts of the first person (such as Elizabeth Anscombe’s or Gareth Evans’).3 Indeed, rather than systematically opposing the French and the Austrian philosopher, these authors try to show how combining their views may provide a more fruitful and phenomenologically accurate account of self-consciousness4 and self-knowledge.5 In this chapter, I would like to acknowledge the fruitfulness of such a confrontation, although ultimately I suspect that they do not save Sartre from the Wittgensteinian radical critique. To show so, I will first turn to what Sartre and the Wittgensteinian agree on; then, drawing on Elizabeth Anscombe’s paper on the first person, I will consider the idea that selfconsciousness is something manifested by the use of “I.” Finally, I will explore the extent to which the question “Who am I?” may be symptomatic of a kind of pathology of self-consciousness, such as Sartrian mauvaise foi. 3.2 A Common Ground First, let us see what these authors agree on and what motivates bringing them together. 3.2.1 (Self-)Consciousness

The most obvious place where we can find Sartre and the Wittgensteinian to be in agreement is philosophy of action.6 Indeed, both Anscombe and Sartre would agree with the idea that being a human agent requires what philosophers, since John Locke,7 call self-consciousness. To be a self-conscious agent is to be able to guide one’s own actions in a way that makes one responsible for them to a higher degree than any other kind of agent (such as an animal or even a physical cause). Self-consciousness is a philosophical concept we inherited from Locke’s response to René Descartes’ cogito.8 Indeed, one of the conclusions of Descartes’ Meditationes de prima philosophia leads to state the indubitable existence of a substantial self, the ego that thinks and feels, as a necessary epistemological ground for any further knowledge. Through his epistemological quest, Descartes made possible what was going to be called the birth of the modern subject – le sujet moderne. What was born was a new way of understanding the issue of the foundations of knowledge, mediated by the thinking self. Indeed if the empiricist tradition after Descartes, and Locke more particularly, rejected the idea of a substantial self or ego, philosophy has since been required to provide an account of this conscious self wherefrom the

Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”  67 possibility of knowledge emerges. And Locke was the one who invented the modern meaning of the word “consciousness,”9 which does not reduce to being conscious or not (e.g. of your environment) or again to any moral sense (of a guilty conscience) but which designates a property of certain beings: there are conscious beings (humans and animals) and non-conscious beings (plants, stones, etc.). But there are also self-conscious beings (human beings) distinguished from merely conscious beings (most non-human living beings). With Locke, self-consciousness became a property of those beings who are not only able to experience their environment but who can be reflectively conscious of that experience. With Locke, consciousness became the criteria of the identity of the person, understood notably as the moral person, the one responsible for her deeds. All the deeds and memories one can consciously attribute to oneself constitute the person’s identity, distinct from her physical identity as a living human animal. From modern times on, self-consciousness has thus constituted one essential difference between human (let us call them “Cartesian”) thinkers and other conscious beings. A new issue was born: who or what is this “self” that the self-conscious being is conscious of? This self that was to be the starting point of knowledge and philosophy in Kant and Husserl, and the whole phenomenological tradition. Sartre’s existential stance is, in turn, an attempt at a solution for refusing to reify or substantialize the self, while maintaining the specific reflexivity of human beings toward their own acting and thinking. With Sartre, the understanding of self-consciousness takes place in the context of a philosophy of action. Indeed one feature of the self-conscious human being is that she is responsible for whatever she does. Actually, being a self-conscious being makes you responsible for whatever you do. A self-conscious being’s actions, however neutral they may be, will not be assessed in the same way as another (not self-conscious) being’s actions. To put this modern idea in Aristotelian terms, an agent who is the intelligent cause of what happens can also be blamed or praised for what she did. Whereas something or some being which is simply the (non-intelligent) cause of what happens can hardly be held responsible in the same way. Self-consciousness is reflected in the human capacity to choose one’s actions – i.e. to not be simply determined by external or internal contingent causes (such as drives, instinct, or physical causes). Of course, human agents are subject to such causes (starting with gravity and nature’s needs, but also sociological and psychological determinations), but when they face such determinations, they essentially have indefinitely many opened ways of reacting to them. To quote Descombes, there are degrees of agency.10 This may be illustrated by an example borrowed from Anscombe:11 the door was shut – What made the door shut? – Did the wind do it? Was it a mechanism

68  Valérie Aucouturier attached to the door? Did John do it? Here not only do we make a difference between a physical cause, a causal mechanism, and John’s deed, but we also make a difference between John’s doing it involuntarily, doing it voluntarily but following an order, and doing it intentionally (e.g. in order to have a private conversation).12 However, as Anscombe remarks,13 the category of the voluntary is not enough to catch the specificity of human action. Because typical human action is goal-directed action – like John shutting the door in order to have a private conversation. Not that other non-human animals cannot act intentionally, but human agents are precisely supposed to be conscious of their own actions and goals in a way animals (and other kinds of agents) are not – a way making them responsible for what they do within the human community. To speak like Wittgenstein, it is part of their “form of life” that when humans act they are liable to be held responsible for what they do, however neutral their action may be.14 In other words, to make a long story short, self-consciousness is a philosophical concept which notably aims at grasping this special relation human beings have to their own actions,15 which makes them not only conscious of what they are doing (like any conscious non-human being could be – such as a bird building a nest) but also conscious of being the agent of what they are doing. Now the next question is: what does this consciousness of agency amount to? What does it mean to be self-conscious (in action)? This leads us directly to the second common feature in Sartre and Wittgenstein. 3.2.2 Non-thetic Consciousness

The second point of convergence between Sartre and the Wittgensteinian rests in the way they think of self-consciousness as being non-positional – i.e. not as a kind of (conscious) relation or epistemic relation to oneself. Indeed, Béatrice Longuenesse explicitly relates Sartre’s theory of selfconsciousness with Wittgenstein and Anscombe’s accounts of the uses of the first-person pronoun:16 both philosophers carefully distinguish selfconsciousness from self-knowledge.17 In other words, they insist that any epistemic relation to one’s (notably psychological) attitudes necessarily is a kind of alienated relation – i.e. a relation to oneself as a third person. Whereas the key characteristic of (self-)consciousness precisely is to be non-thetic, to not take oneself as an object of consideration, less so of epistemic consideration. Self-consciousness is not consciousness of oneself (or of one self). The subject, the “I” disappears from the structure of (self-) consciousness.18 Self-consciousness is not to be understood via the duality of an (active) subject and a (passive) object (of consciousness). It merely characterizes a modality of our relation to what we do, say, think, feel, etc.

Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”  69 (A modality, as we shall see, which is reflected in the uses of “I” and in the grammar of what Wittgenstein calls psychological verbs.) Indeed, Sartre distinguishes between consciousness of the world or consciousness of object, which is thetic or positional in that it instantiates a genuine relation (of a perceiving animal) to (an) object(s), and (self-)consciousness, which is consciousness of being conscious and accompanies all thetic consciousness (of an object). This (self-)consciousness is non-thetic in the sense that it is not consciousness of oneself as an object; it is thus “unreflective” (Sartre 1936: 38). In other words, there could not be thetic consciousness or object-consciousness, without self-consciousness, but self-consciousness itself does not have any object. That self-consciousness escapes the traditional epistemic structure of reflexivity – i.e. being consciousness of one or a self – is otherwise advocated by Anscombe in her 1975 paper “The First Person.” Drawing on Wittgenstein,19 she argues that self-consciousness is “something manifested by the use of ‘I,’” granted that “‘I’ is not a name everyone uses to speak of oneself.” Of course, this will require further specification. For now, we may note that self-consciousness is manifested by the use of “I” in the sense that anyone missing such a use would indeed miss self-consciousness. We shall soon see what this entails. Note further that Anscombe’s characterization implies that to be an I-user is not to name oneself in a special way. It is not a way to speak of someone (which happens to be me) parallel to ways of speaking of others. As we shall see, accounting for the uses of “I” – and thereby for self-consciousness – requires abstracting from the subject-object distinction, which is integral to the concept of reflexivity. In other words, according to Anscombe and Wittgenstein, to be an I-user is not to pick anyone as an object or a subject (of consciousness). Hence before considering how the Wittgensteinian understanding of self-consciousness challenges the Sartrian account, we must first acknowledge how close they are, principally in their refusal to treat self-consciousness as an epistemic subject-object relation or as any kind of reflective relation. 3.2.3 I Am Not a Cartesian Ego

In fact, – and this is the third place of encounter between Sartre and the Wittgensteinian – although an account of self-consciousness does not require any ontology of an object called a “self,” there is no question for both Sartre and Wittgenstein (and Anscombe) that human beings are sensing, acting and thinking animals. I am not a Cartesian ego, but I am indeed a human being. In agreement with Gareth Evans20 and John McDowell, one could say that to individuate a subject or agent is indeed nothing further than to individuate the “human being I am”21 understood as

70  Valérie Aucouturier a “third person,” “a substantial continuity in the objective world,” “the continuing life of a perceiving animal,”22 or “a bodily element in objective reality,” “a bodily presence in the world.”23 In other words, pace Locke, we count human (agents) in the same way we count animal agents.24 And to speak of oneself is indeed to speak of the perceivable human being that I am. “The person,” Anscombe says, “is a living human body.”25 This again requires further justification. Indeed, if self-consciousness neither is consciousness of a Cartesian ego nor of oneself as a bodily human being, all right, then in what sense can I say that I am a bodily human being or a third person? Do I simply relate to myself as any other object in the world? How do I become acquainted with my own body and doings and thoughts and feelings? Most of the difficulty of accounting for self-consciousness rests on the articulation between self-consciousness – understood as (the residue of) a Cartesian feature logically independent from bodily incarnation and experience – and the living, sensing body – understood as an empirical necessary (though not sufficient) condition for self-consciousness. In other words, I need to be a sensing animal to enjoy (self-)consciousness; however (self-)consciousness need not be incarnated since it does not mediate the relation between a subject and an object: it is both subjectless and objectless and cannot be understood in (the epistemological) terms of the subject/ object distinction. I will insist later on how this paradox can be dissolved by considering the issue logically rather than phenomenologically – i.e. by distinguishing between the factuality of our human form of life and the logical characterization of self-consciousness, or rather by insisting that self-consciousness is not in any sense a kind of phenomenologically accountable relation to oneself. Rather, it is a grammatical feature of first-person utterances which reflects some specificity of the language-speaking human form of life. But before doing so, we must turn again to the varieties of selfconsciousness in Sartre and to their relation to the uses of “I.” 3.3  (Self-)Knowledge and (Self-)Consciousness 3.3.1  Varieties of (Self-)Consciousness …

As commentators26 usually remind us, Sartre distinguishes at least two varieties of self-consciousness.27 The first one, described earlier, is non-thetic self-consciousness that accompanies any thetic consciousness, without itself being consciousness of an object. The so-called unity of this (self-) consciousness just is the unity of the object of thought or perception. However, for Sartre, this non-thetic, unreflective self-consciousness can itself become an object of consciousness. For instance, when I take a step aside

Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”  71 and consider my own action.28 As we will later see, a paradigmatic case of such reflective self-consciousness is the sudden acknowledgement of a conduct of mauvaise foi, where I suddenly realize that I am not being myself, that I am merely endorsing a role, playing to be myself. On the other hand, self-consciousness can take a third form which is that of an ordinary thetic (neither non-reflective nor reflective) consciousness of myself as an object or a third person in the world. For instance, when I consider myself on a photograph or when I take judgement of something I did (e.g. wrote) in the past.29 Here self-consciousness takes the traditional epistemic structure of any subject-object relation and becomes a kind of self-knowledge. This thetic self-consciousness must, in turn, be distinguished from what Sartre calls (self-) consciousness of the body for itself.30 Indeed, as suggested earlier, Sartre’s existentialism aims at going beyond any residue of Cartesian dualism by acknowledging the indefectible solidarity between thetic consciousness (which requires a sensing body) and the pre-reflective cogito (i.e. the inevitable presence of (self-)consciousness accompanying any conscious experience). In other words, having or rather being a body is not something that should be accounted for aside from being (self-)conscious. Actually (self-)consciousness is part of the human bodily form of life, although it is not itself (thetic) consciousness of oneself as incarnated in what Sartre calls a “body for others.”31 An authentic divorce from Cartesian dualism requires us to conceive of our own body as both part of our being (self-)conscious beings and as independent from the phenomenological characterization of (self-)consciousness. The body for itself – as opposed to the body for others – cannot, by definition, be an object of conscious experience. Rather, it is that through which experience occurs.32 As much right as the Sartrian account of the various faces of self-consciousness may appear, it faces, however, insurmountable difficulties, notably noted by Longuenesse.33 She rightly sees a “tension” in the idea that “there is consciousness (of) self which is not consciousness (of) the body”34 – i.e. a kind of purely Cartesian consciousness, (onto)logically independent from the body. Which is also precisely the kind of Cartesian residue Sartre wishes to abandon. Longuenesse, however, thinks she can save Sartre from Cartesian dualism by grounding his phenomenological insights on some grammatical remarks borrowed from Wittgenstein, Anscombe, and Evans. In the rest of this chapter, I would like to explore this hypothesis. 3.3.2  … and Uses of “I”

To do justice to the phenomenological accurateness of Sartre’s account of self-consciousness, Longuenesse relates it to Wittgenstein’s remarks on the uses of “I” from The Blue Book.35 Indeed, in his 1930s Cambridge

72  Valérie Aucouturier lectures, Wittgenstein famously drew a distinction – that he would later abandon – between the uses of “I” as subject and uses of “I” as object.36 Let us remind it briefly to the reader. Uses of “I” as object include the following examples: “My arm is broken,” “I have grown six inches,” “I have a bump on my forehead,” “The wind blows my hair about.” Uses of “I” as subject include the following ones: “I see so-and-so,” “I try to lift my arm,” “I think it will rain,” “I have toothache.” About the differences between these two uses of “I,” Wittgenstein says the following: The cases of the first category involve the recognition of a particular person, and there is in these cases the possibility of an error, or as I should rather put it: The possibility of an error has been provided for. (…) On the other hand, there is no question of recognising a person when I say I have a toothache. To ask “are you sure it’s you who have pain?” would be nonsensical. Now when in this case no error is possible, it is because the move which we might be inclined to think of as an error, a “bad move”, is no move of the game at all.37 The key difference between the two uses is thus that in the use as object, “the possibility of an error has been provided for,” whereas in the use as subject, “no error is possible.” For instance, let us say I am involved in an accident and feel a pain in my arm: I could mistakenly think that my arm is broken when it is actually someone else’s broken arm I am looking at.38 However, I could not mistakenly think I am in pain when I am not. Many philosophers wrongly interpreted this passage in terms of “immunity of error through misidentification,”39 saying that uses of “I” as object are not immune to misidentification whereas uses as subject are. In other words, in uses of “I” as object, there would be a possibility of misidentifying the subject to whom the predicate applies, whereas in uses as subject no such misidentification would be possible. Longuenesse comments on this passage and distinguishes two antagonist inheritances of Wittgenstein in Evans and Anscombe.40 To put it in a nutshell, Evans (soon followed by John McDowell) would be generalizing the structure of uses of “I” as object to all uses (in particular to uses as subject), by saying that although no identification takes place first personally in uses as subject, the concept of identification still is relevant to characterize these uses insofar as we can say that any predicate (even so-called psychological or Cartesian predicates) is true of “I” if it is true of the person who utters the sentence. And this is so independent of the speaker’s (epistemological or phenomenological) grounds for saying so. In other words, first-personal statements as subject are immune to error through misidentification in the sense that they necessarily identify the

Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”  73 right subject of whom the attribute is predicated, independently of the (psychological) fact that no act of identification is being made by the speaker who utters the sentence. In addition, this subject that first-person sentences refer to need not be a metaphysical subject, but only the living human being we identify through various public features (see the earlier discussion). On the other hand, according to Longuenesse, Anscombe wrongly generalizes (as Wittgenstein would in his later work) the features of uses of “I” as subject to any use of “I” by saying that first-person sentences never – i.e. not even in uses as object – identify any subject or are “subjectless” – just like impersonal sentences (such as, “It is raining”)41 – and that “I” never is a referring expression or again that “I am E.A.” is not an identity proposition. Longuenesse then argues that we need to separate the wheat from the chaff in both Evans and Anscombe in order to shed light on Sartre’s accurate phenomenological insights. According to her, Anscombe rightly insists on the specificity of the use of “I” by contrast with any proper name: firstperson sentences do not predicate a subject in the same fashion as thirdperson sentences do because of what Evans calls “knowledge from the inside,” Sartre “non-thetic (self-) consciousness,” and Anscombe “agentor-patient conception” (or “unmediated conceptions”42 or again “self-consciousness”). In other words, Anscombe would be right in claiming that I do not predicate things about myself in the same way or on the same grounds as I predicate things about others, even when those predicates are not Cartesian or psychological. In turn, Evans would be right in claiming that this does not prevent first-person sentences to refer to whoever – i.e. the human being or body – is uttering them (a reference which is guaranteed in uses of “I” as subject). Now, Sartre’s struggle to account for (self-)consciousness of the body for itself would simply be symptomatic of the specificity of uses of “I.” Indeed, a proper account of these uses would allow us to see not only the specificity (immunity of error through misidentification (IEM) or guaranteed reference) of uses of “I” as subject, but also how this specificity contaminates other uses (as object) so that I relate, for example, to my own deeds in a different way from to other people’s deeds. 3.4 Immunity We may indeed concede that Sartre’s phenomenological insights are somewhat grounded on the specificity of the uses of the first-person pronoun. And we may also concede, as we already have, that if the philosophical concept of self-consciousness captures some truth about the human condition and if however there is no metaphysical self or subject attached to this

74  Valérie Aucouturier concept, but only flesh and blood human beings, then we need to account for these two dimensions and their articulation (as Sartre struggles to do). However, I do not think that Longuenesse’s reading of Wittgenstein and Anscombe genuinely does justice to their grammatical or logical point. In what follows, I would like to provide a defence – against Sartre and Longuenesse – of the Wittgensteinian point and of how it undermines Sartre’s account of (especially reflective) self-consciousness. To do so, I will need to turn briefly to the idea of “IEM” and then to the philosophy of action. Indeed, following Anscombe43 and Descombes44 I wish to argue that the concept of immunity (IEM) simply is misapplied in the case of first-person utterances and that the kind of error that, according to Wittgenstein, “has been provided for” in the use of “I” as object and that is “impossible” in the use as subject because it cannot be understood in terms of immunity (or not) to error through misidentification. As we shall see, the relevant question to address this issue of so-called immunity or guaranteed reference is not whether misidentification is possible or not but whether the very concept of identification applies. Now, it happens that, with uses of “I.” the question “Who?,” in the sense of identity – i.e. of identifying the person (the “bodily living with a certain sort of life”45), or the “Self” or “subject” – does not arise because it is not applicable or, to quote Wittgenstein, it is “no move of the game at all.”46 This is probably the most badly understood – and most crucial – remark of Anscombe’s paper on the first person. Indeed, the certainty attached to first-personal authority in Cartesian examples or so-called uses of “I” as subject – and, as we shall soon see to any use of “I” – does not depend on a psychological feature of consciousness according to which a mistake is “highly improbable” or even impossible, but it depends on the “grammatical fact that such a mistake is literally inconceivable.”47 The use of “I” does not leave open the possibility for such questions as, “Are you sure you are in pain?” “How do you know?” “Are you sure it is your sister you’re writing a letter to, isn’t it the plumber?” In Anscombe’s words, If you are a speaker who says “I”, you do not find out what is saying “I”. (…) If that were in question, you could doubt whether anything was saying “I”.48 The point is not that in the first person singular, contrary to any other second- or third-personal cases, you do not need to look and see to decide who is speaking. The point is that the question of deciding who is speaking is irrelevant to the uses of “I.” But of course, we do not want to say that anyone wondering who is speaking when someone speaks in the first

Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”  75 person is irrelevant. So in what sense is it irrelevant? It is irrelevant in the sense that I-uses or I-utterances do not carry with them any identification principle that would allow us to identify (and re-identify) their subject – or again, that would make the question “who?” relevant. To genuinely understand this observation, which is the key to understanding the specificity of self-consciousness as “something manifested by the use of ‘I,’” we need to turn to the kind of error which is possible in the use as object and impossible in the use as subject. Then we will consider a third use – that I shall call “the use as agent” – which is (with the use as object) Anscombe’s preferred use (and I will explain why). The consideration of these three uses will shed light on Sartre’s phenomenological insights and on Evans’ and Longuenesse’s misreading of the Wittgensteinian point. 3.5  Three Uses of “I” First, let us consider the uses of “I” as object. “I broke my arm.” I may, Wittgenstein claims,49 mistake someone else’s arm to be mine. Such a mistake involves, says Wittgenstein, “the recognition of a particular person” – i.e. a living human body. But is it a misattribution – i.e. does it involve attributing or misattributing (or predicating) some property to a person? In fact, there is no question here of “taking the wrong object to be the one one means by ‘I’”: “The bishop may take the lady’s knee for his, but could he take the lady herself to be himself?”50 Similarly, I could take someone else’s broken arm to be mine but not because I took myself to be that other person. “The suggestion of getting the object right collapses into absurdity when we work it out and try to describe how getting hold of the wrong object may be excluded.”51 Now what is interesting here is the distinction between two kinds of mistakes: one the possibility of which has been provided for and one which, as we shall see, is simply logically excluded. The difference between the two kinds of error shows that self-attribution of any corrigible property (from the colour of my eyes to my physical condition) does not work the same way as any other kind of attribution. In any other kind of attribution, say “Manon has a bump on her forehead,” I do two things: I identify a person and I attribute a property to this person. Therefore I can make two kinds of mistakes: I can wrongly think that the person I am talking about (who has a bump on his forehead) is Manon when in fact it is someone else or I can mistakenly think Manon has a bump on her forehead (when in fact it is, say, an optical impression), and of course I can do both mistakes simultaneously: I can mistakenly think someone I wrongly take to be Manon to have a bump on her forehead. But when I say “I have a bump on my forehead” or “I broke my arm” or “I am Napoleon” (or “My name is Napoleon”), I can mistakenly say so, because I have

76  Valérie Aucouturier no bump, I did not break my arm, or I am (indeed) not Napoleon. But the mistake is in the object. I cannot be misidentifying the person (me) I am talking about. But let us say I look at someone, on a group photograph that has just been taken, who I mistakenly think is me and who has a bump on her forehead, and say, “I have a bump on my forehead.” Here I would be wrong because it is not me who has a bump on my forehead. However, the misidentification does not concern my use of “I”: I did not mistakenly use “I” to refer to another person instead of me, I did not fail to speak about myself, I just said something wrong about me (that I am on this photograph, etc.). Of course, Evans is right, it is obviously a person (me) I am talking about. And anyone knowing who is speaking could say, “Valérie (mistakenly thinks she) broke her arm,” or “She thinks she is Napoleon!” And it is indeed true that I broke my arm only if it is me (a certain person or human being) whose arm is broken. Evans is right in saying that my firstpersonal statement is grounds for someone else to say things about me – and here, more specifically about things I think, know, or endorse about me.52 However, they do not predicate anything of an “I,” which could be treated as a referring expression. Their mere syntactic form is no reason enough to treat I-sentences as simple “predicative connections” – i.e. as the “combination of a proper name with other signs that result in an independent semantic unit which can be true or false.”53 Otherwise, why not think that “it is raining” contains a referring expression, “it,” of which it is predicated that it “is raining”?54 Unfortunately, regarding first-person sentences, the syntactic scheme provided by the predicative connection “does not account for all the connexions that give meaning to the elements of the proposition.”55 As it happens, first-person sentences “do not involve the connection of what is understood by a predicate with a distinctly conceived subject.”56 For they do not on their own provide any identification principle – i.e. any means to individuate a subject of predication. They are “subjectless” in Anscombe’s sense. Of course, they do have a grammatical subject (the “I” pronoun), but “they do not, by themselves, say who they are talking about. They surely talk about someone, but do not say whom.”57 This is the case when you hear someone speak in the first person or read a text written in the first person but do not know who is speaking or who wrote the text. First-personal sentences “do not say who is the subject they are talking about. But their being in the first-person signals to their addressee how to find it out.”58 So, if first-person sentences do not provide any identification principle, they cannot either be immune to error through misidentification or subject

Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”  77 to guaranteed reference. Because such an immunity or guarantee would require that the same object is rightly identified each and every time one uses the “I” pronoun, which again would require a principle of individuation.59 It is not that I always identify the right person when I say “I.” Actually, I do not make any person-identification. It is not that the “Who?” question always gets the right answer, but the “Who?” question simply does not arise; it is irrelevant. This is the logical or grammatical (in Wittgenstein’s sense) point. In other words, the question, “Who am I – rightly or wrongly – attributing this (psychological or other) property to?” is irrelevant to my using the first-person pronoun. Quoting Anscombe again: Getting hold of the wrong object is excluded, and that makes us think that getting hold of the right object is guaranteed. But the reason is that there is no getting hold of an object at all.60 To talk about oneself in the first person is indeed to talk about a person (a living human being). But it is not a way of identifying anyone or predicating anything from anyone. A first-person sentence can only lead to predication in the context of an utterance, which allows us to relate the “I” to the speaker (or any character she is playing, say in a theatre play or a film). But nothing is predicated of “I” itself, as if “I” by itself could on its own provide an identification principle, just like a proper name does.61 To those62 who still wish to argue that the “Who?” question can nonetheless be raised and find an answer, not from the point of view of the speaker using the sentence but of its hearer (or reader), we shall say: of course we can, but to answer this question, we need to relate the first-person pronoun to a name or description which in turn will provide an individuating principle, even if only “the speaker of this utterance.” However, to say that “I” itself does not provide such a principle is to say that not even “the speaker of this utterance” will do,63 for “I” may be used in indirect speech or, for example, in a play. Similarly “you” does not itself provide an individuating principle. It needs to be understood in a dialogical context. Of course, uses of “I” require some principle of individuation of the human person who uses it, but this work of identification is not done by the pronoun itself. This is the reason why there cannot be any misidentification: because there is no identification at all. And “I am V.A.” is not an identity proposition at all. Therefore self-consciousness cannot be understood in terms of guaranteed reference or identification. For all these reasons, it was clumsy of Wittgenstein to speak about the “recognition of a particular person” in the use of “I” as object. Because it may lead to the thought that such recognition is a prior requirement of self-attribution of any predicate. Whereas the recognition in question only

78  Valérie Aucouturier imports for the second and not the first kind of mistake: self-misattribution is not a misidentification of oneself. At best, it can be a misidentification of a person in a photograph. You may take a person in a picture to be you, but you do not take yourself to be another person. And if you do so, you are not misapplying “I” to someone else or misusing “I” for someone else. You are not failing to talk about yourself but simply saying wrong things about yourself. Actually this “recognition of a particular person,” when it is at play in uses as object, simply points to the fact that these statements are made on the ground of the observation of someone (who I, at least, take to be me) – some person in Anscombe’s sense of a living human body – which also explains why these cases are liable to error. They do not indicate doubt about whether I am the speaker of whatever I am saying.64 So, to translate these remarks into Sartrian terms, there is indeed at least one way of taking oneself as an object of consciousness or knowledge (whatever we want to call it), by considering one’s actions and characteristics from a third-person point of view. But this way of observing and talking about oneself does not undermine self-consciousness understood as the capacity to talk about oneself using the “I” pronoun. But getting to know oneself in such a way is indeed very peculiar. Surely, it is not what Sartre had in mind when talking about the self-consciousness of the body for itself or about bad faith. To understand these phenomena, we need to look at other uses of “I.” So far, so good. We may now turn more briefly to the uses of “I” as subject such as “I have a headache” or “I am thinking about thinking.” These “Cartesianly preferred” examples65 retained Wittgenstein’s attention because they lead directly to the temptation and danger of solipsism – i.e. of thinking that the only thing that exists for sure is what I feel, think, believe, etc., while the existence of an outside world can be at least doubted. We will not address this issue here, but we can see how this philosophical temptation is grounded on the grammar of certain first-personal sentences that match what Wittgenstein called, in The Blue Book, the use of “I” as subject. By contrast with the use as object, in these uses, there is, Wittgenstein says, “no question of recognising a person” and “no error is possible” in the sense that the very idea of being wrong is not just impossible but irrelevant (see the previous discussion). To put this in terms of the two mistakes I distinguished earlier, not only is it irrelevant or non-sensical (and not merely impossible) for me to ask who says (or is) “I” (just like in the use as object or any use of “I”), but, while it could make sense for me to doubt that it is my arm which is broken or for the bishop to take the lady’s knee for his, such a kind of mistake would be completely irrelevant to question my having a headache. Not only can I not ask, “Is it me who is having a headache?” but

Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”  79 neither can I ask, “Am I really having a headache?” This is so, Wittgenstein insists because I do not make these statements on the basis of (corrigible) observation (e.g. of a particular body). It is not as if I had access to some (incorrigible) data or experience that nobody else but me could have access to. It is the very epistemic concept of an “access” or of an object of observation that is misapplied here. I cannot be wrong about my having a headache, not on the ground that it so happens that I am never wrong, but because the very idea of being wrong does not make sense here.66 So when, in the use as object, the possibility of error was on the side of the object and the concept of error or misidentification was irrelevant to “I” itself. Here again, the inapplicability of the concept of error Wittgenstein points to does not suggest immunity to error through misidentification but simply has nothing to do with any identification at all. This revised analysis of Wittgenstein’s Blue Book distinction based on Anscombe’s arguments explains why Wittgenstein had to abandon the distinction. Not that it is irrelevant to distinguish the two cases, but it was clumsy of him to articulate them in terms of “recognition of a person”: an idea which could easily be misunderstood in terms of guaranteed or unwarranted reference or identification, when the whole point was to show the specificity of I-sentences as regards to their object. They are subjectless but not objectless, in that they say something about someone but do not say whom.67 Anscombe calls these use-as-subject examples “Cartesianly preferred” because they are “far removed in their descriptions from the descriptions of the proceedings, etc., of a person in which they might be verified.”68 In other words, they cannot be brought to discussion if we want to decide whether “I” identifies a person or not because what they say about the speaker is all authoritative: the very idea of verifying whether someone really has a headache is misplaced. This is also the reason why they may mislead us to think of them in terms of IEM if we are trapped in the reflective scheme of a subject/object distinction, which suggests that if I cannot fail to recognize my pain, it is because I cannot misattribute this pain to me. But Wittgenstein’s whole point is to say that I am not attributing anything to anyone in saying I am in pain. Not only am I not (necessarily unmistakably) identifying someone who would be in pain,69 but neither am I (necessarily unmistakably) recognizing this pain. To treat I-sentences this way would be to treat them like a special sort of third-personal sentences and to simply ignore their specificity. So, these “Cartesianly preferred” examples are indeed the ones where the specificity of the first-person is most appreciable,70 but their epistemic value is all authoritative: they can be questioned on moral grounds (are they sincere or not?) but hardly verified through direct acquaintance.71

80  Valérie Aucouturier Surely, Wittgenstein and Anscombe’s understanding of these “Cartesianly preferred examples” is the one that gets closest to Sartre’s understanding of non-thetic (self-)consciousness, where he rightly saw that the subject-object distinction was completely irrelevant (and not just strangely in play). But the most relevant examples to our understanding of Sartre’s difficulty are, what we may coin Anscombianly preferred examples, which illustrate a third use of “I” I will call “uses of ‘I’ as agent”: The reason why I take only thoughts of actions, postures, movements and intended actions is that only those thoughts both are unmediated, non-observational, and also descriptions (e.g. “standing”) which are directly verifiable or falsifiable about the person of E.A. Anyone, including myself, can look and see whether that person is standing.72 To do full justice to the characterization of this third use would require turning to what Anscombe calls “practical knowledge,”73 which is nonobservational knowledge of one’s own intentional actions. I will say a bit more later in this discussion. For now, what is particularly interesting in these Anscombianly preferred examples is that they combine features of both the uses of “I” as object and as subject. On the one hand, contrary to the use as object and just like the use as subject, there is “no question of recognising a person”: If I say “I am standing,” I usually do not say it on the ground of any self-observation.74 I do not need to pause and look at myself to say straightaway that I am standing. Whereas to say whether someone else is standing, I first need to look and see whether this is the case. Of course, we can always imagine a situation in which I say I am standing on the grounds of observation (e.g. if I see myself in a photograph), but that would then be an instance of the use of “I” as object. I will say more about this later on. On the other hand, contrary to the use as subject and just like the use as object, there is a possibility of error: If I say “I am standing” not on the ground of observation, my claim can still be falsified or verified by myself or anyone else (which is not the case if I say I am in pain): “Anyone, including myself, can look and see whether that person is standing.” Now remember that the idea of the “recognition of a particular person” was a clumsy idea because it makes us think we are turning to the subject as an object of recognition or observation, when in fact we are not considering who is in question75 but what this person is doing (e.g. standing). The interesting feature is that, contrary to the use as object, the “What?” (e.g. in “What are you doing?”) question, though corrigible, is not settled on the ground of observation.

Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”  81 3.6  Who Am I? Alienation and Authenticity Now, Longuenesse blames Anscombe for focussing on these Anscombianly preferred examples and for neglecting the Cartesianly preferred ones, which would lead her to ignore cases where (self-)consciousness is not nonthetic consciousness (of) the body and therefore to ignore the specificity of Sartre’s incorrigible non-thetic non-reflective (self-)consciousness and the features it shares with (self-)consciousness of the body for itself. However, first, we saw that these examples actually are the most difficult ones, precisely because they are not plain uses as object but share with uses as subject what Anscombe calls “unmediated access” (i.e. they are not made on the grounds of any kind of observation). Moreover, the reason why Anscombe focuses on these examples is precisely because they are the most likely to trap us into treating I-sentences parallel to third-person sentences and ignoring their specificity,76 which is a trap in which Longuenesse herself ends up falling in. Indeed, while she rightly claims there is a “striking parallel between Anscombe’s claim that agent-or-patient consciousness is without a subject and Sartre’s claim that, in its pre-reflective use, ‘I’ is an empty concept,” she then adds, In both cases, there is no object I am conscious of. But of course it does not mean that there is no entity “I” refers to. What the comparison with Sartre reveals is that Anscombe confuses consciousness (and, therefore, mode of presentation), with reference. Moreover, what Anscombe does not consider at all is the move from pre-reflective self-consciousness, to reflective (in Sartre’s sense) self-consciousness, to consciousness of oneself as a full-fledged object, which can also be expressed by a use of “I”. Such a statement expresses a consciousness of myself as an object (who am I in the world?). Moreover, I can misidentify that object.77 In other words, while Sartre rightly acknowledges the varieties of self-consciousness (non-reflective, reflective, non-thetic, thetic) that are reflected in uses of “I,” Anscombe would tend to reduce self-consciousness to its (central) non-reflective and non-thetic dimension, thereby ignoring cases of self-“objectification” (which are actually key to the understanding of Sartre’s mauvaise foi). Anscombe’s mistake would rest on her incapacity to distinguish self-consciousness (a “mode of presentation”) from reference (a logical feature). Longuenesse seems to think that Anscombe is phenomenologically right but logically wrong in her account of the first person. However, this is precisely Anscombe’s (and Wittgenstein’s) point that such a distinction between the logical and the phenomenological is misleading. Of course, we can make sense of the idea of a mode of presentation, as

82  Valérie Aucouturier being the kind of experience we have of, say, being ourselves. But the point is that the philosophical question about what this mode of presentation amounts to cannot be answered independently from the consideration of the grammatical structure of first-person uses. Of course, we can choose to deal with first-personal sentences as simple predicative sentences (just like third-personal sentences), but as we saw, this only leads to philosophical confusion. Because we are left with a grammatical subject – the “I” pronoun – supposedly referring to an entity for which we have no identification principle (see the earlier discussion). It is the logician’s concept of a reference which trapped us in the first place into treating “I” as the name of a person for whom an unfindable identity principle needed to be searched for. A trap in which neither Sartre nor Anscombe wants to fall in. We saw that the predicative analysis of first-person sentences simply misses the specificity of I-uses and therefore of self-consciousness, to the extent that self-consciousness is something manifested by the use of “I.” But Longuenesse is right in stating that the hard – and I shall say misleading – cases are those where I consider myself “as a full-fledged object.” To what extent then is it still self-consciousness? To what extent is this case different from considering any other object of consciousness than myself? Again here, Sartre acknowledges, it would be misleading to simply analyse these cases through the traditional subject-object distinction. And again, to do well, we would have to consider the variety of these cases: there is an important difference between measuring my own size and considering the kind of person I am or I take to be. In my brief analysis of the use of “I” as object, I suggested that cases such as measuring one’s size or (mis)recognizing oneself in a photograph are somehow comparable to any instance of observational knowledge or consciousness. The difference being on the side of the subject: there is no question about who I might be talking about (me), but the possibility of error is all on the side of the object. Now the real tension concerning Sartre’s account of self-consciousness rests in the existential question, “Who am I in the world?” To quote Longuenesse again: “Such a statement expresses a consciousness of myself as an object (who am I in the world?). Moreover, I can misidentify that object.” But can I? We saw precisely that the specificity of so-called selfconsciousness is that misidentification is irrelevant, not in play (and not just impossible). The “Who?” question does not apply, at least to the extent that it is a question about the identity of the speaker. The need to ask who is uttering my own words or doing my own deeds would indeed be a very strange case of a simple lack of self-consciousness.78 However, as Descombes notes, there is a relevant “Who am I?” question understood not as a question about my logical identity but about the kind of person I am or take myself to be – i.e. a question about my way of acting

Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”  83 and behaving and looking at things.79 And it is simply wrong to conflate this question with a question of identification of the person that I am. This question is not an authentic “Who?” question – Sartre’s coffee waiter is not really questioning his own identity with himself; but it is an ethical question about the kind of person he wants to be and the kind of life he wants to live. In his book Le parler de soi, Descombes clarifies this distinction between the existential question, “Who am I?” and the practical question, “What shall I do?” One of the issues raised by Descombes in this book is whether the existential question genuinely applies to an analysis of self-consciousness in action or whether it is somehow a separate question. In other words, can self-consciousness be understood (and if so questioned), as Sartre suggests, as a reflective stance towards oneself as an agent? In other words, is wondering what I should do at the same time considering who is doing it. Is to acknowledge one’s mauvaise foi a way of raising the question, “Who am I in the world?” Is it really a symptom of the unstable structure of self-consciousness? In her paper on practical inference, Anscombe imagines a situation where it would make sense to ask who is the author of my own action.80 But it would have to be a very peculiar situation where my action is only instrumental toward someone else’s goal. Here is Anscombe’s example: [S]uppose I say to you: I want to get this message to N by four o’clock. Unless you take it to him, I shan’t get it to him by four o’clock. And suppose I then hand you the message with nothing more said, whereupon you carry it to N. (Such is our relationship.) So you act on my grounds. I state the premises (…); you draw the conclusion. Now if it were “theoretical” reasoning, i.e. reasoning to the truth of a conclusion, you might “draw the conclusion” without believing it. I make assertions, you produce a statement that is implied by them. If you did believe what I said, and are clear about the implication, very likely you will believe the conclusion. But you may not have believed me. Nonetheless, you can still produce the conclusion precisely as a conclusion from the premises without asserting it and without believing it. How is it with action? The way we are looking at the matter, drawing the conclusion in a practical sense is acting. Then you act in execution of my will. But what are you after yourself? You may be after promoting my objectives. (…) But may it not be that you have no objective of your own here? That you are functioning as an instrument? Asked for the grounds of your action, you point to my grounds, as a man may point to his orders. You are then speaking as one who had a certain role, but whose own objectives do not yet come into the picture.

84  Valérie Aucouturier (…) Then you act, but perhaps woodenly or even as it were ironically. Surely slaves and other subordinates must often act so.81 The interest of Anscombe’s ironical subordinate for the purpose of the present discussion is that it provides an extreme case of acting qua or as the instrument of someone else’s action. Now Anscombe’s analysis of the case shows that “acting as” is different from acting out of akrasia or bad faith. It is a genuine case of alienation. Contrary to bad faith, where one endorses the goals of, say, the waiter; contrary to akrasia, where one aims at and deliberates towards the desired goal however contrary to one’s resolutions; the ironical subordinate does not endorse the goals of the commander, he genuinely is a mere instrument. There, the question may raise: who is acting? Is it the commander or the subordinate? However, in the case of bad faith or akrasia, the question of who is acting does not raise: in order to raise the existential question, the question of sincerity, we must already have decided who is acting. So the question of whether someone acts out of sincerity or bad faith does not raise the question who is performing the action but how the action is performed. Not only is the unity of the self not in question, but self-consciousness is not in question either. What is in question is what Descombes calls “degrees of agency.” Whether I am acting sincerely or in accordance with my resolutions is not a question of my identity as an agent. It is a question about the extent to which my action is voluntary or involuntary, about the extent to which I am acting under some degree of constraint or not. As long as I am not an instrument toward someone else’s action or playing a role – for example, as an actor fulfilling the goals of its characters – I am acting on my behalf. The question “Who am I?” does not raise, but we may wonder to what extent my action is being constrained or not. Time to conclude. As much close as Anscombe and Sartre’s considerations about self-consciousness and self-knowledge may be, their grounds for disagreement are more than anecdotal. And Sartre’s difficulties are actually symptomatic of a reluctance to fully abandon the subject-object distinction when dealing with self-consciousness. This reluctance especially appears when considering “pathologies” of agency, where the agent is not “fully herself” or seems to act under some kind of constraint. Surely Sartre could not have missed the fact that to be constrained in one’s actions is not necessarily to act under the pressure of some uncontrollable psychological mechanism. Constraint does not undermine self-consciousness. To understand how I can come to consider my own actions as inauthentic or as conducts of mauvaise foi, no need to re-introduce by the window the subject-object reflexivity structure that we got out by the door. Mauvaise foi or self-examination82 do not undermine self-consciousness or one’s integrity as an agent. They raise circumstantial questions about the way an

Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”  85 action is performed. The problem with Sartre’s account of reflective selfconsciousness is that it conflates this circumstantial question (“What shall I do?,” “How shall I do it?,” etc.) with an identity question (“Who am I?,” “Who is performing my action?”). Notes 1 See Descombes and Larmore (2009). 2 See Descombes (2014: 17 sq). 3 Longuenesse (2017); Moran (2001). 4 (Longuenesse 2017: 44 sq). 5 Moran (2001: 77 sq). 6 See Webb (2016). 7 Locke (1690: II, xxviii). 8 Balibar (1998). 9 Ibid. 10 Descombes (2004: 90). 11 Anscombe (1983: 89). 12 Note that it is only of a conscious (but not necessarily self-conscious) agent that we can say she did something involuntarily. We do not say the wind closed the door involuntarily. 13 Anscombe (1965: 71). 14 For instance, walking on the flowers in a field can be a perfectly morally neutral action, but doing it in a public garden is wrong or at least prohibited. However, if an animal, say a lion, walks on the flowers in the public garden, it will not be held similarly responsible for having done something it should not have done. 15 Actually not only to their actions but also to their psychological and moral attitudes, their thoughts, beliefs, speech, desires, etc. 16 Longuenesse (2008, 2017: Chapter 3). 17 See Sartre (1942). 18 Sartre (1936: 86–7). 19 Wittgenstein (1953: §§404–10). 20 (1982). 21 (McDowell 1996: 179). 22 Ibid., 102. 23 Ibid., 103. 24 See Locke (1690, II, xxvii). 25 Anscombe (1975: 33). 26 See e.g. Mouillie (2000: 28 sq or B). Longuenesse (2017: 45). 27 Sartre (1943: 20). 28 (1943: 82). 29 Of course, there is no question of denying the phenomenological relevance of such experiences as bad faith or inauthenticity. But, in the rest of this chapter, I would like to question Sartre’s way of picturing and accounting for such experiences. 30 Sartre (1943: 353). 31 Ibid., 388. 32 On this idea, see also Merleau-Ponty (1944: ch. I, sect. 1–3). 33 Longuenesse (2017: 54–9). 34 Ibid., 58. 35 Wittgenstein (1958).

86  Valérie Aucouturier 6 Wittgenstein (1958: 66–7). 3 37 Ibid., 67. 38 Ibid. 39 See, for example, Shoemaker (1968). 40 Evans (1982); Anscombe (1975). 41 Following Descombes (2014: 70), we will soon argue that “subjectless” here does not mean “impersonal” and that this parallel is wrong. 42 Anscombe (1975: 34). 43 Anscombe (1975: 32). 44 Descombes (2014: 135). 45 Anscombe (1975: 29). 46 Wittgenstein (1958: 67). 47 Descombes and Larmore (2009: 160). 48 Anscombe (1975: 29). 49 See also Anscombe (1975: 22). 50 Anscombe (1975: 30); See Descombes’ comment (2014: 135). 51 Anscombe (1975: 31). 52 For, actually, to know whether someone has a bump on her forehead, there is no need to ask them, one can just look and see 53 Descombes (2014: 110); Anscombe (1967: 94). 54 Anscombe (1975: 30). 55 (Descombes 2014: 111). 56 Anscombe (1975: 36), my emphasis. 57 Descombes (2014: 76). 58 Ibid., 77, my emphasis. 59 Anscombe (1975: 27). 60 Ibid., 32, my emphasis. 61 Arguably, this is true of any other pronouns too, especially “you” (for the third-person pronoun normally appears in a context where the person who is spoken about has already been explicitly designated). But this is another story. 62 Like Evans. 63 (Anscombe et al. 1975: 32). 64 This is not to deny that the existential question “Who am I?” is irrelevant. But as we shall see, this is a different question from the one not at play here, which concerns the use of “I” and simply points to the irrelevance of the “Who?” question to characterise this use. 65 Anscombe (1975: 35). 66 For further discussions about this point, see the vast literature on Wittgenstein, private language, and private experience and Wittgenstein (1968). 67 Note that, as Wittgenstein insists, these uses as subject are restricted to the singular indicative present. As soon as these sentences are in a past tense, they lose their specific properties. For example, “I was being stubborn.” 68 Anscombe (1975: 35). 69 Actually, Wittgenstein even allows for the logical possibility of feeling someone else’s pain to insist on the contingency of the fact that my pain is in my body (see Wittgenstein 1958). 70 See, for example, Wittgenstein’s account of Moore’s paradox in Philosophical investigations, II xi and McGinn’s (2011) luminous comment on it. 71 Again, not because their barer would be the only one acquainted or having a certain experience, but because they are not objects of experience in this sense. 72 Anscombe (1975: 35), my emphasis.

Self-Consciousness and Uses of “I”  87 3 Anscombe (1963: 56). 7 74 In the sense, for example, I need to appeal to self-observation to say I have a bump on my forehead. 75 We saw that although I-sentences talk about someone this question is irrelevant to understand their uses. 76 A trap which is less easily ignored in Cartesianly preferred example (although they may lead to another trap – namely, solipsism), and in which we are sure to fall if we merely concentrate on uses as object. In Intention, Anscombe speaks about our “incorrigibly contemplative conception of knowledge” (1963: 57), which it at the source of our tendency to conceive all kind of knowledge as a relation of a subject to an object she contemplates. 77 Longuenesse (2017: 69–70, n. 49). 78 Consider Anscombe’s example (borrowed from William James) in (1975: 36). 79 Descombes (2014: 136). 80 Anscombe (1974). 81 Anscombe (1974: 136–7). 82 See Descombes’ analysis on egotism and Stendhal’s self-examination in (2014: 41).

References Anscombe, Elizabeth. Intention. 2nd ed., Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (1963). ——— Thought and Action in Aristotle. What Is Practical Truth? In G.E.M. Anscombe (ed.), From Parmenides to Wittgenstein, pp. 66–77. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (1981a [1965]). ——— On the Grammar of ‘Enjoy.’ In G.E.M. Anscombe (ed.), Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, pp. 120–132. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (1967). ——— Practical Inference. In M. Geach, and L. Gormally (eds.), Human Life, Action and Ethics, pp. 109–147. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academics (2005a [1974]). ——— The First Person. In G.E.M. Anscombe (ed.), Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, pp. 21–36. Oxford: Basil Blackwell (1981b [1975]). ——— The Causation of Action. In M. Geach, and L. Gormally (eds.), Human Life, Action and Ethics, pp. 89–108. Exeter, UK: Imprint Academics. (2005 [1983]). Balibar, E. Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness. New York & London: Verso. (2013 [1998]). Descombes, V. Le parler de soi. Paris: Gallimard. (2014). ——— Le complément de sujet. Paris: Gallimard. (2004). Descombes, V. & Larmore, C. Dernières nouvelles du moi. Paris: PUF. (2009). Evans, G. Varieties of Reference. New York: Oxford University Press. (2002 [1982]). Locke, J. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, P.H. Nidditch (ed.) Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1975 [1690]). Longuenesse, E. Self-Consciousness and Self-Reference: Sartre and Wittgenstein. European Journal of Philosophy, 16, (2008). 1–21. ——— Self-Consciousness I, Me, Mine. Back to Kant, and Back Again. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2017). Merleau-Ponty, M. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. (1976 [1944]).

88  Valérie Aucouturier McDowell, J. Mind and World. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. (1996). McGinn, M. Wittgenstein and Moore’s Paradox. In R. Heinrich, E. Nemeth, W. Pichler, and D. Wagner (eds.), Image and Imaging in Philosophy, Science and the Arts, vol. 1, pp. 59–72. Frankfurt, Lancaster, Paris, New Brunswick, Ontos Verlag. (2011). Moran, R. Authority and Estrangement. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (2001). Mouillie, J-M. Sartre, conscience, ego et psyché. Paris: PUF. (2000). Sartre, J.-P. La transcendance de l’ego. Paris: Vrin. (2003 [1936]). ——— Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi. Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, 3, (1942). 49–91. ——— L’être et le néant. Paris: Gallimard. (1943). Shoemaker, S. Self-Reference and Self-Awareness. In Q. Cassam (ed.), Self-Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1994 [1968]). Webb, S. Savoir ce que je fais: Anscombe et Sartre. Vers une étude comparative. Klesis, 35, (2016). 12–30. Wittgenstein, L. The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (1958). ——— The Blue Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. (2009 [1953]). ——— Notes on Private Experience and Sense Data. The Philosophical Review, 77(3), (1968). 275–320.

4 Peculiar Access Sartre, Self-Knowledge, and the Question of the Irreducibility of the First-Person Perspective Pierre-Jean Renaudie and Jack Reynolds It is sometimes said that philosophy begins with the Socratic injunction to “know thyself.” Whether contemporary philosophers live up to this vocation might be questioned, but the recent literature nonetheless provides useful resources to determine whether that (alleged) self-knowledge is metaphysically and epistemically different from the knowledge that we might have of other people, or of the external world. On these questions the philosophical landscape is divided, broadly between naturalist and non-naturalist perspectives. The former are in the ascendancy, notwithstanding that non-naturalist conceptions of self-knowledge are in greater accord with many of our basic pre-philosophical intuitions, which tend to assume some sort of special or unique first-personal access to our own thoughts, desires, and intentions. Phenomenological approaches to this question are caught betwixt and between here – neo-behaviourist in certain ways as we will see, but also Cartesian in others. Our engagement with the work of Jean-Paul Sartre in this chapter will pivot around these differences, steering a middle way between naturalist positions that deny the epistemic and broader philosophical significance of any first-/thirdperson distinction and some other phenomenological work that deploy Sartrean ideas and insights to inflate this distinction, notably the influential writings of Dan Zahavi on “for-me-ness,” “mineness,” and first-personal givenness. While we agree with Zahavi and others that pre-reflective experience is indexed to an embodied perspective and (implicitly) to a “here” and “now,” we argue that recognizing the non-egological anonymity of this perspective (and the agency involved), which is prior to any first- and third-person differentiation that depends on language and reflection, is preferable to the sort of “mineness” that Zahavi emphasizes1 and which appears to constitute something like the ontological or metaphysical basis for privileging self-knowledge, when undertaken with the requisite phenomenological pre-cautions and training.2 Through our own reading of Sartre’s work, we outline a position that can endorse the naturalist’s claim that we don’t have privileged self-knowledge in regard to our own mental DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-5

90  Pierre-Jean Renaudie and Jack Reynolds states, but without accepting the too quickly conjoined view that the firstperson perspective might be reduced to the third-person perspective or that it is only the latter which has epistemic and metaphysical significance. In short, we argue that there is an irreducibility of pre-reflective consciousness to third-personal accounts in which any given perspectivality is rendered irrelevant (contra naturalism), and hence that there is an important asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of others in terms of peculiarity of access,3 but this does not entail epistemic privilege (contra non-naturalism). 4.1 Naturalism, Self-Knowledge, and the First-Person Perspective Accepting a naturalistic worldview constrains how we understand the Socratic demand to “know thyself.” For example, naturalist positions tend to give negative answers concerning both the metaphysical status of the self (which is more like a convenient fiction or a product of grammar), as well as any knowledge we might claim to possess regarding our “selves,” whether they are ultimately illusory or not in a metaphysical sense. This is because naturalism calls for continuity with the findings of science and requires the methodological exclusion of modes of knowing that are akin to “papal infallibility.”4 While this is undoubtedly a little vague, in practice, it reflects the idea that the findings and methods of science purport to be objective and third-personal, reproducible by any other scientist.5 Any particular subjectivity may be relevant to the context of hypothesis formation but is irrelevant to the context of discovery and the results produced. As a consequence, orthodox forms of naturalism deny that the distinction between the first- and third-person perspectives is either methodologically or metaphysically deep. Indeed, such a position appears entailed by any allegiance to strong or exclusive renderings of both ontological and methodological naturalism. For naturalists who subscribe to a metaphysical thesis like Wilfrid Sellars’ Scientia Mensura principle (e.g. “science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not”),6 and who also endorse a methodological thesis in which any epistemic inquiry ought to emulate the methods of inquiry of certain privileged natural sciences, then any self-knowledge worthy of the name must be accrued in the same manner as other forms of knowledge, notably scientific knowledge, which is held to be paradigmatically third-personal, notwithstanding the importance of observation and experiment.7 Any claims concerning the special intimacy, immediacy, or epistemic authority about ourselves will appear suspect, whether gleaned through first-personal introspection or inner perception, or that somehow accompany lived experience.

Peculiar Access  91 For the naturalist, then, to know thyself is not to turn inwards, nor is it something fleetingly grasped in a pre-reflective and inchoate way through our embodied experience of a world in action, or when those “average, everyday” projects are problematized, as Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, or any neo-existentialist might hold.8 Rather, to know ourselves we must adopt something like what Dennett calls the “intentional stance” in regard to oneself, which treats oneself as if one were another person.9 It is not the first-person mode of access to our experience that matters since this is liable to confabulation and impromptu theorizing.10 Instead, what Dennett calls a third-personal “hetero-phenomenology” is required: a spectatorial stance towards testimonies and alleged first-personal knowledge and lived experiences, whether our own or others, in both cases attributing beliefs and desires in order to predict and explain behaviour.11 Dennett invokes the term phenomenology here because his method requires us to neutrally bracket any subjective commitment to the truth of our beliefs (in this case beliefs about ourselves), and we instead quasi-inductively catalogue reports of such beliefs, and then treat them objectively from a perspective external to them: that is, spectatorially and quasi-scientifically.12 Even with non-reductive physicalism, which generally denies any stronger physicalist aim to reduce psychology to biology (and ultimately to physics), little credence is given to evidences derived from the first-person perspective. Two key philosophical moves are made here. On the one hand, the firstperson perspective is treated as epistemically suspect. On the other hand, it is held that even if the first-person perspective is epistemically less reliable, in the end, there is also no important asymmetry, or fundamental difference in kind, between the first- and third-person perspectives. While “liberal” and non-reductive naturalists contest this,13 the burden of proof is on those who think the first-person perspective is philosophically significant to establish that, in non-reducible fashion, and without buying into any version of first philosophy wherein we know the structures and contents of our mind in apodictic fashion and from the armchair. It is worth noting, however, that some famous arguments against physicalism (and scientific naturalism) do invoke the first-person perspective and also that they often transgress some central naturalist scruples. This is a vast literature that we cannot address, with Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers’ work being notable, but it is worth considering briefly Frank Jackson’s socalled knowledge argument regarding “black and white Mary,” and her subsequent experience of the colour red.14 The central claim that Jackson derives from this famous thought experiment is that there is some kind of phenomenal experience – i.e. qualia – or at least a distinctive kind of “know-how,” when Mary suddenly experiences red for the first time, having previously been unable to have such an experience due to being either colour-blind or rather cruelly stuck in a black and white room.

92  Pierre-Jean Renaudie and Jack Reynolds And, of course, Mary is also a neuroscientist and expert concerning all of the physical properties of colour and their biological conditions. According to Jackson, however, there remains a first-personal experience, and/or a type of know-how, when she first perceives red that cannot be captured purely third-personally or with a catalogue of all facts and scientific (e.g. third-personal) knowledge. The “know-how” interpretation of Jackson’s thought experiment is of special relevance to us here15 since the self-knowledge we will discuss is akin to a kind of implicit know-how, a practical awareness that is neither accessible to introspection nor readily given propositional form. Jackson’s famous claim is that the thought experiment establishes that physicalism leaves something out since the complete physical knowledge that Mary possesses is insufficient. Such arguments have been criticized from a broadly naturalist perspective that contests the details of the thought experiment and the philosophical force of such “intuition pumps,”16 and also because it appears to violate some naturalist scruples concerning the causal closure of the universe (that is, it looks dualist). But there are some important Sartrean additions to this story that can be made regarding the relationship between the lived and the known, the pre-reflective experience of agency that we have and reflective knowledge of that experience and its contents, as well as the complexity that they introduce into any effort at substantive self-knowledge. This can be elaborated without subscribing to a metaphysical argument for epiphenomenalism as with Jackson’s own use of “phenomenology” and the firstperson perspective, although it must be conceded that like Jackson’s Mary argument, it is not entirely clear that Sartre’s account of a lived and embodied perspective that is “pre-personal” involves a new fact that is in question, nor any strictly propositional account of self-knowledge. The kind of pre-reflective experience that is central to Sartre’s phenomenology is not exactly knowledge, nor is it nothing either, wholly epistemically and methodologically inert. Rather, we are reminded of Wittgenstein’s famous remark regarding sensations: “It is not a something, but not a nothing either!”17. As such, there are valid questions regarding what we can do with this quasi-knowledge without succumbing to a sort of mysterianism about somatic intentionality and lived experience.18 Many theorists of selfknowledge will continue to refuse to count it as knowledge. For Boghossian, for example, there are three possibilities for self-knowledge: “such knowledge is either based on inference, or by a kind of looking, or it is nothing.”19 What are we to say of the kind of indirect knowledge that Sartre says we have, albeit knowledge of a sort that is in the first case mainly negative (we are not x, not y, not just this or that Ego or putative identity – e.g. a university professor), and then more existentially lived rather than propositionally known in a positive fashion, for example, Reynolds and Renaudie are this or that kind of parents, this or that kind of philosophers?

Peculiar Access  93 But let us prepare the ground for this argument by explicating some key Sartrean insights regarding consciousness, self-consciousness, and the Ego. 4.2 Sartre on Consciousness, Self-Consciousness, and the Ego A distinction is usually made between intentional or object-consciousness and self-consciousness, depending on whether consciousness is oriented towards an object or towards itself. In Being and Nothingness, however, Sartre famously claimed that these two aspects of consciousness necessarily go together, and this particular claim became the first of the theses Sartre presented to the Société française de philosophie in a 1947 conference: “Every positional consciousness of an object is necessarily at the same time a non-positional consciousness of itself.”20 With this claim, Sartre stresses the relation between these two forms of consciousness only as much as he emphasizes the necessity to distinguish them on the basis of the opposition between their positional and non-positional (or thetic and non-thetic) character: self-consciousness is an “immediate and non-cognitive relation to oneself,”21 which does not need to “transcend itself to reach an object” like intentional consciousness does.22 When I perceive the book in front of me, I am not only perceptively aware of a transcendent object, I am also at the same time aware of having a perceptual experience of the book. These two aspects of the perceptual experience are strictly irreducible to one another and need to be distinguished even though they always come intertwined. Seeing an object and being aware that we are seeing an object belong to two different kinds of experiences, oriented towards the world in the first case and towards ourselves in the second. Of course, many naturalists deny this distinction, instead invoking theses concerning the “diaphanousness” of experience. In short, they will deny that we do in fact phenomenologically have this second mode of consciousness (i.e. non-thetic self-awareness of seeing red that is different from the perception of a red object in the world), contending that it is either trivial or generates problems regarding an infinite regress.23 Defences of the position also appeal to phenomenology, to memory, and sometimes to empirical studies concerning learning.24 While we are broadly on the phenomenological side of this debate, our aim is not to defend that in detail here. Rather, we seek to show that a proponent of this sort of view (and the peculiar asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of others that results) need not be encumbered by theses regarding epistemic privilege that are suspect for the naturalist. Why? In short, Sartre’s commitment to what he calls the translucency of consciousness, “does not guarantee that something is clearly present in consciousness,” so we can have what Peter Carruthers calls the opacity of mind.25 There is no guarantee that

94  Pierre-Jean Renaudie and Jack Reynolds “what is in consciousness is correctly conceptualised by us”26 since there is a disjunction between the lived and the known in regard to our experiential life. Self-consciousness, according to Sartre, must not be mistaken with reflexive consciousness: the latter is a form of intentional consciousness that takes one’s own lived experiences as its specific object, whereas the former is pre-reflexive and need not involve the intentional distance to the object that the act of reflection entails. Self-consciousness is characterized as an immediate and non-cognitive form of self-awareness, thanks to which one comes to be aware of her own experience without having to posit herself as the object of her reflection. Reflection, on the other hand, is unable to give access to oneself as the subject of unreflected consciousness, but only as the intentional object of the act of reflection – i.e. the Ego in Sartre’s terminology. The Ego is the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon when performing reflection - an object that consciousness “posits and grasps […] in the same act”,27 and that is constituted in and by the act of reflection.28 The Ego is consequently transcendent and available to the third-person perspective. According to Sartre, and here he remains close to the Husserl of Logical Investigations, it “is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the Ego of another.”29 This analysis seems to hinge upon a sharp distinction between two irreducible modes of presentation or “givenness,” following the more phenomenological terminology used by Zahavi,30 intentional in the case of transcendent objects and pre-reflexive in the case of self-consciousness – a distinction from which the opposition between the first- and third-person perspectives can easily be derived. The immediate, self-referential, and prereflexive character of self-consciousness grants us a specific and strictly first-personal access to ourselves, a first-person perspective that expresses, as Shoemaker puts it, the “distinctive way mental states present themselves to the subjects whose states they are.”31 In contrast, the objective relation to the world that intentional (positional) consciousness achieves, insofar as it does not involve such a first-personal mode of givenness, can be characterized as an “impersonal” relation to a transcendent object: When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no I. […] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they which constitute the unity of my consciousness; […] but me, I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is no place for me on this level.32 The streetcar may appear to me in a specific way (as “having-to-be-overtaken,” for instance). Nevertheless, it is not presented to me as an object experienced in first person, but as a transcendent object, experienced in a

Peculiar Access  95 way that overrides, so to say, the subjective aspects of consciousness: the object obliterates the personal features of conscious experience and appears as carrying a set of objective properties strictly independent from my personal experience or subjective relation to the object and fundamentally accessible to a third-person perspective. The “having-to-be-overtakenness” of the tram appears as describing objectively the way the world is and not as an aspect of my subjective experience of the world.33 This distinction between intentional consciousness and pre-reflexive self-consciousness seems to commit Sartre to a version of the kind of theories of self-reference that maintain a “fundamental divide” between firstand third-person perspectives and constitute the target of Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever’s criticisms in their book, The Inessential Indexical.34 Cappelen and Dever call “perspectivality” the idea according to which a philosophical distinction needs to be drawn between the description of the world as it objectively is and as it is subjectively experienced. According to them, this distinction is “philosophically shallow”35 and unable to ground a significant asymmetry between the first and the third-person perspective. Their book presents a series of critical arguments that aim to show how the first-person perspective can always be explained in terms of – and subsequently reduced to – the third-person viewpoint. Although Sartre is not Cappelen and Dever’s explicit target, his key distinction between (pre-reflexive) self-consciousness and (intentional) consciousness would fall under their criticism and thus, from their perspective, doom his theory of consciousness. Emphasizing this very aspect of Sartre’s phenomenology of consciousness, Dan Zahavi considers it as an account of consciousness in which “the types of self-reference available from a firstperson perspective and those available from a third-person perspective are different,”36 akin to the theories of self-reference developed by Castañeda, Perry, Nagel, and Cassam.37 The immediate and pre-reflexive dimension of conscious experience makes one aware of what she experiences in a specific way, which does not involve the level of conceptualization and objectivation that intentional consciousness entails and does not result in a form of reflexive knowledge similar to our intentional knowledge: I experience my feeling of anger in a way that is fundamentally different from the way I experience the object of my anger, the very thing that makes me angry and that my emotional experience is directed upon. And this remains true even when the object of my anger is myself, if, for instance, I reflect on an unforgiveable mistake that I made: In this case, my experience of myself as being angry and my relation to myself as the object of my anger do not coincide. Using David Chalmers’ vocabulary,38 Zahavi notes that “in firstpersonal self-reference one is not aware of oneself as an object that happens to be oneself […]. Rather, first-personal self-reference involves a non-objectifying self-acquaintance.”39 Such a view accords privileged

96  Pierre-Jean Renaudie and Jack Reynolds access to our own occurrent moods, thoughts, and desires based upon a first-personal acquaintance with oneself that he often refers to as “mineness” or “for-me-ness” (a “mineness” which we contend is not phenomenologically basic40). The question, however, is whether the specificity of this first-personal awareness of one’s own experiences and its irreducibility to third-personal modes of objectual knowledge implies a form of asymmetry between the first- and third-person perspectives that presupposes the superiority or primacy of the former over the latter. Sartre’s analysis of consciousness demonstrates, as we shall see, that the irreducibility of the first to the third-person perspective does not necessarily entail that a metaphysically suspicious privilege is granted to the first-person. The first question that needs to be asked is whether consciousness is personal at all according to Sartre, and in which sense. The entire first part of Transcendence of the Ego is dedicated to establishing the impersonal (or “pre-personal”) character of consciousness, which stems from its non-egological structure and results directly, according to Sartre, from his demonstration of the absence of the I in the transcendental field. When he writes that consciousness is “pre-personal,” Sartre implies that its determination in terms of first- or third-person perspectives is meaningless and that such a question can only be asked at a reflective level – i.e. once consciousness has been reflexively tied to an Ego that it becomes essentially related with. Let’s come back to the example of the streetcar. When I run after the streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its intentional object, “the streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken,” and there is no trace of the I in such lived experience. I do not need to be aware of my intention to take the streetcar since the object itself appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. A fundamental characteristic of such intentional experiences, according to Sartre, is that the absence of the experiencing self or Ego makes them look like they were not dependent upon a perspective determined as strictly first personal. The mode of manifestation that characterizes non-reflective states makes them not only non-egological but subjectless,41 insofar as they are lived-through without any reference whatsoever to the experiencing subject (or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced by someone): they are so “translucent”42 that the subjective or first-personal dimension of the experiencing vanishes through the appearing of the object. When I perceive Pierre as loathsome, to take Sartre’s example, I do not perceive my feeling of hatred; Pierre repulses me, and I experience him as repulsive.43 Repulsiveness constitutes primarily an essential feature of his distinctive mode of appearing (or givenness), rather than a trait of my feelings towards him. Intentional consciousness does not only posit and objectify its intentional correlate, it does so by dissolving

Peculiar Access  97 the subjective and first-personal aspects of the experience of the object, making it impersonal. The object then appears as carrying in itself the determinations that I experience “on” it, as with Pierre’s repulsiveness. The specific way that he appears to me is given as impersonal, insofar as it does not appear to me as my specific feeling about Pierre – a feeling of repulsiveness that should characterize my experience rather than him. My experience of the object is not primarily mine but is presented as objective and universalisable so that anyone who knows Pierre could (and maybe should) see his repulsiveness just as much as I do. The fact that the experience of Pierre’s repulsiveness is my experience is not relevant to the description of the experience I am having (as naturalists like Dennett and Garfield 2016 would agree): The experience is given in a way that presents it as identical to anyone else’s experience of the same object, and likely to be shared by anyone. At this level, the conscious experience can paradoxically only be described as first personal from an external point of view (from the point of view of someone who is not currently experiencing it, or from a philosophical perspective that does not coincide with the lived experience exactly). From the point of view of the experiencing subject, it is irrelevant to characterize this experience as “his” rather than as someone else’s. This is why Sartre claims in The Transcendence of the Ego that I-statements (reflective) cannot be derived from lived experiences (non-reflective) without raising some doubts regarding their epistemic validity: Thus to say “I hate” or “I love” on the occasion of a singular consciousness of attraction or repulsion, is to carry out a veritable passage to the infinite. […] Nothing more is needed for the rights of reflection to be singularly limited: it is certain that Pierre repulses me, yet it is and will remain forever doubtful that I hate him. Indeed, this affirmation infinitely exceeds the power of reflection.44 The reflective switch from the experience of a certain feeling to its expression in an I-statement enables one to adopt either a first or a third-person perspective on herself, while this possibility to switch from a perspective to the other was not yet available at the non-reflective level that Sartre’s phenomenology describes. The robust distinction between first- and third-person perspectives that constitutes “perspectivality” according to Cappelen and Dever’s can only make sense after reflection has taken over one’s conscious life and attached some egological content to their experiences. But then, the experience reflected upon cannot be identical with the consciousness that is reflecting: A “nothingness” slips between them, as Sartre famously argues, which enables bad faith in our own self-relation. In contrast, pre-reflective awareness in Sartre describes a primary level45 of

98  Pierre-Jean Renaudie and Jack Reynolds experience that does not provide a personal perspective at all, be it either first or third personal. Describing one’s experience as subjective or first personal can only be relevant in retrospect (through reflection) or from the external viewpoint of another. For Sartre, then, saying that every conscious state is non-positionally and non-reflectively directed upon itself is another way of saying that pre-reflective self-consciousness is not tantamount to a consciousness of one’s self. The distinction between first- and third-person perspectives is unable to capture the impersonal mode of givenness that characterizes pre-reflective consciousness.46 4.3 Sartre on Self-Awareness, Self-Knowledge, and Bad Faith In regard to any substantive self-knowledge that might be achieved through direct self-consciousness, then, our options are limited. We cannot look inwards and discover the truth through introspection (there is literally nothing to observe). Moreover, when we have a lived experience and then reflect on ourselves from outside (e.g. third personally, as an Ego), we are not strictly reducible to that Ego that is so posited. We transcend it. Or better, we both are that Ego (just as we are what the Other perceives) and yet are also not reducible to it, partly for temporal reasons since we are not just our past and our objective attributes (in accord with some sort of principle of identity) because we are also our future projects, albeit in the mode of not being them, as Sartre puts it. This issue of irreducibility is important here, involving something akin to an ontological recognition. This irreducibility expresses, as it were, our mode of existing: We exist in the mode of a non-coincidence to our own Ego, so that we fail to know ourselves every time we simply identify with the Ego that we are. Self-reflection is necessarily delusive, insofar as it posits and grasps the Ego in the same act, and claims that it discovers the very object that it constitutes.47 For now, however, it is worth noting that the kind of epistemic considerations that motivate Dennett’s third-personal or hetero-phenomenology appear to involve a related split concerning the subject of cognition, a kind of epistemic “bad faith,” a “heavy-handed sleight of hand” as Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly put it in a paper of that name.48 Recall that Dennett and many other scientific naturalists demand that we bracket away any subjective commitments or beliefs that we may have – hence Dennett’s idiosyncratic reappropriation of the idea of phenomenology – but it is not to do auto-phenomenology and better attend to the things as they present themselves, but to enable a third-personal hetero-phenomenology in which we adopt the “intentional stance” in regard to oneself and in essence treat oneself as if one were another person, a stranger even.49 One’s experiences are given no special credulity here. In fact, to be analysed and admissible in any science of cognition, they must be framed strictly third personally.

Peculiar Access  99 For Dennett et al., we hence treat ourselves as an object or Id-like (to recall Sartre on Freud), even while we are conscious of this idealization and thus, on Sartre’s account, partly distanced from it. While bad faith is inevitable in Sartre’s view, it is also important to recognize that the germ of its destruction lies within, and this begins to hint at the way in which a pre-personal perspective plays an ongoing and ineliminable role within his philosophy. Although bad faith is pervasive and able to saturate our lives, there is also a kind of optimism about Sartre’s account, in that he describes it as “metastable,” meaning liable to change.50 This is because bad faith always remains at least partly available to us in our own lived experience, albeit not in a manner that might be given propositional form in the same way as knowledge of an external object. In short, when I existentially comprehend that my life is dissatisfying, say, or even reflect on this basis that I have lived an inauthentic life, while I am grasping something about myself (since qua lived experience, it is given differently to the recognition that others have lived a lie: it is more likely to induce anxiety), I am nonetheless not strictly equivalent or identical with the “I” that is claimed to be in bad faith.51 There is a distanciation involved in coming to this recognition and the potential for self-transformation of a more practical kind, even if this is under-thematized in Being and Nothingness.52 To put the point slightly differently, there is a gap here between the modalities of the “I think” and the “I can” to borrow from Merleau-Ponty and Husserl’s related discussions, or the “I think” and the “I am,” as with Sartre’s discussion of Descartes in Transcendence of the Ego. And this lived “I can” is at bottom impersonal and anonymous, albeit indexed to a given bodyworld relationship (it is not a view from nowhere, a God’s-eye view: its objectivity is given differently from that). Of course, in the case of bad faith, it is not the bad faith of just anyone at stake: rather, it is an obscure intimation (if not a direct thetic recognition) of my own bad faith and it is given at the embodied and pre-reflective level, involving an indirect self-awareness that is not equivalent to that which we have towards objects in the world or other people. What good faith would be is much less clear and much less explicated in Being and Nothingness, and necessarily so given his account of consciousness and self-consciousness, but this negative knowledge remains a form of selfknowledge, albeit of an inchoate and imprecise kind. In addition, while it is not precise knowledge, it is nonetheless less liable to confabulation than knowledge of a more reflective variety when we treat the self as an Ego and reflect on ourselves as an object, and also then distinguish between firstand third-personal perspectives. We may, of course, dispute Sartre’s pessimism about the possibility of adequate reflective knowledge of the “I,” which is both epistemic and existential here, noting perhaps that here “perfect is the enemy of good” or reasonable self-knowledge, but on this point

100  Pierre-Jean Renaudie and Jack Reynolds at least, he is broadly with the naturalists. Where he differs from them is in maintaining the irreducibility of the perspectives involved and giving lived experience an ongoing and ineliminable role. To better see this point of difference, let us consider an example of bad faith in Sartre’s work that has been comparatively neglected in the literature (except by Joseph Catalano) but which is useful for our purposes. We are asked to imagine a situation in which two men are rowing (or hiking, in another related story that Sartre also tells). One is straining to make their efforts appear easy and effortless.53 Such a gesture may have been part of their weekly rowing activities for months or years, and over this period of time, it is likely to have ceased being directly given to any conscious intention on their behalf. Instead, it has become more akin to a general manner of comportment in the world. Consider Catalano’s characterization of this: For example, I am living a false idea of manliness that makes me believe that I am rowing easily and that the other is admiring my rowing. As my body moves over time, I think that I experience a smoothness of my muscles that is simply not there. I believe in my ability, just as I believe in the other’s admiration. This self-deception is possible because my I is my interiorization of the way I see myself in the world before others. I see a sparkle in the other's eye that I choose to interpret as admiration for my ability at the oars, but which any unbiased observer would recognize as admiration for my effort to impress my companion. To an unbiased observer, my rowing exhibits a tension that is my effort to sustain an effortlessness that is not present. For me this tension is understood as my effort at rowing.54 And Catalano concludes the article by referring back to this point and example: [T]he effort is going to the creation of an ease-of-rowing that is simply not present. Is this self hidden from this self-deceiver? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that he manages to conceptualize his tension as the natural effort that appears when rowing vigorously. No, in the sense that he does indeed experience a tension. … But this tensed act of rowing is the self-deceiver; it is a self maintaining itself in a self-deception as it keeps from itself the possibility of change.55 This example is interesting for various reasons. First, Sartre’s view appears neo-behaviourist in a way that even seems closely related to Dennett. The rower’s bad faith and lived-tension is nothing other than its expression, in the world. It is in principle available to other perceivers, evident in behaviour and comportment. With the right context, we can perceive the bad

Peculiar Access  101 faith of another in their comportment.56 Sartre’s analyses also retain a role for the peculiarity of access to that experience, and it is this which makes bad faith internally unstable and liable to change. But it is not that there are two objects here: The rower engaging in the act of rowing and whatever they are deliberately attending to, plus consciousness of their own act of bad faith as an object that they might also have direct knowledge of. Rather, the activity of rowing is accompanied by an implicit awareness of one’s agency, but not necessarily judgements or beliefs about agency (it is more like a motor awareness rather than reflective awareness). And as with other types of know-how, it is not readily introspectible or easily made into an object of knowledge. As Ryle, Dewey, Merleau-Ponty, and many others have noted, we might know how to ride a bike to get to work, but nonetheless find it very difficult to give appropriate third-personal directions a stranger or novice could follow.57 Sometimes it is difficult to frame our motor-intentionality in any precise way, to give “what” and “why” answers about what one is up to.58 In this case of bad faith, which is a kind of skill and an implicit way of dealing with the world, there might also be a tacit self-consciousness that accompanies the activity that is not about knowing one’s self qua object. It may include a peculiar lived inkling that our ratiocinations and selfconceptions are, at best, approximate, and there is a negative form of selfknowledge and awareness available in this admittedly imprecise way. In this scenario, we have a peculiar access to bad faith in our own experiences, in contradistinction to the experience of others. Moreover, the prereflective experience of ourselves and the view which the other has of our rowing are irreducible to each other, without either having a general epistemic privilege. Although in the example of the rower, there is a sense in which the bad faith is apparent externally, and to an unbiased observer with sufficient context, it is also internally available, but not in introspection or reflection upon the self, but in the lived action. Contrary to any picture in which reflective self-knowledge is privileged in such cases, we are more liable to believe our own bad faith and self-narration that our rowing is easy and effortless than any third-personal observer is. In at least these kinds of cases, then, the epistemic privilege may well be with others, including in direct perception of others, for example in the anger of the other that is immediately and non-inferentially given59 but also in intentional and complex behaviour like rowing while attempting (in some pre-conscious and non-thetic way) to make it look easy. With the naturalist, then, Sartre denies claims that we can adequately know ourselves as objects in any exhaustive way through self-reflection or any introspective self-seeing, but that is not the end of the matter since there is an indirect self-consciousness and lived awareness that persists. These pre-reflective experiences retain a kind of irreducibility, and they have a peculiar but not epistemically privileged mode of access to them qua lived rather than known.

102  Pierre-Jean Renaudie and Jack Reynolds Sartre hence complicates any model in which we have direct access to our own mental states in self-knowledge and indirect or hypothetical access to those of others. We have direct access to at least some of the emotions and intentions of others. And our relationship to our own mental states is highly complex and indeed liable to confabulation and bad faith, but this does not motivate the kind of reaction to Descartes that one might find in Ryle and Dennett. Consider, for example, the following remark from Transcendence of the Ego: The ego gives itself as an object. Therefore the only method for coming to know it is observation, approximation, expectation, and experience. Yet these procedures, which are perfectly adequate to every non-intimate transcendent, are not adequate here, because of the very intimacy of the ego.60 Here we have a pithy statement that encapsulates the paradox. According to Sartre, the Ego is a transcendent and worldly thing, not something we might peer inwards and have knowledge of internally. And yet the “I” is not more certain, but more “intimate,” which looks like a thesis of peculiarity of access, of asymmetrical access. While the Ego is transcendent, it is also not like other transcendent objects, precisely because intimate. And this means that knowledge of the sort that we enjoy of other objects (e.g. in science and ordinary inductive reasoning) will not adequately grasp it. There are particular difficulties involved in self-knowledge, especially for anything more complex than the occurrent recognition that I know that I believe I am in pain. After all, “reflecting on our psychology can change the objects of this reflection,”61 and, as such, there is no self-knowledge that might be final or wholly adequate. We are, rather, our projects, and Sartre’s existential and moral aim, of course, is to distinguish this open-ended project of self-creation from complete bad faith, in which one refuses any ontic or empirical characterization of who and indeed what one is. For Sartre, this complexity problematizes views of self-knowledge that treat it as equivalent to third-personal knowledge, rather than testifies to them, even if both parties agree that bad faith and confabulation are endemic when it comes to ascribing characteristics to our own Ego, and even if both agree that we cannot look inwards to discover who we are. On the Ryle and Dennett story that we have glossed, the methods for finding out about ourselves are the same as those we employ in regard to others. And while we can use such hetero-phenomenological methods in regard to ourselves as well as in regard to other people (hypothesis, inference, etc.), the methods cannot be precisely the same without something akin to the “heavy-handed sleight of hand” discussed earlier. When it comes to any quasi-scientific theory about ourselves, the difficulties are redoubled; we are especially prone to epistemic failure in our own cases. The methods hence

Peculiar Access  103 must either be different or at least practiced with more expertise and adroitness than any kind of ordinary knowledge might have it. If there were no differences of this nature, then there would be no problem for psychoanalysis, behavioural psychology, existential psychoanalysis, etc., to be practiced in regard to oneself. But there are particular difficulties in the case of oneself that are widely theoretically and empirically attested to.62 Without an account of the significance but not privilege of perspectivality in self-knowledge and action, we seem to have no accounting for akrasia. We make mistakes in interpreting others, of course, and we misunderstand the motives and intentions of our colleagues and friends, but it is less often wilfully blind or “bad” in the same way as our efforts at self-knowledge can be (and when it is blind or biased in regard to others, it is typically when our own identity is somehow at stake). Sartre’s account of consciousness, selfconsciousness, and the Ego, along with the irreducibility of the lived and the known, help us to understand how this complexity and bad faith may be pervasive in our lives (while also being liable to change). 4.4 Conclusion Sartre’s account of the relations between self-consciousness and reflective consciousness develops an original analysis of the asymmetry between the first- and third-person perspectives. He stresses the ontological significance and the irreducibility of our pre-reflective experience, a kind of experience that is implicitly indexed to a “here” and “now,” but which nevertheless cannot be described as first personal strictly speaking, insofar as it does not manifest one’s self and so does not constitute one’s perspective as one’s own. This lived experience does not yet constitute ourselves as selves, and this is why it is best described as pre-personal rather than first personal, in spite of the perspectival character of pre-reflective experience.63 Consequently, the irreducibility of the specific kind of self-consciousness that unreflected experiences involve does not imply some kind of epistemic privilege to be granted to the first person. Being perspectival but not first-personal, pre-reflective awareness is unable to provide us with any stable propositional knowledge of ourselves. Only reflection can bring this primary modality of awareness to a fully-fledged form of self-knowledge, as it allows some distance and opens up a new perspective on oneself that is akin to the other’s point of view and can be described as third-personal. However, this third-person perspective on oneself is just as ambiguous as the perspective that one experiences through pre-reflective consciousness: it deserves the title of “knowledge,” as it makes oneself the object of a reflective act, but it misses the specific kind of intimate connection with oneself that pre-reflective experience allows. The description that Sartre provides of this asymmetry between first- and third-personal knowledge, in other words, is first and

104  Pierre-Jean Renaudie and Jack Reynolds foremost a description of the limits of our self-knowledge, which exhibits the necessary failure of the one-sided conceptions of self-knowledge that ground it on one perspective or the other. The first-person perspective is just as insufficient as the third-person one, although their limitations are not the same, which is the reason why the irreducibility of these two perspectives must be maintained and is philosophically significant. However, if the asymmetry between the first and the third-person perspectives reveals the limits of the forms of self-knowledge that they make possible, it does not rule out the very possibility of any kind of knowledge of oneself, which may be not about an object in form. While it might be disputed that this counts as knowledge, there is something more akin to an embodied “know-how” involved here, rather than knowledge-that, which is often very difficult to articulate as propositional knowledge. The peculiar access to ourselves that pre-reflective experience lets us enjoy might not be able to provide us with epistemic guarantees or certainty about ourselves, but it relies on a kind of immediate self-awareness that lays the ground for self-knowledge and makes it at least possible. If it does not provide proper knowledge of ourselves, it is not non-knowledge either, to recall the enigmatic remarks from Wittgenstein that we considered earlier. Our pre-reflective experience allows us to enjoy (and sometimes be saddened or haunted by) a peculiar access to ourselves, and it is this which makes practices of bad faith potentially liable to transformation. However, this access is not such that it could grant an epistemic privilege to the first person or provide some grounds for first-person authority. Neither the first- nor the third-person description of oneself is sufficient to fulfil the expectations and promises of self-knowledge, but their asymmetry opens the possibility of a negative form of self-knowledge, which comes to be accomplished within our failed attempts to know ourselves and through the negative experience of the insuperable limits of both perspectives. Notes 1 Zahavi (2005, 2019). 2 Such a position appears vulnerable to arguments concerning the reducibility of the first-person perspective to the third in the metaphysical register (e.g. Cappelen and Dever 2013), as well as other arguments that urge a similar move on epistemic grounds and for integration with the relevant cognitive or psychological sciences. And while there is a kind of mineness associated with the prereflective experience of bad faith for Sartre, he argues it is an impure form of self-awareness, as we will see. 3 We borrow this term from Alex Byrne, though pursue it in very different ways to his work, which remains much more Rylean and inferentialist. For Byrne, self-knowledge must be said peculiar since the method by means of which we come to know our own mental states is a method that only applies to our mental states (not to others’), and that is not available to anyone else, Byrne (2005: 81; 2018: 8).

Peculiar Access  105 4 Dennett (2007: 252) 5 Notwithstanding the so-called replication crisis. In short, many experiments are not, in fact, able to be replicated or reproduced by subsequent experimenters, especially in social psychology. 6 Sellars (1963, 173). 7 cf. Dennett (1991). 8 cf. Reynolds and Stokes (2017). 9 Dennett (1991: 76). 10 Ibid., 68. 11 Dennett (2007). 12 Ibid., 252. Dennett’s teacher, Gilbert Ryle, made some similar points, famously declaring that “the sorts of things I can find about myself are the same as the sorts of things that I can find out about others, and the method of finding them out are much the same” (Ryle, 2009). 13 For example, De Caro and Macarthur (2011). 14 Jackson (1982). 15 Compare Cath (2009, 2012). 16 Dennett (1991). 17 Wittgenstein (1950: §304). The parallel with Wittgenstein on this point has been pointed out by Kathleen Wider (1991), Joseph Catalano (1990: 675), and more recently by Katherine Morris in various places. 18 These questions align with those that are posed to agentialist conceptions of self-knowledge, like those of Richard Moran who draws on Sartre (2002). If self-knowledge is some sort of commitment is it right to even call it knowledge, as Brie Gertler (2011) asks? 19 Boghossian (1989: 5). 20 “Toute conscience positionnelle d’objet est nécessairement conscience non-positionnelle de soi” (Sartre, 2003, 98). 21 Sartre (EN 19). 22 Sartre (EN 18). 23 Compare Garfield (2016). 24 See Zahavi (2019); Thompson (2010). 25 Carruthers (2011). 26 Catalano (1990: 681). 27 Sartre (TE 31). 28 Sartre (TE 80-1). 29 Sartre (TE 80-1). 30 Zahavi (2005: 119). 31 Shoemaker (2010: 157). 32 Sartre (TE 102, 49). 33 Compare, also, TE 56. 34 Cappelen and Dever (2013: 1). 35 Ibid., 2. 36 Zahavi (2005: 17). 37 Castañeda (1966, 1999); Perry (1979); Nagel (1974); Cassam (1997). 38 Chalmers (1996: 197). 39 Zahavi (2005: 27). 40 For a disentanglement of the different notions used to express the subjective character of experience, such as “mineness,” “me-ness,” and “for-me-ness,” see Guillot (2017). 41 But compare Thompson (2010), who thinks we can preserve the idea of subjectivity without the Ego.

106  Pierre-Jean Renaudie and Jack Reynolds 2 Translucide (TE 41). 4 43 Sartre (TE 63–4). 44 Sartre (TE 63–4). 45 “Premier degré” (TE 41). 46 In some passages of Transcendence of the Ego, then in Being and Nothingness, Sartre draws on a distinction between pure and impure forms of reflection. A reviewer has suggested that pure reflection might form the basis for comprehending one’s own implicit and pre-reflective experiences more directly, and not in the bad faith of impure reflection. If so, it might then appear that Sartre endorses a privilege to first-personal awareness, contrary to our arguments. This material of Sartre’s is not especially clear and raises numerous difficulties (see, for instance, Sarah Richmond’s introduction to The Transcendence of the Ego, Richmond 2004: xii–xiii); Sartre himself substantially modified his account of pure reflection between Transcendence of the Ego and Being and Nothingness, bringing up more obscurities as to the epistemic status of such reflection (Webb 2022: 79). While interpretations of Sartre can and will differ, we note that he still describes pure reflection as nothing “but a quasi-knowledge” (quasi-connaissance, BN 162), hence we maintain that it does not provide propositional knowledge of ourselves. As such, we think his account of pure reflection is compatible with the position we outline. 47 Sartre (TE 80-1). 48 Dreyfus and Kelly (2007). 49 Dennett (1991: 76). 50 Sartre (1958: 90). 51 Compare Moran (2001). 52 Sartre gives it more attention in his abandoned Notebooks for an Ethics. Judgements differ as to the ultimate success of this account. 53 Sartre (1958: 564); cf. Catalano (1990: 683). 54 Catalano (1990: 683). 55 Ibid., 693. 56 While this is available to all, coming to have knowledge of it may require engaging in something like existential psychoanalysis of it, especially in regard to self-knowledge. Elaborating on that account, and Sartre’s discussions concerning the fundamental project, is something we cannot do here. 57 We cannot here engage with intellectualist replies, but see Jason Stanley’s Knowing-how (2011). 58 Brownstein (2014). 59 Compare Sartre (1958: 346). 60 (TE 86). 61 Bortolotti (2008: 102). 62 Bortolotti (2008). 63 Compare Kapitan (2015).

References Boghossian. P. Content and self-knowledge. Philosophical Topics, 17(1), (1989). 5–26. Bortolotti, L. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. New York: Wiley. (2008). Brownstein, M. Rationalizing flow: Agency in skilled unreflective action. Philosophical Studies, 168(2), (2014). 545–568.

Peculiar Access  107 Byrne, A. Introspection. Philosophical Topics, 33(1), (2005). 79–104. ——— Transparency and Self-Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press. (2018). Cappelen, H. & Dever, J. The Inessential Indexical. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2013). Carruthers, P. The Opacity of Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2011). Cassam, Q. Self and World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1997). Castañeda, H.-N. “He”: A study in the logic of self-consciousness. Ratio, 8, (1966). 130–157. ——— The Phenomeno-Logic of the I: Essays on Self-Consciousness. Edited by T. Kapitan et J. G. Hart. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. (1999). Catalano. J. Successfully lying to oneself. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50(4), (1990). 673–693. Cath, Y. The ability hypothesis and the new knowledge-how. Noûs, 43(1), (2009). 137–156. ——— The Ability Hypothesis Knowing How without Knowing That. In J. Bengson and M. A. Moffett (eds.) Knowing How: Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action, pp. 113–135. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2012). De Caro, M. and Macarthur. D. (eds.) Naturalism and Normativity. Harvard University Press. (2011). Dennett, D. Consciousness Explained. New York: Basic Books. (1991). ——— Heterophenomenology reconsidered. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 6 (1–2), (2007). Dreyfus, H. & Kelly, S. Heavy-handed sleight of hand. Phenomenology and Cognitive sciences, 6 (1–2), (2007). 45–55. Garfield, J. Engaging Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2016). Gertler, B. Self-Knowledge. New York: Routledge. (2011). Guillot, M. I me mine: On a confusion concerning the subjective character of experience. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1, (2017). 23–53. Jackson, F. Epiphenomenal qualia. Philosophical Quarterly, 32, (1982).127–136. Kapitan, T. Is Subjectivity First-Personal? In S. Miguens Travis, C. Morando Bravo and G. Preyer (eds.), Prereflective Consciousness: Early Sartre in the Context of Contemporary Philosophy of Mind. London: Routledge. (2015). Moran, R. Authority and Estrangement. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (2001). Nagel, T. What is it like to be a bat? The Philosophical Review, 83(4), (1974). 435. Perry, J. The problem of the essential indexical. Noûs, 13(1), (1979). 3–21. Richmond, S. Introduction. The Transcendence of the Ego, Trans. A. Brown, London: Routledge, 2004. Reynolds, J. & Stokes, P. Writing the First-Person. In G. D’Oro and S. Overgaard (eds.), Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2017). Ryle, G. The Concept of Mind. London: Routledge. (2009). Sartre, J.-P. Transcendence of the Ego. Trans. F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick. New York: The Noonday Press. (1957 [1936a]). ——— The Transcendence of the Ego, Trans. A. Brown London: Routledge. (2004 [1936b])

108  Pierre-Jean Renaudie and Jack Reynolds ——— Being and Nothingness. Trans. H. Barnes London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (1958 [1943]). ——— La Transcendance de l’Ego et autres textes phénoménologique. Paris: Vrin. (2003 [1936c]). Sellars, W. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. In Science, Perception and Reality. London: Routledge. (1963). Shoemaker. S. The First-Person Perspective and Other Essays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2010). Thompson. E. Self-No-Self? Memory and Reflexive Awareness. In M. Siderits, E. Thompson and D. Zahavi (eds.), Self and No-Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2010). Webb. S. Connaissance de soi et réflexion pratique. Critique des réappropriations analytiques de Sartre. Sesto San Giovanni: Mimesis. (2022). Wider, K. A Nothing About Which Something Can Be Said: Sartre and Wittgenstein on the Self. In R. Aronson and A. van den Hoven (eds.), Sartre Alive. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. (1991). Wittgenstein, L.W. Philosophical Investigations. London: Blackwell. (1950). Zahavi, D. Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-Person Perspective. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (2005). ——— Subjectivity Consciousness and (Minimal) Selfhood: Getting Clearer on For-Me-Ness and Mineness. In U. Kriegel (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2019).

5 Some Problems of Other Minds Katherine J. Morris

“An ‘inner process’ stands in need of outward criteria,” Wittgenstein famously says.1 Although variously interpreted, this remark is widely seen as some sort of contribution to dissolving various problems discerned in Anglo-American philosophy of mind, such as the problem of other minds and the mind-body problem. (My own focus will be on the first of these, and in particular on what is usually called “the epistemological problem of other minds”; this focus is to be taken as read in what follows2). Less well known in Anglo-American circles are Sartre’s observations on “inner processes” and “outward criteria” (not, of course, Sartre’s terms), where he seems at first sight to take an even stronger view: “These frowns, this redness, this stammering, this slight trembling of the hands, these downcast looks which seem at once timid and threatening – these do not express anger, they are the anger.”3 I argue that reading these two authors in dialogue with one another can not only shed light on both but enable us to see more clearly Sartre’s unique contributions to the problem of other minds as it is discussed in Anglo-American philosophy.4 Before we begin, I want to distinguish two questions which are not always carefully distinguished in the literature:5 (a) “How do we know that there are other conscious beings?,” and (b) “How do we know what that particular other (conscious) being is thinking and feeling?” 6 These are importantly different questions; for one thing, they are, or may be, differently motivated: the first is, as Avramides puts it, “a distinctively philosophical problem,” the second may, in part, be rooted in our actual experience of others.7 Both seem apt for raising an “epistemological problem of other minds” that might lead some to some form of scepticism: solipsism in the case of the first, what we might call “opaquism” in the case of the second: a view according to which the minds of others are forever beyond our ken. It will turn out that the “outward criteria” just alluded to are of relevance only to question (b), despite the fact that the so-called criterial approach is frequently taken to be addressed to (a). 8 My main aim in this chapter is to show that Sartre has distinctive contributions to make to both (a) and (b). DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-6

110  Katherine J. Morris I begin, in Section 5.1, with a brief review of what are usually considered the standard approaches to the problem of other minds within AngloAmerican philosophy. Section 5.2 identifies certain assumptions which lead to our seeing a sceptical problem of other minds, and which remain unchallenged by the standard attempts at a solution; Sartre and Wittgenstein invite us to reject these assumptions. Section 5.3 explores Sartre’s infamous “look” as his response to question (a); his accompanying reflections on knowledge and certainty are put into conversation with Wittgenstein’s. Section 5.4 then examines what Sartre’s and Wittgenstein’s “criterial approach” to question (b) looks like, shorn of the assumptions identified in Section 5.2, and returns to the considerations that may motivate scepticism about other minds. By way of conclusion, one might say that on Sartre’s and Wittgenstein’s way of looking at things, there are, after all, “problems of other minds,” but these aren’t sceptical problems. 5.1 The Problem of Other Minds in Anglo-American Philosophy The epistemological problem of other minds is often expressed as follows: “[W]hat entitles us to our basic belief that other human beings do have inner lives?”9 This formulation immediately takes us toward question (a) rather than question (b).10 But why is this question seen as raising a problem? Gomes usefully distinguishes between two routes to this: the problem of error, arising from the possibility of pretence, and the problem of sources, arising from first- /third-person epistemological asymmetries in respect of knowledge of inner processes.11 There are three relatively popular attempts to address it:12 analogical inference, inference to the best explanation, and “the criterial solution” (often associated with Wittgenstein). Analogical inference is the idea that I (to borrow Sartre’s example) see someone turning red and clenching his fist, recall that this is what I do and look like when I am angry, and infer on the basis of this analogy that the other too is (probably) angry (and hence, I suppose, has an “inner life”). There are obvious objections (which Sartre too presses13) – for example, that the conclusion is not only uncheckable but logically impossible to check and that it is an inductive generalization based on only one case14 – although none of these objections is decisive. There is an even more basic objection which doesn’t much seem to be discussed in the Anglo-American literature – namely, that most of us have little to no idea what we actually do or look like when we are, for example, angry; thus, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, “a decisive factor is missing” for any reasoning by analogy.15 Moreover, analogical inferences are at best probabilistic, at worst mere conjecture;16 they won’t allow us to avoid foundering on what Sartre calls “the reef of solipsism.” Inference to the best explanation as a solution to the other minds’ problem is based on the thoughts (characteristic of some forms of functionalism)

Some Problems of Other Minds  111 that other minds are theoretical entities like electrons and that “the mental states of human beings are what cause them to behave as they do.”17 Of course, it still has a strictly uncheckable conclusion, but this is not thought to be a problem in science, so why should it be here? On the other hand, Sartre’s objection to the analogical inference approach applies here too: the “best explanation” is still at best probabilistic.18 The criterial solution, having its source in a particular interpretation of Wittgenstein, is taken to suggest that there is a conceptual link between behaviour and mental states that is neither inductive nor deductive. This is held to be a weak solution since, without entailment, “the claimed conceptual links fail to bridge the gap between observed behaviour and the unobserved inner states to which they are conceptually linked” (Hyslop 2009).19 5.2 Some Presuppositions of Anglo-American Approaches to Solipsism None of the popular solutions to the problem thought to be raised by question (a) seems remotely satisfactory; we need to re-examine why exactly it is thought to raise a problem. How do we get from the possibility of pretence or epistemological asymmetries to solipsism? McDowell draws a parallel between solipsism and the argument from illusion. The argument from illusion starts from the idea that judgements about the existence of physical objects are, as a class, epistemologically problematic, whereas judgements about, say, sense-data, are not; if all we have to go on to ground the former type of judgement is the latter, and if the latter could all be true without any of the former being true, then it seems that we have no good reason to suppose that any of our judgements about the existence of physical objects are true. In like manner, solipsism starts from the idea that “[j]udgements about other minds are, as a class, epistemologically problematic. Judgements about ‘behaviour’ and ‘bodily’ characteristics are, as a class, not epistemologically problematic,”20 and the rest follows in parallel. Thus, McDowell argues, the sceptic’s picture “is attainable only by displacing the concept of a human being from its focal position in an account of our experience of our fellows, and replacing it with a philosophically generated concept of a human body … conceived as [a] merely material object”;21 the picture underlying scepticism about other minds presupposes that there is “a corpus of ‘bodily’ and ‘behavioural’ information, unproblematically available to us in a pictured cognitive predicament in which we are holding in suspense all attributions of psychological properties to others,”22 a picture that suggests that we can straightforwardly establish that someone is behaving thus and so while remaining in the dark about whether he is thinking and feeling thus and so.

112  Katherine J. Morris Sartre and Wittgenstein, too, identify and challenge (Sartre, at least, in rather more detail) the presupposed conceptions of behaviour and the body; they also highlight a further presupposition, as we will see, and they show that the standard approaches to defusing the threat of solipsism rest on those self-same presuppositions, more or less guaranteeing that they will fail. Let us look at these presuppositions in more detail. First, “behaviour.” The analytical approaches canvassed in Section 5.1 all begin from a question which asks about the relation between behaviour and mental states, without asking what we are talking about when we use the word “behaviour.”23 We might begin with a distinction which David Armstrong made some years ago between “physical behaviour” and “behaviour proper.” The former “refers to any merely physical action or passion of the body,” the latter “implies relationship to the mind.”24 Put just like that, the distinction is (at least) vague if not question-begging, but it may get us started. Do we describe behaviour as a smile or a frown on the one hand, or as the corners of the mouth moving upward or downward, on the other? A clenched fist, or the fingers being folded tightly? A moan, or sounds of such and such a frequency and duration? Both the analogical and best-explanation approaches presuppose that “behaviour” means “physical behaviour,” whereas for the criterial approach, insofar as it is held to derive from Wittgenstein, it means “behaviour proper.” (At any rate, his own examples all characterize behaviour as behaviour proper, e.g. crying,25 groaning,26 and so on.) It might of course be thought that what we have here is simply different descriptions of the same phenomenon. For example, it might be held that the first descriptions in each of these pairings can be rephrased in terms of the second plus a hypothesized or typical mental cause: a smile is an upward turn of the mouth caused by pleasure, a moan is a sound of such and such a frequency and duration caused by pain, and so on. Clearly enough, however, these attempted paraphrases won’t do: there are many kinds of smiles – sickly, polite, insincere, wicked – and many kinds of moans – of pain, of sexual pleasure, of appreciation of a pun – so we would need something more specific to characterize the physical behaviour. Furthermore, if we look cross-culturally, we find that “[t]he angry Japanese smiles, the [angry] westerner goes red and stamps his foot or else goes pale and hisses his words.”27 Moreover, we would need to accommodate the variability of these movements and sounds, even as expressions of pleasure or pain – both individual (some individuals turn the corners of their mouths down when they smile)28 and cultural (think of an American as opposed to a British smile).29 The prospects for any such paraphrase seem bleak. However, the analogical and best-explanation approaches seem to assume the possibility of such paraphrases because they presuppose that our grounds for knowledge of other minds must ultimately be physical behaviour.

Some Problems of Other Minds  113 The second presupposition concerns the (human) body, understood, in Sartre’s words, as “a certain living object composed of a nervous system, a brain, glands, digestive, respiratory, and circulatory organs” (BN 303/409; cf. McDowell’s “merely material object”), something like Descartes’ corps-machine. One of the most important contributions of the phenomenologists is their reconceptualization of the body, and Sartre was part of this. Descartes’ doctrine expresses one way of understanding the body, but this represents only one “ontological dimension” of the body, according to Sartre, who identifies several further dimensions. The dimension which he labels “the body-for-the-other,” but which is equally a description of the other’s body-for-me, is the one we need here: “being-for-the-other is in its entirety body; here there are no ‘psychological phenomena’ there to be united with the body; there is nothing behind the body. Rather, the body is in its entirety ‘psychological.’”30 Physical behaviour is the movement of a body-machine, behaviour proper the conduct of a “psychological body.”31 The body-machine is a “being-in-the-midst-of-the-world” (“our inert presence as a passive object among other objects”); the psychological body is a “being-in-the-world” (“the being that makes the world happen, by projecting itself beyond the world toward its own possibilities”).32 (Thus, one aspect of the so-called coquette’s bad faith emerges at that moment when her suitor takes her hand, threatening “the vague and unstable harmony” of the moment, she leaves her hand where it is but “does not notice she has left it there … her hand rests there, inert between the hot hands of her partner, neither consenting nor resisting – a thing.”33 Her hand is both a thing (part of the body-machine) and expressive (here, of consent), so part of the psychological body; in refusing to notice that she has left her hand in that of her partner, she is, in bad faith, treating her own body as if it were nothing but a body-machine.) It may be helpful to say more both about the “psychological body” and about the dimension of the body which is my own body as being-for-itself: the latter is my “there-being”: my insertion in the world. The world is perspectival (“For me this glass if to the left of the decanter and a little behind it”34), it is “oriented” “in relation to me”;35 the world must of necessity “appear to me in order,”36 that is, not all at once. But then “the order of the objects in the world” – the “perceptive field” – refers us to a centre around which that field is oriented37 – namely, the body as beingfor-itself, which is “the total centre of reference indicated by things.”38 This perceptive field is at the same time39 a field of instrumentality of which my body is also the centre: “Objects are revealed to us at the heart of a structure of equipment in which they occupy a determinate place,” where “place” is defined “in relation to axes of practical reference. ‘The glass is on the tray;’ this means that we must be careful not to upset the glass if we

114  Katherine J. Morris move the tray.”40 Our own bodies, for us, are the (unperceived and unutilizable) centres of the perceptual-cum-instrumental field. Equally, the Other’s body “is immediately given as the centre of reference in a situation which is synthetically organized around it … the Other is given to me from the outset as a body in situation.”41 This brings us to the third presupposition: the Anglo-American approaches canvassed above all focus on the relation between behaviour (however conceived) and mental states, to the exclusion of the context, setting, or (in Sartre’s terms) situation.42 Consider this: “[W]e never perceive a clenched fist. We perceive a man who in a specific situation clenches his fist.”43 Our recognition that a man is angry depends not only on his clenching his fist but on the situation. (We are having a quiet drink in a pub; a young man, gazing intently at his smartphone, knocks into the elbow of another man standing at the counter, causing his lager to spill. This second man, already having had a few, turns red, clenches his fist, and bellows, “Watch where you’re going!” Contrast: I am at the doctor’s, and she is taking some blood; she wraps the rubber tubing around my upper arm and asks me to clench my fist to get the vein to pop up.)44 We might say a bit more about Sartre’s use of the term “situation.” According to him, pure “data” are only revealed to us “as already lit up” by ends so that “[s]ituation and motivation are one and the same.”45 Webber helpfully distinguishes between “the field of meanings” and “the field of reasons” encompassed within the term “situation.” The former corresponds roughly to what I just called the perceptive-cum-instrumental field: instruments, for example, have a social “meaning” which is independent of my own particular projects (e.g. trays are for holding things such as glasses); the field of reasons depends on my projects (e.g. I don’t want to upset the glass); this motivates me to be careful when moving the tray. “Alarm clocks, tax forms, police officers and signs that tell us to keep off the grass are all socially constituted meanings, but it is only as a result of my projects that I experience them as having any directive significance for me,”46 i.e. as reasons for me: “[I]t is I and I alone who confer on the alarm clock its exigency.”47 Things may be more complicated than this: pubs, smartphones, doctors, and rubber tubes, at least, are part of the field of meanings, but perhaps there are social meanings which count as socially anticipatable and socially intelligible reasons (e.g. drinking sometimes makes people irascible, i.e. such as (e.g.) to experience being jostled as an occasion for anger); no doubt this could be further refined. (Lest some Anglo-American philosopher feels moved to distinguish between the “physical situation” and the “situation proper” in a way parallel to the earlier distinction between physical behaviour and behaviour proper, where the former may correspond to something like the behaviourist’s

Some Problems of Other Minds  115 “stimulus,” the latter to be rephrased in some manner as “physical situation plus hypothesized mental effects,” or some such, the prospects of so doing are at least as bleak as the prospects for the parallel rephrasing in regard to behaviour.) Thus, not only the threat of solipsism but the first two standard attempts to solve it rest on certain presuppositions which Sartre and Wittgenstein invite us to reject. (We return to the third, the so-called criterial solution, in Section 5.4.) But where does this leave question (a) itself? Do we know that there are other conscious beings? If so, how? 5.3 Sartre and the “Reef of Solipsism” We consider here Sartre’s response to question (a) “How do we know that there are other conscious beings?” Sartre can be understood as arguing that there is something problematic about the use of the term “know” here (unlike with question (b)), such that the question is ill formed, and some of Wittgenstein’s reflections in On Certainty can help us to make sense of this. Sartre offers us the word “certainty” as opposed to “knowledge” to characterize our relationship to the existence of other subjects.48 This is not a matter of replacing question (a) with “On what grounds are we certain that there are other conscious beings?”; this question too is ill formed. Although this is (again) hardly his terminology, we can see his remarks as indicating that “knowledge” and “certainty” involve different “language-games.”49 He shares with the Anglo-American tradition the idea according to which knowledge is something like justified true belief (generally embellished by Anglo-American philosophers with curlicues to bypass Gettier examples). Thus, any knowledge-claim requires grounds (Cf. Wittgenstein, less dogmatically: “‘I know’ often means: I have the proper grounds for my statement”50). Certainty, by contrast – what Sartre sometimes calls “lived certainty”51 – not only does not require but does not admit of grounds.52 In Sartre’s view, each of us possesses certainty that there are other conscious beings, but nothing would count as grounds for it, so nothing would count as knowing it. At the same time, certainty really does mean certainty (i.e. not merely psychological conviction; in Wittgenstein’s terms,53 it is “objective certainty,” not “subjective certainty”): Sartre’s paradigm of such certainty is Descartes’ certainty of his own existence (hence Sartre refers to “the cogito of the Other’s existence”).54 A way of getting at this kind of certainty, again following Wittgenstein and Descartes, might be to say that nothing would count as grounds for doubting it,55 moreover, that doubtclaims, like knowledge-claims, require grounds.56 (To say “All those ‘others’ might be mindless automata or zombies” isn’t to offer grounds for doubt!) Perhaps, then, we can look at the proposition that other conscious beings exist, for Sartre, as something like what Wittgenstein commentators

116  Katherine J. Morris sometimes call a “hinge proposition” or a “framework proposition”; after all, Wittgenstein’s reflections on the concept of knowledge, which as we have seen parallel Sartre’s, emerge in his response to Moore, who claims to know such propositions, and he offers “hinge propositions” as his alternative. Wittgenstein characterizes certain propositions, which “have a peculiar logical role in the system of our empirical propositions,”57 as “the scaffolding of our thoughts”;58 “the questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn.”59 Looking at it in this light might enable us to make sense of a number of Sartrean claims that otherwise seem puzzling. For example, Sartre claims that I have “always” possessed certainty regarding the existence of other conscious beings;60 I suppose “always” means: as long as I have existed as a full-fledged “for-itself”; 61 my initiation into my linguistic and cultural community infused this and other “framework propositions” into my whole way of being-in-the-world; without this initiation, I would not be I (or even an I). Again, we can begin to make sense of Sartre’s rather eeriesounding claims that the Other is “present everywhere, below me, above me, in the neighbouring rooms”62 – I am always already a social and cultural being – and that “this original presence is transcendent – that is, beingbeyond the world”63 – the framework for the (lived) world is “beyond” the (lived) world: it frames it but is not within it. And it might help us to understand his claim that our certainty of the existence of other subjects is “prior” to any knowledge we might have regarding any particular Other’s psychological states (the Other “cannot at first be an object”:64 the framework is logically prior to what takes place within the framework). Illuminating though this way of looking at things is, it needs some tweaking.65 In particular, so far it doesn’t allow us to make sense of Sartre’s notorious claim that it is paradigmatically shame (understood not as the unpleasant awareness of being looked at, but simply the awareness of being looked at) which manifests one’s certainty of the other’s existence. Here is one possibility: Sartre’s contemporary, the sociologist Norbert Elias, argued that shame is an essential mechanism of what he called “the civilizing process,” or more generally something like socialization and acculturation. Whatever Elias actually meant by this, there is some plausibility in the thought that socialization and acculturation require being aware of being looked at and judged to be doing things correctly or incorrectly by others. This would suggest that the existence of other subjects is, in effect, a condition for the possibility of socialization and acculturation, hence a condition for the possibility of “inheriting” “framework propositions” (“the inherited background against which I distinguish true and false”66). We might then say that the existence of other subjects is part of, as it were, the scaffolding for the scaffolding.

Some Problems of Other Minds  117 Whether or not one accepts the details of this reading of Sartre (and I am sure as well that there is much that remains unclear), the central points are that, according to Sartre, question (a) “How do we know that there are other conscious beings?,” is ill framed, unlike question (b) and that we possess certainty – “objective” certainty – that there are other conscious beings.67 5.4 Opaquism and the “Criterial Solution” We turn, finally, to question (b) “How do we know what that particular other (conscious) being is thinking and feeling?” This question is sometimes heard as accompanied by a particular despairing gesture, as it were: “How can we possibly know what another is thinking and feeling?”68 The suggestion is that once we reject the presuppositions challenged in the previous section, we can ask question (b) without the despairing gesture that is, “Well, how do we know (how do we tell) what others are thinking and feeling?” Sartre and Wittgenstein answer this, roughly speaking, by saying, “From what they say and do, and the situation in which they say and do this.”69 We can see, first, that “criterion” in, at least, the later Wittgenstein’s usage is not particularly a technical notion;70 secondly, that criteria are unlikely to be cashable out into a general formula (the criteria for P’s being in pain are P’s saying a, b and c and P’s doing x, y, and z in situation with features l, m, and n): whether something counts as a criterion for a particular “inner process” is circumstance-dependent;71 and thirdly and most importantly, that the main criticism levelled at the so-called criterial solution – namely, that “the claimed conceptual links fail to bridge the gap between observed behaviour and the unobserved inner states to which they are conceptually linked” (Hyslop 2009) – has no grip once we reject the sorts of presuppositions examined in Section 5.2. First, the term “gap” only makes sense if we are thinking of behaviour as “mere behaviour,” and, secondly, “inner states” are not (always) “unobserved.” We can make better sense of this, however, if we look back at the motivations for solipsism, which may also motivate opaquism. We noted earlier that there are at least two routes to the epistemological problem of other minds: the problem of error and the problem of sources. I think there is a third route, not often discussed – namely, that sometimes some others really are opaque to us. We look at each in turn. 5.4.1 The problem of error

The problem of error is motivated by the possibility of pretence; however, just because sometimes people pretend to thoughts or feelings that they don’t have, or pretend not to have thoughts or feelings that they do have, should hardly lead us to suppose that others’ “inner states” are forever

118  Katherine J. Morris beyond our ken. We can go further. If we put the objection as follows: “there is a difference between a genuine expression of anger and mere pretence, and that difference need not show up in behaviour,”72 we might, in the first place, issue a reminder about the importance of the situation, highlighted in Section 5.2. Recall our little scene in the pub. It might turn out that the men in our scenario were putting on this act in order to distract the staff while their collaborator grabbed the money out of the till, so a wider view of the situation would enable us to correct our mistake, whether or not we actually do so. And, in the second place, we might ask, “Show up” to whom? Some people just aren’t very perceptive, but nonetheless the difference between genuine and pretended anger may well show up, to the appropriately sensitive perceiver, in the agent’s “fine shades of behaviour.”73 (An experienced poker player is good at hiding his feelings about his hand but is also good at recognizing “tells” in the behaviour of other poker players.) Thus, of course, we can be mistaken about another’s “inner processes,” but it’s not clear why this fact should motivate the despairing “How can we possibly know what another is thinking and feeling?” – a great many such errors seem to be due to our own lacks, narrowness of vision, and inexperience. 5.4.2 The problem of sources

According to some, the epistemological problem of other minds “is produced by the radical difference that holds between our access to our own experience and our access to the experience of all other human beings.”74 Clearly enough, however, simply pointing to such an asymmetry doesn’t raise a problem. Sartre, like McDowell,75 takes a broadly perceptual approach to knowledge of others’ “inner states,” which he puts thus: “[I]t is not necessary to resort to habit or reason by analogy in order to explain how we understand expressive conducts. These conducts are originally given to perception as understandable.”76 From this perspective, the asymmetry would be expressed, for example, by saying that the other feels his anger, whereas I (at least often) perceive it; this hardly motivates the despair of opaquism. There are, of course, epistemological differences between these two modes of access (even if these are sometimes exaggerated):77 in particular, first-person claims such as “I have a pain in my foot” are often held to be incorrigible, whereas third-person claims such as “She has a pain in her foot” are held not to be. We may be tempted on this basis to say “Well, only I can know whether I am really in pain; another person can only surmise it,” but, as Wittgenstein comments, “If we are using the word ‘know’ as it is normally used … then other people very often know when I am in pain.” Moreover, “It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a

Some Problems of Other Minds  119 joke) that I know I am in pain. What is that supposed to mean – except perhaps that I am in pain?”78 The possibility of error about another’s inner state has already been accounted for; this should not tempt us to suppose that we can never know what another is thinking or feeling. But can we make sense of the idea that we perceive others’ inner states? Here is one possible model: that we look at anger, for example, as up to a point analogous to any other perceivable object, where our understanding of what it is to perceive an object is fully phenomenologically informed. This means recognizing that if, for example, one moves around a vase, what one perceives isn’t a series of discrete profiles that sum up to a whole vase, both because there is clearly not a definite number of profiles which could be summed and because the profiles are not discrete but internally related (each profile makes explicit the horizons of the previous profile and announces the horizons of the next profile as about to be made explicit). Rather, one is presented with a vase – a unified object – through being presented with the profiles.79 The thought would be that the other’s experience of his own anger is one “profile” of the object anger; its other profiles are presented to us. This makes sense of Sartre’s claim that “[t]hese frowns, this blushing, this stammering, this slight trembling of the hands, these downcast looks … – these do not express anger, they are the anger.”80 Clearly, this analogy holds only up to a point; after all, with a perceivable object, “we can move our head, body, or change our entire position by walking around the object so that the occluded side is eventually experienced directly… But clearly this is not the case with another’s mentality.”81 I can’t experience another’s anger as he experiences it, but that just means: I perceive it, I don’t feel it. This conception may at first sight look like what Krueger and Overgaard label the “co-presence thesis,”82 which claims that in perceiving another’s expressive behavior, associated mental phenomena are somehow experientially co-present … CP is motivated by the more general phenomenological observation that what we experience often outstrips what we perceive. For example, when we perceive a tomato, we experience … the whole tomato, that is, the tomato as a solid object in its three-dimensional density, including both its front as well as its backside.83 They find this problematic as a way of expressing the idea that we (sometimes) perceive others’ inner lives since it seems to imply that “the mentality of another can never be anything more than amodally copresent within expressive behaviour. … All we ever really see – have presented to us – is behavior. The mental, though somehow co-presented, is never really given as such.”84 However, this is not the case with the model I am offering, which

120  Katherine J. Morris is therefore not equivalent to CP. 85 On my model, the analogue of the other’s mentality (here, his anger) is the tomato in CP: the whole, of which the other’s experience of his anger is one profile, his behaviour another. Hence if I can perceive a tomato, then I can perceive another’s anger. Thus first- /third-person asymmetry, understood as an asymmetry between (for example) feeling and perceiving, doesn’t seem to invite any form of scepticism, and we have suggested a route (no doubt there are others) for making sense of the idea that we perceive the inner states of others. 5.4.3 The problem of opacity

Sometimes others are more or less opaque to us. Although Sartre doesn’t seem to be attuned to this fact, Wittgenstein is: “[O]ne human being can be a complete enigma to another. We learn this when we come into a strange country with entirely strange traditions; and, what is more, even given a mastery of the country’s language,”86 and again: “[S]omeone may feel concerning certain people that he will never know what goes on inside them. He will never understand them. (Englishwomen for Europeans.).”87 So too is Merleau-Ponty: “I do not … understand the expression of the emotions in primitive peoples or in circles too unlike the ones in which I move.”88 Compare Austin: “[T]here are many types of people, and many individuals too, with whom I (they being what they are, and I being what I am) never can tell. The feelings of royalty, for instance.”89 Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and Austin all point us in the direction of why such opacity might be encountered: those with whom we do not share a “form of life,” to use Wittgenstein’s expression, are, often, more or less opaque to us, the unshared form of life human (“If a lion could talk, we could not understand him”;90 “I do not ‘understand’ the sexual pantomime of the dog, still less of the cockchafer or the praying mantis”91), more narrowly cultural (Wittgenstein’s “strange country with entirely strange traditions,” Merleau-Ponty’s “primitive peoples”), or even more narrowly class- or “walks-of-life”-based (Merleau-Ponty’s “circles too unlike the ones in which I move,” Austin’s royalty). But those with whom we do share a form of life are, often, more or less transparent to us.92 This line of thought should not encourage opaquism. Of course, we still might wonder how we are to reconcile these observations with a broadly perceptual view. This isn’t a problem, as long as we recognize that perception is “smart,” as some commentators put it,93 and that a good part of its education comes via our inculcation into our form of life. 94 5.5 Concluding Remarks I began by distinguishing between two questions: (a) “How do we know that there are other conscious beings?” and (b) “How do we know what

Some Problems of Other Minds  121 that particular other (conscious) being is thinking and feeling?,” the first of which is often taken to raise the threat of solipsism, the second of which may be taken to threaten what I termed “opaquism.” Both Sartre and Wittgenstein invite us to resist assumptions about behaviour, the body and the importance of the “situation,” which are all too often unquestioned, and without which scepticism about other minds would find it difficult to get going; moreover, most of the standard attempts to rebut either form of scepticism about other minds rest on those very same assumptions. (That word “invite” is intentional; I don’t take Sartre and Wittgenstein to have demonstrated that these presuppositions are wrong. Nor would, at least, Wittgenstein: they are offering the fly a way out of the fly-bottle, which it may or may not choose to take.) Regarding the first question, Sartre argues that the existence of other conscious beings is a lived certainty; as such, we can’t know that other subjects exist, if this is supposed to imply that we can give grounds for the claim that they exist: the existence of other subjects is part of the framework (or indeed a condition for the very possibility of the framework) within which one can ask such questions. Regarding the second, I showed that a criterial approach, sans the assumptions about behaviour, the body, and the situation identified earlier, does not have the problems it is often taken to have; Sartre offers us a version of the claim that we, at least often, perceive others’ inner processes. The usual motivations for scepticism about other minds (pretence on the one hand, first- /third-person asymmetry on the other), within this framework, do not motivate opaquism, nor does a third possible motivation – namely, that some other people are, at least sometimes, opaque to us. It doesn’t follow, obviously enough, that there are no “problems of other minds”; pretence can be a genuine, agonizing, or hilarious, problem in everyday life, as can the kind of opacity that comes from unshared forms of life, and sometimes, as Sartre says, “Hell is other people”: others’ perspectives on us may disturb and oppress us (although they may also delight us or buoy us up). But those problems are not sceptical problems. Notes 1 (PI 580). It is noteworthy that “inner process” is in quotation-marks here, as Hunter (1977: 805) observes; I take it that the point of these is to challenge the idea that “inner” and “outer” are externally related, that there is a “gap” between them that needs to be bridged (see Section 5.4; see Morris (2018) for an exploration of the notion of internal relations in Wittgenstein and the phenomenologists). If I continue to use “inner process” without the quotation marks, it is simply to avoid irritating the reader. 2 However, as we will see, “the epistemological problem of other minds” is not univocal. Space precludes direct consideration of the conceptual problem of

122  Katherine J. Morris other minds (“how is it possible for us to form a concept of mental states other than our own[?],” Hyslop (2009), although much that is said here will be relevant to it. 3 (BN 346). In fact, both authors, in part on the basis of such statements, find themselves considering the question of whether they themselves are committed to behaviourism (PI 307: “‘Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise?’”; BN 294/399: “Does this [that ‘anger that is objectively apprehended is an arrangement of the world around an intraworldly presence-absence’] mean the behaviourists were right”?). Wittgenstein is sometimes actually read as a type of behaviourist, see, for example, Graham (2019). To my knowledge Sartre never has been so read (there are more and less interesting possible explanations for this). 4 I am grateful to David Macarthur for comments on an earlier version of this chapter. 5 There are others, for example, “How do we know that that particular other being is a conscious being?” This question might take us in a direction not usually explored within the remit of the problem of other minds, namely inviting us to consider the inner life of non-human animals. 6 This distinction is closely related to a distinction made by Dretske (1966) and pursued by Avramides (2015), between what Avramides calls a “thin” sceptical problem of other minds (“Is it possible to know what another is thinking or feeling?”) and a “thick” problem (“Is it possible to know that others think and feel?”). 7 Avramides (2015: 140). 8 I am grateful to my former student Julia Sojka for helping me to see this more clearly than I had in connection with Wittgenstein. 9 Hyslop (2009). N.B.: I rely heavily on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy simply because it is widely considered by Anglo-American philosophers to be reasonably authoritative and, because it is regularly revised, reasonably up to date. The SEP article “Other minds” has recently been rewritten by Anita Avramides (2019); I refer to both Hyslop’s and Avramides’ versions of this article. 10 Although interestingly differently expressed here: we might wonder whether we can really identify another being as a human being without knowing that they have, or at least have had, or “ought” to have/have had, an “inner life.” 11 Gomes (2018). 12 Hyslop (2009); cf. Avramides (2019: 1). 13 For example BN (224/311). 14 Hyslop (2009). 15 (PP 214/190). 16 (BN 250/344). 17 Hyslop (2009). 18 Sartre and Wittgenstein have much deeper objections to the scientism implicit in such an approach, but it would take us too far afield to explore these here. 19 Hyslop (2009) cites McDowell here, without, however, exploring McDowell’s reasons for rejecting this way of understanding Wittgensteinian “criteria.” We will, implicitly at least, be rejecting it here. 20 (McDowell (1982: 468). 21 Ibid., 469. 22 Ibid. 23 One might expect this question to be closer than it is to the forefront of AngloAmerican discussions of behaviourism and the problem of other minds.

Some Problems of Other Minds  123 However, neither the SEP article on behaviourism (Graham 2019) nor the earlier version of the article on other minds (Hyslop 2009) even touches on this question. An important (and admirable) exception is Avramides (esp. 2001). 24 Armstrong (1968: 84). 25 (PI 244). 26 (PI 404). 27 (PP 219/195). No doubt this is too crude, but it makes the point. 28 Moreover, as Wittgenstein notes, “We may say correctly ‘his face has the same expression now as previously’ – even though measurement yielded different results on the two occasions” (CV 38). 29 From New York Times, D. T. Max, 11 Dec. 2005: “Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, contends that Americans and the English smile differently. On this [American] side of the Atlantic, we simply draw the corners of our lips up, showing our upper teeth. … In England, they draw the lips back as well as up, showing their lower teeth.” 30 (BN 305/412). 31 There is nothing in Wittgenstein that resembles the phenomenologists’ thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the body. For all that, there are indications throughout of his recognition of a widespread picture of the human body as a mere object or a machine and his eagerness to challenge that picture; for example, “[t]he human body is the best picture of the human soul” (PI II 178), and “Well, who says that a living creature, an animal body, is a machine…?” (RPP I 918). 32 (BN 58/101). 33 (BN 56/98). 34 cf. (BN 306/413). 35 (BN 307/414). 36 (BN 309/416). 37 (BN 317/427). 38 (BN 320/430). 39 (BN 325/436). 40 (BN 321/431). 41 (BN 344/459). 42 Teichmann 2017 is a rare exception among Wittgenstein scholars in including context within the concept of criteria. 43 (BN 346–7/462). 44 Studies have shown that numerically the same face – as captured on film – can express multiple emotions depending on the context (cf. Merleau-Ponty SNS 54). 45 (BN 487/636). 46 Webber (2018: 45). 47 (BN 38/77). 48 See, for example, BN 302/408 (here he uses the term “evidence” in the Husserlian sense, meaning “being evident,” i.e. certain), although his language isn’t entirely consistent. For Sartre, the difference between (a) and (b) is linked to his distinction between “the Other-as-subject” and “the Other-as-object.” 49 Compare: “‘Knowledge’ and ‘certainty’ belong to different categories” (OC 308). However, as Wittgenstein would surely also say, what matters here is not the words ‘knowledge’ or “certainty,” but the recognition of the different roles in our lives and in our language played by different words and propositions (pace Hyslop, 2000, e.g. p. 58).

124  Katherine J. Morris 0 OC 18. 5 51 Compare and contrast, Wittgenstein OC 7: “My life shews that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there…”; and “Giving grounds … comes to an end … it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (OC 204). 52 We might say: no grounds that we could possibly offer would be more certain than a lived certainty (cf. OC 1). 53 (OC 194). 54 BN 251/346. Despite all the controversy about how exactly to understand Descartes’ cogito, one never sees scepticism regarding one’s own existence taken seriously by philosophers; can we really speak of a “cogito” when it comes to the existence of others? That is just Sartre’s point: that scepticism about the existence of other subjects is no more seriously entertainable than scepticism about one’s own existence. 55 This aspect of Descartes’ thinking is all too seldom recognized, yet the whole strategy of Meditation I is to explore, as the title indicates, “What can be called into doubt” (italics added; to call something into doubt is to provide grounds for doubt). 56 cf. (OC 122). And we might even add that just as grounds for knowledgeclaims are intersubjectively recognizable as grounds (cf. OC 18), so too are grounds for doubt. 57 (OC 136). 58 (OC 211). 59 (OC 341). He offers a huge variety of such propositions; the best comparator for our purposes is, I suppose, what one commentator calls “trans-historical” Glock (1996: 78), for example, “The earth existed long before my birth” cf. (OC 84), as opposed, for example, to “I have two hands.” 60 (BN 251/345). Here he actually uses “known” rather than “been certain,” but see earlier notes. 61 Hyslop: “Grant that I am certain [of the existence of other subjects] before I am ashamed. Surely some explication is needed. Even if there is no ‘how’, is there a ‘when’, or a ‘where’, or something?” (2000: 55). 62 (BN 277/377). 63 (BN 277/378). 64 (BN 252/346). 65 In fact, Wittgenstein might well call “There are other conscious beings” “nonsense,” as he does “There are physical objects” (OC 35). This is one reason for not taking “outward criteria” as directed at question (a), but it also supports the suggestion that for him too, question (a) should be handled very differently from question (b). 66 (OC 94). 67 Analytic philosophers may note (and may even take it as a knockdown refutation) that this approach, combined with the conviction that we can sometimes know what another is thinking or feeling, seems to entail the rejection of the so-called principle of epistemic closure, according to which if I know that p, and know that if p then q, then I know that q. That is, if I know, for example, that Tim is angry, and know (as it may seem that I do) that if Tim is angry, then he is a conscious subject, then I know that Tim is a conscious subject (from which it seems to follow that I know that there are conscious subjects). It would take me too far afield to show this, but it’s far from clear that the violation of this (alleged) principle is a consequence, and even less clear either Sartre or Wittgenstein would find that worrying.

Some Problems of Other Minds  125 8 Cf. Austin (1970: 76). 6 69 Cf. “What is the criterion for the redness of an image? For me, when it is someone else’s image: what he says and does” (PI 377). McDowell also takes this as a paradigm (1982: 465). 70 Cf McDowell (1982: 461). 71 cf. McDowell (1982: 463, citing PI 164) 72 Hyslop (2009). 73 (PI II 203, 204, 207). 74 Hyslop (2009). 75 McDowell (1982). 76 (BN 347/463). 77 See Morris (1996). 78 (PI 246). 79 Cf. Morris (2018: 164). 80 (BN: 346-7/462). 81 Krueger and Overgaard (2012: 243) 82 (CP) 83 (2012: 243). 84 Ibid., 243–4. 85 Nor is it equivalent to Krueger and Overgaard’s “hybrid” view, which they characterise as follows: “certain bodily actions are expressive of mental phenomena in that they actually make up proper parts of some mental phenomena. In other words, some mental phenomena have a hybrid structure: they straddle internal (i.e. neural) and external (i.e. extra-neural, gross bodily) processes” (2012: 244). Profiles aren’t parts. They confuse the issue when they continue: “When we perceive certain forms of behavior and expressive actions, we quite literally perceive aspects of some mental phenomena”; aspects aren’t parts either, surely. 86 (PI II 223). 87 (CV 84). 88 (PP 214/190). 89 Austin (1970: 104). 90 (PI II 223). 91 (PP 214/190). 92 Austin: “[W]e certainly can recognize when some near relative of ours is angrier than we have ever seen him” (1970: 104). 93 Krueger and Overgaard (2012). 94 Nor need we see the opacity as permanent; it may be that we can learn to inhabit a different form of life. See Morris (2017).

References Abbreviations Used Works by J.P. Sartre: BN: Being and Nothingness (original French publication 1943). Page references are to two different translations; the first is by H. E. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1993 reprinting), the second by S. Richmond (London and New York: Routledge, 2018).

126  Katherine J. Morris Works by L. Wittgenstein: PI: Philosophical Investigations (1958). Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees. Tr. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. As is customary, PI references are by section number, PI Part II references are given as PI II followed by the page number. OC: On Certainty (1969). Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, tr. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. CV: Culture and Value (1980). Ed. G. H. von Wright in collaboration with H. Nyman, tr, P. Winch. Oxford: Blackwell. RPP: Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (1980), 2 vols. Vol. I eds. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe. Vol. II eds. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trs. C.G. Luckhardt and M.A.E Aue. Oxford: Blackwell. Works by M. Merleau-Ponty: PP: Phenomenology of Perception (original French publication 1945). Page references are to two different translations; the first is by C. Smith (London and New York: Routledge, 2009 reprinting), the second by D. A. Landes (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). SNS: Sense and Non-Sense (1964; original French publication: 1948). Trs. H. L. Dreyfus and P. A. Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Other Works Referenced Armstrong, D. A Materialist Theory of Mind. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (1968). Austin, J. L. Other Minds. In Philosophical Papers, 2nd ed. London, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press ([1964] 1970). Avramides, A. Other Minds. London and New York: Routledge. (2001). ——— On seeing that others have thoughts and feelings. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 22, (2015). 138–155. ——— Other minds. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford. edu/entries/other-minds/. (2019). Dretske, F. Seeing and Knowing. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. (1966). Glock, H.-J. A Wittgenstein Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell. (1996). Gomes, A. Scepticism About Other Minds. In D.E. Manchuca and B. Reed. (eds.), Skepticism from Antiquity to the Present, pp. 700–714. London: Bloomsbury. (2018). Graham, G. Behaviorism. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato. stanford.edu/entries/behaviorism/. (2019 [2000, substantially revised 2019]). Hunter, J. Wittgenstein on inner processes and outward criteria. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 7(4), (1977). 805–817 Hyslop, A. Sartre and other minds. Sartre Studies International, 6(1), (2000). 48–60.

Some Problems of Other Minds  127 ——— Sartre and other minds. Sartre Studies International, 6(1), (2009 [2005, substantially revised 2009]). Other Minds. https://stanford.library.sydney.edu. au/archives/fall2010/entries/other-minds/. A further substantial revision in 2014 is no longer available. Krueger, J., & Overgaard, S. Seeing subjectivity: Defending a perceptual account of other minds. ProtoSociology: Consciousness and Subjectivity, 47, (2012). 239–262. McDowell, J. Criteria, defeasibility and Knowledge. Proceedings of the British Academy, 68, (1982). 455–479. Morris, K. J. Pain, injury and first/third-person asymmetry. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 56(1), ([1996] 1982). 125–136. ——— Merleau-Ponty on Understanding Others. In L. Dolezal and D. Petherbridge (eds.), Body/Self/Other: Phenomenology of Social Encounters, pp. 237–266. New York: SUNY Press. (2017). ——— Internal Relations in Wittgenstein and the Phenomenologists. In O. Kuusela, M. Ometita and T. Ųcan (eds.), Wittgenstein and Phenomenology, pp. 161–175. New York and London: Routledge. (2018). Teichmann, R. Not a something. Nordic Wittgenstein Review, 6(1), (2017). 9–30. Webber, J. Rethinking Existentialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2018).

6 Scepticism as Nihilism Sartre’s Nausea Reads Cavell David Macarthur

We may define “scepticism” in general terms as reason’s self-defeat, what Hume called a “malady” of reason, and what Kant thought of as a scandal to reason’s pretensions – which explains why scepticism is one of the two primary modes of philosophy; the other being constructive metaphysics – a vision of the triumph of reason.1 This paradoxical formulation leaves much to be determined, however, since, as the history of philosophy shows, rational self-defeat can take many different forms including argumentative techniques that undermine rational beliefs case by case (e.g. Pyrrhonian scepticism), radical doubts that undermine all claims to “knowledge” in some specified area (e.g. Cartesian external world scepticism), or doubts about the grounds of the conditions of contentful thought, or meaningful speech, quite generally (e.g. Kripke’s meaning scepticism2). The question I want to raise in this chapter concerns Stanley Cavell’s conception of how “the claim of reason” undermines itself in the case of external world scepticism.3 I believe Cavell’s work on scepticism in both the external world and other minds cases is currently unavailable for contemporary philosophy. In order to begin to make it available, I will engage in sympathetic criticism of Cavell’s articulation of scepticism and, particularly, of his attempt to read a Wittgenstein-inspired conception of scepticism back into the Cartesian tradition of scepticism. The upshot will be a new understanding of what Cavell calls scepticism and the beginnings of a new understanding of its relation to post-Kantian German Idealism and Romanticism. Stanley Cavell’s writings on modern scepticism, although amongst the most profound and provocative in philosophy, are also the least well understood. And no doubt this is one reason why they are rarely discussed in the literature; and, where they are, almost never engaged with critically – with one or two notable exceptions.4 There are several reasons why Cavell’s conception of scepticism is misunderstood but perhaps the most significant reason is what I shall call the continuity thesis. This is the view that Cavell’s discussion of scepticism is continuous with, or an extension of, traditional DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-7

Scepticism as Nihilism  129 modern scepticism as we find it in, say, Descartes’s Meditations. The continuity thesis seems to be explicitly endorsed by Cavell himself. In the “Preface” to the 1999 edition of The Claim of Reason, Cavell speaks of the first three parts of the book as “an academically recognizable study … of skepticism as understood in Descartes and Hume and Kant.”5 Influential commentators have also found the view in Cavell. Richard Rorty, as astute a reader of philosophy as you can find, complains that Cavell simply rehearses the same old scepticism about the external world that one can find in Descartes and the epistemological tradition he inspired. Rorty speaks in derogatory terms of the scepticism about the external world with which Cavell is concerned as “‘professional’ philosopher’s skepticism” and complains, “Why ‘the external world’ again?” Another important interpreter of Cavell, James Conant, also claims, The term “skepticism” in Cavell’s work – and in his writings on Wittgenstein – exclusively denotes a problematic of the Cartesian variety.6 Conant contrasts Cartesian scepticism, which concerns whether what seems to be so really is so, with Kantian scepticism, which concerns the very possibility of things seeming to be so. I shall argue that, on the contrary, if we have to choose between these options, then the scepticism with which Cavell is concerned is much closer to Kantian, not Cartesian, scepticism in Conant’s lexicon7 – in spite of certain elements of Cavell’s own self-understanding. However, as we will see, Cavell is better thought of as situated within post-Kantian thought – notably that of Jacobi – and, most centrally and prominently, within Wittgenstein’s concern for the conditions of meaningfulness in language. Conant is right, however, that Cavell takes himself to have a unified account of scepticism throughout his work, even if it takes different forms concerning, most prominently, the external world and other minds. An important constraint on the interpretation of Cavell on scepticism which I intend to observe is not to multiply senses of the term “scepticism” in interpreting his writings. Cavell’s continuity thesis runs into at least two major obstacles:8 (1) his characterization of scepticism focuses for the most part on the repudiation of criteria for judgement not, as tradition dictates, radical doubts about our justifications for claims to knowledge, but there is no straightforward path from the former to the latter, and (2) what motivates scepticism, on Cavell’s view, is, ultimately, disappointment – a position which either passes over or slights the traditional sceptical ground of radical doubt. Cavell sometimes says it is disappointment in knowledge and sometimes disappointment in criteria. But these are not obviously the same. These two interpretative difficulties leave us with the question, how are we to understand Cavell on scepticism?

130  David Macarthur The problem we are confronting can also be brought out by considering two very different characterizations of scepticism in Cavell’s writings. In The Claim of Reason (1979). Cavell writes, I apply [the term “skepticism”] to any view which takes the existence of the world to be a problem of knowledge.9 This is Cavell at his most traditional and this understanding certainly aligns with Cartesian scepticism – but even here Cavell departs from tradition in two significant ways: (1) in taking theories of knowledge that aim to refute traditional scepticism as instances of scepticism and (2) in making allowance for non-traditional understandings of the sceptical problem according to which the problem for knowledge at issue is not, or not ultimately, a matter of reasonable doubt but something else – which Cavell will come to speak of as disappointment. The second, and prevailing, characterization of scepticism in Cavell’s writings makes no mention of knowledge or radical doubt at all. Here is one of many examples: [The] repudiation of criteria … is how The Claim of Reason interprets the possibility or threat of or the temptation to skepticism.10 A closely related variant of this formulation is that scepticism is an attack on “the ordinary,” a term which refers to the interpersonal realm of ordinary or everyday language which is understood as being articulated by way of criteria – criteria being employed, following Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, as tools of grammatical investigation.11 Since the repudiation of criteria (= an attack on the ordinary) is Cavell’s standard characterization of scepticism, let us call this Cavellian scepticism for the purposes of explication without prejudging its relation to traditional epistemological scepticism. Richard Rorty also discerns an ambiguity in Cavell’s treatment of external world scepticism in The Claim of Reason.12 He sees it as conflating traditional epistemological scepticism (which Rorty understands narrowly as arising from a commitment to the “theory of ideas” popular in the seventeenth century) with another quite different form of scepticism which he puts as follows: The Kantian, Romantic worry about whether the words we use have any relation to the way the world actually is in itself.13 As we will see, there is some justice in this characterization, but it has the disadvantage that it does not make any connection with either Wittgensteinian criteria or the ordinary. It is far from obvious that we can assimilate the

Scepticism as Nihilism  131 Kantian question of whether we only know the world as it appears, not as it is in itself, with criterial scepticism which questions the basis for applying our words to the world (– without the Kantian qualification, world in itself). Although, as Cavell himself notes, there is an analogy between grammar in Wittgenstein’s philosophy and transcendental logic in Kant’s14 – for example, both deal with possibilities of phenomena – can we simply assume that Cavell applies the full Kantian philosophical machinery of appearances/things in themselves (etc.) to the limitation of criteria he is concerned to explicate?15 Cavellian scepticism confronts us with a loss of concepts. The question is, Why should we think of that as a failure of knowledge specifically?16 For the purposes of this chapter, I will not consider it an adequate answer to this question to claim that what connects Cavellian scepticism concerning criteria with traditional external world scepticism is the imagination.17 I will be assuming that the continuity thesis that Cavell endorses depends upon their being a rational relation between these characterizations of scepticism, or, in other words, that there is a claim of reason at stake here.18 The interpretative method I adopt is unorthodox. I shall regard Sartre’s existentialist novel Nausea as a reading of Cavellian scepticism – by which I mean the novel’s description of what I take to be an experience of Cavellian scepticism invites a certain interpretation of it. My aim is to read Cavellian scepticism by interpreting it as, or leading to, the existential crisis Sartre so forcefully describes in Nausea – focusing, in particular, on the famous description of Roquentin’s reaction to the roots of a chestnut tree in a public park. My understanding of the philosophical import of this key passage from Nausea is more or less familiar, although I perhaps place more weight on the issue of nihilism than standard commentaries do.19 The motivation for this methodological conceit – appealing to literature written in 1938 by an existential phenomenologist as a reading of philosophical ideas expressed half a century or more later by an uncategorizable philosopher originally trained in analytic philosophy – is based on the striking analogies between Sartre’s literary and Cavell’s philosophical expression of the problem of the relation of language to the world. This approach might be regarded as perverse or arbitrary were it not for the fact that Cavell himself finds important points of comparison between existentialism and analytic philosophy in a paper in which Wittgenstein is regarded as the paradigm of an analytic philosopher20 – the very philosopher who is a touchstone for Cavell’s own philosophical endeavours. It is also significant that the interpretative claims generated by reading Cavell in this way find striking confirmations within his own writings – enough to encourage me to go beyond them. As we will see, Sartre’s novel also provides a basis for elucidating the “truth” of scepticism – Cavell’s articulation of which is painfully ambiguous. Seeing Cavellian scepticism as manifest in Roquentin’s existential crisis arguably clarifies and deepens our appreciation of both.

132  David Macarthur Given that Cavell traces the source of scepticism to a perversity of human nature (“the human drive … to make itself inhuman”),21 it should not be surprising that it finds expression in everyday life, art, and literature, as well as philosophy. I could also point to Cavell’s pathbreaking work on the interpenetration of literature and philosophy, and, in particular, his defence of the possibility of prescient philosophical discoveries in literature which underwrites his vision that literature and philosophy interpret one another – for example, the discovery of modern scepticism in Shakespearean tragedy prior to Descartes.22 We will find that the very attempt to articulate Cavellian scepticism involves difficulties that make a literary presentation particularly appealing. Before we begin, a note of clarification. For the purposes of this chapter, I will focus exclusively on external world scepticism. Cavell’s treatment of other minds’ scepticism will only be discussed for the purposes of clarifying the external world case. This may seem wrong-headed given that for Cavell the latter problem – or Cavell’s replacement for that, namely, the problem of the other – is the more important orientation in his mature thought.23 But it is worth gaining a clearer view of what external world scepticism becomes in Cavell’s writings for at least two reasons: (i) Cavellian scepticism is originally articulated in terms of external world scepticism, even if it is supposed to apply to both external world and other minds scepticisms. And Cavell continues throughout his writings to use the term “scepticism” to refer to both forms of scepticism. Indeed a constraint on my interpretation is to find a unified understanding of scepticism since this is clearly what Cavell intends. (ii) It is in the case of external world scepticism that Cavell sees the most continuity with traditional scepticism. It is precisely that continuity thesis that I want to challenge. A discussion of Cavell’s conception of scepticism of other minds requires separate and detailed treatment that I will leave for another occasion. 6.1 Scepticism of the Possibility of Judgement (Criteria) vs Scepticism of the Actuality of Knowledge (Justification) The question now before us is this: Can Cavell’s vision of scepticism be understood as a continuation or extension of traditional external world scepticism which presents us with a problem of knowledge in particular? Inspired by Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, Cavell interprets scepticism to be the repudiation of our ordinary language by means of an attack on (grammatical) criteria. Criteria “tells us what kind of object anything is.”24 They are the mostly implicit basis by which we apply concepts of “objects” to the world; the “objects” in question being familiar or everyday things, happenings, actions, or states of mind, such as chairs, mountains, red, rain, sunshine, dreams, waving, hoping, understanding,

Scepticism as Nihilism  133 and so on. For example, suppose that one having been asked whether there are any chairs in the basement says “Yes, there is a chair there” on the basis of satisfying this criterion for a chair: that something one sees in the basement looks like a chair. The sceptic states, “Perhaps you only dreamt or hallucinated that you saw a chair.” Let us further suppose that nothing stands in the way of making this ordinary identification: One has not taken hallucinogenic drugs, nor is over-tired, the basement is well-illuminated, and so on. The sceptical line of questioning repudiates the ordinary criteria by suggesting that despite blamelessly taking oneself to be in normal circumstances for identifying and naming things, one had an experience that could be described as only seeming to see something that looked like a chair, even though there was no actual chair there to be seen. Why should we think a loss of a judgement about a chair leads to a threat to our knowledge that the external world exists (supposing we have such knowledge)? In Cavell’s rehearsal of Cartesian scepticism, if one is in the right mood, then the undermining of one’s judgement (about, say, a chair) by way of the repudiation of criteria inevitably leads to the catastrophic realization that one does not know for certain that the external world, as a whole, exists. Three contestable features of the situation are crucial for the viability of this criteria-defeating route to a traditional sceptical conclusion: (1) that one takes one’s judgement to be an instance of propositional knowledge about the empirical world and (2) that the relevant object – a chair in this example – functions as what Cavell calls a “generic object,”25 which is not a distinct category of objects but “summarize[s] the spirit in which the object is under discussion, the kind of problem that has arisen about it, the problem in which it presents itself as the focus of investigation.”26 The spirit of the inquiry is one in which we are not trying to learn anything new about how to recognize, identify or describe things. So it cannot be answered by, say, mentioning one’s past familiarity with chairs. The kind of problem at issue – as dictated by the example in question and the logic of ordinary language – is a problem of existence, not identification. And, beyond that, (3) the example in question is considered a best case of knowing since only in that case is (certain) knowledge of the external world as a whole put in jeopardy. For, then, we can reasonably argue “If I don’t know this then I don’t know anything” – given that nothing is more securely known than this. The catastrophic result is that we cannot know whether the external world exists tout court. With this summary of Cavell’s derivation of scepticism before us, it is worth recalling the character of traditional scepticism in the modern period as represented by Descartes’s Meditations. Scepticism is presented as an epistemological attack on whether we have sufficient or good enough justifications or reasons to sustain claims of having certain knowledge about the external world.27 So, for example, the meditator reflects on the

134  David Macarthur possibility of extended life-like dreams or hallucinations, and even the deceptive machinations of an imagined evil demon, to undermine perception in general – any and every perceptual experience – as a source of certain knowledge about the external world. If successful, no appeal to perception can thereafter function as a reason or justification for claiming to know with certainty about, say, chairs, trees, buildings, people, and so on. The sceptic puts one in the impossible position of arguing for the existence of an external world whilst depriving one of all of one’s perceptual resources for justifying claims about it.28 If we leave aside for the moment the contestable features that are supposed to convert Cavellian scepticism into traditional Cartesian scepticism, it is immediately apparent that Cavell’s problem is not an epistemological problem concerning our lack of appropriate justification for knowledge but, instead, a semantic problem arising from a realization that concept application, even if done fully responsibly, is limited in what it can achieve. The problem is not, in the first instance, that we lack knowledge that we ordinarily suppose we have but that we lose, or are threatened with the loss of, the very basis of our intelligibility in our mother tongue. In stripping us of our criteria – or at least in doing this in cases where we are not prepared to accommodate the loss of the concepts at stake – scepticism undermines the condition of our mutual intelligibility; that is, it undermines the natural language that we employ to do “work” of various kinds in our everyday lives together. Without criteria, ordinary judgement is impossible. The undermining of criteria results in a loss of concepts and, consequently, a loss of the judgements involving them. This threatens us with incoherence, emptiness, or pointlessness. Cavellian scepticism, then, is a linguistic-existential problem that can arise for any criterial concept or at least any such concept whose loss we feel we cannot live without.29 Cavell summarizes this idea by saying that scepticism is an attack on the ordinary where the ordinary is understood as articulated by way of (Wittgensteinian) criteria.30 The serious interpretative problem we face is this: scepticism understood as a crisis of unintelligibility based on an unaccommodated attack on criteria is clearly distinct from, so not a continuation of, traditional epistemology-focused scepticism. What is in focus in the undermining of criteria (i.e. Cavellian scepticism) is judgement, whereas what is in focus in the Cartesian sceptic’s undermining of justification is knowledge.31 As Cavell puts it, Criteria are criteria of judgment; the underlying idea is one of discriminating or separating cases, of identifying by means of differences.32 So how does Cavell suppose we are led from Cavellian scepticism to Cartesian scepticism? No doubt some judgements count as knowledge but not

Scepticism as Nihilism  135 all of them do. Cavell often simply assumes that in studying judgement, we are studying human knowledge, but these categories do not coincide so some justification for the transition from a focus on judgement to a focus on knowledge is called for.33 Especially so since without that transition, we cannot see any clear path connecting the repudiation of criteria that Cavell calls scepticism with traditional knowledge-focused scepticism. A claim to knowledge presupposes that the language it is expressed in is meaningful. But if that is in question, the resulting crisis is a lot more serious than a loss of knowledge. We may put this by saying that if criteria are defeated then the problem we face is not a problem of knowledge in particular. Moreover, the implication does not go the other way. If we have somehow lost knowledge of the external world (as in Cartesian scepticism), we would not thereby lose the capacity to make intelligible judgements about it. We might suppose we simply undermine a relation of knowing which leaves our beliefs, say, relatively intact.34 It is true that if we lose our capacity to apply the concepts of our language to the world we thereby lose the capacity to know the objects that these concepts are concepts of. But we would not lose knowledge in particular; we would lose our capacity for intelligible thought quite generally. Note, too, that what is in focus when criteria are repudiated is the loss of particular judgements or claims; knowledge only gets into the picture in so far as we take those judgements to be matters of knowledge. The derivation of scepticism about knowledge based on radical doubt does not go through if what is in question is a judgement about a generic object which is not being regarded as a best case of knowledge about the external world. Is it natural to so take it? If we imagine saying in all seriousness, “I know that that is a chair” as traditional epistemologists do, then we are in the position of G. E. Moore when he said “I know that this is a hand”; to which Wittgenstein responded that such an utterance is a misuse (or metaphysicalization35) of the expression “I know…” whose meaning has not been determined in such circumstances. Since it is not conveying any information to anyone, what is Moore’s purpose or point in so speaking?36 Cavell himself says that such a claim, made in the non-claim context of traditional epistemology (where one is not addressing anyone and so only imagining making a claim), is “not fully natural, … [that] it lacks a clear sense.”37 But, then, why think it is a best case of knowledge? And if we are not prosecuting a best case of knowledge, then no sceptical moral concerning knowledge follows from its failure. Another way of trying to connect Cavellian scepticism and traditional scepticism would be if the concept of knowledge were a criterial concept. But there is no straightforward connection between the repudiation of criteria and the sceptical eradication of knowledge for the simple reason that the concept of knowledge is not a criterial concept.38 That is, there are no

136  David Macarthur criteria for the difference between knowing and mistakenly thinking one knows, just as there are no criteria for the difference between truth and falsehood, or believing truly and believing falsely. Whether a proposition is true and whether we know it or truly believe it are not matters of recognition. I conclude that Cavell’s Wittgenstein-inspired conception of scepticism that gives pride of place to the notion of a criterion, and our repudiation of it, is not a continuation or reasonable extension of traditional scepticism as we find it in, for example, Descartes, Hume, Reid, or Moore. Cavell is only able to derive a traditional sceptical conclusion from his consideration of the repudiation of criteria because he starts, somewhat dubiously, with what is conceived of as a best case of knowledge of the external world (e.g. “I know that there is a piece of paper in my hand”) which is less tendentiously regarded as a judgement about which we are certain (e.g. “There is a piece of paper in my hand”).39 Cavellian scepticism is directed at the intelligibility of a judgement, not its status as an instance of knowledge. So the quasi-traditional characterization of scepticism from The Claim of Reason which we quoted earlier40 is misleading. We have found that Conant’s claim that Cavellian scepticism is exclusively a matter of Cartesian scepticism does not withstand scrutiny. Given the vacillation in the formulation of scepticism in Cavell’s texts, it would be more appropriate to say, as Conant does about Wittgenstein, that “the scope of the term ‘skepticism’ as employed by Wittgenstein [and so, I suggest, Cavell] is sufficiently capacious to encompass both Cartesian and Kantian varieties of skepticism.”41 In the present chapter, I want to go beyond such an accommodation by consistently reading Cavell on scepticism, inspired by Sartre’s Nausea, in a way that contests the continuity thesis and which provides a unified account of scepticism in Cavell’s thought. According to this reading, Cavellian scepticism is not equivalent to Cartesian scepticism; nor is Cartesian scepticism an instance of it. As we have seen, this reading involves countering some of Cavell’s own claims and commitments regarding his Wittgenstein-inspired scepticism and its relationship to the history of modern philosophy. Before we get to that, let us consider the second major problem for the continuity thesis. 6.2  Scepticism as Disappointment with Criteria or Knowledge? As we have seen, the first major discontinuity between Cavellian scepticism and traditional scepticism concerns what kind of problem it is and what it is a problem of. The second, related discontinuity, concerns the motivation for the problem. Traditionally, in the modern period at least, the basis for scepticism is rational doubt, which is directed at entire domains of presumed knowledge: the external world, other minds, the past, etc.42

Scepticism as Nihilism  137 Whereas in Cavell’s case, the ultimate motivation for scepticism is disappointment – and consonant with his wavering between two definitions of scepticism, we find him wavering about what we are disappointed in. Sometimes it is said to be knowledge: In Wittgenstein’s work, as in skepticism, the human disappointment with human knowledge seems to take over the whole subject.43 Sometimes it is said to be criteria: It is exactly as important to Wittgenstein to trace the disappointment with and repudiation of criteria (which is how The Claim of Reason interprets the possibility or threat of or the temptation to skepticism) as to trace our attunements in them (to which Austin confined himself).44 These apparently divergent formulations can be brought into alignment if we take the knowledge in question to be knowledge of language, hence of criteria.45 But, note, that knowledge of language is a wholly different kind of knowledge: it is neither empirical knowledge nor a priori knowledge. Although largely a matter of know-how, knowledge of our language gives us access to possibilities of worldly phenomena. But Cavell also speaks of disappointment in our knowledge of other minds even when we can be said to have successfully achieved such knowledge. Disappointment in our knowledge of other minds is not disappointment in criteria since, in this case, criteria are satisfied and we have, in addition, what we consider good grounds for our claims about another mind. In the other minds case, Cavell says, “[T]here is a skepticism which is produced not by a doubt about whether we can know but by a disappointment over knowledge itself.”46 This shows how very distant Cavellian scepticism with respect to other minds – less misleadingly titled “the problem of the other” – is from traditional other minds scepticism.47 The problem is not the traditional epistemological one about how we can infer an “inner” mind on the basis of “outer” behaviour, where the latter is understood, in alienated terms, as mindless physical movement. Our problem, as Cavell sees it, is that the achievement or value of our knowledge of others – knowledge which we undoubtedly have – is somehow less than we imagined it would be, falling short of our hopes or wishes or ideals for such knowledge.48 The problem of the other is a recurrent ethically charged problem of acknowledging specific others – a partner, a lover, a friend, a sister, a brother, a fellow citizen, an acquaintance, a stranger, and so on – that characterizes our everyday lives in communication and community with fellow human beings in which “we deny how real the practical difficulty is of coming to know another person, and of how little we can reveal of ourselves to another’s

138  David Macarthur gaze, of bear of it.”49 I take it that this practical difficulty cannot be fully accounted for in terms of conditions for the application of criteria. The role of doubt and disappointment in the case of external world scepticism is quite different. Scepticism, in this case, is motivated by radical doubt, but only in an attenuated sense. In contrast to traditional Cartesian scepticism, the sceptical crisis for Cavell is not that there is a rationally compelling argument for the conclusion that we cannot know that the external world exists. Since scepticism arises in a “non-claim context” on the basis of a metaphysical doubt (e.g. an evil demon, or endless dream) that is neither reasonable nor unreasonable it leads to “irresolution.”50 What inspires a sceptical crisis for Cavell is not simply doubt but an initial “sense that … something is, or may be, amiss with knowledge as a whole.”51 The sceptical crisis, on this account, is largely a consequence of a felt inadequacy in human knowing that we experience before doubts have been raised. [Note: it is important for the present account that Cavell also thinks we are subject to a felt inadequacy of human meaning.52] We may say that this experience is confirmed or made vivid by the incapacity of human knowledge to undermine radical doubt and establish what the sceptic denies. In writing his dissertation, Cavell was initially tempted by, but ultimately rejected, the project of appealing to criteria to refute scepticism (a project prosecuted, notably for Cavell, by Wittgenstein sympathizers Norman Malcolm and Rogers Albritton).53 So it is plausible that, as Cavell sees things, we are also disappointed that criteria do not provide materials for an argument from premises the sceptic must accept (as a user of language) to a conclusion that the external world exists. If that is the case then this “scandal … to universal human reason,” as Kant called it, is not something that we can remove; it is something we must learn to live with.54 But whether we should accept that defeatist position will depend upon what we are relying upon to settle our relation to the world. Is it criteria (knowledge of language) or empirical knowledge? 6.3  The Problem of Existence: Roquentin’s Epiphany (Nausea) I want to now turn to consider a well-known passage from Sartre’s famous 1938 novel Nausea (La Nausée) on the grounds that it is a powerful literary presentation of an experience of Cavellian scepticism. Nausea is a story set in the seaside town of Bouville in the 1930s about Antoine Roquentin, a man who tries but fails to write a biography of the late eighteenth-century diplomat Marquis de Rollebon. He is one of several characters, including the Autodidact and Annie, a former lover, each of whom in their own ways unsuccessfully attempts to impose an “order” – a form of human meaningfulness – on what Roquentin shockingly discovers to be a fundamentally chaotic or meaningless reality. The condition of

Scepticism as Nihilism  139 nausea refers to his experience that “things have broken free from their names” because the meanings of things, the concepts we use for things, have no necessary grounding in existence.55 That the world does not determine the concepts we have for it is experienced as a sickness. In a memorable and climactic scene from the novel the protagonist suffers from what might be described as a metaphysical or sceptical delirium occasioned by a deeply unsettling insight about the relation of language to the world: So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty mass, entirely beastly, which frightened me … existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder – naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness. … I realized that there was no half-way house between non-existence and this flaunting abundance. If you existed, you had to exist all the way, as far as mouldiness, bloatedness, obscenity were concerned. In another world, circles, bars of music keep their pure and rigid lines. But existence is a deflection. … We were a heap of living creatures, irritated, embarrassed at ourselves, we hadn’t the slightest reason to be there, none of us, each one, confused, vaguely alarmed, felt In the way in relation to the others… And I – soft, weak, obscene, digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts – I, too, was In the way. … I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. … And without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to Existence, the key to my Nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity. … This root – there was nothing in relation to which it was absurd. Oh, how can I put it in words? Absurd: in relation to the stones, the tufts of yellow grass, the dry mud, the tree, the sky, the green benches. Absurd, irreducible; nothing – not even a profound, secret upheaval of nature – could explain it … neither ignorance nor knowledge was important: the world of explanations and reasons is not the world of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is clearly explained by the rotation of a straight segment around one of its extremities. But neither does a circle exist. This root, on the other hand, existed in such

140  David Macarthur a way that I could not explain it. … The function explained nothing: it allowed you to understand generally that it was a root, but not that one at all. This root, with its colour, shape, its congealed movement, was … below all explanation. Each of its qualities escaped it a little, flowed out of it, half solidified, almost became a thing; each one was In the way in the root and the whole stump now gave me the impression of unwinding itself a little, denying its existence to lose itself in a frenzied excess. … The simplest, most indefinable quality had too much content, in relation to itself, in its heart… I understood the Nausea, I possessed it… The essential thing is contingency. I mean that one cannot define existence as necessity. To exist is simply to be there; those who exist let themselves be encountered, but you can never deduce anything from them. I believe there are people who have understood this. Only they tried to overcome this contingency by inventing a necessary, causal being. But no necessary being can explain existence: contingency is not a delusion, a probability which can be dissipated; it is the absolute, consequently, the perfect free gift. All is free, this park, this city and myself. When you realize that, it turns your heart upside down and everything begins to float … no one has any rights; they are entirely free, like other men, they cannot succeed in not feeling superfluous.56 I shall not attempt to give a detailed philosophical explication of this passage in the context of the novel as a whole nor within the larger body of Sartre’s philosophical writings. For present purposes, my ambitions are both less and more than that. I want to use this unsettling experience of loss and estrangement as a reading of Cavell’s vision of scepticism. As we have noted, Cavell traces the roots of scepticism to “an initial threatening sense or fact of something amiss.”57 So my claim is that Roquentin gives expression to this sceptical experience or sense. No doctrines of existentialist philosophy are presupposed or required other than what can be gleaned from Sartre’s description of this experience.58 We may say that it is a phenomenological record of one man’s reaction to what Cavell calls the “truth” of scepticism – on a particular reading of it which I will explore shortly. It provides a way of making sense of Cavell’s vision of our natural relation to the world as a whole and its sceptical undermining. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant famously claimed that existence is not a property or predicative determination of things: Thus when I think a thing, through whichever and however many predicates I like (even in its thoroughgoing determination), not the least bit gets added to the thing when I posit in addition that this thing is. For otherwise what would exist would not be the same as what I had thought in my concept, but more than that, and I could not say that the very object of my concept exists.59

Scepticism as Nihilism  141 The position Sartre articulates in effect rejects Kant’s view of existence. To help explain this, he contrasts stones, tufts of yellow grass, dry mud, trees, sky, green benches, etc., with a circle which, unlike such ordinary “material” things, is necessarily and completely determined by its conceptual definition (say, “being a plane figure whose boundary consists of points equidistant from a fixed point” (OED)). In contrast, Roquentin comes to feel that concepts of material objects are a mere play on the surface of things, whose existence overflows our concepts in an over-abundance or superfluity. From this perspective, existence is an inexplicable and unknowable something in addition to, or over and above, our conceptual determinations. Since it does not necessitate the concepts we apply to it, we can come to feel that human meanings are null and void since they lack a requisite grounding in existence. 6.4  Scepticism as the Repudiation of Criteria Considered from the point of view of traditional epistemology, the passage represents an anti-sceptical attitude to existence in so far as that the problem of (material) existence it expresses is not a problem of knowledge (“neither ignorance nor knowledge was important”). In Roquentin’s experience what “suddenly unveiled itself” as (material) existence in the form of the root of the chestnut tree is undeniable, a revelation, a terrible bearing upon one of the things as they are without adornment – existence considered as “a frightful, obscene nakedness … a flaunting abundance.” The protagonist’s confrontation with the palpable reality of existence is so overwhelming as to render traditional scepticism unavailable. But there is, nonetheless, an analogy between Roquentin’s experience and traditional scepticism: both see that a gap opens up between existence and conceptual determination – either because existence is too much (overflowing conceptual determination60) or too little (not being available to be conceptually determined). It is curious that only in the former case is there felt to be a profound loss of meaning. Traditional epistemology avoids problems of meaning. We might, then, see Cavellian scepticism as a corrective to this asymmetric response, given that it, too, sees scepticism as a crisis of meaningfulness.61 Nonetheless, it is noteworthy that the very idea of such a gap involves or leads to the repudiation of criteria that Cavell typically identifies with scepticism. So there would be a line of thought from traditional scepticism to Cavellian scepticism if a lack of knowledge of existence led to a lack of trust or faith or belief in existence. Otherwise not. Perhaps this explains why Cavell assimilates the different problems of traditional scepticism and Cavellian scepticism: He credits knowledge and its loss with extraordinary powers. Of course, as we have seen, and in some tension with that thought, he also admits disappointment that knowledge lacks these powers.

142  David Macarthur Roquentin is aware of a gap between the existence of things and words: the “feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface.” He comes to feel that without a secure basis for applying words or concepts to the world then “the diversity of things, their individuality” is lost. Not that the ordinary things of this world would cease to exist; but that the ways we have of dividing the world up into such things – “the root, the park bench, the sparse grass” – comes to seem artificial, arbitrary, contingent, an “appearance” or “veneer” that is not determined by the world that they are supposed to be true of. Cavell explores the idea that applying our criteria for concepts of “objects” does not guarantee their existence; Sartre explores the more or less converse idea that existence does not guarantee the value or significance of the “objects” that we have concepts for. In either case, conditions for the operation of criteria are undermined. Since Roquentin’s experience is a form of Cavellian scepticism – the result of the failure or limits of criteria – then it can also interpret it. As we have seen, the problem of existence he confronts has nothing to do with epistemology or its key concepts of knowledge, certainty, belief, and justification (explanation, reason, etc.). So Nausea reads Cavellian scepticism in counter-epistemological terms, which implies a rejection of the continuity thesis that Cavell officially affirms. On this reading, Cavellian scepticism is a scepticism about intelligibility or meaning in general since we are dealing with the failure or limitation of criteria for judgement concerning generic objects under unexceptional conditions – things any ordinary speaker can be expected to be familiar with. If we transpose Cavell’s recital of epistemological scepticism into a semantic key, then we might think of the initiating question as directed at a best case of intelligibility or meaning. Consider again, “That is a chair.” If we allow the judgement – and, as in the recital of Cartesian scepticism, there is a serious question of whether we can allow it – can we not say, analogously with the role of best cases of knowledge in traditional scepticism, that failure of a best case of meaning with respect to a generic concept generalizes to all cases of meaning something by one’s words? The application of the criteria of a chair does not guarantee that the chair one took oneself to be speaking of actually exists. Here the thought is something like, “If I do not mean what I imagine I mean in this case (namely, that there is an actual chair there) then I don’t ever mean what I imagine I mean by any of my words”? And can we not say that the failure of criteria where dream or hallucination (etc.) doubts are concerned – doubts that imaginatively seem to detach one’s worldly experience from the world – also imply a problem about existence? Indeed Cavellian meaning scepticism is arguably more compelling than traditional knowledge scepticism for the simple reason that if criteria are called into question, or if the conditions for their application are

Scepticism as Nihilism  143 undermined, there is no such thing as justifying them. As Cavell notes, criteria either “do or do not apply,” and “if there is a doubt about their application then the case is in some way ‘nonstandard’”62 – in which case our capacity to apply the concept they make possible fails – in the sense that it does not achieve what we imagine it achieves. If this is not something we can accommodate ourselves to, then the intelligibility of language begins to collapse.63 It is notable that Cavell mostly avoids epistemological inquiries about what sustains a claim to knowledge in the face of reasonable criticism; nor does he detail how the authorities or objective standards or forms of evidence that we invoke in our epistemic practices vary depending upon the topic under discussion and the different kinds of context for raising and answering reasonable doubts.64 Instead, he offers an account of how the sceptic’s choice of a generic object as a target of epistemological scrutiny is anything but arbitrary: since if asked how one knows that that is a chair – where chairs are among the generic objects that any native language speaker will naturally be familiar with – the question of existence can seem forced upon us. But that is equally true if criteria for judgement are in focus. In general, Cavell shows little interest in exploring the rational justification of a claim to know – which is significant given that this is precisely the focus of traditional Cartesian scepticism.65 Criteria are not epistemic justifications (say, matters of evidence or rational support) as Cavell himself points out.66 It would be taken as a joke if in answer to the question “How do you know that there is a chair there?” you replied “I speak English.” That is not, and would not be taken as, a justification of a claim to knowledge.67 But it is a reminder that a native speaker knows the language they speak, which involves being attuned to its criteria – including those of something’s being a chair – and the conditions of their application. Criteria control what we take to be possibilities of phenomena whether or not they are actual, so whether or not they are matters of truth or knowledge. 6.5  Scepticism as Nihilism Since we are separating the semantic issue of criteria and their limitation from the epistemic issue of knowledge and its susceptibility to doubt, Cavell’s tracing of scepticism to a disappointment in knowledge is blocked. Here, again, Sartre’s text reads Cavell better than he does himself. We read: “The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use,” an experience which Roquentin feels he is unable to adequately put into words but which he describes in terms of a sense of the “fundamental absurdity” of the world. What finds expression here is nihilism, a profound sense of the loss of the meaning or significance or value of things. Nausea reads Cavellian scepticism as nihilism.68

144  David Macarthur Although the term “nihilism” does not appear in The Claim of Reason, I submit that this issue haunts Cavell’s entire discussion of criteria and their limits. For instance, criteria are criteria of judgement – except when they are not, when all one achieves is a qualified “retaining of the concept” as when we say, “Ok, then, maybe it is not a chair but at least it looks like a chair” – thus retaining the concept of chair, even when we cannot judge that what is before us is, in fact, a chair.69 Since it does not exist, the chair of our experience becomes a conceptually undetermined something, lacking human interest and value. Furthermore, even though Cavell, in his reading of Wittgenstein, makes a great deal of the theme of our attunement in criteria as a condition of our mutual intelligibility in language, it is worth noting that this theme has its flip-side – namely, our actual or possible misalignment or disagreement in criteria: If the fact that we share, or have established, criteria is the condition under which we can think and communicate in language, then skepticism is a natural possibility of that condition; it reveals most perfectly the standing threat to thought and communication, that they are only human, nothing more than natural to us.70 This has a significant bearing on the difference between Cavellian scepticism and traditional scepticism: a natural threat to thought and communication is not thereby a natural threat to knowledge of the external world. Indeed since the existence of other people is required for talk of communication or its breakdown to so much as make sense, then that concern is simply incompatible with doubts about the external world’s existence since other people are, of course, part of the external world. Two issues are particularly worth calling to attention in regard to the threat of nihilism.71 In the first place, there is the fragility of the background we take for granted in the application of concepts. Consider this passage: For the phenomena which constitute the criteria of something’s being so are fully in the nature of things – they are part of those very general facts of nature or of human life against the background of which our concepts mean anything at all, and in particular, mean something about what we call “the nature of things” or “the world.”72 That implies that if we lose our confidence that criteria establish something’s being so – perhaps as a result of sceptical doubt or of the existential crisis Roquentin describes – we lose our grip on the nature of things. And without that background, we realize that our concepts mean nothing at all! The familiar world, our form of life, is then lost, and we reach a point that is, as Sartre puts it, “absurd, irreducible, nothing.”

Scepticism as Nihilism  145 A second theme related to nihilism concerns the connection between the application of criteria and value, hence between the failure of criteria and the loss of value. Cavell writes, [W]hat we seem headed for is an idea that what can comprehensibly be said is what is found to be worth saying. This explicitly makes our agreement in judgment, our attunement expressed through criteria, agreement in valuing. So that what can be communicated, say a fact, depends upon agreement in valuing, rather than the other way around.73 If Cavell is right that value underwrites judgement, then a failure in our attunement in criteria is inevitably experienced as a loss of value.74 When Sartre writes, “[T]he root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished,” one thing he means is that the function or value of these things has disappeared. All the differences that make a difference, as articulated by all of our many and various distinct concepts for things, become valueless, leaving us with a “fundamental absurdity.” Understanding Cavellian scepticism as nihilism finds striking echoes in Cavell’s text. In the context of the problem of the other he admits, This perception of skeptical practice [that “I am … revealed as lethal … [that I] kill intimacy and maim social existence”] is what has led me sometimes to speak of skepticism as nihilism.75 My present line of argument is that we should extend this nihilistic understanding of scepticism in the case of other minds to the case of external world scepticism too, which brings to the fore the idea that the attack on our criteria is an attack on the interest or value or point of our concepts quite generally. There are many other passages in which this nihilistic vision of scepticism is, if not explicit, at least implicit. A representative passage reads, We understandably do not like our concepts to be based on what matters to us (something Wittgenstein once put by saying “Concepts … are the expression of our interest” (§570)); it makes our language seem unstable and the instability seems to mean what I have expressed as my being responsible for whatever stability our criteria may have, and I do not want this responsibility; it mars my wish for sublimity. The human capacity – and the drive – both to affirm and to deny our criteria constitutes the argument of the ordinary. And to trace the disappointment with criteria is to trace the aspiration to the sublime – the image of the skeptic’s progress.76 Here scepticism is presented as a repudiation or denial of our criteria, which involves an attack on our concepts and so, on the values or interests

146  David Macarthur they express and our role in maintaining those values or interests. Put otherwise, scepticism is an attack on the ordinary – a realm of human value and interest – that is articulated by criteria, whose stability we are responsible for maintaining; hence, something we disown when this responsibility comes to seem unsustainable or a burden. 6.6  The “Truth” of Scepticism I: Knowing Let us take stock. Despite his official commitment to the continuity thesis, I have shown that for Cavell scepticism is, first and foremost, criterial scepticism, which I have further argued can be characterized as, or the threat of, nihilism. Cavell writes, I have read Wittgenstein’s portrait of skepticism as the site in which we abdicate such responsibility as we have over words, unleashing them from our criteria, as if toward the world – unleashing our voices from them.77 In this vision, criteria constitute our access to the world. There is no suggestion that this entails that our relation to the world as a whole is one of knowing – on any understanding of that concept. Admittedly, Cavell does often tend to (want to) see criterial scepticism as continuous with traditional external world scepticism – but we have found that he has no compelling reason to do so. And, as I shall now argue, a powerful reason to avoid doing so is not to trivialize the “truth” of scepticism – an oft-repeated notion that is at the core of Cavell’s outlook. Commentators are in agreement that Cavell’s idea that there is a “truth” in traditional scepticism is one of his profoundest insights. Yet there is surprisingly little consensus about what this “truth” is. One thing that is clear is that Cavell does not mean that something the sceptic says is, simply, to be accepted as true. Rather, once suitably reinterpreted – and that is the problem – there is a way of accepting the conclusion of scepticism – namely, a way of understanding the claim that we cannot know that the external world exists. What is this way? A survey of Cavell’s remarks expressing this notion reveals a significant ambiguity. Here are some representative remarks in which Cavell expresses the “truth” of scepticism: Wittgenstein’s appeal to criteria … does not negate the concluding thesis of skepticism, that we do not know with certainty of the existence of the external world (or of other minds). On the contrary, Wittgenstein, as I read him, rather affirms that thesis, or rather takes it as undeniable, and so shifts its weight. What the thesis now means is something like: Our relation to the world as a whole, or to others in general, is not one of

Scepticism as Nihilism  147 knowing, where knowing construes itself as being certain. So it is also true that we do not fail to know such things.78 the truth of skepticism, or what I might call the moral of skepticism, namely, that the human creature’s basis in the world as a whole, its relation to the world as such, is not that of knowing, anyway not what we think of as knowing.79 What is the sense that something escapes the conditions of knowledge? It is, I think, the sense, or fact, that our primary relation to the world is not one of knowing it (understood as achieving certainty of it based on the senses). This is the truth of skepticism.80 The answer does not consist in denying the conclusion of skepticism but in reconceiving its truth. It is true that we do not know the existence of the world with certainty; our relation to its existence is deeper – one in which it is accepted, that is to say, received. My favorite way of putting this is to say that existence is to be acknowledged.81 I have highlighted key phrases in these passages which qualify, so weaken, how we are to understand the “truth” of scepticism. Taking these qualifications into account, Cavell can naturally be taken to be saying that we are not to understand our relation to the world as a whole as a matter of certain knowledge or, more fully, certain knowledge based on the senses – an intellectualized conception of knowledge that traditional Cartesian scepticism demands and that traditional constructive epistemology aims to furnish.82 But accepting that is consistent with thinking that our relation to the world as a whole remains, after all, a matter of knowledge on some alternative non-sceptical understanding of it, say, a conception of knowledge not understood in terms of certainty or from the detached God’s-eye-perspective of classical epistemology. That is a natural reading of Cavell’s remark, “For the point of forgoing knowledge is, of course, to know.”83 Let us call this the knowing reading of the “truth” of scepticism, one which depends upon shifting between two senses of the term “know,” a theoretical (or sceptical) and an everyday sense. On this reading, we can make sense of apparently paradoxical remarks such as, Our relation to the world as a whole, or to others in general, is not one of knowing, where knowing construes itself as being certain. So it is also true that we do not fail to know such things.84 Here we can understand the first occurrence of “knowing” as epistemically loaded, a variant of the certain knowledge Descartes demands in the Meditations. In that sense, we do not know that the external world exists. The second occurrence of “know” may be taken in two ways. It may mean that

148  David Macarthur we do not fail to know such things with certainty – the epistemically inflationary sense again – because that is not something we ordinarily aspire, or need aspire, to do. Or it may mean knowledge in the ordinary sense of the term in which case that we do not fail to know that the external world exists may mean that we do know it after all. And that fits with passages in which Cavell says our relation to the world’s existence is one of acknowledgement or acceptance (which is an analogue of acknowledgement): I do not propose the idea of acknowledging as an alternative to knowing but rather as an interpretation of it, as I take the word “acknowledge,” containing “knowledge,” to suggest (or perhaps it suggests that knowing is an interpretation of acknowledging).85 Since acknowledgement is a form of knowledge, and the existence of the world is to be acknowledged, then it follows that it is to be known. Not, to be sure, known as traditional epistemology imagines knowledge, but known, let us say, according to a form of knowledge manifest in our actions and reactions to the world. 6.7  The “Truth” of Scepticism II: Not-Knowing I find this interpretation ultimately unsatisfying. It rightly sees Cavell as critical of the epistemological tradition and the violence it does to our ordinary concepts, for example, Descartes on knowledge (scientia = apodictic knowledge), doubt (metaphysical doubt), and certainty (absolute certainty = indubitability). But it leaves Cavell open to the charge that he has not said enough to explain how we know that the external world exists, a question that the ordinary grammar of the term knowledge makes room for, indeed forces upon us.86 And despite the textual evidence there is for it, it doesn’t square with other important passages in his writings. I want to try another approach based, once again, on an appeal to Sartre’s novel. Looked at through a Sartrean lens, the “truth” of scepticism is that our relation to the world is not established by any epistemic notion, neither certainty, nor knowledge, nor belief – whether or not these are interpreted within an epistemological theory or simply as they are used in everyday life. That is, the question of there being a “truth” of scepticism does not turn on our aspiring for a special theoretically loaded sense of knowledge. This, too, finds confirmation in Cavell’s writing. For example, it is not quite right to say that we believe the world exists (though certainly we should not conclude that we do not believe this, that we fail to believe its existence), and wrong even to say we know it exists (while of course it is equally wrong to say we fail to know this) … [we] have a

Scepticism as Nihilism  149 hard time saying what it is right to say here, what truly expresses our convictions in the matter. I think this is a genuine and a fruitful perplexity … our relation to the world’s existence is somehow closer than the ideas of believing and knowing are made to convey.87 It is clear in this passage that “believe” and “know” are meant with their ordinary significance. Returning to what Kant regarded as a scandal to human reason, we can now say this: If the existence of the external world is not a matter of knowledge in any sense, then it is no scandal that we have no “satisfactory proof” of it. And there is no longer any need to live with a feeling that we have failed to know something of great importance which we rightly aspire to know. Knowing, here, is not a genuine or legitimate aspiration that we are somehow falling short of. According to the present understanding of it, then, the “truth” of scepticism is that our relation to the world is one of not-knowing.88 That is, our relation to the world as such is not one of knowing, and, furthermore, we have no positive theory of our relation to the world. The role this insight plays is akin to what Kant calls a “negative discipline,” a form of understanding which provides a way of avoiding errors in our thinking but without any claim to provide a positive account.89 This answers a worry that one might have had about our interpretative endeavour. One might think the appeal to Nausea to cast light on our relation to the world suffers a fatal flaw in so far as there will be inevitable ambiguities or indeterminacies in the literary presentation of philosophical ideas. I want to suggest, on the contrary, that that is part of the strength of the appeal since, here, we have a sense of philosophical ideas as having reached a quandary. If we find the question of our relation to the world as a whole both natural and confounding – Cavell calls it “a genuine and fruitful perplexity” – then literature is perhaps the ideal mode of expression of our perplexed condition. Two further considerations count in favour of the not-knowing reading of the truth of scepticism apart from the support one can find in some of Cavell’s texts. One is that the truth of scepticism, so understood, aligns well with Wittgenstein’s thought – which, given the central place of Wittgenstein’s methodology in Cavell’s thinking, should be congenial to his own outlook. Of his method of philosophizing, Wittgenstein remarks, This method consists essentially in leaving the question of truth and asking about sense instead.90 We could rephrase that to say that Wittgenstein’s method essentially leaves the question of knowledge aside and asks instead about sense or the grammatical criteria that establish it. Wittgenstein is clearer than Cavell in

150  David Macarthur distinguishing matters of truth – including knowledge, the social establishment, and maintenance of truth – from matters of sense when reflecting on the eliciting of criteria.91 Another consideration in favour of the not-knowing reading of the “truth” of scepticism concerns Cavell’s philosophical mission to keep philosophy open to scepticism. He remarks, I came to the idea that philosophy’s task was not so much to defeat the skeptical argument as to preserve it, as though the philosophical profit of the argument would be to show not how it might end but why it must begin and why it must have no end, at least none within philosophy, or what we think of as philosophy.92 As Cavell sees it, the sceptical argument is preserved not because we ordinarily know that there is a world external to our minds which that argument bears upon. It is preserved because we are, somehow, open and susceptible to the sceptic’s epistemological construal of our ordinary (everyday, natural) position as one of knowing or believing that the external world exists. But however natural this is, it is a sleight of hand as Cavell notes. In defending Wittgenstein’s procedure, he writes, That “there are material objects” or that “other persons are sentient” are not propositions which Wittgenstein supposed to be open to either belief or disbelief [DM: or, we can add, knowledge or the lack of knowledge]. They seem to be ordinary “beliefs” only when the philosopher undertakes to “doubt” them. I am not saying that this is obviously not real doubt, but merely suggesting that it is not obvious that it is, and that it is completely unobvious, if it is not real doubt, what kind of experience it is and why it presents itself as doubt.93 The concluding sentence suggests, once again, that when it comes to articulating our relation to the world, we are at a loss. We do not know what to say. The problem for Cavell is that he has no account of precisely why we are susceptible to replacing our natural relation to the world with the sceptic’s epistemological construal of it. If we clearly keep Cavellian scepticism in mind, a more compelling account of our openness to scepticism is available. We are open to the repudiation of criteria because we can both want and lack justification for thinking that criteria establish the existence of things. As Cavell puts it, Criteria are “criteria for something’s being so,” not in the sense that they tell us of a thing’s existence, but of something like its identity, not of its being so, but of its being so.94

Scepticism as Nihilism  151 On our alternative account, openness to scepticism is as close as a felt need to answer the question of why we should think criteria establish something’s existence, its being so.95 Without that, a gap can seem to open up between our conceptual image of the world and existence. And, then, criteria fail us, and we seem in danger of losing the world. In an insightful and very suggestive discussion of Cavell on scepticism, Nikolas Kompridis characterizes Cavell’s late turn to romanticism as providing a way of recovering our natural relation to the world that is sundered in traditional epistemology – either destructive (traditional scepticism) or constructive (metaphysics) – and, we might now add, in Cavellian scepticism.96 Romanticism makes available “the recovery of the world” which, Cavell argues, is inseparable from a recovery of the human from its drive to self-destruction.97 Kompridis traces a path towards this recovery through “a kind of [literary] writing through which our contact with ‘things as things’ can be regained and reclaimed.”98 What I want to call particular attention to is that this form of words is a most fitting description of Sartre’s Nausea with the caveat that Sartre pictures our contact with the world as unavoidable, indeed, a cause of sickness for which there is no cure. But this disparity is merely apparent. Kompridis is referring to the reclamation of a human world of value and meaning; Sartrean nausea is occasioned by an uncanny sense of an alien or inhuman world without value or meaning. These are the two sides of the argument of the ordinary, in Cavell’s terminology, according to which the ordinary and scepticism face off against one another. Romanticism recovers the ordinary world of human habitation from scepticism pictured by Sartre as an inhuman alienated world. Literature, for both Cavell and Sartre, is capable of recovering a world of people with whom we communicate and respond and of things that are humanly significant and valuable. Cavell defends the aptness of something in the vicinity of Sartre’s description of our condition when word and world are out of alignment. In a famous passage, he writes, Human speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less, than this [“our sharing routes of interest and feeling”]. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying.99 What Cavell identifies as the terrifying here is, I suggest, what Sartre thematizes as the nauseating. As the history of philosophy shows, the problem can arise through a prior commitment to scientific naturalism which, by equating the world with the scientific image of the world and nothing more, effectively disenchants the world of meaning and value. Cavell and Sartre propose another perhaps more intuitive motivation for the problem

152  David Macarthur in a sense that the meanings and values of things are not rationally grounded in reality in some way that we desire or demand – which is not to say that we can make full sense of this desire or demand. In so far as our concepts lack a guarantee, or solidity, or necessity that we crave, they come to be seen superficial, superfluous, and contingent.100 The felt groundlessness of the meanings and values of things leads us to experience them as unreal, lacking genuineness. Improvizing upon a remark of Wittgenstein’s we may say, the difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our meanings and valuings – except that here, unlike the case of belief, what we mean by “grounds” is unclear.101 It is being unable to accept our ordinary condition of groundlessness – or being unable to satisfy our relentless craving for metaphysical groundedness102 – that is our scepticism or nihilism. 6.8  Scepticism and Romanticism This chapter has been largely concerned with clarifying how best to understand what Cavellian scepticism is (namely, a form of meaning scepticism or nihilism) by distinguishing it more carefully than Cavell does, or wants to, from traditional epistemological scepticism induced by radical doubt (e.g. Descartes, Hume). Nonetheless, it is clear that in the vast majority of his writings, scepticism stands for Cavellian scepticism, and the truth of scepticism is an attack on the self-understanding of the Cartesian sceptic. In Cavell’s vision of language, what is terrifying is its groundlessness which implies that we have no guarantee of achieving, or maintaining, our ordinary intimacy with the world through our mutual attunement in criteria.103 This is why we have, in a sense, the power to destroy the world, to kill it, by stripping ourselves of language; as if taking revenge upon it.104 In Sartre’s parallel vision, the source of our pain or sickness is that our conceptual imagine of the world is not grounded in an appropriate way in existence. For Sartre, the key issue is that we cannot see the conceptual image, whether of the world or ourselves, as necessary. And without that necessity, we feel concepts, and ourselves as concept-wielding creatures, as valueless, superfluous, “in the way.” One consequence of clarity here is that we can understand openness to scepticism not as a matter of new ways of doubting a claim to know (for certain) by means of the senses but in the much more radical and interesting terms that any and every concept is open to repudiation – with the caveat that if we can accommodate to the repudiation of a given concept, we may be able to avert a sceptical crisis. Given this radical openness of the sceptical problem, it is not to be wondered that there is no final insight or recovery or realignment from the encounter with Cavellian scepticism.105 It is also worth noting that Cavellian scepticism is perhaps not best seen as

Scepticism as Nihilism  153 immediately calamitous in the manner of Cartesian scepticism – where the collapse of a best case of knowledge implies the loss of our knowledge of the world as a whole. There are many possible forms of partial emptiness or partial unintelligibility that fall short of the complete collapse of meaning. That is to say, we may or may not find the loss of a concept as a best case of meaning anything leads to a general sense of meaninglessness. In so far as the sceptical attack on criteria is piecemeal, then we might think that we lose concepts and the actions into which they are woven in stages – although the effect on our life may not be easily circumscribable. The attack on the ordinary allows for degrees, partial forms of disfigurement, or distortion that do not imply or lead to the complete undermining of intelligibility. That is why Cavell speaks of scepticism as a threat of unintelligibility rather than the realization of unintelligibility. The consequence of an attack on ordinary criteria for a concept depends on the centrality of the concept that is under threat to the life we lead (table, hand, rain, person, love, etc.). The more central the concept lost, the more likely we will feel we have lost the world, our world – that nothing is intelligible to us anymore. A second interesting consequence of this elucidation for Cavell’s thinking concerns how best to understand his late turn to romanticism – a turn that, as Kompridis notes, is beginning to make itself felt in Part IV of The Claim of Reason. In the mature work In Quest of the Ordinary (1988), Cavell explicitly develops the idea of romanticism as a response to worlddenying scepticism. This makes good sense on the reading developed here that sees Cavellian scepticism as an attack on our concepts, or their application to the world, since, if we follow out its implications, such scepticism is a “vision of the death of the world” where “the world” is articulated in terms of our concepts thereof.106 However, since Cavell misguidedly often thinks of scepticism in his writings as an attack upon knowledge, this epistemological construal colours his view of romanticism and its capacity to counter scepticism. Thus he writes of romanticism as working out a crisis of knowledge … a response to the threat of skepticism and to a disappointment with philosophy’s answer to this threat – particularly as embodied in the achievement of Kant’s philosophy.107 Thinking of romanticism as responding to a crisis of knowledge in particular is both a cause and an effect of a particular understanding of scepticism cast in terms of Kant’s problematic idea that we cannot know the world as it is in itself. This is a third conception of scepticism distinct from both Cartesian and Cavellian scepticism.108 As Rorty perceptively saw, Cavell’s engagement with romanticism leads him to reconceive scepticism in

154  David Macarthur Kantian terms but in a way that has little to do with the criteria-based scepticism that is the main focus of his writing.109 Consequently, romanticism, perhaps especially in the form of romantic poetry, is seen by Cavell as “the recovery of the thing in itself” as an object of knowledge.110 Romantic poetry’s power of animism, its capacity to reanimate the world, provides a way of achieving some respite from scepticism understood in this Kantian vein. Cavell poses the question “whether knowledge or consciousness is the more fundamental or useful emphasis in understanding romanticism,” as well as the companion question, “whether animism or sublimity is the more fundamental emphasis” in romanticism’s response to scepticism.111 I think this wavering in both cases reveals an uneasiness or hesitation about his treatment of scepticism, in particular, over the question of whether the issue is, or is not, fundamentally epistemological.112 Despite this ambivalence, Cavell opts for knowledge and animism, respectively.113 I want to suggest that the emphases fall differently if we consistently think of scepticism in Cavell’s texts as Cavellian scepticism as we have articulated it. In particular, the connection between Cavell and the Kantian problematic of the thing in itself becomes less direct (and stands in need of rethinking), and Cavell’s connection with post-Kantian scepticism becomes more perspicuous.114 Indeed, a particularly striking connection emerges between Cavellian scepticism and Jacobi’s total scepticism or nihilism as Paul Franks describes it: In Jacobi’s view the long descent into nihilism begins as soon as one accepts the demand for justification for what ordinarily requires no justification … a deeper diagnosis of philosophy’s power of negation than the notions of doubt or ignorance would suggest.115 In a remarkably similar vein, Cavellian scepticism can be described as arising from the demand for justification for criteria which ordinarily require no justification, or for which the question of justification is quite out of place (so that we do not know what a “justification” here would look like). Moreover, in further alignment with Jacobi’s nihilism, this is not an epistemological problem arising from unanswerable doubt. The sceptical terminus is what Franks calls “an absolute nothing” suggestive of something more catastrophic than the (mere?) loss of justification; and which aligns well with Sartrean absurdity.116 In Cavellian or Sartrean terms, we can say that what is at stake is the collapse of meaning uberhaupt, the threat of the loss of an intelligible human world as a whole. It is worth noting that traditional scepticism presupposes the meaningfulness of the language used to express it and tends to fall to pieces if this is challenged.117 This suggests a problem in the very attempt to coherently

Scepticism as Nihilism  155 express Cavellian scepticism or the idea that a gap can open up between words in general and the world. Put otherwise, scepticism as nihilism is difficult to accommodate within philosophy given that philosophy works from within the standpoint of concepts-at-work which presupposes their ordinary value and meaning. Both Cavell and Sartre look to literary art to articulate, as well as provide some critical perspective on, scepticism as nihilism. In closing let me suggest that Cavellian scepticism is more consonant with the alternative options of consciousness and sublimity that Cavell sidelines in favour of knowledge and animism in his epistemically oriented conception of romanticism. Indeed, putting these answers together, we may say that the fundamental question is whether we can find value or meaning in the world at all, or, in other words, whether we can find the world of interest to us from the point of view of an indeterminate or perplexing relation to it. And a natural way to take that idea is to understand it as concerning whether we can find the world of aesthetic interest to us for aesthetic interest has the power to transform the disorientation of a je ne sais quoi experience – including the unintelligibility of language that characterizes Cavellian scepticism – into a form of (perhaps partial, hence intriguing) comprehensibility. Romanticism can be seen as an important form of resistance to scepticism, then, because it makes available a renewed aesthetic orientation towards the world – a mode of awareness that reveals the world as interesting (again) in the face of the threat of sceptical nihilism. Cavell notes that provoking an aesthetic experience of the sublime – a curious embodied capacity to take reflective pleasure in displeasure – is a way of bringing the world to life for us again.118 So, by the same token, is an intimation of beauty, a reflective pleasure unmixed with displeasure. As Kant saw, the feeling of aesthetic pleasure in a literary work is a feeling of life (Lebensgefühl), hence an incentive to reconnect words and world in the (re)creation of a life-world.119 Romanticism suggests that the beauty or sublimity of literary language – as manifest in, say, a romantic poem (Cavell) or a novel (Sartre) – has the power to return us from disorientation, reminding us that language is intelligible, that it provides us access to the world through its imaginative powers of suggestion.120 Human responsiveness to the beautiful or the sublime in literary art is capable of putting language and world together, as we might put it, notwithstanding our fear of finitude and our unappeasable demand to find metaphysical grounds for our meanings. Notes 1 Hume (2007: Book 1, Part 4, Sect. 2). Cavell prefers to say of skepticism that “it is (ordinary) language that defeats itself.” Cavell (2006: 134). 2 Kripke (1982).

156  David Macarthur 3 The title of Cavell’s magnus opus, The Claim of Reason, signals both one’s claim of reason for oneself – that one can speak with the voice of reason including, of course, the voice of skepticism – and reason’s claim on oneself, the normative question whether what one takes to be reasons are indeed (good) reasons. 4 One such is Nicholas Kompridis, whom I wish to thank for his friendship and conversation. I have benefited more than I can say from illuminating discussions with him about Cavell, and Rorty, and their differing ideas of, and relations to, skepticism. Thanks to Nick, Gavin Kitching, Dan Pash, Aaron Baird, Oliver Gordon and Winston Leung for comments on a draft of this chapter. And thanks also to Andrew Norris for being a constant source of friendly provocation. 5 Cavell (1999: Preface, xii). 6 Conant (2012: 62). Conant’s reading is based on the continuity thesis that Cavell explicitly but, as I see it, misguidedly, endorses. What is questionable in Conant’s characterization is his claim that Cavell is exclusively concerned with the Cartesian skeptical problematic since the dominant characterization in Cavell’s writings is that skepticism is the repudiation of Wittgensteinian criteria. I agree with Conant that Cavell does not “command a clear overview of the shape of the philosophical terrain” he is exploring with such brilliance (ibid.). Part of an explanation of this is that Cavell is working across traditions (say, German Idealism, American Transcendentalism, and the philosophy of ordinary language), and across disciplines (say, philosophy and literature). 7 The qualification is due to the fact that Kant is concerned with the conditions of the possibility of experience of the world whereas Wittgenstein, Cavell’s guide in these matters, is concerned with the conditions of the possibility of language about the world. 8 Although I agree with Kompridis that Part IV of The Claim of Reason presents a treatment of skepticism about other minds that is the least traditional and most far-reaching section of the book, I take issue with his claim that Parts I–III “sit comfortably within the ambit of academic philosophical discourse about [skepticism].” Of course, in saying this Kompridis is simply endorsing Cavell’s own self-understanding. Kompridis (2022: 75). 9 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 46). It is worth noting that by “world” in this definition Cavell means to refer to both the external world and other minds – the latter being embodied creatures constituting a social world within the external world. 10 Cavell (1990: 92). 11 Concerning the argument of the ordinary with skepticism, Cavell remarks, “This argument of the ordinary – as what skepticism attacks, hence creates, and as what counters or recounts skepticism” (ibid., 61). 12 Rorty (1982: Chapter 10). 13 Ibid., 179. 14 And so, presumably, there is a close connection of criteria and empirical schemata. 15 See, for example, Cavell (1969, 13). 16 Commentators are equally caught up in this problem. For example, Timothy Gould does not explain what the connection is between “the wish to repudiate the world as such” by way of the repudiation of our concepts of the world and “the catastrophic inadequacy of the ordinary world as a scene of knowledge” Gould (2014).

Scepticism as Nihilism  157 17 For example, Aaron Baird has suggested to me that one might say that, for Cavell, Cartesian skepticism is a distorted “expression” of a skeptical anxiety about meaning. That might be right, but if so, then how can one demonstrate that this transformation is rational – a constraint, I believe, Cavell would accept? Also such an accommodation does not explain why Cavell speaks, in his own voice, of skepticism as “that anxiety about our human capacities as knowers” (1988: 4). 18 It is important to recall Cavell’s effort to recover the idea of subjectivity-affirming reason in aesthetics, morality and philosophy from being overshadowed by the prestige of objective (subjectivity-denying) reason in science, mathematics and logic. See, for example, “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy” Cavell (1969, chapter 3). 19 For example, Jack Reynolds and Pierre-Jean Renaudie focus on the issue of the contingency of our concepts in (2022). One commentator who invokes the idea of nihilism in his reading of Sartre is Ratcliffe (2009: 360). 20 Cavell (1964: 946–74). It is also worth noting that there are interesting points of comparison (notwithstanding significant differences) between Husserl, an important influence on Sartre’s philosophy, and Cavell regarding their treatment of skepticism. See Stone (2000). 21 Cavell (1989: 57). 22 Cavell (2003). 23 I agree with Kompridis that Cavell’s discovery of “the problem of the other” is arguably the greatest achievement of The Claim of Reason. Despite some confusing passages, Cavell is aware that his conception of skepticism concerning other minds has no precedent in the tradition whereas he thinks of his conception of external world skepticism as continuous with the tradition. The label “other minds skepticism,” therefore, is gravely misleading in the context of Cavell’s thinking as it suggests a fully general doubt about our knowledge of other minds that is nowhere to be found in Cavell’s texts. There is no argumentative but, at best, only an imaginative connection between traditional other minds skepticism and “the problem of the other” – which is really a problem of our acknowledgment of others, and of being acknowledged by others, and the ethical costs to oneself and others of its hedging or limitation. 24 Wittgenstein (1958: #373). 25 Typical examples from the history of philosophy include a fireplace, a dressing gown, a hand, a pencil, a table, a tomato, and so on. The point of such examples is that native language speakers are perfectly familiar with such things so that in prosecuting a doubt about a judgment with respect to them it simply cannot be a matter of identity (what it is) that is in question but inevitably becomes a question about its existence (that it is). We cannot doubt in such a case that what presents itself to us as a hand or a pencil or a tomato etc., is rightly called or counted as such – for the recognition and naming of such ordinary things is, normally, granted to any speaker of the language as a matter of course. 26 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 53). 27 Actually things are more complicated than that since Descartes aims to secure absolutely certain (or indubitable) knowledge which he terms “scientia” – but I will not explore the implications of adopting this philosophically inflationary conception of knowledge here. For further discussion of this point and how it affects the rationality of Cartesian doubt see Macarthur (2003) It is noteworthy that Cavell’s use of “certain” does not refer to absolute certainty (indubitability).

158  David Macarthur 28 This undermining extends to testimonial evidence in so far as reliable perception is a condition of testimony. 29 That raises the interesting question whether there are any criterial concepts that we cannot under any circumstances live without, whose loss we couldn’t accommodate to. I shall not explore this issue here but it may provide a way of blocking a sceptical crisis. See Cavell (1990: 82). 30 Wittgensteinian criteria contrast with Austinian criteria which have the following characteristics: (1) they are specific marks and features (e.g. the black and yellow wings of a goldfinch); (2) they are matters of expertise; (3) they might be found listed in a catalogue, such as a bird watcher’s guidebook or a Sotherby’s furniture catalogue. Wittgensteinian criteria are non-specific, not matters of expertise and not apt for cataloguing. See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations; and J. L. Austin (1970). 31 Or perhaps a specialized form of knowledge, for example, Descartes’s concern to find “scientia”, “certain” (i.e. indubitable) knowledge. It is worth noting that Cavell himself adopts a quasi-Cartesian target for scepticism: not knowledge exactly, but certain knowledge; but here the term “certain” is being used in an everyday non-Cartesian sense. See fn. 27. 32 Cavell ([1979] 1999, 17). 33 Cavell writes, “in using Wittgensteinian criteria we end up knowing a kind of object” (ibid., 16). And elsewhere: “The focus upon judgment takes human knowledge to be the human capacity for applying the concepts of a language to the things of a world, for characterizing (categorizing) the world when and as it is humanly done, and hence construes the limits of human knowledge as coinciding with the limits of its concepts (in some historical period)” (ibid., 17). In these passages there is an unmotivated slide from concept application to the question of knowledge and its limits. 34 This point is familiar from the sceptical tradition. There are various fall-back positions available in response to the sceptical challenge to knowledge – namely, knowledge for practical purposes; or, if one is leery of the concept of knowledge, reasonable belief. That is, it is unclear why a sceptical argument specifically undermining knowledge should be supposed to automatically provide a correlative argument undermining belief unless one is simply assuming that the same procedure and considerations equally undermine belief. But that assumption cannot be sustained. For a start there seems to be no such thing as a best case of believing so no general conclusion follows from a loss of belief in a particular case. The implications and consequences of the question “How do you know?” directed at a knowledge claim does not have a parallel in the case of belief. For example, there is no general requirement to demonstrate that one’s beliefs are justified; and nothing follows about our entitlement to believe from a failure to answer the question “Why do you believe that?” In contrast, a claim to knowledge cannot be responsibly sustained unless one can appropriately say how one knows. It is an insight of the pragmatist tradition that the concept of knowledge may be more trouble than it is worth and may be dispensed with in so far as common life and scientific practice can be reconceived on the basis of reasonable belief. See, for example, Peirce (1955: Chapter 2) and, more recently, Quine (1969: Chapter 3). 35 Wittgenstein says that Moore uses “I know” with “a metaphysical emphasis” (1969b: 482). 36 Ibid., 347. 37 Cavell ([1979] 1999, 198).

Scepticism as Nihilism  159 38 The idea that there are criteria for knowledge or knowledge claims can be found in Bruno, (2021: 30); Mulhall (1998: 44), and, sometimes, Cavell, e.g., (1990: 24). 39 This, I take it, is Wittgenstein’s line in On Certainty. Knowledge of language (i.e. of criteria) gets expressed in judgments of certainty, which are not open to inquiry or doubt in ordinary circumstances. 40 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 46). 41 Conant (2012: 62). 42 Cavell says certain knowledge but this takes things in the wrong direction as he himself later acknowledges. For it is then open to one to say, under sceptical pressure, that even if one is not certain one can know for practical purposes. 43 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 44). 44 Cavell (1990: 92). 45 This interpretation of knowledge in this context is suggested by Cavell (1969: 64). 46 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 440). 47 Other differences between other minds scepticism and the problem of the other include (1) the latter, unlike the former, is reciprocal, the problem not just of my knowledge of the other but the other’s knowledge of me; (2) the former, unlike the latter, presupposes sceptical conceptions of an “inner” mind and an “outer” body which are, at best, only causally related to one another and (3) the former is a problem for other minds in general whereas the latter is only an acute problem for specific other minds. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 90. 50 Cavell (1988: 4). 51 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 140). 52 For example, see the “whirl of organism” passage: Cavell (1969: 52). 53 This project, as articulated and defended by Norman Malcolm and Rogers Albritton, is discussed in the first half of The Claim of Reason. 54 Kant writes in the Critique of Pure Reason, “[I]t always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us (from which we after all get the whole matter for our cognitions, even for our inner sense) should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof” (Kant [1781], 1998: Bxxxix–xl) 55 Sartre ([1938] 2000: 180). 56 Ibid., 126–8. 57 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 141). 58 I here rely upon Cavell’s precept that “the object of interpretation … becomes[s] a means of interpretation” (1969: xxiii). 59 Kant ([1781] 1998: A600/B628). 60 Since Sartre holds that the gap between existence and conceptual determination does not apply to abstract objects such as circles, I take it that by “existence” Sartre means material existence. 61 It is also worth observing that the tree root both is and is not a generic object in Cavell’s sense. Generic objects “are ones specifically about which there just is no problem of recognition or identification or description; ones about which the only “problem,” should it arise, would be not to say what they are but to say whether we know they exist, are real, are actually there” Cavell

160  David Macarthur











([1979] 1999: 52). Like a generic object it is something any ordinary language speaker is familiar with (can identify, name, etc. without the need of experts or other authorities), and in this moment of philosophical delirium, it represents (material) existence as such. So far so good. But unlike a Cavellian generic object there is no question of knowledge at issue. 62 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 14). 63 This is a place where a sceptical conclusion might be blocked on the grounds that the repudiation of a generic concept is something that we might accommodate ourselves to – a possibility that Cavell himself makes available in his response to Kripke. See footnote 29. 64 Cavell writes, “The focus upon judgment takes human knowledge to be the human capacity for applying the concepts of a language to the things of a world, for characterizing (categorizing) the world when and as it is humanly done” ([1979] 1999: 17). But human knowledge is not simply a matter of applying concepts to things in judgments. It also, and crucially, involves the issue of justifying or grounding one’s claims. As Wittgenstein puts it, “‘I know’ often means: I have the proper grounds for my statement,” and “If someone believes something, we needn’t always be able to answer the question ‘why he believes it’; but if he knows something, then the question ‘how does he know?’ must be capable of being answered” Wittgenstein (1969b: 18, 550). 65 Cavell’s concern for justification is largely centred on the justification of action rather than knowledge: see ([1979] 1999: Part III). 66 Ibid., 14. 67 But from Cavell’s perspective, such an answer should be perfectly in order since it is a reminder that, of course, I know the criteria of generic objects like chairs. Wittgenstein wryly suggests something like this as a possible response when he remarks: “How do I recognize that this colour is red?” – one answer would be: “I have learnt English.” Wittgenstein (1958: #381). 68 In Conant’s terminology, Cavellian skepticism is a form of Kantian skepticism, one that concerns what Wittgenstein calls “the possibilities of phenomena” rather than their actuality (ibid., #90). That raises the interesting question of how we should interpret Cavell’s somewhat dismissive response to Kipke’s Wittgenstein-inspired meaning skepticism. I leave discussion of the Cavell-Kripke debate for another occasion. 69 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 45). 70 Ibid., 47. 71 An intriguing question beyond the scope of this chapter is the connection between Cavellian scepticism and Nietzsche’s notion of nihilism. See Norris (2017: 75). 72 Ibid., 106. 73 Ibid., 94. 74 Cavell also puts the key idea here like this: “the idea of valuing as the other face of asserting”; and “valuing underwrites asserting” (ibid., 94, 95). 75 Goodman (2005: 159). 76 Cavell (1990: 92). 77 Ibid., 22. 78 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 45). Emphasis added. 79 Ibid., 241. Emphasis added. 80 Cavell (1992: 106–7, footnote). Emphasis added. 81 Ibid., 133. Emphasis added.

Scepticism as Nihilism  161 82 See fn. 27 and fn. 31 for a caveat about the notion of certainty in play here. Recall that from the point of view of Cavellian scepticism, the traditional sceptic and the epistemologist who aims to refute him are both sceptics in so far as they both do violence to our ordinary criteria. 83 Cavell (1969: 325). 84 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 45). Emphasis added. 85 Cavell (1988: 8). 86 Barry Stroud argues that the sceptic uses (or can use) the concept of knowledge in the ordinary sense and presses the question how we know what we take for granted that we know (1984: 261–2). 87 Cavell (1992: 145). 88 For further discussion of the theme of not-knowing in Cavell’s treatment of scepticism see Macarthur (2014). 89 Kant ([1781] 1998: A709/B737). Shieh (2006) arrives at a similar “merely negative characterization” of the truth of scepticism but his account de-emphasizes the anti-epistemological theme that I take to be central to Cavell’s articulation. 90 Wittgenstein (1998: 3). 91 This is perhaps the only point I can agree on in Malcolm Turvey’s critical study of Cavell on scepticism: (2001: 117–36, 124). Turvey thinks it is enough to refute Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein on criteria to simply re-state the Malcolm/Albritton position without adequately dealing with Cavell’s objections to it: “In some cases, according to Wittgenstein, criteria do constitute necessary and sufficient conditions that logically entail that something is the case” (ibid., 135). And he wrongly thinks that Cavell claims criteria do not ever establish anything with certainty. See Cavell ([1979] 1999: 31). What Cavell does want to say is that whatever certainty criteria establish does not provide an answer to the sceptic – that is, one that guarantees the existence of whatever criteria are concepts for. 92 Cavell (1988: 5). 93 Cavell (1969: 61). 94 Cavell ([1979] 1999: 45). 95 It is also worth noting that this alternative understanding of our openness to (Cavellian) scepticism fits well with Cavell’s tracing of scepticism to “a natural experience of a creature complicated or burdened enough to possess language at all” (ibid., 140) – not the reasonableness of doubt but the way we possess language. 96 Kompridis (2022: 73–106). 97 Cavell (1988: 26). 98 Kompridis (2022: 99). 99 Cavell (1969: 52). 100 Richard Eldridge, explaining the roots of Cavellian scepticism, writes, “As discursive, acting, judging subjects we wish for more – more mastery, more grounding, more surety – from the ordinary.” The problem, I suggest, is not one of quantity, as perhaps these words suggest, but a problem of an entirely different order. What we wish for is absolute mastery, absolute grounding, absolute surety, a form of words that we cannot give a clear sense to. Eldridge (2003: 5). 101 Wittgenstein: “The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing.” (1969b: 66).

162  David Macarthur 102 See Cavell (1988: 4). The term “metaphysical” here is meant to suggest that we cannot satisfactorily specify the nature of this groundedness that we feel is lacking. 103 Wittgenstein, similarly, speaks of a philosophical crisis in which “the ground upon which we stood and which appeared to be firm and reliable was found to be boggy and unsafe” (Wittgenstein, 1969a: 45). 104 Wittgenstein provides the following motivations for taking revenge upon language: (1) that ordinary use is surrounded by a “mental mist” (ibid., 17), (2) that it is “sometimes misleading” (ibid., 52), (3) that it tempts us to draw “misleading analogies” (48), (4) that it can seem “too coarse” for our purposes (ibid., 45), (5) that misleading pictures are embedded in it (ibid., 43) and (6) and that it can make us “feel cramped” by “hold[ing] our mind rigidly in one position, so to speak” (ibid., 59). 105 The term “realignment” is from Eldridge (1989). 106 Cavell (1988: 44). 107 Ibid., 52. 108 A reading that attempts to accommodate all of these kinds of skepticism in Cavell’s work faces a dilemma: either the term “scepticism” becomes so capacious as to verge on incoherence or one sees Cavell as confusingly multiplying the senses of “scepticism” with little or no indication of the relation between them. Since Cavell presents his account of scepticism as if it concerned a unified notion – one side of “the argument of the ordinary” – I have resisted either form of accommodation. 109 Note that this Kantian thing-in-itself scepticism is not equivalent to “Kantian scepticism” in Conant’s terminology. 110 Cavell (1992: 95). As Kompridis explains, such poetry acts to counter the disenchantment of the world occasioned by the rise of scientific naturalism – the view that knowledge is nothing but scientific knowledge and that the world is nothing but the scientific image of the world (– on the model of atoms and the void). Part of what this means is that romantic poetry recalls us to a human world populated by human others and their expressions (not mere bodies and their physical movements), of human values and meanings. Cavell is mostly silent on sources of scepticism that have their roots in scientistic thinking. 111 Cavell (1988: 53). 112 Further evidence of this uneasiness is the admission that “the alternatives in each question are inseparable.” 113 Cavell (1988: 54). Cavell sees scepticism as capable of being countered, although not finally defeated, by romanticism’s invocation of animism in the form of poetry with the power “to bring the world back, to bring it back, as to life” (45). 114 That Cavell understands scepticism as implicating the Kantian problem of our epistemic relation to the world-in-itself (as Rorty saw) is one reason that it is potentially misleading to use Conant’s terminology to say (correctly, I take it) that Cavellian scepticism is Kantian scepticism – but with the qualification noted in fn. 7. 115 Franks (2005: 164, 173). 116 Ibid., 164. Although Franks articulates Jacobi’s scepticism in terms of a response to the ancient problem for justification known as Agrippa’s Trilemma (infinite regress, ad hoc assumption, circularity), I take it that the very extremity of Jacobi’s position pushes it beyond the confines of its epistemological

Scepticism as Nihilism  163 starting point. The shift from thinking of Jacobi’s position as a form of epistemological scepticism to a form of nihilism suggests that what is being negated is deeper than the loss of the epistemological category of justification would suggest. What is at stake is the very basis of an intelligible world at all. It is worth noting that Franks goes on to speak of nihilism as “the annihilation of the ordinary” (165) – a formulation that perfectly fits Cavellian scepticism as we have articulated it here. 117 Wittgenstein remarks, “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything” (1969b: 115). It is clear that Wittgenstein is thinking that doubting everything includes doubting the meaning of the words one uses to express one’s doubt, which is incoherent. 118 See Kant’s Critique of Judgment ([1790] 2000, 5: 204, 44). 119 Kant defines pleasure in the Critique of Practical Reason as “the idea of the agreement of an object or an action with the subjective conditions of life” (Kant [1788], 2002, 5: 9n: 9–10). 120 This is so even if, paradoxically, the novel describes the nausea that results from an intimation of the groundlessness of our concepts and meanings.

References Austin, J. L. Other Minds. In J.O. Urmson and G.J. Warnock (eds.), Philosophical Papers Oxford: Clarendon Press. (1970). Bruno, G. A. Shelling, Cavell and the Truth of Skepticism. Journal for the History of Analytic Philosophy, 9(9), (2021). 21–40. Cavell, S. Existentialism and Analytic Philosophy. Daedalus, 93(3), (1964). 946–974. ———. Must We Mean What We Say. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1969). ———. The Claim of Reason, revised edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ([1979] 1999). ———. In Quest of the Ordinary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1988). ———. This New Yet Unapproachable America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1989). ———. The Claim of Reason, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome. La Salle, IL: Open Court. (1990). ———. The Senses of Walden. Expanded edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1992). ———. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2003). ———. Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (2006). Conant, J., Two Varieties of Skepticism. In J. Conant and G. Abel (eds.), Rethinking Epistemology. Berlin: De Guyter (2012). Eldridge, R. ‘A Continuing Task’: Cavell and the Truth of Skepticism. Bucknell Review, 32(1), (1989). 73–89. ———. Introduction: Between Acknowledgement and Avoidance. In R. Eldridge (ed.), Stanley Cavell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2003).

164  David Macarthur Franks, P. All or Nothing: Systematicity, Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism in German Idealism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (2005). Goodman, R.B., Contending with Stanley Cavell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2005). Gould, T., Cavell, Stanley. In M. Kelly (ed.), Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2014). Published on-line: Oxford Reference. Hume, D. A Treastise Concerning Human Understanding. Ed. D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2007). Kant, I., Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A.W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ([1781] 1998). ———. Critique of Judgment. Ed. P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [1790] 2000). ———. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. W.S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: H ­ ackett. ([1788] 2002). Kompridis, N. The Recovery of the Human: Cavell, Skepticism, Romanticism. In S. Hetherington and D. Macarthur (eds.), Living Skepticism. Leiden: Brill. (2022). Kripke, S. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (1982). Macarthur, D. The Seriousness of Doubt and Our Natural Trust in the Senses in the First Meditation. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 33(2), (2003). 159–181. ———. Cavell on Skepticism & the Importance of Not-Knowing. Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies, 2, (2014). 2–23. Mulhall, S. The Givenness of Grammar: A Reply to Steven Affeldt. European Journal of Philosophy, 6, (1998). 32–44. Norris, A. Becoming Who We Are. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2017). Peirce, C. The Fixation of Belief. In J. Buchler (ed.), Philosophical Writings of Peirce, Chapter 2. New York: Dover. (1955). Quine, W. V. O., Epistemology Naturalized. In Ontological Relativity, Chapter 3. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. (1969). Reynolds, J. & Renaudie, P.-J. Jean-Paul Sartre. In E.N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Summer 2022 Edition). https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/sum2022/entries/sartre/ Ratcliffe, M. The Phenomenology of Mood and the Meaning of Life. In P. Goldie (ed.), Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion. (Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2009). Rorty, R. Cavell on Skepticism. In The Consequences of Pragmatism, Chapter 10. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (1982). Sartre, J.-P. Nausea. Trans. Robert Baldick. London: Penguin. ([1938] 2000). Shieh, S. The Truth of Skepticism. In A. Crary and S. Shieh (eds.), Reading Cavell, pp. 131–165. London: Routledge (2006). Stone, A. D. On Husserlian and Cavellian Skepticism. The Philosophical Quarterly, 50(198), (2000). 1–21. Stroud, B. The Philosophical Significance of Skepticism. Oxford: Clarendon. (1984).

Scepticism as Nihilism  165 Turvey, M., Is Scepticism a Natural Possibility of Language? Reasons to be Sceptical of Cavell’s Wittgenstein. In R. Allen and M. Turvey (eds.), Wittgenstein, Theory and the Arts, pp. 117–136. London: Routledge (2001). Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell. (1958). ———. The Blue and Brown Books, 2nd ed., Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell. (1969a). ———. On Certainty. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (1969b). ———. Culture and Value, Revised edition. Trans. P. Winch. Oxford: Blackwell. (1998).

7 The Secret Passion Sartre, Huston, and the Freud Screenplay Robert Sinnerbrink

This new art was mine, was everyone’s. We had the same mental age: I was seven and could read; it was twelve and could not speak. They said that it was just starting and that it would improve; I thought that we would grow up together. I have not forgotten our mutual childhood.1

In 1958, celebrated American film director John Huston commissioned Jean-Paul Sartre to write a screenplay based on the young Freud’s “discovery” of psychoanalysis. In keeping with Hollywood convention, the film was to focus on Freud’s “heroic” period as a young neurologist in which he abandons his collaborative work on hysteria (with Breuer) and embarks on the bold quest to develop a new science of the mind based on the idea of the unconscious shaping our psychic life.2 Huston’s desire for both a dramatic and a “critical” portrait of Freud drew him to the existentialist philosopher and writer, whom he thought would not only provide a powerful story but an intellectually sound approach to Freud’s life and ideas. According to J. B. Pontalis, Huston was not only familiar with Sartre’s work but had brought Huis Clos to the New York stage and “had dreamed of making a film of Le Diable et le Bon Dieu”; as Huston remarks in his autobiography, Sartre was “the ideal man to write the Freud screenplay” because he both knew Freud’s works intimately “and would have an objective and logical approach.”3 Sartre agreed to the offer and initially produced a synopsis of 95 pages in late 1958 (simply entitled “Freud”), which Huston accepted. Sartre then wrote the screenplay over the following year, which ballooned to over 300 pages following Huston’s requests for modest alterations. As legend has it, the philosopher and director quarrelled over the script, and the partnership ended badly, with Sartre deciding to remove his name from the credits and Huston going on to complete the film (Freud: The Secret Passion (1962)), using Sartre’s script (supplemented by professional screenwriters) and casting Montgomery Clift to star as the young Freud.4 The script was born out of a most unlikely scenario: an existentialist philosopher, sceptical about the role assigned to the unconscious, writing a

DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-8

The Secret Passion  167 script depicting Freud as a neurotic intellectual who, in analysing his patients as well as himself, discovers the “dark continent” of the mind. Yet Sartre’s screenplay shows the intellectual seriousness of his critical engagement with Freud. It also suggests that this encounter with Freudian psychoanalysis was more significant for the development of Sartre’s own thought than is often thought. Indeed, the screenplay manages to combine an account of Freud’s development of psychoanalysis with an “existentialist” interpretation of Freud’s “fundamental project” through which he arrives at self-understanding and freedom. Sartre acknowledges both parallels and disagreements with Freudian psychoanalysis, revealing the relationship between existentialism and psychoanalysis to be more complex than generally assumed. This fascinating case also demonstrates the challenges facing writers and filmmakers concerned with dramatizing psychoanalytic thought or bringing Freudian ideas to the screen (rather than the well-known application of Freudian psychoanalysis to cinema spectatorship). The main difficulty Sartre encountered – echoing Freud’s own reservations about the feasibility of filming psychoanalysis – was to find effective ways of presenting the “abstraction” of Freud’s ideas on film while ensuring dramatic plausibility and cinematic credibility. In this chapter, I suggest that this is one of the most intriguing aspects of Sartre’s Freud screenplay and troubled collaboration with filmmaker Huston. On the one hand, Sartre’s portrayal of the young Freud as a conflicted, impassioned “outsider” sheds important light on Sartre’s complex critical relationship with psychoanalysis; on the other, Huston’s film provides a striking cinematic exploration of Freud’s journey to psychoanalysis that compares favourably with more recent biopic efforts such as David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method (2011). In both cases, however, the challenge of “screening psychoanalysis” looms large. Despite Huston’s intriguing efforts to capture both the human drama of Freud’s struggle and the intellectual challenge posed by psychoanalytic thinking, the difficulty of translating the Freudian account of psychic reality remains, made even more challenging by Sartre’s well-known criticisms of psychoanalytic theory and the unconscious.5 The Sartre, Huston, Freud screenplay, I suggest, thus provides a fascinating case study for the exploration of the complex relationship between film and philosophy. 7.1  Sartre’s Freud Scenario How did this unlikely encounter come about? Following the success of The Misfits and his collaboration with Montgomery Clift, Huston was keen to make a film based on Freud’s life and wanted a script that was both intellectually informed about psychoanalysis and attuned to Freud’s personal struggles.6 Huston thus approached Sartre (they had met in 1952 on the set

168  Robert Sinnerbrink of Moulin Rouge) and offered him $25,000 to deliver a script based on the life of the early Freud, covering the fascinating period of his collaboration with Breuer prior to the “discovery” of psychoanalysis (roughly spanning the years 1882–1890). Huston was convinced that Sartre could provide a rigorous account of Freud’s thought during this period but also deliver a script that was both intellectually and dramatically satisfying (although best known for his novels and plays, Sartre had also written screenplays for French films and enjoyed considerable success as a screenwriter).7 For his part, Sartre needed the money and accepted the offer promptly. At first an amusing side project or money job, Sartre soon took the project more seriously, as attested not only by the extraordinary blowout in the final script length, which according to Huston would have resulted in a sevenhour film, but also by the multiple versions of the script he produced. Sartre later remarked that he thought Huston picked the wrong person for the job, “because one shouldn’t choose someone who doesn’t believe in the unconscious to do a film to the glory of Freud.”8 Nonetheless, the aim for both Sartre and Huston was to make an “intellectual thriller” rather than a conventional biopic. Huston takes credit for the idea of an “adventurous Freud,” exploring his own unconscious, and wanted to tell the story as though it were a crime drama.9 Sartre confirms this account, noting that what interested Huston “was to show Freud, not when his theories had made him famous, but at the time, around the age of thirty, when he was utterly wrong; when his ideas led him into hopeless error.”10 The idea was to focus on this key period of Freud’s life and intellectual development, following his career up to the point of the discovery of the Oedipus complex. To this end, Sartre studied Ernest Jones’s recently published Biography of Freud, as well as key Freudian texts such as Freud and Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria, the case studies, Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and The Interpretation of Dreams in order to tell the story of Freud’s early development.11 The ambition in Sartre’s enterprise is remarkable: he aimed to cover Freud’s break with Meynert, his complex relationship with Breuer and their studies of hysteria, the therapeutic use of hypnosis, Freud’s relationship with Fliess (which was omitted from the film), key therapeutic relationships with his patients, while emphasizing Freud’s troubled self-analysis, his discovery of “the ‘dark continent’ of the psyche, and eventual breakthrough to the ‘talking cure.’” What is remarkable about Sartre’s efforts with the Freud script is the fact that he remained sceptical, in his published works, of the role accorded to the Freudian unconscious (proposing the notion of “bad faith” instead) with its implicit “decentring” of human consciousness (hence freedom). As Pontalis and other commentators point out, however, we should be wary of assuming a too sharp opposition between Sartre’s account of consciousness and the Freudian model of psychic life. Instead, we can consider the

The Secret Passion  169 Freud screenplay as both drawing on and testing ideas and approaches that would be developed further in Sartre’s explicitly auto- and biographical works (such as Words (1964), and The Idiot of the Family (1971–2)).12 Far from a straightforward rejection of the Freudian unconscious, the Freud scenario reveals, rather, a complex engagement that spanned decades. Sartre acknowledges parallels as well as disagreements with Freud, for example, rejecting Freud’s biologism and commitment to scientific naturalism, Freud’s taking psychoanalytic categories as designating real or actual entities, and famously criticizing Freud’s positing of the unconscious as playing a fundamental role in shaping psychic life. On the other hand, the power of Freudian psychoanalysis to reveal hermeneutically illuminating patterns of meaning and desire, forcing forms of self-reflection and critical understanding of fantasies and trauma at the core of our neurotic behaviours and irrational self-justifications found a much more sympathetic hearing. What is most remarkable about Sartre’s screenplay, I suggest, is its “metareflexive” stance concerning the relationship between psychoanalysis and existentialism: the way in which it manages to combine an account of Freud’s intellectual development towards the “talking cure” with an existentialist interpretation of Freud’s own struggle to develop psychoanalysis as a “fundamental project” through which he arrives at self-understanding and freedom in shaping his own existence. As Koch observes, what an analysis of the Freud scenario reveals is how “Sartre the biographer hides his own project of existentialist analysis of an author named Freud.”13 7.2  Sartre’s Freud Scenario and Huston’s Freud: The Secret Passion Despite its centrality to the movies, the screenplay has traditionally been regarded as a minor or even forgotten element of cinematic art. Authorial credit largely remains reserved for the director (with credit often going to cinematographers, actors, and producers over screenwriters), while the screenplay plays its role as “vanishing mediator” in both providing a foundation or framework for the film that ideally vanishes in the actual production of the movie. Screenwriting is often a collaborative affair among several writers and generally turns into group work once studio writers, editors, directors, and actors weigh in with changes to the script during filming and in postproduction. Despite recent efforts to restore artistic credit to the screenplay, and even arguments for the philosophical significance of the screenplay, the screenplay and screenwriter remain underrecognized contributors to the authorship of cinematic and televisual works.14 The story of Sartre’s collaboration with Huston is not unusual, nor is the lack of attention to Sartre’s script surprising given prevailing assumptions over authorship and artistic contribution in the composition of cinematic works. Nonetheless, the case of Sartre’s Freud scenario is

170  Robert Sinnerbrink striking for just these reasons: it shows the intriguing interplay between original script and narrative film, and it shows how important scripting can be in the case of intellectual biopics that attempt both to present a life in dramatic terms and articulate the ideas and actions that define that life. As remarked, this is especially the case with Sartre, some of whose later works focus on precisely the relationship between author, work, and life, where the power of ideas to shape our existence takes on an autonomous life, and the way artists and writers shape their existence in respect of a “fundamental project” can provide a unifying way of narrating and understanding a life.15 Sartre’s script integrates these themes in its presentation of the young Freud, emphasizing, in a surprisingly candid manner, his “unconscious” motivations, the need to work through his own neuroses and to confront his intellectual father figures (Meynart, Breuer, and Fliess). Although a mainstay of cinematic representations of towering figures, this aspect of Freud’s story chimed with Sartre’s interest in the relationship between neurosis, creativity, and freedom, particularly in the case of thinkers, writers, and artists (recalling his work in Anti-Semite and Jew (1946) and Saint Genet (1952), and anticipating his study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot (1971–72)). In this respect, the Hollywood appetite for a tale of heroic struggle and emancipation from familial as well as societal pressures meshed well with the existentialist emphasis on the need to confront one’s past and creatively overcome adversities by the exercise of a projective freedom or transcendence in response to situational constraints. As Pontalis remarks, we cannot be sure what exactly Huston requested Sartre do to the script apart from cutting it back and streamlining its overall shape. In the event, Sartre did remove some elements – Freud’s relationship with Fliess and the latter’s curious theories, for example, which both disappear entirely from the film – but expanded others to the point that the revised text now came in at over 300 pages. Although it appears Sartre did not quite complete this second, expanded version of the script, Huston did receive and read it, and some new additions from the second version – such as the “mountain cave dream” sequence – made it into the film version.16 Huston invited Sartre to work on the screenplay at his Irish country house, an ill-fated encounter that made clear how much the filmmaker and philosopher despised each other. Sartre complained of the “dead” nature of his host and guests with their “frozen complexes,”’ mocking Huston’s claim that there was “nothing” in his unconscious, and Huston disparaging Sartre for his relentless monomania and failure to be hypnotized (something that Huston was apparently trained to do). “Occasionally you encounter someone like that,” Huston wrote of the philosopher, someone “hypnotically impregnable.”17

The Secret Passion  171 Indeed, as editor of the Sartre screenplay(s), Pontalis had to navigate a difficult course through the extant Sartre texts, which comprise (1) the original synopsis (with variants), (2) the screenplay given to Huston in 1959, (3) the rewritten screenplay (which is defective and incomplete), and (4) other fragments related to the project. He chose to foreground (2), the Huston screenplay, supplementing it with additions from the rewritten screenplay, some of which, as remarked, were included in Huston’s movie. It is clear that Sartre consulted numerous texts in researching Freud’s life and ideas (he took some licence with chronology and detail for the sake of dramatic coherence and narrative momentum); it also appears likely the French translation of Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud (published in 1958) was a key reference and indeed a major impetus for Huston as well.18 Drawing on these sources, what interested Sartre, according to Huston, was drawing a portrait of a “contradictory, violent, repressed personality, permanently in conflict with himself and his surroundings, stubborn and tormented.” This was a Freud whose struggle for self-understanding drove the discovery of psychoanalysis as “the product of a long activity carried out upon himself – and above all, which counted for much more in Sartre’s eyes, against himself – with breakthroughs, impasses, regressions.”19 The “scientific” discovery of the unconscious was as much a form of self-discovery, and the psychoanalytic method applied to Freud’s famous case studies as much a form of self-analysis and therapeutic cure. This picture of Freud – a doctor having to cure himself to cure others – provided a model for The Idiot of the Family: showing the intimate and productive relationship between neurosis and creativity, a relationship articulated via Sartre’s concept of the “singular universal” that he would go on to explore, as Pontalis remarks, “from Baudelaire to Flaubert, by way of Saint Genet and Les Mots.”20 7.3  Adapting Sartre’s Freud Despite the quarrel between Sartre and Huston, large parts of Sartre’s script, as Pontalis observes, are taken over verbatim and provide the basis for Huston’s film. Freud: The Secret Passion thus deserves to be described as a collaborative work, even if the collaboration in question remained fractious and conflictual, culminating in Sartre’s decision to have his contribution to the film erased. The film, following the script, maintains a strong emphasis on Freud’s intellectual development, focusing on five key years in the young Freud’s life (1885–1890).21 This period encompasses some of the more dramatic events in Freud’s intellectual journey, spanning his meeting with Charcot, collaboration with Breuer, experiments with hypnosis, abandonment of the “seduction theory,” development of the account of infantile sexuality, discovery of the Oedipus complex, to the method of free association. At the same time, it follows the Hollywood

172  Robert Sinnerbrink convention of treating the life of a celebrated subject as a heroic struggle against ignorance and misunderstanding, personal and familial turmoil, inner doubt and social prejudice. The main female character, Cäcilie Körtner [Susannah York], is a composite of Freud’s most famous female case studies (such as Dora, Cäcilie M., and Anna O.). She plays an important role in both the script and the film, which both focus on the difficulties with her treatment and transference relationship with Breuer, as well as the doubts and prejudices Freud experienced as he develops his psychoanalytic method. Although Huston originally had Marilyn Monroe in mind for the role, Susannah York ably portrays the spirited but neurotic young patient. She combines a surface candour and innocence with a deeper sense of anger and betrayal directed at her father, whose repeated liaisons with prostitutes (and unexpected death) seriously traumatized her. Summoned as a young girl in the middle of the night to identify her father’s body – apparently suffering a heart attack while in a brothel – Cäcilie represses this traumatic memory, which is linked with the repressed idea that, since her father was attracted to prostitutes, she should become one herself. She re-narrates this disturbing fantasy in ways more compatible with her image of her father as well as herself but at the cost of precipitating her debilitating neurotic symptoms. Freud inherits Cäcilie as a patient from Breuer, who abruptly abandons treating her when he takes her transference relation to be a romantic passion that would threaten Breuer’s marriage. Compressing a good deal of intellectual development into key dramatic sequences, Freud both refines his account of transference and arrives at the Oedipal fantasy hypothesis based on his treatment of Cäcilie. The drama of deciphering Cäcilie’s Red Tower/Red Tower Strasse dream symbolism – involving a snake and staff “medical” symbol that provides the key linking sexual imagery with her father, the doctor figure of Breuer, then Freud – provides a striking denouement that brings together the script and film’s key thematic movements.22 Sartre’s script (and indeed the movie itself) is structured according to four thematic axes. The first is Freud’s intellectual quest, which commences with his fascination with hysteria and struggle to study it, while training as a young neurologist, in the face of the scientific scepticism of his medical teachers and peers. As Meynert puts it, hysteria is nothing but playacting and deception, whereas for Breuer and Freud, it offered paradigmatic cases to study psychological maladies that manifest physical symptoms in the absence of physiological causes. Freud’s relationship with the rather authoritarian Meynert sets the scene for a series of intellectual father figures whom Freud initially follows, then abandons (Breuer and Fliess), in the process of developing his own independent project leading to the “discovery” of the unconscious. Indeed, the script tracks quite faithfully his journey from the studies in hysteria, positing of the mechanism of

The Secret Passion  173 repression, and shift from using hypnosis as an investigatory technique to developing the therapeutic method of free association. The second theme tracks Freud’s therapeutic relationships with his patients. There is the tragic case of Carl von Schlossen [called von Stroehe in the script], whose disturbing fantasies and later suicide initially scare Freud off his path but eventually point him back towards the idea of the Oedipus complex. The focus in the film, however, is Freud’s treatment of Cäcilie, initially one of Breuer’s subjects who becomes Freud’s patient. Her story – from her ambivalent fascination with her philandering father and rivalry with her mother, to the traumatic discovery of his predilection for prostitutes and confused response of guilt and repression – provides all the essential clues that lead Freud towards ideas of trauma, repression, and the psychic origin of neurosis. This path of discovery is linked with the third theme, Freud’s self-analysis, and discovery of the source of his own neuroses thanks to the ambivalent relationship he had with his father and mother. The treatment of Cäcilie and uncovering of what she has repressed is coupled with Freud’s own struggle to discern the meaning of his Oedipal fantasies. Sartre takes liberties with Freud’s biography, casting a famous dream Freud had as an event experienced by the young Sigmund, which involved his father having his cap knocked off his head and being roundly abused by an anti-Semitic passerby. Asked by his son what he did in response, the father replied, “walked over to pick up my cap and put it back on my head.” Sigmund is infuriated by his father’s meek and passive response, imagining instead the response of Hamilcar, Hannibal’s father, who made Hannibal vow to take vengeance on the Romans.23 Wishing his father had been stronger, Freud saw himself as Hannibal, fighting bravely against the oppressors in order to prove his worth not only as a man and a scientist but also as a Jewish intellectual confronting anti-Semitism in Vienna. Indeed, this moment becomes a turning point or defining moment in Freud’s experience, vowing to become exceptional and successful to compensate for his father’s disgrace.24 Dreams feature centrally in both the script and movie, with Cäcilie’s dreams being foregrounded as well as Freud’s. Indeed, deciphering dreams and analysing them for their latent content becomes as important in Freud’s story as the theoretical modelling of psychic mechanisms of repression. The motivation for all of Freud’s efforts, however, is no ideal pursuit of truth or moral desire for virtue. Rather, Sartre adds a distinctively “Sartrean” emphasis on the situational features that shaped Freud’s personality both psychologically and intellectually. Indeed, much is made in Sartre’s script of the key role of anti-Semitism in fuelling Freud’s intellectual passion and ambition, which we can describe as the fourth key thematic axis organizing the script, and one that Sartre emphasizes at least as much as the more “Freudian” elements of trauma, repression, and Oedipal anxiety.

174  Robert Sinnerbrink Although Huston’s film notes Freud’s Jewish heritage, showing his traditional Jewish wedding and key scenes with his father (retaining the important Hannibal episode), the anti-Semitism theme recedes from the bulk of the film and does not play a significant role in shaping Freud’s quest. As an assimilated Jew in Vienna, who is nonetheless conscious of the stigma that attaches to his status, Sartre’s Freud, by contrast, is deeply motivated by his experience of, and desire to master, anti-Semitism via the drive to succeed, to take intellectual “revenge” for the anti-Semitism he and his family experienced. It is not enough, he remarks, to be merely conventional or mediocre, for others would then eventually come to think the worst of him as a Jew. Rather, he had to prove his exceptional status through a freely chosen project that both marginalized him from the mainstream scientific community and demonstrated his intellectual superiority and existential authenticity. This element is Sartre’s original contribution to the project, not only anticipating his later work but practising what I shall call his “enveloping” strategy: enveloping and transcending the Freudian latent meaning of the story to reveal its “repressed” existential core. 7.4  Sartrian Freud or Freudian Sartre? One of the key questions facing any reader of the script, as Charbonneau asks, is whether we are dealing with a Sartrian Freud or a Freudian Sartre.25 To be sure, there are substantial correspondences between Huston’s idea to depict an “adventurous Freud,” an “explorer of the unconscious,” presenting his story of the uncovering of the unconscious as though it were “a police investigation,”26 and Sartre’s “intellectual thriller” laced with psychological conflict, social ostracism, moral taboos, and existential drama. In Huston’s dramatic image, Freud’s journey was indeed depicted as a journey into the underworld, an infernal descent into a Dantean Hell, even if this hell refers to the unconscious rather than to other people. Another strong parallel is the coupling of Freud’s intellectual quest to develop a psychoanalytic method with his desire for self-understanding through critical analysis, and his lifelong quest to discover the “dark continent” of the mind presented as a defining existential project expressive of, rather than comprised by, his situated freedom. There are, however, significant differences that become apparent on closer scrutiny and show the depth of disagreement between Huston and Sartre on both Freud and the psyche. Charbonneau identifies three main themes in Sartre’s script that parallel his own work in important ways: the role of the father (and need to break away from him), prostitution (and its ambivalent role in regard to sexuality and freedom), and anti-Semitism (which is as much an “unconscious” trauma for Freud as it is a lived social reality).27 Of these three key themes, the central role of the father and, to a

The Secret Passion  175 lesser extent, prostitution, persist in the movie, but the anti-Semitism theme all but disappears (one is tempted to say is repressed). Instead, Huston emphasizes the heroic struggle of a committed scientist to uncover the truth against scepticism, dogmatism, and moral conventionality (both regarding the key role of sexuality and the need to explore repressed fantasies and desires during therapeutic treatment). Huston’s Freud emerges more clearly as an Enlightenment, rather than an existentialist, intellectual hero. The film’s prologue, for example, features a narrator (Huston) intoning the three great blows to humankind’s vanity, or collective narcissism: Kepler’s heliocentric model of the solar system, Darwin’s evolutionary theory of natural selection, and Freud’s discovery of the unconscious. Thanks to these three blows, we could no longer regard ourselves as the centre of the universe, as distinct from or superior to nonhuman animals, or as “masters in our own home” in respect of human consciousness. Freud’s discovery of the unconscious and subsequent birth of psychoanalysis is thus presented as a scientific discovery on par with the most revolutionary modern discoveries of physics, biology, and psychology, which grants Freudian theory and the unconscious a scientific, factual, and historical status that Sartre clearly rejected. Indeed, a deeper source of the tension between Sartre and Huston, one might venture, has to do with the clash between Huston’s “Enlightenment” view of psychoanalysis as a key contribution to the modern task of rational self-understanding and Sartre’s more “existentialist” conception of Freud’s detection of the various strategies of self-deception, repression, and fantasy, to which we are all prone but which do not constitute factual properties of the mind nor scientifically amenable facts. The film is the product of these clashing views, overtly aligning Freud with the great scientific discoveries of modernity while stylistically and dramatically siding with the more socially ambiguous and psychologically conflicted model of consciousness to which Sartre was drawn. The one overarching theme that does unite the philosopher and filmmaker, however, is the idea that we can arrive at self-knowledge not through ourselves but only through others. Freud’s great insight, for Sartre, was not so much the discovery of a putative unconscious realm of the psyche but rather that self-reflection must proceed by way of the Other, an engagement with, analysis of, and reflection upon ourselves through the eyes of the Other (the Gaze or Look), which is constitutive of any reflective sense of self that we may have. Given the strong Freudian and Sartrean resonances of this idea – the gaze of the Other as a condition of our struggle for self-understanding and freedom – how was this translated into cinema, which has long been theorized in terms of psychoanalytic theory and “the gaze”?

176  Robert Sinnerbrink 7.5  Screening Freud Sartre’s challenge as a scriptwriter was not only to tell the story of Freud’s simultaneous intellectual and personal quest for self-knowledge but also to present this story through moving images. Although an avid moviegoer, Sartre did not write much about cinema (although he certainly wrote screenplays and scenarios for the cinema),28 while Freud himself remained sceptical as to whether Freudian psychoanalysis could be appropriately translated onto the movie screen.29 Yet Sartre had a lifelong and strong affinity for the movies, praising their mystery, magic, and egalitarian pleasures in his autobiography, Words, far more than he felt for Freudian psychoanalysis or the Freudian unconscious, towards which he remained critical and unconvinced. Sartre’s challenge, therefore, was to find ways of rendering not only Freud’s character and story but also the ideas behind psychoanalytic theory in ways that would retain dramatic credibility, intellectual cogency, and cinematic plausibility. This is what makes the Sartre/ Huston collaboration an illuminating case study in the relationship between film and philosophy: How can cinema “screen thought”? Like modern literature, painting, and theatre, cinema has long been explored and been influenced by Freudian ideas. The oneiric capacities of cinema and “cinematic” qualities of dream and fantasy encouraged both the artistic and theoretical exploration of this parallel. Inspired perhaps by the surrealists’ and experimental filmmakers’ enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, German Expressionist filmmaker G.W. Pabst made the first explicitly “psychoanalytic” film, Secrets of a Soul: A Psychoanalytic Thriller, in 1926. Displaying Pabst’s signature German Expressionist style, the film was made, much to Freud’s chagrin, with leading Freudian disciple Karl Abraham credited as screenwriter. Freud’s scepticism was quite explicit, centred on the problem of how the “abstractions” of Freudian theory could be represented visually through moving images. In retrospect this may seem ironic given how avidly filmmakers adopted Freudian ideas, weaving Freudian themes into a wide range of filmmaking styles and genres from surrealist cinema, 1950s Hollywood, domestic melodrama, to Hitchcock’s work, and beyond. Sartre and Huston, moreover, faced the same challenge as Abraham and Pabst – namely, how to represent Freud’s “discovery” of the unconscious cinematically? How to depict dreams, fantasy, and desire precisely when these phenomena either resist representation or else function by way of suggestion or symbolism, involving distortion or displacement? To be sure, Sartre was less concerned with the issue of visual representation than with the challenge of translating Freud’s story in psychological, intellectual, as well as existential terms. Despite his script’s strongly “theatrical” quality, with its precise stage directions and clipped dialogue style recalling Sartre’s plays, there is nonetheless significant

The Secret Passion  177 attention given to visual presentation and suggestions for directorial presentation. In Huston’s hands, this was translated into an impressively expressive cinematic style that was well suited to conveying the ambiguous, repressive, stifling yet charged atmosphere of fin de siècle Vienna. How, then, to represent Freudian (as well as existentialist) ideas through the cinema? Filmmakers have used five key cinematic techniques, styles, or devices, all of which are amply on display in Huston’s Freud: abstraction, visual expression, montage (cutting and editing), mise-en-scène (or composition within the frame), and movement. Abstraction has long been used to convey both complex ideas and subjective states; avant-garde and experimental cinema, for example, typically used abstract, non-representational images to communicate the “abstraction” of thought or the symbolism of dreams (Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel’s surrealist works such as Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or). The opening sequence of Freud: The Secret Passion, for example, features an abstract “cosmic” image – which could be an organic figure, an eye, a galaxy, an abstract shape – accompanied by the narrator’s voiceover (voiced by Huston himself) commenting on the three blows to human vanity struck by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud. Expressionism in cinema, typically emphasizing the expressive play of light and darkness, stylized, symbolic, or evocative imagery, expressive use of music, and so on, has long been associated with conveying subjective experiences, states of consciousness, or mood-like states of mind.30 Acting performance styles too can be expressionistic, also conveying through gesture, facial expression, vocal intonation, and physical movement, the inner states of a character. In Freud, the sharp contrasts between light and dark – typically the way Montgomery Clift’s face is shot half-illuminated, halfshadowed, with sharp contrasts in light and darkness within interior shots and the emphasis on darkness in the outdoor shots, are cases in point. Pabst’s silent film on Freud, Secrets of a Soul (1926) is an exemplary kind of expressionistic work that uses visual style to convey mood as well as subjective states such as dreams in a manner that does not depend on verbal articulation or realistic presentation.31 Filmmakers typically use montage or the deliberate matching or juxtaposition of images to convey meaning or express ideas via the relationship between images, and such patterns of image composition are very evident in these kinds of expressive passages (conveying dreams, for example). Cäcilie’s dream sequence, as I will discuss in this chapter, uses both expressive composition and montage to good effect. The compositional arrangement of elements or items within a shot (mise-en-scène), but also the compositional form of the shot in terms of movement, rhythm, visual patterning, and camera perspective, are other important techniques used to convey meaning but also to suggest ideas or states of mind. In Freud, the marked emphasis on gloomy, stuffy, constraining “bourgeois” domestic

178  Robert Sinnerbrink interiors, coupled with expressionistic lighting and shadow contrasts, and stylized compositional patterns and camera placement effectively suggest the closed, stifling, sexualized, and repressive atmosphere of Freud’s milieu, not to mention Viennese society more generally. Finally, movement, whether of the camera, actors, or bodies depicted on screen, plays an important role in the style and significance of performance captured and conveyed on film. The actors’ bodies, particularly their facial expressions, are a powerful means of communicating action as well as thought through physical movement. Montgomery Clift’s piercing, troubled gaze, and his stiff, tensed movements, effectively convey much of Freud’s preoccupied state of mind as well as revealing unconscious hints of meaning in the form of parapraxes or unintentional but significant behaviours (Sartre’s script emphasizes this more explicitly, drawing attention to Freud’s compulsive cigar smoking, rational self-control coupled with involuntary unconscious actions, including unseemly lapses in decorum, such as nose picking). The numerous scenes featuring patients under hypnosis or hysterics acting under hypnotic suggestion all attest to the importance of physical movement and action in conveying “inner” states of mind. All these elements are combined in the typically “Freudian” dream sequences that feature in both script and film. One of Freud’s nightmares is vividly depicted, immediately after a confronting session with his patient von Schlosser, a young man who keeps a dressmaker’s dummy in his room, draped with his father’s army jacket, and fantasizes about killing his father and seducing his mother (while under hypnosis he takes a knife, cuts off the dummy’s head, removes the masculine jacket, then caresses and kisses the “female” form). The dream shows Freud being dragged into a mountain cave by von Schlosser, with a rope tied around Freud’s waist; once deep inside the cave, he is dragged before a stylized Byzantine Goddess/ Mother figure seated regally upon a throne (a figure who appears to be Freud’s mother but also resembles his wife Martha). Accompanied by a jagged, disturbing soundtrack, Freud’s dismissive mentor Reynert is seen sporting a top hat and playing the organ while laughing maniacally. Freud is then dragged out of the cave by von Schlosser and tries desperately to cut the rope binding him to his patient. Failing to sever the rope, he begins throwing stones at von Schlosser, which forces the young man to fall off the cliff, taking Freud with him into the void. Freud wakes up in a terrified state, arms flailing and calling desperately for his “mother,” only to be corrected and comforted by his wife, Martha. Freud’s dream sequences highlight the “expressionist” style used for much of the film, coupled with surrealist elements juxtaposing symbolic images and disturbing sounds and physical actions. The expressionist style, both in this dream sequence but also in more regular scenes, emphasizes Freud’s “dual” character: His face remains half-illuminated, half-shadowed,

The Secret Passion  179 the sharp contrasts expressing the conflict between lucidity and opacity, knowledge and ignorance, consciousness and unconsciousness that define both Freud’s subjective journey towards self-understanding as much as his scientific quest to explore the psyche. Cäcilie, interestingly, tends to be shot in much fuller light, her face radiant and expressive, becoming more prominent as her treatment progresses under Freud’s care. Physical movement is another key feature in the film, with director Huston exploiting Montgomery Clift’s intense gaze, rigid facial expressions, and slightly strained vocal delivery, as well as his “neurotic” mannerisms. There are frequent scenes depicting Freud walking alone at night, meditating on his patients, ruminating on ideas, physical movement giving expression to the movement of his thoughts, his arduous efforts to fathom his past as well that of his patients in the hope of finding a way of treating them through psychoanalytic therapy. The movement of bodies – notably the actions, mannerisms, gestures of Freud’s hysterical patients – here also gives expression to psychic experience, the outer manifestations of physical behaviour providing clues to the “inner” workings of the unconscious mind. Sartre, however, was clearly less concerned with the visual dimensions of cinematic presentation than with its dramatic and thematic aspects. Indeed, his screenplay can just as well be read as a play, with the dialogue, dramatic scenarios, and symbolism conveying meaning, emotional states, and ideas. Nonetheless, Sartre was sensitive to the cinematic dimensions of the story, including several references to how certain scenes might be presented visually. Freud: The Secret Passion thus shows the important contribution of screenwriting to grounding and structuring a film but also how directorial creativity and visual strategies of presentation complete the finished work. A good example of the interplay between Sartre’s script and Huston’s direction is the sequence depicting Cäcilie’s traumatic memory of her father’s death. The film presents this as narrated sequence and as a visual flashback, coupling Cäcilie’s psychologically disguised version of events, shifting from manifest to latent content, so to speak; we see different presentations of her memories, from revised and disguised recollection to the revelation of repressed traumatic content. This shift is also evident in Sartre’s script [second version], which emphasizes Freud’s attempts to analyse the memory/dream/fantasy to uncover its true content.32 A strong parallel is also drawn with Freud’s self-analysis and his recoiling from the disturbing but obvious Oedipal fantasies of the troubled von Schlosser. Huston’s film version allows us to witness the therapeutic shift from Cäcilie’s fantasized version of events to the exposure of their repressed meaning, demonstrating the ultimate psychoanalytic therapeutic goal of relieving neurotic symptoms via self-understanding achieved through analysis and reflection on repressed or distorted memories. What we are presented with, however,

180  Robert Sinnerbrink is a thoroughly “Enlightenment” version of Freud descending – with his patients – into the dark and disturbing realm of the unconscious in the service of self-emancipation. At the same time, we are offered, in both script and film, a powerful expression of Sartre’s vision of the role of the existential “fundamental project” that both individuates and unifies a life defined by a freely chosen course of action that constitutes the kind of person one becomes over time. Sartre’s presentation of Freud does not translate psychoanalytic theory into existentialist analysis – which would be problematic given Sartre’s resistance to the notion of the unconscious – but rather envelops and recontextualizes Freud’s trajectory in a manner that illuminates both ways of thinking. 7.6  A Sartrian Freud? One of the more interesting ironies of the collaboration between Sartre and Huston is precisely this dialectic between self-emancipation through reflective analysis and Freud’s darker vision of the dominance of the unconscious realm over our conscious life. Script and film stage a struggle over the demotion of consciousness from the source of transcendent freedom to the effect of unconscious forces and situational histories. Indeed, Huston’s aim was to show, in the manner of a detective story, how Freud’s discovery of the unconscious was effectively the third major scientific blow to human vanity – our metaphysical narcissism – after Copernicus and Darwin. We are no longer sovereign masters of conscious freedom but subject to unconscious mechanisms of repression that we do not consciously control. At the same time, however, the film also emphasizes, precisely, Freud’s conscious control, his driven character and sustained commitment not only to develop a new model and method of psychic investigation and therapeutic practice but also to emancipate himself through self-knowledge and prove his worth against prejudice and ignorance (the anti-Semitism theme so prominent in Sartre’s script). One could even say that Sartre/Huston’s Freud attempts, in an ambiguous manner, to replace Id with Ego, such that the relationship between unconscious desire and conscious freedom remains ambivalent and conflictual. From this point of view, the film offers a fascinating example of the dissonance between Huston’s “Enlightenment” vision of Freud’s heroic discovery of the unconscious and Sartre’s conditional treatment of the unconscious in deflecting and distorting consciousness, while insisting on the centrality of existential freedom and conscious choice in elaborating Freud’s journey of self-emancipation. We might describe the drama that transpires, at a meta-level of reflection, as Sartre’s attempt to envelop the role and significance of the Freudian unconscious and subordinate it to his philosophical vision of the individual as defined by the existential choice of a fundamental project.

The Secret Passion  181 As remarked, however, the theme on which both Sartre and Huston converge is the role of the Other in mediating personal identity and critical self-understanding. Here the role of cinema itself becomes important: the way film can stage the relationship of the Gaze or Look [regard] between individuals, thereby opening an intersubjective space of encounter and engagement that includes us as viewers or witnesses of the narrative that unfolds on screen. In many scenes of Huston’s film, for example, we see Freud both in intimate close-up and from the viewpoint of an Other, not necessarily always Freud’s immediate interlocutors but from another perspective – that of the camera point of view – both intimately linked and irreducibly removed from his own subjective experience. Here we could also underline the film’s attention to Freud’s intellectual “father figures,” as well as his patients, notably Cäcilie, as establishing difficult, sometimes conflictual relationships that open an ambiguous space of intersubjective recognition, a communicative space of encounter – the therapeutic dialogue between analyst and analysand – that allows for a “working through” of psychological as much as social-cultural and existential meaning. This unlikely yet remarkable collaboration shows how the Freudian drama, relayed via both script and film, allows us to recognize both the societal and psychological constraints upon our capacity for freedom while insisting on the possibility of transcending these factical “givens” of our social situation. Sartre/Huston’s Freud thus offers an intriguing case study in how cinema can communicate ideas visually and dramatically via the intersubjective experience of narrative engagement. It offers a surprisingly Sartrian slant on psychoanalytic theory as a means of existential emancipation that recognizes, in an ambiguously enveloping manner, the intellectual and psychological achievement of Freud’s pioneering investigations of the “dark side” of human consciousness. That this Freudian scenario could be successfully translated into film suggests that Sartre’s intuitions about cinema, which grew up and developed in tandem with his own philosophical work, were wiser than he knew. Notes 1 Sartre and Schlipp (1964: 77). 2 In what follows I draw on Pontalis (1985: viii–xviii). 3 Pontalis (1985: vii); Huston (1980: 294). 4 As Betschart (2020: 118) explains, “The film shows Freud’s development from neurology via hypnosis and the theory of sexual abuse to the Oedipus complex and the theory of child sexuality. As in the case of Les orgueilleux, Sartre withdrew his name, because the screenplay had been cut down by Charles Kaufman and Wolfgang Reinhardt from several hours to a short 120 minutes. Nevertheless, an estimated ninety percent of the movie including all the main figures were taken from Sartre’s screenplay.”

182  Robert Sinnerbrink 5 See Sartre and Schlipp (1989: 458–460). 6 Pontalis (1985: vii). 7 According to Betschart (2020), Sartre wrote several screenplays during the late 1930s and 1940s, writing eight for French Film production company Pathé between 1943 and 1946. His screenplay for Les Jeux sont faits, written in 1943, was made into a highly successful film in 1947, directed by Jean Delannoy, with writing credits going to Jacques-Laurent Bost, Sartre, and Delannoy. His screenplay Typhus was adapted and produced in 1953 as a Franco-Mexican production entitled Les Orgueilleux [The Proud and the Beautiful]. Sartre was even nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story for this film; however, he had withdrawn his name from the credits since Jean Aurenche and Jean Clouzot had substantially revised the scenario and screen dialogues (Betschart 2020: 117). In 1955, Sartre completed a screenplay, Les Sorcières de Salem, an adaptation of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which was produced as a joint Franco-East German film production in 1957, directed by Raymond Rouleau and starring Simone Signoret as Elizabeth Proctor and Yves Montand as John Proctor. See Betschart’s (2020) discussion of Sartre’s work as a screenwriter, focusing on his adaptation of Les Sorcières de Salem and the political dimensions of this work given Sartre’s response to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and critical stance towards American society. 8 Sartre and Schlipp (1981: 12). 9 Huston (1965: 18). 10 Sartre (1976: 130). Quoted in Charbonneau (2007: 87). 11 See Barnes (1989: 52–3). 12 Ibid., 57. Betschart (2020: 119) notes that the Freud scenario was significant as a “precursor to Sartre’s voluminous L’idiot de la famille (The Family Idiot) about Gustave Flaubert.” 13 Koch (1991: 8). 14 Nannicelli (2012). 15 Hazel Barnes notes that Sartre’s Freud scenario does not offer a distinctively Sartrean view of its subject but does resemble his biographies in other respects. His aim in the biographies, as she remarks, was “to pinpoint the moment which unifies all that has gone before and establishes a man as what he has essentially become – as Sartre showed how Genet the thief became Genet the writer, how Flaubert became the author reflected in Madame Bovary” (1989: 57). Sartre’s goal, in short, was “to uncover the person’s fundamental project, his manner of relating himself to the world, his way of being” (1989: 57). Although this is also true of the Freud scenario, the latter differs from the biographies in that its subject “does not move in the usual Sartrean terrain” (that is to say, “encounters with Being and Non-Being, the nothingness of Evil, the pursuit of the real/unreal, the impossible possibility, the compelling force of the missing God, etc.” Barnes even goes so far as to reject the idea that Sartre offers an account of Freud’s “fundamental project,” offering rather a conventional psychoanalytic story of his breakthrough via analysis. Barnes (1989: 57–58). 16 Pontalis (1985: vii). 17 Huston (1980: 276). Quoted in Pontalis (1985: ix). 18 Barnes notes that “the Freud of the scenario has stepped out fully dressed from the pages of Ernest Jones’ biography, Volume I” Barnes (1989: 53). See also Nehamas (1987: 193–194). 19 Pontalis (1985: xi). 20 Ibid., xii.

The Secret Passion  183 21 This is Pontalis’s figure; the precise dating varies between commentators, but all agree that the film focuses on the mid to late 1880s period spanning his internship with Charcot (1885) and collaboration with Breuer (1886), which was also the period in which he treated Anna O. The film version ends with Freud visiting his father’s grave, which would suggest some point in or after 1896. 22 This important sequence analyzing Cäcilie’s dream, which provides the clue to unlocking her traumatic memories and repressed wishes, appears in the second version of the Freud scenario and is carefully adopted, edited, and compressed in Huston’s film version. 23 Barnes (1989: 55). As Freud remarks, “Ever since that time Hannibal has had a place in my fantasies” in Freud (1965: 230). 24 As Koch notes (1991: 11), Sartre turns this dream into an experienced event that turns out to be traumatic and significant for Freud as an adult. This event, Koch remarks, “composed of the narratives of Jones and Freud, forms the point of crystallization in Freud’s development. He must become the Hannibal character prompted by the fall of the idolized father.” 25 Charbonneau (2007: 86 ff). 26 Quoted in ibid., 87. 27 Ibid. 28 See Betschart (2020: 116–119), Fautrier (2006), and Connor (2001) for illuminating discussions of Sartre’s early writings on cinema and sustained involvement in screenwriting. 29 Freud remarked of the pending film by Pabst: “It seems that a film on psychoanalysis has become as inevitable as the boyish bob. But for my part, I won’t have my hair cut that way and I would wish even less to be personally connected to any film whatsoever.” Cited in Zeul (1989: 955) and in Koch (1991: 3). 30 The musical soundtrack to Freud: The Secret Passion was composed by Jerry Goldsmith and features passages of unsettling, atonal composition. Parts of Goldsmith’s Freud soundtrack were re-used in Ridley Scott’s science-fiction horror classic Alien (1979). 31 Pabst uses symbolism, expressive contrasts, surrealist modes of presentation, and camera distortion/special effects to convey oneiric states and dream passages. See, for example, the following clip from Secrets of a Soul: https://www. youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=Df1CGxqS1MA. 32 Sartre (1985: 152–65).

References Barnes, H.E. Sartre’s scenario for Freud. L’Espirit Créateur, 29(4), (1989). 52–64. Betschart, A. Sartre, the film, and the United States. From love story to critical appraisal. Studi sartriani, anno XIV, (2020). 115–132. Charbonneau, M.A. The Freud scenario: A Sartrian Freud – A Freudian sartre? Sartre Studies International, 13(2), (2007). 86–112. Connor, J.D. Sartre and cinema. The grammar of commitment. MLN, 116(5), (2001). 1045–1068. Fautrier, P. Le cinéma de Sartre. Fabula LH, 2, (2006). https://www.fabula.org/ lht/2/fautrier.html Freud, S. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. J. Strachey. New York: Avon. (1965).

184  Robert Sinnerbrink Huston, J. Huston avant le deluge: Interview with Robert Benayoun. Positif, 70(18), (1965). 1–28. ———. An Open Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. (1980). Koch, G. Sartre’s screen projection of Freud. October, 57, (1991). 3–17. Nannicelli, T. A Philosophy of the Screenplay. London and New York: Routledge. (2012). Nehamas, A. The Freud scenario. Grand Street, 6(3), (1987). 192–200. Pontalis, J.B. Editor’s Preface. In J.-P. Sartre (ed. J.-B. Pontalis), The Freud Scenario. Trans. Q. Hoare. London and New York: Verso Books. (1985). ———. Editor’s Preface. In J. Huston (ed.), An Open Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. (1980). Sartre, J.-P. Words. Trans. I. Clephane. London: Penguin Books. (1964). ———. Being and Nothingness. Trans. H.E. Barnes. London: Routledge. (1989). ———. An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre. In P.A. Schlipp (ed.), The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. La Salle, IL: Open Court. (1981). ———. Sartre on Theatre. Trans. F. Jellinek. New York: Random House. (1976). ———. The Freud Scenario. Ed. J.-B. Pontalis. Trans. Q. Hoare. London and New York: Verso Books. (1985). Zeul, M. John Huston’s Freud-film 1961. Psyche, (1989), 952–966.

8 Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO Talia Morag*

Psychoanalysis in general, and Freudian psychoanalysis in particular, has been accused of being a pseudo-science and of being ridden with obscure terminology.1 Much of that criticism is addressed at the explanatory concept that is at the heart of psychoanalytic theory and practice – namely, the Freudian unconscious. Sartre too has played a role in this history of criticism by attacking a specific concept of the unconscious, arguing that it is non-explanatory.2 The criticisms against the Freudian unconscious have been a major contributing factor to the decline of the status of psychoanalysis in the academy and in the popular imagination.3 It is therefore striking that although the unconscious is a cornerstone of psychoanalytic theory of no matter what school, it has received very little discussion in recent times. The psychoanalytic contemporary literature is concerned with different matters, and little attention is given to the unconscious as such. But distraction from the criticisms against psychoanalysis and its core concept will not eliminate them or the damage they inflict on the status of psychoanalysis as both theory and practice. A full defence of the notion of the Freudian unconscious would require identifying the various notions one can find in Freud’s writings and discussing the criticisms against each of them. Although I cannot embark on this task here, I should say that I think that the criticisms, including Sartre’s, are by and large justified. In this chapter, I am going to try to do something else, and that is to propose a new notion of the unconscious that is still Freudian, and that is based on two interrelated psychological processes: one is what Freud calls “primary processes,” and the other is Sartre’s notion of bad faith. Sartre’s notion was meant to replace the Freudian unconscious, which he sought to demolish. And yet my aim is to show that bad faith is in fact an aspect of the Freudian unconscious. The scope of this chapter will not allow the comparative examination of this new notion, showing how it is not * Many thanks to Justin Clemens, John Monteleone, Alison Clark, Gavin Kitching, and especially David Macarthur, for their comments.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-9

186  Talia Morag vulnerable to the criticisms of other Freudian notions. But I will be able to show how different this new notion is to the one that is at the heart of Sartre’s critique and, at least in that respect, show this new notion’s promise. 8.1 The Freudian Unconscious as an Explanatory Concept The Freudian unconscious is posited to explain various puzzling behaviours. Paradigmatically, these are the neurotic symptoms: hysteria (or psychosomatic symptoms), obsessional compulsive behaviours, and phobias.4 The explanatory mission begins when people come to the psychoanalyst, say Freud, with a sense of a riddle about themselves, complaining about a certain behaviour of theirs that they do not understand. They feel that there is something to understand – namely, that their behaviour is not merely physiologically caused but that it has some meaning that is not known to them. In other words, psychoanalysis begins when people see the causes of their symptoms as something of which they can become aware. To speak like a philosopher, then, patients begin psychoanalysis when they are prepared to see the psychological causes of their symptoms as personlevel phenomena. Indeed, during the analysis, patients will typically accept that the causes for their symptoms relate to their behaviour in their social relationships and interactions, which go beyond the immediate context of the behaviour that brought them to psychoanalysis in the first place. Psychosomatic symptoms feel much like any other pain that is physiologically caused, and yet no physiological intervention makes them go away. A person confused by their pains, who suspects they are somehow linked to psychological aspects of themselves, will go to a psychoanalyst, rather than to a pain clinic, say. Compulsive actions and thoughts seem like any other intentional action or rationally guided thought, such as washing hands or doubting one has locked the car. Such actions and/or thoughts are revealed as obsessive-compulsive when a person sees they form part of a routine that is not rationally justifiable, tries to control or dim them down through reason – as one does with intentional actions or ordinary beliefs – but fails. It is when obsessional neurotics feel baffled by their symptoms, when they feel that their symptoms are meaningful yet obscure, that they seek psychoanalysis. And similarly with phobias – namely, rationally unjustifiable fears that one is unable to control through reason, but that one feels that they somehow express a deeper mystery about themselves of which they can become aware. To say it in the least controversial manner and in almost too general terms, Freudian psychoanalysis provides an explanation of the following form: The symptom comprises a distorted expression of unconscious emotions and/or sexual desires, which are linked with certain memories and/or fantasies. These unconscious states of mind are characterized by an incompatibility with a person’s self-conception and with the moral and other

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  187 social norms this person endorses. In other words, these unconscious emotions or desires are usually dormant or latent, in a dispositional state, and occasionally they get enlivened into an occurrent state, but their expression disguises, as it were, the remembered and/or fantasized scenarios in which they originate.5 This distortion or disguise occurs through what Freud names “primary processes.”6 These are unconscious associative processes that connect the emotionally and/or sexually laden scenarios – whether those are memories or fantasies – with the current behaviour within the current scenario. Primary processes, therefore, serve two main functions: (1) to connect between a current situation and an unconscious emotion and/or desire and thereby trigger those unconscious emotions and/or desires into an enlivened occurrent state and (2) to produce a behaviour which is associatively connected to the memories and fantasies that are implicated in those unconscious emotions or desires. The connections in question, as I have shown elsewhere, consist of similarities, inversions, part-whole and partpart relations.7 As a result, the puzzling behaviour that is produced – such as a pain in a certain bodily zone, a compulsion, or a fear reaction – is said to be “symbolic” of the unconscious emotions and/or desires that caused it.8 I shall give an example of such an explanation in Section 8.3. For the moment, I want to claim that already here we see that the term “unconscious” in the Freudian explanatory framework relates to two different psychological aspects of the mind. First, we have unconscious mental states, which can be either dormant or enlivened. This is a rather mysterious notion. A couple of difficulties immediately emerge: (1) How are we able to virtually forget about certain experiences or fantasies that have been causing us so much conflict? And, (2) How are we able to not become aware of such emotions or sexual desires when they become occurrent? Emotions and desires feel a certain way, and feelings are conscious occurrences. Freud too recognizes this apparent paradoxicality of unconscious feelings.9 The second aspect of the unconscious as an explanatory concept consists in the unconscious primary processes. I shall regard this short and thin description of the Freudian unconscious and its two aspects as the core notion of the Freudian unconscious. Freud himself articulates a plurality of far more detailed theoretical notions. Primary processes are present throughout Freud’s writings, and psychoanalytic explanations by no matter what school of psychoanalysis rely on them, even if very little attention is given to their discussion. It is rather the first aspect, to do with certain embodied mental states being hidden, that has altered throughout Freud’s writings and that has suffered criticism. The most influential and also most criticized theoretical constructs that correspond to that first aspect are known as the topographical model and the structural model. Within the topographical model, the unconscious is conceived as a (metaphorical) place in the mind, which stores certain emotions, desires,

188  Talia Morag memories, and fantasies that have been rejected from consciousness due to their incompatibility with the person’s self-conception, and their potential to cause guilt or shame or embarrassment. The unconscious as a storage room for conflictual mental states is controlled by what Freud calls “the censor.” The censor is like a little person within us, a homunculus, whose function is to control the locked forbidden mental states. The censor may lock them in or let them out “disguised,” a disguise or a symbolic distortion that occurs through primary processes.10 The structural model posits that the mind is composed of three or four homunculi – the (in)famous Id, Ego, Superego, and Ego ideal. The unconscious here is conceived as a quality of the Id (our source of shameless or socially forbidden desires and emotions) and of certain aspects of the Superego (our punitive conscience).11 Even if Sartre’s text seems to amalgamate these models,12 his critique addresses the intentional aspect of the topographical model – namely, censorship. I explicate Sartre’s criticism, which I find convincing, and show its merits elsewhere. My goal in this chapter is to offer a new notion of the unconscious, which involves neither a hidden intentionality nor a secret room, and in that sense evades Sartre’s criticism of the unconscious altogether. Ironically, I shall turn to Sartre’s alternative to the unconscious – bad faith – to construct this new notion of the unconscious that does not entail censorship. The resulting notion will still qualify as Freudian, as it involves the two aspects of the core conception of the unconscious specified earlier – namely, embodied mental states that can remain latent and in a certain sense forgotten for a long time, while still having causal effects on our behaviour, as well as primary processes. Demystifying the first aspect of the unconscious will be the main advantage, so I shall try to show, of this new notion. Rather than eliminating the Freudian unconscious, then, I shall suggest that Sartre’s notion of bad faith contains the insights required to recover the Freudian unconscious in the aftermath of Sartre’s own criticisms against it. 8.2 Bad Faith and Some Preliminary Connections to Psychoanalysis Sartre presents the Freudian unconscious as an attempt to explain the familiar, ordinary and perplexing phenomenon of self-deception. We say about people that they are self-deceived, that they deny their weaknesses and their moral failings, that they can be blind to aspects of themselves that others can identify in their behaviour. And yet it is difficult to understand how such a lack of self-knowledge is possible given our ordinary understanding of deception, which involves the intentional deception of another person.

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  189 As Jerome Neu explains,13 two paradoxes are involved in self-deception. The first is that of knowledge: When we deceive others, we know the truth that we are concealing from another person, and the deceived does not know that truth since our mind is separate from the mind of the deceived. Self-deception then, which involves only one person, seems to suppose the apparently paradoxical idea that one can both know and not know the same content. As Sartre says, [T]he one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.14 The second paradox is that of intention. When we deceive others, we do so deliberately. But if we deliberately try to conceal the truth from ourselves, we seem to be trying to follow a procedure that entails knowing the truth. This procedure could not then conclude in not knowing the truth. As Sartre says, “[I]f I deliberately and cynically attempt to lie to myself, I fail completely in this undertaking.”15 Sartre claims that the Freudian unconscious was posited to solve this paradox. Yet Freud had no particular interest in the paradox of self-deception, and the unconscious was never meant to solve it. Nevertheless, Sartre’s historical error provides a conceptual insight: Even if the explanatory purpose of the unconscious is historically unrelated to the paradox of selfdeception, the notion of the unconscious bears a strong resemblance to self-deception. First, both cases are characterized by an unawareness. Secondly and relatedly, admitting an unconscious is a way of seeing people as not transparent to themselves, as somehow not knowing aspects of themselves that they could, at least in principle, come to acknowledge. The unconscious too, then, involves the apparently paradoxical capacity to not know what we could know about ourselves. Finally, the unconscious status of certain emotions, desires, fantasies, and memories is said to protect us from guilt, shame, and embarrassment and from damaging our selfconception. Self-deception too is said to be similarly motivated, to comprise a way of avoiding difficult truths about oneself, either by “hiding a displeasing truth or presenting as truth a pleasing untruth.”16 In fact, when one hears about the Freudian unconscious, one might express scepticism about its existence, given the mystery in the idea that we may not know crucial things about ourselves, namely the two difficulties outlined in Section 8.1. How is it possible for a young man, for example, to be ignorant of his resentment against his father or for a nanny to not know that she is in love with the father of the children under her care?17 How can we hide such major emotional aspects of ourselves from ourselves in this way? The formulation of this question about the unconscious

190  Talia Morag is virtually identical to the question about self-deception. We take this question to express a paradox rather than scepticism when it comes to selfdeception, since unlike the attitude people have to the Freudian unconscious, few would doubt that we can successfully deceive ourselves.18 In order to solve the paradox of self-deception, Sartre proposes we understand it in terms of what he calls “bad faith.” It is not at all clear nor does Sartre bother to argue that the phenomenon of bad faith covers all cases of self-deception. Nevertheless, the plurality of his examples shows that it is a widespread phenomenon. Perhaps the best way to introduce what Sartre calls “bad faith” is through a quick example, familiar from everyday life: the denial of one’s past through its objectification. Imagine a person who willingly confesses that they left their first romantic partner in a cowardly and undignified manner, judging themselves to have been too young, inexperienced, and typically thoughtless. Effectively, this person is distancing themselves from the younger version of themselves, as it were, as if that younger version is a person who no longer exists or has nothing to do with who they are now – a different person, separate from them, an object to be classified and summedup by listing their characteristics. People have objective aspects, what Sartre calls “facticity,” to the extent that they are a physical thing amongst other things or to the extent that their personality can be locked in other people’s descriptions of them, as if their behaviour could not suddenly change or as if they could not freely make unpredictable choices. And people are subjects, or what Sartre calls “transcendence” insofar as they are not merely a thing nor just a character in someone else’s movie, so to speak. But in this example, a person is regarding their past as a finished and separate part of themselves. That is, their past is not only an objective aspect of a person who is both object and subject at the same time but rather an object that has nothing to do with who they really are, as it were, that is a subject, capable of changing and being different to their past. Effectively, such a person is not responsible for their past, for their merely objective part, separable from who they actually are. It is as if they say, “I am on a plane where no reproach can touch me since what I really am is my transcendence.”19 This focus in bad faith on one’s subjectivity, alienating oneself from one’s objective aspect, is a case of self-deception because the truth is, Sartre claims, that we are both subject and object, and that our past is part of who we are now and that we are thereby responsible for our past actions. Some questions arise at this point, however: Are we supposed to ascribe people with an explicit belief about their subjectivity as separate from their objective aspect? It seems more plausible to regard it as an implicit belief, some kind of a presupposition that we can ascribe to them even if they are unable to articulate it. But why is this belief necessarily false? It seems

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  191 dogmatic to simply accept without argument that Sartre’s theory, whereby our objective and subjective aspects are intertwined, is correct.20 Perhaps instead of presupposing a metaphysics of subjectivity and objectivity intertwined, we can suppose that such a person, deep down, to speak metaphorically, believes that they are responsible for their past – whether or not that belief is correct. And yet here the paradoxes lurk again. What does it mean to believe “deep down” what one denies in their sincere statements? And how can one intend to deny responsibility without effectively assuming responsibility? In other words, Sartre can be interpreted to claim that the self-objectifying activities of bad faith are motivated by the denial of responsibility, but in order to avoid the paradox, that motivation needs to be unknown to us. As I will explicate in this section, Sartre’s suggestive insight accounts for such unawareness by taking recourse to a notion of an attention shift. To say it most generally, then, bad faith consists in identifying with only one aspect of oneself – either the objective or the subjective – at the expense of the other. Bad faith is self-deceptive since it denies its motivation – namely, the avoidance of responsibility – which is disagreeable to assume.21 In what follows, I focus on one of Sartre’s examples, and explicate through its interpretation the structure of bad faith and how it avoids the paradox of self-deception, without requiring – at least on the face of it – a notion like the Freudian unconscious. This is a much-discussed example, where interpreters attempt to provide different accounts to Sartre’s, perhaps because Sartre’s words make readers feel uncomfortable. 22 It is the example of the “date” or of the “coquette,” in itself a questionable label in French, especially in our post #METOO era. To describe the scene in the crudest terms, as someone might from a third-person perspective, we have here two people on a date, they are chatting, and at some point, the man takes the young woman’s hand, which remains motionless in his.23 Let us set this date in the 40s of the twentieth century, in a café-bistro in Paris. In what follows, I am going to use Sartre’s description of this woman’s state of mind without replacing or contradicting it. This is not to say that it is the only way to interpret a scene of this sort.24 But I find Sartre’s descriptions highly plausible. I say this because, although I have no specific memory of such a date, I have experienced fragments of this date on different occasions. I may as well have been on such a date, and I have heard similar stories from some of my female childhood friends. I can certainly identify easily with the state of mind of this woman as Sartre describes it. I will, however, build on Sartre’s suggestive insights and elaborate on the psychological processes involved in bad faith. I shall also add a few details to the scene, which will not contradict Sartre’s description but comprise additions to fill in the picture so that it fits with my capacity to identify with it. I am picturing a very young and aspiring woman, a poet who is

192  Talia Morag about 20, maybe even younger than 20, and a middle-aged man, a successful novelist and playwright. This writer often sits in the same café-bistro, where he eats his lunch every day, and it is there where he met our young poet and invited her to meet him there again for dinner. Our young poet is very excited. This writer is not good-looking, and he seems kind of old to her. She is not quite sure she is attracted to him physically, but she admires him and his work and feels quite special to arouse his interest. She can sense that this writer is interested in her sexually. If only she were straightforwardly attracted to him! Maybe she will develop such an interest over time, maybe a couple of glasses of wine will help, and maybe he won’t even make the “first approach”25 tonight. These thoughts may be passing in the young poet’s mind, but she is not dwelling on them. For the moment, they are just having a conversation, and she is focusing on “what is respectful and discreet in the attitude of her companion.”26 Her focus is so determined that she can re-interpret even an obvious phrase such as “I find you so attractive!”27 as a merely kind compliment. She listens to his words, taking them at face value, without bothering to see any subtext that would indicate his sexual intentions. She is in a strange objectified and frozen present, composed of words uttered and a respectful attitude, ignoring the subjective aspect of her companion as an agent acting intentionally, and who has forward-looking sexual goals to which he alludes in his word choices and mannerisms. In other words, our poet deceives herself regarding what is going on between them on this date through bad faith: seeing the writer’s interest in her qua a pure subject, ignoring his sexual interest in her body, as well as through denying the subjectivity of her date. So far, we can say that she is able not to know what she does know, or at least what she would probably have to admit if confronted about it – namely, that the famous writer is sexually interested in her – through a shift of attention. The knowledge aspect of the paradox of self-deception assumes a too-strong notion of un-knowing, as if to be self-deceived means that a certain fact is completely inaccessible to us. Being in bad faith merely supposes that we are able to ignore what we could potentially know by focusing on something else.28 Our young poet’s bad faith goes deeper because it is not the case that she wants her date to stop sexually desiring her body. His desire is more than just flattering, a term she might use had she been able to simply reject this writer from the start. As I interpret Sartre, on the one hand, there is something “humiliating”29 about being desired as a mere body, and therefore she wants this desire to be for her as a pure subject. But on the other hand, the desire must be addressed at her body as an object, as a beautiful and sexually appealing object. So this desire to be desired is in bad faith as well, as our poet sees herself as entirely a subject and entirely an object at the same time.

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  193 Is this so hard to understand? I want to say that in reality, many women may feel this paradoxical desire for a man’s desire. Our poet does not want to be “objectified” as if she is a mere poster in someone’s garage, to say it crudely. She wants to be acknowledged for her depth and poetry. She wants to feel “admiration, esteem, respect,”30 and this is the subjective aspect of the writer’s desire that she allows herself to recognize in real time. Somehow feeling or paying attention to his desire for her body would rule out this respect (why?). If she were clearly unattractive, then she would be certain that he is indeed interested in her poetry. But it is not the case that our poet wishes to be unattractive (who does?). She wants to be desired for the way she looks. She is living a contradiction, but she can deceive herself and avoid confronting this contradiction by inattending to the overtly sexual aspect of the writer’s desire. What is conscious here is our poet’s focus on herself as being seen as physically attractive and as a spiritual delight. Let me emphasize – she is not happy to be both beauty and intellect intertwined. Somehow, she is both 100 percent gorgeousness and 100 percent poetry. It is as if her date could be two people and provide these two contradicting recognitions of her value. The structure of bad faith as a matter of attention still requires further understanding, for how can our poet be shifting her attention without knowing what she is doing and why? Then comes the most striking moment of bad faith for our poet. The famous older writer takes her hand. How awkward is that?! It is not like our young poet is interested – not yet, anyway. But neither does she want to just end it all in an embarrassing rejection: [T]he young woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice she is leaving it. She does not notice because it happens by chance that she is at this moment all intellect. She draws her companion up to the most lofty regions of sentimental speculation; she speaks of Life, of her life, she shows herself in her essential aspect – a personality, a consciousness. And during this time the divorce of the body from the soul is accomplished; the hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion – neither consenting nor resisting – a thing.31 Our young poet is ignoring her own body by talking, I want to say talking a lot, talking fast, one word follows another, not to leave any space of silence or any space for her date to start talking. She talks about the most abstract topics she can think of that remove her attention from this concrete and embodied situation. By ignoring her hand and focusing on her “lofty” speech, she is also, at the same time, objectifying her hand, as if she was not her hand, as if this hand was not an embodied expression of her soul. And our young poet is fully aware of this incredible alienation.

194  Talia Morag The hands of this older man are warm; she can feel it. She is consciously experiencing herself as a mere object and as an entirely spiritual being at the very same moment. There may be something shocking about this description, and some readers may find it implausible. But alienation or dissociation from one’s own body is all too familiar from reports of women who have been sexually abused.32 When it comes to our poet, according to Sartre, her self-alienation in bad faith effectively achieves an avoidance of responsibility for the way this date unfolds. An acknowledgement of this dynamic of desire would force our poet to make a decision between two unwanted options: calling the date off or cooperating with a sexual advance she might not even want. Although these moments of bad faith are conscious, it is not the case that our poet is acting intentionally here with the goal to continue the date and attempt to maintain the delicate balance of neither rejecting nor welcoming her date’s sexual desire. She is not telling herself that she is going to ignore his desire or ignore her own body in order to continue experiencing the possibility of a sexual encounter without deciding whether or not this possibility shall be realized. Neither is she telling herself something more abstract, that would, according to Sartre, be the goal of any bad faith – namely, that she wants to “escape”33 herself through this form of self-denial. If she were able to articulate such goals, this endeavour would exhibit the intention paradox of self-deception and be bound to fail. Sartre’s solution to the paradox is metaphorical, but nonetheless suggestive: “The decision to be in bad faith does not dare to speak its name.”34 I take this phrase to mean that bad faith is not an intentional action and is not done under description, as Kent Bach says, using Anscombe’s account on intentional action.35 That our poet avoids confrontation through attention shift and self-alienation is a true description of her activity, but it is not the description under which the action is performed. The action of attention shift, as I suggest elsewhere,36 is an action tendency of an aversive affective reaction. Just as we are prepared to say that turning one’s gaze away in disgust or in shame is not an intentional action but an emotionally motivated one, so we can say here that shifting attention in bad faith comprises an aversive reaction which is not done under description. Neither does our poet have to convince herself that she is indeed a poetic spirit in a beautiful inert body; her self-image is already wrapped up in this notion. There is no persuasion in an experience of bad faith. As Sartre says, “[T]o the extent that [one] could be persuaded, [one] have always been so.”37 And so, our poet’s self-image has been in place for a while. In other words, this is not the first time she has “divorced” herself from her body. It is, rather, a “pattern of distraction.”38 Our poet has had some practice in this form of self-denial.

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  195 Sartre is satisfied with his description of this young woman. It shows an instant of bad faith, and he can account for it without taking recourse to the Freudian unconscious or to any other robust notion of unawareness. The Freudian unconscious is invoked to solve a riddle, a complaint by a patient that does not understand herself. On the face of it, there is no riddle here. The fascinating non-Anscombian feature of bad faith, its non-intentional feature, which enables this striking capacity our young poet has to ignore her own hand, is said to be a pattern, an enactment of a habit, and that’s that. It seems that it is the pattern qua pattern that is said to be motivating our poet. But a pattern is itself in need of an explanation. How did it come to be? This particular pattern of alienation from one’s own body is mysterious, and one wonders how this habit and this self-image have formed in our young poet. I shall get back to this question in the next section. In the rest of this section, I shall complete the date example in a way that Sartre does not and put forward the idea that our middle-aged famous writer is also in bad faith on this occasion. I suggest that Sartre in his authorial voice as the writer of this text gives voice to this man, which is perhaps why people feel uncomfortable about this example. Sartre appears to have very little sympathy for this “coquette.” His description of her as not knowing whether or not she sexually desires this man sounds accusatory.39 I allow myself to assume that our middle-aged famous man is annoyed with our young poet, or at least losing his patience. She is ignoring his verbal advances and pretending that this is not a romantic date whose trajectory towards sexual contact is supposedly clear to both sides from the start. She “consented” to this date, and she will have to, at some point, either reject or welcome his “first approach.”40 But there is no law of dates whereby the first approach must be made on the first date. This supposed knowledge is itself in bad faith. It comprises an objectification of a relational matter between two people who are in fact free to either make or not make any such approach and whose sexual desire need not be and often is not a predetermined matter. We talk about having or losing “chemistry” as a date progresses, about being suddenly turned on or turned off by something the other person says or does. This powerful man is simplifying and objectifying our poet’s ambivalence. The only thing this man can say about her psychology relates to the way she either rejects or accepts his desires. There is no consideration of her emotions or her personality or the actual content of her words. Discussion of her personality merely figures as one of her (reproachable?) strategies to maintain her indecision. Why does this man take her hand? To force her to make a decision? To know where he stands? “We know what happens next,” Sartre says immediately after telling us that the man took our young woman’s hand.41 If we all know that this woman’s hand will freeze

196  Talia Morag in this man’s warm hands, then so does this man – prior to taking her hand. This man knows he is not welcome and persists anyway. Our middle-aged famous writer is not just in bad faith because of his objectification of our young poet. He is in bad faith because he is objectifying himself as well. Sexual desire to another person and the pursuit to its realization is a delicate relational matter. Our famous writer does not seem to have a choice here either. It is as if he is obliged to take a course of action that has been set when he asked this woman on a date, according to some social contract or a metaphysics of dates. When he does not listen to what her words imply or to her body language, he is not listening to himself and his wants either. “We know what happens next” – that phrase shows us that even holding a frozen hand of a woman who is not actually consciously experiencing a desire to be touched seems to be part of this supposed normal trajectory of dates. Our famous man is letting himself become a cliché. He is not for a moment letting himself react and interact with the contingencies of the situation. This is not his first date either. He is just going through the motions. For him, this pattern of distraction from his own desire and from women’s desires is normal and habitual and does not raise any questions. But I see a riddle here. I wonder, how did this man become so alienated from the intricacies of his own sexuality? One might think the answer to this strange relational situation is in our gendered social norms and expectations. That is probably part of the truth. It is what we can call its objective aspect – namely, the extent to which people’s behaviours merely exhibit the norms of their time and place. If our young poet somehow lived long enough to witness #METOO come to being, she might think, “Ah right. So I was a victim of this man, who had a position of power over me in the literary world.” And this man might look back (as so many of them do today) and say, “Well, those were the norms at the time; I wasn’t thinking beyond them, who did?” We tend to accuse a man like that of shedding responsibility for his actions too easily. And yet we don’t accuse the ageing poet that she is taking on a victim role too easily. I certainly do not want to accuse our young poet of anything, especially since her patterns of bad faith do not qualify as intentional actions. I may not have positive feelings about this older writer and his generation, but I am not so quick to accuse him either. I urge the reader to remove moral judgement from this situation and set the whole matter of accusations aside. It is very difficult for us to conceive of a responsibility that is divorced from blame, and Sartre’s notion of responsibility is certainly not helpful here since it is tied to choice.42 Although the scope of this chapter does not allow me to spell out carefully such a notion, it is not unheard of in the philosophical literature, even outside the philosophy of psychoanalysis.43 To say it all too briefly, what I will want to say is that our young poet is implicated in this situation in a person-level manner. Namely, she can

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  197 become self-aware of some emotions and/or desires of hers that causally contribute to the occurrence of this situation. Let us imagine a situation where our young poet, an otherwise assertive and confident young woman, comes back home after that date and feels quite awful about it. She reflects on it with a friend: “You know what, this is not the first time I sat there frozen, unable to just say or do something to change the dynamic with a man. What a weird feeling that was, to be alienated from my own hand like that. But I could not bring myself to move my hand; I just could not help it. I don’t get it. Why couldn’t I just say this was too quick for me? This freezing happened to me before, yes, but that’s not helping me understand it, is it?” Her friend, at this point, can suggest psychoanalysis. Our poet’s behaviour during that date is a symptom – she complains about it, and she seeks self-understanding. Instances of bad faith, if they are seen for what they are, and if they are troubling for a person who seeks to explain their origins, can be understood as symptoms within the framework of psychoanalysis. And inasmuch as bad faith requires explanation, psychoanalysis takes recourse to the Freudian unconscious. I shall offer such an explanation in the next section, through which I shall also propose a new notion of the Freudian unconscious. 8.3 A New Notion of the Freudian Unconscious as Bad Faith Combined with Primary Processes Our young poet is not the only woman to have formed a behavioural pattern of alienation from her own body. I will not suggest, however, an explanation that fits all such women. According to my understanding of the psychoanalytic point of view, explanations are as singular as the people they explain. There may be similarities and overlaps among people who exhibit a similar pattern, but the more one enquires into an explanation of this sort, the more its specificity is revealed. The explanation I am about to give, then, is as imaginative as Sartre’s description of this young woman. It is not a real explanation of a real person, but it has the form of what such an explanation would be. My suggested explanation for the poet’s symptom comprises a demonstration of what would count as a psychoanalytic explanation while using a minimal notion of the unconscious that differs from the notions that are the target of Sartre’s critique and that further takes recourse to Sartre’s notion of bad faith. My goal, then, in offering this explanation, is to propose a new notion of the Freudian unconscious. In this section, I shall offer a simplified version of the psychoanalytic explanation for our poet’s frozen hand on this date. This simplified explanation of what happens on this date takes recourse to another scenario, a memory, which our poet reveals during her psychoanalysis. I shall explain what it means for such a memory to be unconscious, and how it can cause

198  Talia Morag behaviour. In the next and final section of this chapter, I will show how this proposed notion of the unconscious enables a far more complex version of a psychoanalytic explanation, where the causal role of this scenario of origin, as we can call it, becomes a lot less prominent. This is a scene of sexual child abuse by a close family friend, the poet’s so-called uncle. She tells her analyst how she admired this family friend, and he often made her feel important, listening to her whereas other adults ignored her. He gave big tight hugs and wet kisses on her cheeks, which she visibly disliked, but her parents never stopped it nor signalled their disapproval. She complied and was gradually able to accept those wet kisses as if they are meaningless. She wiped off the wetness like one would wipe off water that spilled on the table. Already as a young child, our poet reports, she experienced moments of bad faith where she ignored her own body through its objectification – that is, through prioritizing its physical aspect while neglecting its implication in her subjective experience. She was thereby able to disregard her feelings of disgust. When she was about 10, so she says in recollection, this “uncle” occasionally touched her inappropriately. He did it quickly, without acknowledging it, when everyone was around, but when nobody could see and when he could have plausible deniability. She recalls that her emotions were mixed. She felt complimented and humiliated at the same time. She liked being desired like a woman, but the secrecy and publicity of this touch, the way she was entirely ignored and yet exposed in this weakness, was degrading. She felt ashamed and afraid to get caught not resisting but also could not resist, as she was already complicit, already a part of this activity. She felt pleasure and sexual excitement from his touching, but him being so old, like a parent, his bigness and hairiness and his deep smoker’s voice and smell were disgusting to her. She felt helpless and stuck in her ambivalence. In the earliest years of his career as a psychoanalyst, Freud thought of such scenarios remembered in analysis as scenes of seduction, childhood sexual traumas, which were repressed due to their incompatibility with the love and trust toward the perpetrator. The sexual trauma was said to come in two parts. First was the original experience of the event itself, and second was the repression of its memory later in life, when the sexual significance of the event could be comprehended. But then Freud came to doubt the reality of the original event and claimed instead that these scenes may have happened, or may have been sheer fantasy, or may be a mixture of truth and falsity, blended with fantasy. Freud’s doubt came hand in hand with his discovery of infantile sexuality.44 And so it could be that what is incompatible and conflictual about such scenes, whether memories or fantasies, has to do with the forbidden nature of the child’s desire regarding those scenes – whether that desire was actually present at the time of the

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  199 scene or retroactively added on to it in a later memory.45 Whether a memory or a fantasy or a mixture of both – this scenario has a “psychological reality” in our poet’s mind, and it is causing her distress.46 Let us call this scene the scene of origin while recalling that origins can be myths, or at least partly mythological.47 The simplified version of a psychoanalytic explanation supposes that our poet remembers this scenario during the analysis and that beforehand it was unconscious, in a sense yet to be explained. How could she forget about these scenarios? At some point in this young poet’s life – during one of the childhood scenes as they occurred, or perhaps at a moment later in life when she remembered the scenes, a recollection that may have already been blended with fantasy – our poet experiences that scenario as conflictual. It need not be the case that she explicitly thinks to herself that these scenes conflict with her self-image or with her love for her parents who did not protect her and so forth. Our poet may just emotionally react to the scene or the memory with an aversion, which is in turn expressed by avoidance of the emotions and/or sexual desires that scene arouses. But how can one avoid an emotion that is already occurring? Without committing to any specific theory of emotions, it is uncontroversial to say that what we normally call an emotional episode is characterized by at least some of the following: an embodied feeling, facial expressions, a salience of certain people and things in the environment, an urge to act or at least an embodied action readiness and passing thoughts and images. Interestingly, all these experiential components of an emotional episode may also occur with sexual desire. Each theory of emotion describes different causal connections amongst some or all these elements and how they unfold in an emotional episode, as well as how we end up naming the episode with an emotion-type word, such as fear or disgust. But it seems possible, and I suggest that it is often possible, to experience some or all of these affective elements, all of which occur passively, without linking them into a self-aware moment of naming one’s emotion or sexual desire.48 Perhaps one cannot deny acknowledging one’s sadness when bursting into tears when someone dies, but most of our emotional reactions are not so extreme or undeniable. One need not connect the dots, as it were. Instead, one can objectify each component of the episode: a speedy heart rate can be dismissed as a sign of fatigue or as the effect of too much coffee, muscle contractions can be ignored as we ignore our back pain or a headache, a salient feature in the situation we are in can be dismissed as a random stare to be replaced by another, a passing thought or an image can easily be ignored as mere “junk” of the brain. Failing to connect the various experiential aspects of an emotional or a sexual experience and treating them as separate and merely physiologically caused occurrences amounts to an objectification since it effectively dismisses the

200  Talia Morag subjective aspect of their genesis. This subjective aspect has nothing to do with choice, which is the subjectivity Sartre emphasizes. Rather, emotions and sexual desires are subjective in the sense that they implicate us as relational and socially interactive people in a normative realm. It is challenging to articulate the kind of responsibility implicated in emotions and sexual desires, and I cannot embark on this challenge here, but our practices of praise and criticism regarding such embodied mental states presuppose some kind of responsibility. The avoidance of an occurrent emotion or a sexual desire has, therefore, the structure of bad faith. We are so accustomed to ignoring such fleeting feelings, saliences, thoughts, and images that some readers might doubt that we even have them on a regular basis. It is very easy, however, to convince oneself that we have such passively occurring “associations,” let us call them, all the time. Just go to a quiet place, relax in your chair, and think of nothing, or rather try to think of nothing – and fail. Associations will be running through your mind uninvited. Resting our minds seems virtually impossible, and so some of us seek guided meditation. Some meditation methods can, to a certain extent, quiet our associations, but only because the guide instructs us to focus on our breathing or on our sensations or on a certain repeated word. Certain kinds of guided meditation, in other words, is also a form of distraction through intentional focus on something other than our associations, which are in turn treated as a nuisance or as mere background noise. The structure of bad faith basically gives us an account of unawareness of emotions or sexual desires as they occur. Bad faith makes sense of our capacity to fail to acknowledge and articulate certain occurrent emotions and desires, even when we cannot but experience their affective aspect. This lack of acknowledgement is not what Freud called “suppression,” where one is aware of one’s emotion as an emotion (rather than as a mere bodily feeling and a fleeting association) and prevents it from being expressed due to self-criticism or fear of social criticism.49 Occurrent emotions or sexual desires that we name “unconscious” remain inarticulate. And yet they are somehow expressed, manifested. Ironically, the structure of bad faith Sartre proposes as an alternative to the Freudian unconscious, which he abhors and criticizes, can be used to explicate one of the main mysteries about the unconscious. The simplified psychoanalytic explanation, which posits that this memory has been repressed at some point, now reads as a moment where our poet remembers this scenario of origin but manages to be in bad faith and ignore her emotions regarding this scenario or rather the components of those emotions. How does she manage to be in bad faith about a memory at that moment for the first time? Bad faith is a pattern, how can we talk about a first instance of bad faith about a specific emotional reaction? In

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  201 what follows, I assume that somehow this is possible and show the consequences of this supposed initiation. I will return to this question in the next section. I am thus assuming a first moment of bad faith regarding the emotion aroused by the memory of the scenario of origin, whereby our poet ignores her feelings through their objectification and shift of attention. And this moment of bad faith initiates a pattern of distraction or of inattention from the components of this emotional episode. Say for example, in that first moment of repression, our poet ignores certain saliences, such as an image of the uncle himself. That first moment then starts a pattern of ignoring images of the uncle that pop into her mind. Now the image of the uncle – whether in memory or in perception – is a likely trigger of the emotionally laden scenario of origin. Initiating a pattern of ignoring such a salience, then, amounts to initiating a pattern of inattention to triggers for the arousal of this memory/fantasy. She can avoid her uncle by not being at home when he comes or by avoiding events where his attendance is expected. On this account, she is not intentionally avoiding the uncle under the description “avoiding the uncle.” She is enacting a habit of bad faith, still expressing, as it were, her aversion to the emotion/desire regarding the scenario of origin, or rather to an aspect of that affective experience – namely, a certain salience it involves. Another straightforward trigger could be the mention of her uncle’s name, from which she can deflect the conversation. Avoiding straightforward triggers keeps the emotion from being aroused at all. Less straightforward triggers might also cause a fresh moment of bad faith about an aroused emotion/desire related to the scene of origin, such as other family friends who remind her of her uncle through a similarity association, or events with such other family friends. There is no need to construct intentional avoidance strategies. The poet is just in bad faith regarding the components of the emotional episode about which she is conflicted and then further inattents to other saliences and thoughts that are associated with these elements. Once our poet habitually inattends to such non-straightforward triggers, the memory of the scenario of origin and its emotional aspect is even less likely to become enlivened. I suggest through this example how being unconscious of occurrent feelings through bad faith can turn into being unconscious of dispositional emotions and the scenarios from which they originate. At first, we ignore a feeling as it occurs, then we ignore what causes it, and then we ignore anything that could remind us of what causes this feeling. This “reminding” relation consists in an associative connection (e.g. part-whole relations, similarities) between certain people and things and other people and things or situations that would arouse the feeling about which we are in bad faith.

202  Talia Morag The associations that connect both directly and indirectly to the scenario of origin create a bundle of associatively connected scenarios which our young poet avoids. This bundling comprises an associative primary process, that is a “condensation” of associations, and it is characterized by a certain affect that remains latent. In other words, a specific pattern of inattention to certain emotionally and/or sexually laden scenarios turns into a bundle of associative patterns of inattention that effectively prevent these affective scenes from being thought about. As Freud says about his patients: Forgetting impressions, scenes or experiences nearly always reduces itself to shutting them off. When the patient talks about these “forgotten” things he seldom fails to add: “As a matter of fact I’ve always known it; only I’ve never thought of it.”50 Bad faith together with associative processes account for the most mysterious and controversial aspect of the Freudian unconscious – the unawareness of certain occurrent and dispositional emotions. There is no need to conceive of those as closed in a secret chambre in the mind guarded by a censor. Indeed, no censorship is required on this account to keep this affectively laden memory at bay. And as I shall now explain, no censorship is required to disguise the emotion and/or desire when they are aroused at a later date in order to prevent their conflictual acknowledgement. This new conception of the Freudian unconscious as associative habits of inattention or as associative patterns of bad faith can, as I shall now demonstrate, do the explanatory work for which the Freudian unconscious has been posited. Let us revisit our young poet on her date. The situation includes an older and admired man, a desire to be taken seriously by him, his behaviour that can be seen as both kind and friendly and as sexually interested, and sexual advances for which she is not ready. These behaviours and this man are similar to aspects of the scenario of origin. And since this is a new person in her life, our poet has no existing pattern of inattention to these features of the current situation, which thereby connect through similarity associations to the old memory. The condensation of these similarity associations arouses the memory and enliven its affect – whether it is an accurate memory or a worked and re-worked memory or even a pure fantasy. Whatever the source of this scenario, our young lady has long-sustained habits of avoiding it and the affect it arouses. Our poet’s aversion to this scenario is as great as it always has been, and it comes together with an immediate inattention to it in bad faith. That is, she is not attending to her embodied feelings or to whatever images or words that fleetingly pass her mind – relating to her uncle, or her parents,

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  203 or other parts of that scenario of origin. And yet the condensation of similarity associations has the effect of seeing the current situation in terms of the old one. The lack of acknowledgement and the deniability of her uncle’s advances structures her bad faith about the writer’s advances in the current situation. The old memory of being complimented and taken seriously but also humiliated at the same time puts our poet in the position of feeling desired entirely as an object and entirely as a subject at the same time. The enlivened affect, caused by the condensation, is expressed through the compliant freezing of her hand, a behaviour that is similar to her compliance and her pretence as if nothing is actually happening in the scenario of origin. This expression of affect, coming from the enlivenment of an unconscious memory of fantasy and experienced as caused by people and things in the here and now, comprises the primary process Freud calls “displacement.” The poet’s frozen hand is then explained by the processes of condensation and displacement, as well as by her unconscious memory, which is in turn explained in terms of bad faith. To conclude this section, I want to emphasize how this notion of the Freudian unconscious – bad faith and primary processes – does not posit any homuncular censorship. The associations that connect the here-andnow situation and the scenario of origin are similarity associations. If one makes explicit the respects in which these similarities hold one can see they are relatively few. Like a metaphor or a symbol, then, the resemblances between the uncle and the writer, between the compliant and silent child to the freezing hand of the adult, between a child who enjoys attention and a poet that craves the appreciation of a famous writer – these are resemblances between unlike things. It is the imaginative nature of associations and not some additional “disguise” on top of that imaginative nature that makes the current puzzling behaviour – namely, the freezing of the hand – seem “symbolic” of the scenario of origin.51 There is no need to posit any additional disguise on top of the imaginative nature of associations. This symbolism, on this account, is not the result of an intentional process performed by some separate censorship function or homunculus. On this account, condensation and displacement are not processes that are somehow mobilized for the sake of censorship or for the sake of anything. Associations, on the account here proposed, have no purpose but simply occur as they do all the time anyway. Condensation arouses an unconscious emotion not because it was somehow permitted to do so, but only because the relevant here-and-now trigger is a new one, for which no pattern of inattention is currently in place. I have not explicated Sartre’s criticism against the censorship involved in the topographical model of the Freudian unconscious. Yet, my alternative account, comprised partly from Sartre’s own account of bad faith, provides a new Freudian notion of the unconscious that evades the notion of

204  Talia Morag censorship altogether, and thereby the target of Sartre’s criticism. That alone should speak for the promise of this new notion. In the next section, I will show how this notion can be used to complexify the psychoanalytic explanation in a way that does not rely on just one unconscious emotionally and/or sexually laden scenario. And I will do so first by explicating how it is possible to repress through bad faith a new emotional reaction to the scenario of origin, even if bad faith is supposed to be a pattern, and thereby rely on past experiences of bad faith. 8.4 Psychoanalysis as the Gradual Breaking of Patterns of Bad Faith I said earlier that a pattern of bad faith regarding the scenario of origin is initiated at some point and that this moment of repression occurs through bad faith – namely, through the objectification of the components of the relevant emotion so that they can be ignored. But if bad faith is in its nature a pattern, how can we talk about initiating it? We cannot. But now when we see how a pattern of bad faith about an emotion that is associated with a scenario of origin turns into a moment of bad faith about another, chronologically later and associatively connected scenario – the date (or rather dates) – we can understand this moment of initiation differently. We can now say, that just like the scenario of origin is both imaginatively and causally connected with the scenario of the date, the scenario of origin is imaginatively and causally connected to a previous scenario. That is, it is already a part of a different pattern of bad faith. Perhaps it is even the scenario of the wet kisses described earlier. There, too, we have a compliant child who ignores her disgust while her parents implicitly encourage her to suffer in silence. And what would the scenario before that one be? There would be so many candidates for previous imaginatively and causally connected scenarios that would account for this bad faith about the wet kisses. In that culture and in those days of our poet’s childhood, parents discouraged their kids from expressing and indeed from having all kinds of emotions. Typical examples include telling boys not to cry and be brave and telling girls not to be angry and be sweet and accepting. The message seems to be ambiguous and to include not only the decree to control the expression of one’s emotion but also the reproach for having this emotion at all. Today, parents, such as myself, are encouraged at their kids’ daycare to validate their child’s emotions while also controlling the public expression of emotions. We tell our children “use your words,” to educate them to stop hitting, while still being able to articulate their anger. In many ways, we are raising children who are more self-aware and less prone to repression in comparison to children like our poet. But I still have to tell my son

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  205 to put sunscreen on even if he is disgusted by it, or to put his seatbelt on even if he feels trapped in it, and that he better get used to it. Sometimes, I also cannot resist repeating the phrase, “You get what you get and you don’t get upset.” But the term “get upset” is ambiguous. It could sound as if I tell him not to express his upset inappropriately, or it could sound as if I am telling him not to be upset at all. Effectively, we teach our children to ignore affects and bodily inconveniences in a pretty pervasive manner. Although we can trace the poet’s behaviour on her date to a scenario of origin, as we called it, it seems virtually impossible to continue tracing the bad faith on that scenario to an exact chain of previous scenarios. And it seems rather artificial to talk about the first link in that chain. The capacity to repress emotions is something that Freud and subsequent psychoanalysts suppose we have through witnessing countless sessions where patients remove repression in psychoanalysis. But there is no theory of how this capacity comes to be. A similar problem arises for anyone who tries to explain how we come to have a rationally connected network of beliefs. Wittgenstein here says, “Light dawns gradually over the whole.”52 When it comes to an imaginatively connected network of emotions, we can say something very similar. Although a temporally ordered causal chain of scenarios can be to some extent traced to a scene that seems more important and chronologically earlier than others, we cannot trace such a temporally indexed chain of repression to earlier and earlier occasions. To mirror Wittgenstein’s image of a sunrise, we may imagine instead a sunset over a city, and how shadows emerge gradually over the whole. The combination of imaginative associations with bad faith effectively regards the dating pattern as emerging from previous patterns of bad faith. What we called the scene of origin is not exactly a scene of origin then. Nor is the dating pattern of our poet disconnected from other, later patterns of bad faith. For example, when our poet goes to a job interview or to the doctor or to renew her passport, for example, and the interviewer asks inappropriate questions, she may just ignore them as if they were never asked or she may comply and answer them while ignoring how uncomfortable they make her feel. Such scenarios include an authority figure, probably significantly older than her, and unwelcome and inappropriate questions that touch upon private and personal matters. These patterns bear similarities to one another and to the dating pattern. Most philosophical accounts of the Freudian-psychoanalytic explanation end up explaining a symptom in terms of one scenario of origin.53 Other associatively related patterns, which emerge in analysis, would be considered as also ultimately caused by the scene of origin. But the account I propose differs from those accounts given that the main causal mechanism involved, the one due to which a new situation becomes an occasion for fresh bad faith about an affective episode, consists in imaginative associations. The

206  Talia Morag various patterns are thus not only associatively but also causally related to one another. And it is thus a lot less clear that the scenario of origin has more causal weight than other, later, associated scenarios. It could very well be, for example, that during her date, the main scenario that is operative in our poet’s mind is not the one with her uncle, but the job interview she had a week beforehand. In fact, on this account, it is possible that our poet never actually forgot the uncle-event, but instead forgot many other associated events. She might even see the connection between her behaviour at the date and the uncle scenarios before she begins psychoanalysis, but somehow she is unable to stop this freezing pattern of behaviour since quite a few other emotionally laden memories are associatively bundled with it and need to be acknowledged and articulated. The account I propose then, may alleviate some concerns about the exaggerated importance of one scenario.54 The poet’s problem, so to speak, is not just one unresolved or inarticulate emotion, but her entire “emotional baggage,” as we call it. One would still want to enquire further into primary processes and the kind of unconsciousness they presuppose. In particular, one might worry that the explanation I propose includes an empirical hypothesis out of nowhere, to do with the enlivenment of unconscious emotions and the fleeting images and feelings they may involve. If they are ignored, according to this account, how can I say they even exist? I defend this notion elsewhere,55 but here I will just suggest, that one could, in principle, slow down and attend to such fleeting words and images, as one does when one “free associates” in psychoanalysis. If such imaginatively related images and words frequently occur during an emotional reaction in psychoanalysis, it is reasonable to suppose they occur outside of the psychoanalytic situation as well. Psychoanalysis is precisely the occasion to pay attention to the associations one normally ignores in bad faith in real time, while an affective episode is taking place. Noticing and verbalizing one’s feelings, acknowledging them as meaningful, rather than mere background noise, comes hand in hand with taking some responsibility for them. Our young poet can come to see that although she never intended to be in this situation nor chose to freeze her hand, her emotions and/or desires were expressed in it, and she can now express them differently by attending to herself in new ways. It is rather striking that Sartre mentions nothing of our young poet’s emotions in the date scene. Yet this blind spot of the text supports the claim that our poet is not aware of her emotions. If our young poet were able to say to herself, “I feel disgusted,” or “I have sexual feelings for this man,” or “Somehow I am both attracted and disgusted by him” – then she would be able to acknowledge her hand in his and be well in her own body, so to speak. Sartre is right: Our poet “does not quite know what she wants.”56

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  207 Her desire to be desired in this paradoxical way is a way of avoiding her own embodied desire. She is disconnected from her sexual desire and related emotions, distracted from them, not aware of them, fails to acknowledge their existence. Sartre’s example effectively includes through this peculiar absence of emotions and desires in his description of the poet exactly what he wishes to nihilate from his psychological theorizing – unconscious desires and emotions. Various saliences or thoughts or images may be fleeting in our poet’s mind: the writer’s unappealing features (a component of her disgust experience), fantasies of suddenly getting up to go to the toilet (running away in fear), actively reciprocating the touch of his hand (in desire), or words that pop-up like “OMG…”. But such associations occur passively and not intentionally, and our poet dismisses them as she dismisses most associations that intrude on her intentional elevated speech. As our poet goes through psychoanalysis, gradually breaking her patterns of bad faith, she will have the opportunity to connect with her own positive sexual desires. It could very well be that those desires and maybe some other emotions too were never forgotten in the proper sense of the word because they were never acknowledged in the first place. Breaking the patterns of bad faith can come hand in hand with becoming capable to connect the dots, as it were, to recognize the various affective features that come over her as expressing herself, as a subject, as a person who partakes in the normative realm of relationships. In fact, the very moment of deciding to go to psychoanalysis comprises the first step for taking some responsibility over her symptom. Our poet could have blamed this writer, who surely felt her frozen hand but did not let it go; she could have blamed the times and gender stereotypes; she could have regarded her behaviour as a form of compulsion or paralysis caused by her habits to comply to authority figures and go to cognitive behavioural therapy to fix her implicit false beliefs about what she owes to authority figures and learn strategies to force herself to resist such situations in the future. Bad faith is always an option. When our poet complains that she does not understand herself and how she could not move her hand, when she feels a sense of a riddle about herself, she is already effectively treating her symptom as meaningful, as a person-level phenomenon. Whatever notion of responsibility that is implicit in this overcoming of bad faith, it is far removed from Sartre’s since our poet made no choices to get into such a situation nor will she get out of her pattern by forcing a new choice. Nonetheless, the connection between Sartre’s account of bad faith and Freudian psychoanalysis runs deep. Not only is bad faith an important component of this new conception of Freudian unconscious but also the way into psychoanalytic treatment, as well as its progression characterized by a gradual breaking of patterns of bad faith.

208  Talia Morag Notes 1 For example, Popper (1962), Grünbaum (1984), Crews (1995), Cioffi (1998). 2 Sartre (1943: 50–5). 3 The phenomenon known as “Freud Bashing” is still common practice, see a recent version in Horgan (2019). 4 The unconscious was then further used to explain a whole range of puzzling mental phenomena, such as dreams, slips of the tongue, and jokes. 5 This general form of explanation can be found throughout Freud’s writings, from the very beginning of his published work, in Breuer J. & S. Freud, 1983. “On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: Preliminary Communication.” In Studies on Hysteria, S.E. 2, 3–17. 6 See, for example, S. Freud, 1900. The Interpretation of Dreams, S.E. 5, Chapter 7. 7 Morag (2016). 8 The term “symbolic” appears already in the “Preliminary Communication.” This use of the term “symbolic” in psychoanalysis is what Laplanche and Pontalis call the broad sense or the term, where a behaviour “has at least two meanings, one of which is standing for the other, both concealing and expressing it” (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973: 442). 9 Freud (1915), “The Unconscious.” S.E. 14, 161–215, 176–8. For a non-Freudian contemporary discussion of the issue, see Whiting (2020: Chapter 1). 10 See, for example, Freud (1915), “The Unconscious,” section II. 11 Freud introduces these homunculi progressively throughout his work. The mature model appears in Freud. 1923. The Ego and the Id. S.E. 19, 1–59. 12 This amalgamate also appears in Freud, “On Dreams.” S.E. 5, 629–714. 13 Neu (1988). 14 Sartre (1943: 49). 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 The first example is from the case known as “The Rat Man in Freud,” Notes Upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis [1909], S.E. 10, 155–249. The second is the Case of Lucy R. in Freud, Studies on Hysteria [1893–95], S.E., 2, 106–24. 18 I note in passing that analytic philosophers use Sartre’s insight regarding the resemblance between self-deception and the Freudian unconscious to provide an account of self-deception. Sometimes Sartre’s influence is acknowledged, for example, Pears (1985), Johnston (1995), and often it is not, such as in Davidson (1982), which basically gave rise to what Dunn calls “neo-Freudian” accounts of self-deception (1994). I elsewhere discuss such accounts and their relation to Sartre’s critique of the Freudian notion of unconscious censorship. In this paper, I am engaged in the opposite project, as it were – namely, to provide an account of the Freudian unconscious in terms of self-deception. 19 Sartre (1943: 57). 20 Sartre says, “These two aspects of human reality are and ought to be capable of a valid coordination” (1943: 56). 21 For a detailed account of Sartre’s bad faith in terms of avoidance of responsibility, see Moran (2001: 3.2). 22 For example, Moi (1994: 127–33); Deutscher (2003: 32–38). 23 Sartre (1943: 55–7). 24 In fact, any scene described in minimal terms of bodily movements lends itself to different interpretations regarding the state of mind of the participants in the scene. Consider Hacking’s example of two people shaking hands. Are they making a business deal? Or have they just met for the first time? (1995: 247).

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  209 5 Sartre (1943: 55). 2 26 Ibid. 27 Ibid. 28 See Kent Bach on self-deception and his discussion on evasion (1981: 368). 29 Sartre (1943: 55). 30 Ibid. 31 Sartre (1943: 55–6) 32 Kozlowska et al. (2015); recall, for example, Rose McGowan who reported on Good Morning America dissociation during the alleged rape by Harvey Weinstein: “Literally when he grabbed me I was thinking ‘Oh I hope I still have lipstick on for the camera’” (2018). 33 Sartre (1943: 57). 34 Sartre (1943: 68). 35 Anscome (1963); Bach (1981: 368). 36 (Morag 2016). 37 Sartre (1943: 68). 38 Sartre (1943: 54) My emphasis. 39 Sartre (1943: 55). 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 See Reyonlds and Renaudie’s discussion in (2022: Section 4.1). 43 For example, taking responsibility for our implicit biases despite our inherent incapacity to intentionally control them. Brownstein (2018: Chapter 5). 44 For a detailed survey of Freud’s fluctuating views regarding the seduction theory and the reality of the scene of origin see Schimek (1987); Laplanche and Pontalis (2006 [1973]: 403–403). 45 See Freud’s illustrating example of two girls of the same household, one is the daughter of the landlord and the other of the caretaker, who engaged in “naughty” sexual games. The first may end up with neurosis, as she was brought up on ideals of “feminine purity and abstinence,” and the second, growing up in much more sexually liberated environment, can end up being an actress leading a pathology-free life. Freud, Introductory Lectures, S.E. 16, Lecture 22, 352–4. 46 And psychological reality is just as significant as actual reality, according to Freud. See, for example, Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis, S.E. 23, Lecture 16, 363. 47 At times, Freud likened these scenarios to myths of origin of nations, which have some historical truth in them but have been worked and re-worked over time. See S.E. 10, 206–8, fn1. 48 This failure to view feelings as falling under the relevant emotional concept is one way in which Deonna and Teroni understand unconscious emotions in (2012, 16–17). 49 This is the usual sense of suppression in Freud’s writings, see Laplanche & Pontalis (2006 [1973]: 437–8). 50 Freud, [1914]. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through” S.E. 12, 148. 51 Freud never states that associations are imaginative. In fact, sometimes, regrettably, he calls them “logical,” for example, in Breuer and Freud, “The Psychotherapy of Hysteria.” In Studies on Hysteria, S.E., 2, 288–90. One only needs to go over the case-studies, the dreams, and the jokes that Freud analyses in terms of associations throughout his writings to convince oneself that they are

210  Talia Morag not what we normally call logical, but rather similarities, part-whole relations, and inversions. One could then turn Hume’s insights for support here, who claims that associations are a product of the imagination (Book 1, Section 8.4). Hume and Freud make use of different associations, apart from the association similarity, but there are many similarities to be found between Hume’s and Freud’s associationisms. I mention some of them in Morag (2016). 52 Wittgenstein (1969: 141). 53 For example Rorty (1980); De Sousa (1980); Lear (2004). 54 For further detail see Morag (2016). 55 Morag (2016, 2022). 56 Sartre (1943: 55).

References Anscombe, G. E. M. Intention, 2nd edn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (1985 [1963]). Bach, K. An analysis of self-deception. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 41(3), (1981). 351–371. Brownstein, M. The Implicit Mind: Cognitive Architecture, the Self, and Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2018). Cioffi, F. Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience. Chicago: Open Court. (1998). Crews, F. (ed.). The Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy in Dispute. London: Granta Books. (1997 [1995]). Davidson, D. Paradoxes of Irrationality. In R. Wollheim and J. Hopkins (eds.), Philosophical Essays on Freud, pp. 289–305. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1982). De Sousa, R. The Rationality of Emotions. In A. Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions, pp. 127–151. Berkeley: University of California Press. (1980). Deutscher, M. Genre and Void: Looking Back at Sartre and Beauvoir. Aldershot: Ashgate. (2003). Dunn, R. Motivated irrationality and divided attention. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 73(3), (1995). 325–336. Freud, S. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Trans. J. Strachey. London: The Hogarth Press. (1995 [1966]). Grünbaum, A. The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique. Berkeley: University of California Press. (1984). Hacking, I. Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (1998 [1995]). Horgan, J. Why we’re still fighting over Freud. Scientific American, (2019), May 13. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/why-were-still-fightingover-freud/ Hume, D. A Treatise of Human Nature. London: Everyman’s Library Press. (1911 [1738]). Johnston, M. Self-Deception and Nature of Mind. In C. Macdonald and G. Macdonald (eds.), Philosophy of Psychology: Debates on Psychological Explanation, Volume One, pp. 432–460. Oxford, UK & Cambridge USA: Blackwell. (1995). Kozlowska, Kasia et al. Fear and the defense cascade clinical implications and management. Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 23(4), (2015). 263–287.

Sartre’s Bad Faith, the Freudian Unconscious, and a Case of #METOO  211 Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. London: Karnac. (2006 [1973]). Lear, J. Avowal and unfreedom. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXIX(2), (2004). 448–454. Moi, T. Simone de Beauvoir: The Making of an Intellectual Woman. Oxford: Blackwell. (1994). Morag, T. Emotion, Imagination, and the Limits of Reason. London: Routledge. (2016). ———. Liberal Naturalism and the Foundations of Psychoanalysis. In M. De Caro & D. Macarthur (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism, pp. 383–410. London: Routledge. (2022). Moran, R. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (2001). Neu, J. Divided Minds: Sartre’s ‘Bad Faith’ Critique of Freud. In On Loving Our Enemies: Essays in Moral Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2012 [1988]) Pears, D. Motivated Irrationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (1985). Popper, C. Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge. New York: Basic Books. (1962). Reyonlds, J. & Renauldie, P.-J. Jean-Paul Sartre. Stanford Encyclopeda, https:// plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/. (2022). Rorty, A. Explaining Emotions. In A. Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions, pp. 103– 126. Berkeley: University of California Press. (1980). Sartre, J. P. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. H. E. Barnes. New York: Philosophical Library. (1956 [1943]). Schimek, J. G. Fact and fantasy in the seduction theory: A historical review. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 35(4), (1987). 795–1036. Whiting, D. Emotions as Original Existences: A Theory of Emotion, Motivation and the Self. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. (2020). Wittgenstein, L. On Certainty. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. (1969). Televisionography

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9 Anguish and Anxiety Anthony Hatzimoysis

1 There is a set of fundamental affective states, attendance to which has been thought to reveal important truths about our existence, and, arguably, none of those states is as revealing about the human predicament as what is denoted by the term “anguish.”1 The concept of anguish has become something of a hallmark for the existentialist tradition, often taken to signify some sort of a life-changing experience, whose unique character forces upon the subject the acknowledgement of the undeniability of a certain aspect of the human way of being. My concern in this chapter is with understanding whether and how the Sartrean view of affectivity may illuminate the phenomenon of anguish. Since anguish makes a strong appearance in the very first chapter of Part 1 of Being and Nothingness, it might well be expected that the related discussion may throw considerable light on the ontological grounds of a range of phenomena which occupy current psychology and psychopathology. However, those phenomena are not usually addressed in relation to anguish; instead, the term employed for characterizing such phenomena – both within and outside the existentialist tradition – is that of anxiety.2 It might be thought that this is a mere terminological accident; at most, it might indicate a difference in use due to the contingencies of academic conventions, rather than some substantial distinction that is allegedly highlighted by the employment of the two terms. In one sense, an appeal to the contingencies that favour the choice of one term over the other is not out of place since it is precisely such a contingency – how the German word Angst found its way in the French philosophical vocabulary in the early 1940s – that partly explains the use of angoisse, instead of anxiete, in Sartre’s work. In another sense, though, the issue is hard to resolve; since anguish and anxiety carry different connotations, it is worth asking what might ground one’s preference for one term over the other. We need, I think, to explore how exactly the concept of anguish relates to the concept of anxiety. DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-10

Anguish and Anxiety  213 In the following section, I present some considerations from the semantic history of the two terms, which show why their difference is not as sharp as one might expect. This leads me to adopt, for the sake of the argument, a practical distinction, referring to what Sartre is talking about as cases of anguish and to what most contemporary researchers explore as cases of anxiety. However, that gives rise to the next issue: How is the Sartrean conception of phenomena of anguish connected, if at all, to what we currently refer to as phenomena of anxiety? It seems obvious that the two types of phenomena are not unrelated – after all, one of the most cited reasons why many psychopathologists invoke Sartrean ideas is how helpful those ideas appear to be in the process of diagnosing certain cases of anxiety. Is anguish the foundational phenomenon exemplified by a variety of anxiety experiences? Or, is it just a sub-type of anxiety, which is the main category, and which may include some rather peculiar affective phenomena, such as the one presented by existentialist thinkers? I shall offer some considerations which bear upon the interpretation of this dilemma. My analysis will indicate that the Sartrean approach pushes us in the direction of holding on to two affective species; one is anguish (including central cases of anxiety), and the other is fear. Thus, if we endorse a Sartrean perspective, the relevant phenomena seem to fall into two main categories, one concerning a specific way of standing towards oneself (in anguish or in anxiety), the other concerning objects or events which pose a threat to oneself (in fear). Nevertheless, my remarks do not present a neat resolution of the aforementioned issues; rather, they constitute mere fragments of a dialectic that might hopefully prove illuminating in our search for the exact relation between anguish and anxiety. 2 How is “anguish” related to “anxiety”? Answering that question should help us with our inquiry into the reasons why Sartre has chosen the former term over the latter, or, to be accurate, why he opted for angoisse over anxiete, which as a matter of fact is the French word through which “anxiety” and its cognates enter the European vernacular.3 An obvious move in answering that question is to do a bit of lexicographical research into the etymology of the two terms. However, the results of such research do not furnish us with a neat taxonomy of senses. Take for instance a classic text on passions, such as De natura hominis (written by Nemessius of Syria in the fourth century AD), whose medieval editions contributed to the introduction of the relevant terminology into modern philosophy. When the treatise is translated for the first time into Latin in the twelfth century, the Greek term agonia, which in Nemessius denotes “a helpless fear of failure,” is rendered as fatigatio by Alfonso of Salerno and

214  Anthony Hatzimoysis simply as agonia by Burgundio of Pisa, while the term anxietas is used by Burgundio for achthos, which in Nemessius denotes the type of afflictio or tristia that “renders one speechless.”4 Finally, the term angustia, which is at the root of contemporary anguish, and thus might be expected to have more literary or spiritual overtones, is instead encountered in Pantegni, the medical-oriented classification of emotional phenomena based on their physiological antecedents, behavioural consequences, and health-related implications – hence the emphasis on the bodily profile of angustia, that includes a constriction of the throat or the chest that inhibits, or sets specific obstacles, to agency.5 Both angustia and anxietas carry some of the meanings conveyed by the Greek verbs anchw (to press tightly, to pull the knot, to suffocate), and agoniw (to engage in battle, to compete, to struggle). Perhaps what is shared by all those different terms is a pair of features that are commonly taken to characterize phenomena of both anguish and anxiety: a choking sensation and a battle with something. A crucial dimension of the Sartrean angoisse is that it denotes a phenomenon in which, the one I am in battle with, and the one who is pressing the knot, are actually none other than myself. That seems initially to set Sartrean anguish apart from anxiety, as the latter is understood by many contemporary researchers. Nowadays anxiety is commonly interpreted as a response to what is perceived as the non-clearly identified (uncertain, unknown, or uncanny) threat emanating from an external object (be it the funny noises you hear as you walk in the woods, or tomorrow’s encounter with the interview panel). Hence, most contemporary discussions of anxiety see it in correlation to the emotion of fear.6 It would be instructive, therefore, to consider, first, how anxiety is thought to differ from fear. It will be shown that the difference between the two states becomes clearer when we invoke certain Sartrean ideas about how anguish differs from fear. 3 The standard way of drawing the distinction between anxiety and fear is in terms of their temporal index, their epistemic status, and their intentional focus. By differences in their temporal index, I mean that fear has been defined as present-oriented while anxiety is future-oriented. 7 That sounds intuitively correct, but it cannot be literally the case, for the reason that fear is a response to what is conceived of as a future or forthcoming harm. If the harm were present, the corresponding state would be pain and not fear that such pain is in the offing and the exact same point applies to the fear of losing something we hold dear or valuable. Sartre gives us a clue of what that difference might be in his discussion of how one relates to oneself in the future: “[A] situation that provokes fear, in so far as it threatens to change my life

Anguish and Anxiety  215 and my being from outside, provokes anguish to the extent to which I mistrust my own reactions to the situation.”8 Hence, it cannot be the dimension of the future as such, that demarcates anguish from fear but something about the way in which one relates to the future in anguish, which is absent from the case of fear. The same, I think, applies to anxiety, when it is triggered in relation to situations that call for a certain reaction on the part of the agent. One’s doubts about one’s ability, first, to identify the norm that is appropriate to apply in the circumstances, and, secondly, to carry through the task prescribed by that norm, is characteristic of what is labelled as “practical anxiety.”9 Note that, as currently interpreted by several researchers, practical anxiety concerns mainly some sort of information deficit. It is observed, for instance, that individuals anxious about what to do tend to engage in information gathering aimed at helping them work through the uncertainty they face. That brings us to the next demarcation principle between anxiety and fear, concerning the epistemic status of the two experiences. The epistemic difference between the two phenomena concerns fear’s relation to what is known and certain, while anxiety is linked to what is generally unknown and uncertain.10 Granted, many cases of fear – say, out in the street, in the face of an attacking dog, or in your bedroom, in the face of a night burglar – come with overwhelming evidence of your emotional state. There are cases of fear, though, that do not come epistemically packaged –your foreboding about tomorrow’s business meeting, for instance, or your fear of the dark, have a built-in uncertainty about them since you might not be quite sure what exactly you are going through. Cases of anxiety, on the other hand, might come with an acute experience of restlessness or disquietude that leaves you with no doubt as to what you are currently feeling. Perhaps, when theorists talk about the certainty or uncertainty of those states, they refer not to a subject’s awareness of what goes on in his/her mind but to the external target of one’s affective state. That brings us to the notion of intentionality, which seems to help us demarcate fear and anxiety when the former is conceived as an emotion and the latter is treated as a mood. Anxiety can indeed be conceived as a mood,11 yet a closer look at certain psychopathological phenomena indicates that it is far from evident that anxiety is not also – and, in fact, normally – an emotion.12 Anguish, on the other hand, is standardly treated as a mood, not least because of the context from which the term owes its popularity – namely, Heidegger’s discussion of Angst as a Stimmung – indeed as a Grundstimmung, a fundamental mood – in Being and Time.13 Heideggerian Angst was first translated into French as angoisse, and that is probably the main reason why Sartre endorses that particular term in the relevant sections of Being and Nothingness.14 Let us assume, for the sake of the discussion, that anguish is a mood, as opposed to fear – that is, an emotion – and let

216  Anthony Hatzimoysis us further accept that the two types of affective states differ in terms of intentionality. There are, though, two very different ways of invoking intentionality as a demarcation principle. Traditionally, the idea was that moods differ from standard emotions due to their lack of an intentional dimension.15 Recently, the distinction is drawn not in terms of the presence or absence of intentionality but on the particular type of intentional relation that each type of affective state bears to the world.16 Let us look at how those ideas might apply to the case of anguish. 4 Every mood, be it positive, negative, or neutral, appears to have some significance. That significance is double-arrowed: A mood indicates something for the life of the person undergoing the experience, while it points at a value-laden aspect of the surrounding world. That “pointing at” is a kind of intentionality, and its invocation has explanatory value because it helps to render the whole experience intelligible. By correlating the experience with salient aspects of a situation, the intentionality of moods appears to enable our understanding of why the person is in the mood that he is, by showing why it is reasonable for a subject, in his circumstances, to be so affected. The standard way to present the intentionality of a mental state is by citing the object at which it is directed. The main candidate for an intentional object that is attributed to moods is the whole world.17 That proposal appears to do justice to the overwhelming character of many moods, the fact that moods pervade our experience, that they suffuse all aspects of our encounter with reality. Anguish has been presented as a prominent example of a mood directed at the whole world. In anguish, I experience a global suspension of the values that sustain my interaction with other human beings, a suspension resulting from disengagement with the identity I have constructed, which appears now unable to help me navigate the normative domain. That is what I would call a neo-Kantian version of how anguish is implicated in one’s relation to the whole world.18 There is also the existentialist version of the same point that is prevalent in the contemporary analysis of the phenomenon. In anguish, the world in which I exist has sunk into insignificance, and the world which is thus disclosed is one in which entities can be freed only in the character of having no involvement.19 Those are valuable insights into the phenomenology of mood. However, taken literally, the suggestion that the world is the intentional object of our moods is, in my view, problematic for several reasons, one of which applies to anguish specifically, while some of which concern moods in general. To begin with, the claim that a certain mood amounts to the experience of the world as devoid of significance sounds to me more like a description of depression than of anguish. The sense of disengagement with reality, the

Anguish and Anxiety  217 failure to discover something worth pursuing, not because something else makes a higher demand on your attention, but because nothing of your projects commands anymore your attention, is more a characteristic of depressive states and their correlatives than it is of anguish.20 We need at this point to draw some distinctions that will help us understand the relevant phenomena. We may distinguish between an associated feature – such as a symptom, which is a typical aspect of the clinical picture of a more pervasive mood – and a coexisting complication, that is an additional mood, or in some cases, an additional mood disorder, that is also present. In clinical practice, the simultaneous presence of mood disorders goes by the name of “comorbidity”: Anguish and depression present high comorbidity, which is partly explained by their common negative affects, such as seemingly uncaused tension, chronic worry, and irritability.21 There are, though, elements of each of those moods which are not shared by the other: depression is characterized by anhedonia – the total absence of genuine pleasure – whereas an anguished subject can display high energy, even when in a fit of that mood. It is important, therefore, that when it is claimed that anguish is an intentional state directed at the whole world that our conception of the world is articulated in a way that captures what is distinctive of that particular mood. There are, however, some general reasons to be sceptical about the proposal to treat not just anguish but any mood as intentionally directed to the whole world. First, the proposal employs a notion that is not easy to determine. It is not clear whether we are invited to think of the world as a maximally inclusive situation encompassing all others, or perhaps as an object which has in it everything (except for itself), or as the totality of phenomena linked by a complex network of references to each other.22 It can be retorted that the proposal requires nothing more than a loose understanding of the term as employed in ordinary contexts. However, that retort does not really answer our query; it rather shows that the appeal of the proposal trades on the ambiguity of the basic term it employs. Secondly, the proposal makes excessive demands on the representational capacities of ordinary subjects. An affective state that is intentionally correlated to the whole world would entail an ability to form representations that move well beyond the perspectival, partial, and limited access to one’s immediate environment. Thirdly, even if we manage to sort out the aforementioned issues, the suggestion that moods are intentionally directed at the world founders on the problem of distinguishability between kinds of affective states. To be outraged with the whole world is not a mood: It is an intense (in its phenomenal quality) and global (in its intentional content) emotion.23 The preceding discussion indicates some of the limitations of the intentionalist approach to moods. The problems of intentionalism do not imply that we should treat moods as purely internal affairs. A mood, just like any

218  Anthony Hatzimoysis other affective phenomenon, is not detached from the world, neither is it a clog of mental machinery that can be added or subtracted from the rest of one’s psychological make-up; rather, it is how the whole of oneself is living through a particular situation. By “living through” I mean both conceiving of and responding to a situation.24 The notion of a response to a situation is particularly significant for the present discussion since it appears to mark a point of convergence between the Sartrean approach to affectivity as a kind of conduct25 and contemporary approaches to anxiety as a form of behaviour that is set off in the face of an uncertain threat. Is, after all, anxiety the general phenomenon, within which existential anguish might fall? 5 I have been talking about anxiety as if it were a single state. However, there are several phenomena that come under the heading of anxiety, most often defined in their acute form, as types of psychological malfunction. We thus have panic disorder – with or without agoraphobia26 – anxieties triggered over specific items – such as heights, injections, or enclosed spaces27 – obsessive-compulsive disorders – crucially characterized by the recurrence of intrusive thoughts and repetitive forms of conduct28 – and posttraumatic stress disorder, with a distressful, yet persistent re-experiencing of aversive events, followed by the agitated response to seemingly unrelated events.29 Note that those categories present anxiety through its disorders; in fact, it has become increasingly difficult, especially in the psychological literature, to think of anxiety as anything but a disorder. The emphasis on the pathological nature of anxiety is one of the factors that matter to therapeutic interventions; the other factor is the delimitation of each anxious experience around a specific stimulus; by focusing, for instance, on your avoidance of elevators, or on your recurrent cancellations of your dental appointment, the therapists may manage – usually through pharmaceutical or behavioural means – to assuage the particular problem. However, that approach gives rise to some methodological worries; on the one hand, it is not evident that what is treated is anxiety as such, rather than some of its arguably most unpleasant symptoms; on the other hand, it is not clear that the therapists approach the relevant cases as indicative of anxiety, rather than as ordinary cases of fear – fear of lack of mobility, in the case of elevators, or fear of pain, in the case of dental treatment. Let us grant then, that when successful, the relevant therapy cures a particular fear: that does not entail that it illuminates the nature of anxiety unless it is already assumed that anxiety is, in some essential respect, no different than fear. As the cases we have examined indicate, that essential respect is their intentionality: anxiety allegedly concerns a situation, an external object, or

Anguish and Anxiety  219 an event that poses a threat to the agent – exactly like with the emotion of fear. Despite their differences in temporal index and epistemic status, in terms of intentionality, anxiety and fear are structurally identical. If that view were correct, anxiety would have little to do with anguish. If, on the other hand, anguish and anxiety have a similar intentional structure, anxiety cannot be so easily reduced to fear. In my opinion, Sartre’s discussion in Being and Nothingness can help us address this issue, by showing how the experiences denoted by the terms anxiety and anguish, differ from the experience of fear. 6 What is distinctive of anxiety cannot be the external event faced by the subject, but how the subject relates to it; that is what is lost in most contemporary accounts of the relevant phenomena – and what is brought to the front in Sartre’s discussion of anguish. Admittedly, there are several types of anxiety that cannot be reduced to the particular examples offered in Being and Nothingness; however, most types of anxiety share with the Sartrean examples a common intentional structure, to wit that in anxiety – just like in anguish, and in contradistinction to fear – that of which one feels anxious is, in a certain sense, not some external object or event, but oneself. More precisely, anxiety and anguish involve an awareness that how things will turn out is crucially dependent upon oneself. Hence, one’s awareness of a danger of threat is not by itself sufficient to qualify an affective state as a state of anxiety; neither is it sufficient to claim that the danger or the threat is unknown or uncertain – a fear of something unknown or uncertain is still fear – and after all, as a man of wisdom once put it, “The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”30 My suggestion is that if we are to think of anxiety as a phenomenon that is genuinely distinct from common and garden varieties of fear, then we may best approach it in the way Sartre analyses anguish. Consider the anguish experienced during vertigo – what is distinctive of that experience, affectively, what demarcates clearly form a case of fear, is that, strictly speaking, in vertigo, one is not afraid of falling over the top of balcony, but of throwing oneself over.31 Consider also the paradox of anguish generated over a past event. In facing the gaming tables today, the gambler who had resolved last week not to touch the cards again experiences anguish not because he is afraid of what might happen as the night unfolds, nor because he has forgotten the fact of his past decision, but because he fully acknowledges his decision as a fact of the past, appealing to which cannot magically and on its own make him stay away from the game. The gambler somehow begs his past decision to come and save him, and

220  Anthony Hatzimoysis anguish is the growing realization that no past fact as such – not even his own past psychological fact – can resolve his present problem for himself.32 Both cases show that “freedom is the source of its own anguish,”33 and pave the way for Sartre’s celebrated analysis of the ways in which most people cede any personal responsibility by opting for an identity that would allow them to live as if they were not free. Anguish and anxiety are affective experiences that have found pride of place in life-changing narratives, marking an irrepeatable moment of conversion into authenticity. However, if we adopt the Sartrean perspective, anxiety, no less than anguish, is significant because of its ordinariness. Consider, thus, what in my view is the most interesting, as well as the least addressed, category in today’s clinical taxonomy: generalized anxiety disorder – what used to be called “free-floating anxiety.” The term refers to chronic, excessive, and uncontrollable worry about a number of apparently disconnected events or activities – such as one’s academic performance or the balance of one’s bank account. 34 Symptoms of that disorder include restlessness or feeling on edge, being easily fatigued, difficulty concentrating on your work, irritability, muscle tension, and unsatisfying sleep. Those phenomena remain hard to decipher if one focuses just on external dangers or potential threats and have thus often been understood as the surface indicators of underlying battles one haves with oneself so as to face up – or postpone facing up – to the demands of faith, or the inevitability of one’s own death, or of the responsibility brought about by one’s freedom. Assessing the soundness of those proposals is far beyond the scope of this chapter. So, let me simply conclude with the following remarks concerning two points which are major concerns to the Sartrean conception of affective phenomena. The first concerns Sartre’s attempt to understand affectivity as a particular class of conduct.35 Anxiety no less than anguish, appears counterproductive. In many cases, undergoing such an emotion is not simply unpleasant; it is also a source of difficulties in realizing a fixed goal, but that is, I think, its major strategic value for the subject. Anxiety is often a form of affective procrastination, whose function is to disrupt the normal unfolding of the events, thus serving the wish – often irrational – that a foreseeable event be avoided, either because it will not be realized or because it will, but with oneself being discharged from the task of bringing it about, letting the events, as we say, take their own course, while oneself is somehow – magically36 – removed from the scene. The second point concerns the issue of how in anguish one relates to oneself in the future since, as Sartre puts it, “I am the one who I will be in the mode of not being he.”37 I suggest that the Sartean view of this issue can be more aptly expressed with reference to the normative character of personal identity. Each one of us is what one is projecting oneself to be,

Anguish and Anxiety  221 professionally, socially, sentimentally, in light of one’s own commitments towards both the world at large, and particular others. 38 It is as if I constantly make an appointment with a certain conception of myself at the end of the day. Anguish, if you wish, is the unspoken, unarticulated, worry that I might miss the appointment, not because I was held up, but because I am no longer sure that I really want to meet myself there.39 Notes 1 Kierkegaard, S. (1844), Heidegger (1927), Sartre (1943). 2 Stanghellini et al. (2019). 3 Cf. Lopez-Ibor and Zappino (2019, 476). 4 Knuutilla (2004: 233); Nemesius of Emessa (1917: Chapters 18–21); (1975: Chapters 17–20). 5 Pantegni, Theorica IV.1; Knuutilla (2004: 215); cf. Loper-Ibor and Zappino (2019: 475). 6 For a fear-focused overview of current research into cases of anxiety, see Carleton (2016). 7 Mineka & Ohman (2002), Carleton (2016). 8 Sartre (1943: 66, 64). 9 Kurth (2018: 67–83). 10 Bammer and Smithson (2008), Fergus and Rowatt (2014), Khawaja and McMahon (2011). 11 Barlow et al. (2011). 12 Kurth (2018). 13 Heidegger (1927: Sections 28–30, 39). 14 Richmond (2018: xlvii). 15 Searle (1998). 16 De Sousa (1987), Goldie (2000), DeLancey (2006). 17 For Solomon, moods “are about the whole of our world” (1976: 173), while for Lyons, moods are “aimed out at the world” (1980: 104); cf. Annette Baier (1990: 14). Cf. Hatzimoysis (2017) for a critical assessment of alternative ways of supplying intentional correlates to mood states. 18 I have in mind not any specific claims made in the neo-Kantian literature (anxiety is peculiarly absent from neo-Kantian ethics) but the conceptual outlook presented in Korsgaard’s lectures on self-constitution (2008), as well as various turns of phrase we find in Moran (2001) and Appiah (2005). 19 Heidegger (1927: Division 1, Chapter 6). 20 See Radden (2009) on melancholy and Ratcliffe (2010) on depression. 21 Boelen et al. (2016), Mahoney & McEvoy (2012). 22 For some classic alternatives see Quine (1960), Lewis (1986), Divers (2002). 23 Cf. Jesse Prinz (2004). 24 The fact that emotive states constitute, inter alia, a type of response to a situation is well brought out in attitudinal approaches to affectivity, such as the one proposed by Deonna and Teroni (2012); for critical discussion, see Dokic and Lemaire (2015), Tappolet (2016). Cf. Hatzimoysis (2014b) for the need to retain a clear distinction between emotional and practical responses to a demanding situation. 25 Sartre (1940: 199, n. 25).

222  Anthony Hatzimoysis 6 Mathews and MacLeod (1994), Brown and Barlow (2009), Barlow (2011). 2 27 Reiss (1991), Barlow et al. (2011). 28 Asmundson (2002), Ormel et al. (2004), Banduci et al. (2016). 29 Boelen (2016), Oglesby et al. (2016). 30 H. P. Lovecraft (1927: 255). 31 Sartre (1943: 66–9). 32 Sartre (1943: 71–2). 33 Sartre (1943: 74). 34 Ladouceur (2000), Miranda and Mennin (2007), Barlow (2011), Dugas and Ladouceur (2000). 35 For a reconstruction of the Sartrean view of emotional conduct, see Hatzimoysis (2011: Chapter 4). 36 On the “magical” element of emotional responses in face of unbearable situation, see Richmond (2010) and Hatzimoysis (2014a). 37 Sartre (1943: 70). 38 Sartre (1943: 75). 39 I am grateful to audiences at the University of Geneva, the University of Pisa, and the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, where earlier versions of the chapter were presented.

References Appiah, A. K. The Ethics of Identity. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (2005). Asmundson, G. J. G., Coons, M. J., Taylor, S., & Katz, J. PTSD and the experience of pain: Research and clinical implications of shared vulnerability and mutual maintenance models. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 47, (2002). 930–937. Baier, A. What emotions are about. Philosophical Perspectives, 4, (1990). 1–29. Bammer, G., & Smithson, M. (eds). Uncertainty and Risk: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. London: Earthscan. (2008). Banducci, A. N., Bujarski, S. J., Bonn-Miller, M. O., Patel, A., & Connoly, K. M. The impact of intolerance of emotional distress and uncertainty on veterans with co-occuring PTSD and substance use disorders. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 41, (2016). 73–81. Barlow, D. H., Ellard, K. K., Fairholme, C., Farchione, T. J., Boisseau, C., Allen, L., & Ehrenreich-May, J. Unified Protocol for the Transdiognostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders. New York: Oxford University Press. (2011). Boelen, P. A., Reijntjes, A., & Smid, G. Current and prospective associations of intolerance of uncertainty with symptoms of prolonged grief, posttraumatic stress, and depression after bereavement. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 41, (2016). 65–72. Brown, T. A., & Barlow, D. H. A proposal for a dimensional classification system based on the shared features of the DSM-IV anxiety and mood disorders: implications for assessment and treatment. Psychological Assessment, 21, (2009). 256–271. Carleton, R. N. Into the unknown: A review and synthesis of contemporary models involving uncertainty. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 39, (2016). 30–43. De Sousa, R. The Rationality of Emotions. Cambridge: MIT Press. (1987). DeLancey, C. Basic moods. Philosophical Psychology, 19, (2006). 527–538. Deonna, J. A., & Teroni, F. The Emotions: A Philosophical Introduction. New York: Routledge. (2012).

Anguish and Anxiety  223 Divers, J. Possible Worlds. London: Routledge. (2002). Dokic, Jérôme, & Lemaire, Stéphane. Are Emotions Evaluative Modes? Dialectica, (2015). 271–292. Dugas, M. J., & Ladouceur, R. Treatment of GAD: targeting intolerance of uncertainty in two types of worry. Behavior Modification, 24, (2000). 635–657. Fergus, T. A., & Rowatt, W. C. Intolerance of uncertainty and personality: experiential permeability is associated with difficulties tolerating uncertainty. Personality and Individual Differences, 58, (2014). 128–131. Goldie, P. The emotions: A Philosophical Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2000). Hatzimoysis, A. The Philosophy of Sartre. Durham: Acumen. (2011). ——— Consistency in the Sartrean analysis of emotion. Analysis 74(1), (2014a). 81–83. ——— Passive fear. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 13(4), (2014b). 613–623. ——— Representationalism and the intentionality of moods. Philosophia, 45(4), (2017). 1515–1526. Heidegger, M. Being and Time. Trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. ([1927] 1962). Khawaja, N. G., & McMahon, J. The relationship of meta-worry and intolerance of uncertainty with pathological worry, anxiety and depression. Behaviour Change, 28, (2011). 165–180. Kierkegaard, S. Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. Trans. R. Thomte. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ([1844], 1981). Knuutilla, S. Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (2004). Korsgaard, C. Self-Constitution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2008). Kurth, C. The Anxious Mind: An Investigation into the Varieties and Virtues of Anxiety. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (2018). Ladouceur, R., Dugas, M. J., Freeston, M. H., Leger, E., Gagnon, F., & Thibodeau, N. Efficacy of a cognitive-behavioral treatment for generalized anxiety disorder: evaluation in a controlled clinical trial. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 68, (2000). 957–964. Lewis, D. On The Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell. (1986). López-Ibor, María Inés, & Zappino, Julia Picazo. Vital Anxiety. In Giovanni Stanghellini et al. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology, 475–483. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2018). Lovecraft, H. P. H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia. Ed. S. T. Joshi & D. E. Schultz. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ([1927] 2001). Lyons, W. Emotion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1980). Mahoney, A. E., & McEvoy, P. M. Trait versus situation-specific intolerance of uncertainty in a clinical sample with anxiety and depressive disorders. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, 41, (2012). 26–39. Mathews, A., & MacLeod, C. Cognitive approaches to emotion and emotional disorders. Annual Review of Psychology, 45, (1994). 25–50.

224  Anthony Hatzimoysis Mendelovici, A. Intentionalism about moods. Thought 2, (2013). 126–136. ——— Pure Intentionalism About Moods and Emotions. In U. Kriegel (ed.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind, pp. 113–134. London: Routledge. (2014). Mineka, S., & Ohman, A. Phobias and preparedness: the selective, automatic, and encapsulated nature of fear. Biological Psychiatry, 52, (2002). 927–937. Miranda, R., & Mennin, D. S. Depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and certainty in pessimistic predictions about the future. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 31, (2007). 71–82. Moran, R. Authority and Estrangement: An Essay on Self-Knowledge. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (2001). Nemesius of Emessa. Premnon Physicon a N. Alfano in Latinum translatus, ed. K. Burkchardt. Leizig: Teumbner. (1917). ———. De natura hominis: Traduction de Burgundio de Pise, ed. G. Verbecke and J. R. Moncho. Leiden: Brill. (1975). Oglesby, M. E., Boffa, J. W., Short, N. A., Raines, A. M., & Schmidt, N. B. Intolerance of uncertainty as a predictor of post-traumatic stress symptoms following a traumatic event. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 41, (2016). 82–87. Ormel, J., Rosmalen, J., & Farmer, A. Neuroticism: a non-informative marker of vulnerability to psychopathology. Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology, 39, (2004). 906–912. Prinz, J. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2004). Quine, W. V. O. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (1960). Radden, J. Moody Minds Distempered: Essays on Melancholy and Depression. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2009). Ratcliffe, M. The phenomenology of mood and the meaning of life. In D. Zahavi (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, 349–372. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2010). Reiss. Expectancy model of fear, anxiety, and panic. Clinical Psychology Review, 11, (1991). 141–153. Richmond, S. Magic in Sartre’s Early Philosophy. In J. Webber (ed.), Reading Sartre: On phenomenology and existentialism, pp. 22–44. London: Routledge. (2010). ——— Notes on the translation. In Sartre (ed.), Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. ([1943] 2018): xxxviii–lxiv. Sartre, J.-P. The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Trans. J. Webber. London: Routledge. ([1940] 2014). ——— Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology. Trans. S. Richmond. London: Routledge. ([1943] 2018). Searle, John. Intentionality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1998). Solomon, R. The Passions. New York: Anchor Press. (1976). Tappolet, C. Emotions, Values, and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2016).

10 Sartre, James, and the Transformative Power of Emotion Demian Whiting

10.1 Introduction Sartre’s Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions published at the outbreak of World War II offers a theory of emotion that stands in sharp contrast to other theories of emotion popular at the time, including the feeling theory of William James, the behaviourist theory of Pierre Janet, and the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud. Sartre finds several faults with other theories and is especially scathing of James’s theory. For Sartre the idea that emotions are bodily sensations is far too crude a theory and one that, associating as it does emotions with passive states over which we have no or little control, sits too uneasily with Sartre’s existentialist outlook on the world. Sartre proposes instead that emotions involve transformations to the world as we experience or represent it. To be sure, Sartre does not take emotions to be nothing but types of cognitive transformations. The body also has a part to play in our understanding of emotion, both in relation to purposeful behaviour (fearing an object might involve fleeing the object, for instance) and in relation to more autonomic bodily activity (for instance, constriction of blood vessels and increased respiration in the case of fear). Indeed, for Sartre, the transformational nature of emotion cannot be disentangled from the body and its activity. In Sartre’s words, “[D]uring emotion, it is the body which, directed by the consciousness, changes its relationship to the world so that the world should change its qualities.”1 However, the transformative nature of emotion is what is most distinctive of Sartre’s theory of emotion, and it is that feature of his view that I will be focussing most of my attention on in this chapter. The point of this chapter is to spell out and discuss Sartre’s theory of emotion as presented in the Sketch with two aims in mind. The first is to show that although emotions have the power to transform our perspectives on the world in ways described by Sartre, emotions are not the cognitive transformations in question. The second aim is to show why on one

DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-11

226  Demian Whiting plausible way of thinking about the relationship holding between emotions and the cognitive transformations they help to bring about, emotions might be best understood on the sort of model that Sartre is keen to reject from the outset – namely, a feeling theory, whether of the Jamesian or nonJamesian variety. The structure of the chapter is as follows. In Section 10.2, I spell out some of the main features of Sartre’s theory of emotion, features that I explain need to be understood in the context of Sartre’s criticisms of James’s feeling theory of emotion. In Section 10.3, I discuss the virtues and weaknesses of Sartre’s theory of emotion, with a focus on Sartre’s idea that emotions involve a change or transformation to our perspective on the world. Although I think we can learn from Sartre’s theory, I say why Sartre’s theory is mistaken. In Section 10.4, I take seriously the idea that emotions might nevertheless transform our perspectives on the world. However, I also show why accepting this idea leads us to something like a Jamesian view of emotion. In Section 10.5, I revisit the criticisms Sartre makes of James’s theory. One of those criticisms I accept may be a reason to think that the bodily feelings or sensations that make up emotions are not to be construed in quite the way James construes them. But I argue that none of Sartre’s criticisms succeed in showing that emotions are not types of bodily feelings or sensations. 10.2 Sartre’s Theory of Emotion In order to understand Sartre’s theory of emotion, we need to understand the criticisms that Sartre makes of James’s feeling theory of emotion since Sartre develops his own theory of emotion against the backdrop of these criticisms. Emotions, James argues, are nothing but feelings or perceptions of bodily changes.2 As James describes his central idea, “My thesis is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion.”3 In the case of fear, for instance, we see a dangerous creature coming towards us (the exciting fact), and as a result of seeing the creature, our hearts begin to pound, our breathing increases rapidly, adrenaline rushes through our veins, our palms start to sweat, and our hairs stand on end – where for James our fear is nothing other than the perceptions of these bodily changes. James is led to his view of emotion on the basis of first-person observation of emotion, as summarized by his well-known subtraction argument for the idea that emotions are nothing but feelings of bodily change: If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no “mind-stuff” out of which the

Sartre, James, and the Transformative Power of Emotion  227 emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. … Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition of it in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for one, certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensation of its so-called manifestations.4 Sartre makes two key criticisms of James’s theory of emotion. First, he points out that if emotions are sensations of bodily change, then each emotion will have its own unique bodily profile, but Sartre thinks that this is not the case. For instance, Sartre claims that we cannot distinguish between joy and anger according to their bodily modifications since both emotions involve the same bodily modifications (say, faster respiratory rhythm and increased muscle tone).5 Second, Sartre sees in emotion a “meaning” or “signification” or “organized structure,” which Sartre thinks cannot be explained on the view that emotions are bodily sensations. Emotion, Sartre tells us, “is not a pure, ineffable quality like brick-red or the pure feeling of pain – as it would have to be according to James’s theory. It has a meaning, it signifies something for my psychic life.”6 For Sartre emotion has a “meaning” or “signifies” in the sense of being purposeful or directed at a goal or end – and which, if true, supports the idea that emotions are to be modelled on actions or behaviours, rather than bodily sensations, mental phenomena that we merely suffer, and which relate us to the body and nothing else. Central to the theory that Sartre offers in place of James’s feeling theory is the idea of emotions being a type of behaviour we enact in order to elude a difficulty or obstacle.7 Thus emotions, Sartre tells us, “represent, each of them, a different way of eluding a difficulty, a particular way of escape, a special trick.”8 This turns out to be the idea that when having an emotion, we seek to transform the world in ways that will make our situations more bearable when we cannot see an easy or happy way out. Sartre spells this idea out in the following passages: [Emotion] is a transformation of the world. When the paths before us become too difficult, or when we cannot see our way, we can no longer put up with such an exacting and difficult world. All ways are barred and nevertheless we must act. So then we try to change the world; that is, to live it as though the relations between things and their potentialities were not governed by deterministic processes but by magic.9 The impossibility of finding a solution … is apprehended objectively, as a quality of the world. This serves to motivate the new unreflective consciousness which now grasps the world differently, under a new

228  Demian Whiting aspect, and imposes a new behaviour – through which that aspect is grasped – and this again serves as hyle for the new intention. But emotional conduct is not on the same plane as other kinds of behaviour; it is not effectual. Its aim is not really to act upon the object as it is, by the interpolation of particular means. Emotional behaviour seeks by itself, and without modifying the structure of the object, to confer another quality upon it, a lesser existence or a lesser presence (or a greater existence, etc.).10 Sartre illustrates his theory of emotion early on with the example of reaching for some grapes. On realizing the grapes that we desire are beyond our reach, we feel frustrated and as a result project upon the grapes the property of being too green, a type of “conjuring” act that promises to resolve the difficulty or conflict that we are facing, as well as one that characterizes the disrelish or irritation we feel. Sartre writes, They presented themselves at first as “ready for gathering”; but this attractive quality soon becomes intolerable when the potentiality cannot be actualized. The disagreeable tension becomes, in its turn, a motive for seeing another quality in those grapes: their being “too green”, which will resolve the conflict and put an end to the tension. Only, I cannot confer this quality upon the grapes chemically. So I seize upon the tartness of grapes that are too green by putting on the behaviour of disrelish. I confer the required quality upon the grapes magically.11 Of course, our projecting upon the grapes the property of being too green or sour will in reality make no difference to the actual colour or chemical constitution of the grapes. Our magically bestowing certain qualities upon objects will for us always be nothing more than a sleight of hand, one that can only ever result in self-deception. In reality, then, it is the world as we experience or represent it that is reconfigured in emotion, not the world in and of itself. Nevertheless, our projecting upon objects certain properties may still serve a more limited purpose for us in so far as it can give us a place of psychological refuge in relation to the intolerable situations that we find ourselves in. The idea that emotions comprise transformations to the world as we experience it captures for Sartre as well the sense in which emotions as a form of consciousness directed at the world, constitute a type of non-reflective awareness of the world or a “specific manner of apprehending the world.”12 My disrelish at being unable to reach the grapes constitutes a form of awareness of the grapes, an awareness that for Sartre involves my projecting upon the grapes the property of being too green. For Sartre, this idea of emotions constituting a type of awareness is intimately tied up with

Sartre, James, and the Transformative Power of Emotion  229 his comments about emotions having a “meaning” or “signification,” an aim or goal-oriented nature. For our emotions to be goal-oriented in the way that Sartre thinks they are (for instance, for our disrelish to aim at transforming in some way the grapes that we cannot pick) is for us to apprehend the objects of emotions in certain ways (for instance, it is for us to apprehend the grapes as being too tart or green). Sartre has other interesting things to say about emotion. For instance, as the passages quoted earlier illustrate, Sartre thinks that emotions take the form of overt physical behaviours. Our conferring onto the grapes the property of being too green takes the form of our “putting on the behaviour of disrelish.” Or to take another example, our denying existence to a ferocious beast that is threatening us (a type of cognitive act that Sartre thinks characterizes fear) takes the form of the physical act of fainting. It might take also the form of fleeing the beast, since for Sartre fleeing is itself a way of conferring a lesser existence upon something. Moreover, Sartre thinks that emotions involve or are accompanied by physiological changes, beatings of the heart, and visceral stirrings, for instance. Indeed, for Sartre, physiological changes provide emotion with its weightiness or substance, without which emotional behaviour would be play-acting.13 Nevertheless, for Sartre, emotion’s transformational nature seems to constitute the real essence or form of emotion, that which makes emotion the distinctive psychological kind that it is. In holding that emotions are transformational in the sense of involving a change to one’s perspective on the world, Sartre can be seen to be defending a representational theory of emotion. But Sartre’s representational theory of emotion is not one that associates emotions with mere appearances or imaginings. This is because Sartre claims that in the case of genuine emotion, the realities that we create for ourselves when undergoing the emotion are ones that we wholeheartedly endorse or believe in and not merely imagine or entertain as being true. Sartre writes, [E]motion is a phenomenon of belief. Consciousness does not limit itself to the projection of affective meanings upon the world around it; it lives the new world it has thereby constituted – lives it directly, commits itself to it, and suffers from the qualities that the concomitant behaviour has outlined.14 Sartre’s theory, then, is a fully-fledged cognitive theory of emotion. That being said, Sartre’s cognitive theory is unlike many other cognitive theories of emotion, in so far that Sartre takes emotions to be mental states that we might associate with a kind of wishful thinking, beliefs that we form to help us deal with tricky situations. We realize that we cannot reach the grapes in front of us and given the intolerability of that situation are

230  Demian Whiting spurred on instead into projecting upon the grapes the property of being sour, a type of cognitive act that leaves us in a better place psychologically and potentially one that enables us to continue on our way. We see a ferocious beast heading towards us and realizing that we lack the means to defend ourselves (such as climbing a tree or shooting the beast dead) are motivated instead into thinking that the beast does not exist, a way of thinking that provides us with some sort of immediate psychological place of refuge in a situation that would otherwise be intolerable. It follows that Sartre takes emotions to be a species of false belief, mental representations that need have no basis in reality but arise solely in order to help us to deal with or find bearable difficult situations for which there is no straightforward solution. In holding that emotions are false beliefs, Sartre’s theory stands in sharp contrast to many modern-day representational theories of emotion, which take emotions to be mental states that disclose or at least promise to disclose important truths to us, that some object is dangerous or is to be avoided, for instance.15, 16 10.3 An Evaluation of Sartre’s Theory of Emotion Is Sartre’s theory of emotion credible? I do not think so, but before explaining why, a few positive remarks might be made. To begin with, Sartre’s theory can be viewed as a precursor to many modern-day emotion theories that associate emotions with beliefs or other kinds of mental representations, such as perceptual-like states.17 Moreover, the types of considerations motivating Sartre’s cognitive theory of emotion – including those relating to the need for a theory of emotion to explain emotion’s outward-facing nature along with its “meaning” or “signification” – are much the same sorts of considerations that have proven significant for many contemporary representational theorists of emotion. But Sartre’s theory of emotion is important not only for helping to pave the way for theories of emotion that followed Sartre, and which are popular today. Sartre’s theory is bold and interesting and contains important insights of its own. In particular, it is plausible to suppose that emotions may sometimes be accompanied by the kinds of cognitive transformations that Sartre speaks about. For instance, when terrified by a threatening object, we do sometimes seem to engage in acts of wishful thinking in the form of projecting upon the object properties that make the object less threatening to us. And plausibly our projecting these qualities upon objects might serve a valuable psychological role by making our situations more bearable for us. The point is worth underlining since in our excessively rational society false beliefs are often associated with poor mental health, delusions, or ways of thinking that need correcting by therapy or medication. Sartre’s theory of emotion suggests that this idea might be mistaken or at least

Sartre, James, and the Transformative Power of Emotion  231 needs qualification. False beliefs and the emotions accompanying those beliefs may sometimes discharge an important psychological role. Of course, that role is limited. As Sartre points out when discussing the person who faints when confronted by a wild animal, no behaviour could seem worse adapted than that.18 But, given that Sartre is talking principally about situations where engaging in wishful thinking might be the only option left available to us (we cannot escape the creature, and it will surely attack and defeat us), then we might take the view that in these situations, our engaging in wishful thinking promises to provide us with an overall net benefit and certainly more benefit than if we do nothing at all. Much less satisfactory, however, is the way that Sartre views the relationship holding between emotions and cognitive transformations. Sartre’s idea, as we have seen, is that emotions just are or involve cognitive transformations, that to undergo an emotion is to reconfigure the world as we experience or represent it, to see the grapes as being sour, or to deny existence to the savage creature that threatens us, for instance. But that emotions cannot be the cognitive transformations, in whole or in part, is supported by the following two considerations. The first is that we can undergo emotions of different types without the cognitive transformations that Sartre associates with emotions of those types. True, when we undergo an emotion, we might sometimes be led to form a belief that helps us deal with an intolerable or hopeless situation that we find ourselves in. But this need not always be the case. Indeed, on many occasions when undergoing an emotion, we do not seem to be faced with impossible situations of any kind, and therefore it is implausible to suppose that emotions comprise or involve cognitive transformations that would help us to elude or come to terms with such situations. The point is especially true of so-called positive emotions, such as joy and pleasure, which we often undergo when not facing an obstacle or difficulty of any kind. To be sure, Sartre thinks that his theory applies to such emotions. He claims that joy comes about when we cannot immediately possess the thing that we desire.19 But even supposing joy is sometimes undergone in the face of a difficulty or when a desire is frustrated, joy is not normally occasioned in this way. Joy is much more commonly undergone when desires are satisfied. Therefore, it is implausible to suppose that joy is to be understood as a cognitive transformation that is enacted in response to a difficulty.20 However, the point is true also with respect to negative emotions, such as anger and fear. Recall that for Sartre emotions are behaviours of defeat, cognitive acts that we engage in when we realize our situations are hopeless. But although emotions such as fear and anger are often undergone when facing a challenge or difficulty, these emotions need not always be linked to behaviours of defeat and their associated cognitions. Indeed, fear

232  Demian Whiting and anger often function to enable us to take effective action, thereby helping us to evade or mitigate the challenges that we face.21 For instance, fear can focus attention on what needs to be done and motivate adaptive behaviour. Where emotions play such a function, behaviours of defeat and the associated representations seem nowhere in the vicinity. But if fear and anger can be undergone without the cognitive transformations Sartre associates with these emotions, then such transformations cannot be part of our understanding of fear and anger. The second consideration that speaks against Sartre’s theory of emotion is that Sartre’s theory implies that the emotion and the cognitive transformation are formed at one and the same time. But anecdotal evidence intimates that this is mistaken, that in fact the emotion comes before the cognitive transformation and might in some way be responsible for the cognitive transformation. We are led or motivated to suppress in thought the object threatening us because the object terrifies us. We are led or motivated to confer upon the grapes the quality of being sour because we feel tense on realizing that we are unable to reach the grapes. This is hinted at even by some of Sartre’s own remarks when describing cases that he takes to illustrate his theory. When describing the grapes example, Sartre tells us that prior to the representation of the grapes being too green is a “disagreeable tension [which] becomes, in its turn, a motive for seeing another quality in those grapes.”22 But what is this “disagreeable tension” to which Sartre alludes and which becomes “a motivate for seeing another quality in [the] grapes” other than an emotion or affective state of some kind, a state of frustration or irritation, for instance, one triggered by the realization that the grapes cannot be reached? And this is what Sartre writes about the fear case: I see a ferocious beast coming towards me: my legs give way under me, my heart beats more feebly, I turn pale, fall down and faint away. No conduct could seem worse adapted to the danger than this, which leaves me defenceless. And nevertheless it is a behaviour of escape; the fainting away is a refuge. But let no one suppose that it is a refuge for me, that I am trying to save myself or to see no more of the ferocious beast. I have not come out of the nonreflective plane: but, being unable to escape the danger by normal means and deterministic procedures, I have denied existence to it. I have tried to annihilate it. The urgency of the danger was the motive for this attempt to annihilate it, which called for magical behaviour.23 But again, what is Sartre referring to when he talks about the “urgency” of the danger? “Urgency” here speaks of an emotive or affective quality, one that becomes a motive for the attempt to annihilate in thought the ferocious beast. However, that emotive quality as described by Sartre in this

Sartre, James, and the Transformative Power of Emotion  233 passage is not the cognitive act to which Sartre alludes and associates with the emotion of fear, the annihilation in thought of the object threatening us. Rather it is the source of the cognitive act, perhaps the thing issuing in a demand for that act.24 10.4 Emotions as Possessing Transformative Powers Although Sartre is mistaken to think that emotions are themselves the cognitive transformations that he associates with the emotions, left open, as we have just seen, is the possibility that emotions have the power to bring about such cognitive transformations. Indeed, talk of emotional “incantation” and “transformation” in the Sketch might even be reconstrued in that direction – namely, in the direction of emotions having transformative powers. According to this alternative thought, then, although to feel frightened (say) is not to suppress in thought the object that is threatening us; nevertheless, it is to undergo a mental state that might sometimes succeed in bringing about the suppression in thought of the object that is threatening us. This idea promises to retain what is interesting and insightful about Sartre’s theory of emotion, while at the same time facing none of the criticisms raised to Sartre’s own way of conceptualizing emotion. Even if an emotion can help bring about a belief that we might associate with a kind of wishful thinking, the emotion need not always bring about the formation of such a belief. Consequently, we can undergo emotions without having the kinds of mental representations that Sartre associates with the emotions. Also, thinking of emotions as sometimes possessing the powers to help transform the world as we represent it promises to get the temporal ordering right. If emotions have the power to change the world as we represent it, then emotions come before the changes in representation. But what might emotions’ transformative powers consist in? And what might those powers tell us about the nature of emotion? In answer to the first question, I argue elsewhere that emotions serve as categorical bases for our cognitive dispositions, our being disposed to attend to something in thought, for instance, or our being disposed to form a belief in the light of supporting evidence.25 This claim builds on the idea that dispositional properties have categorical bases, properties in virtue of which objects are disposed to behave in certain ways. For instance, a vase is disposed to shatter when struck in virtue of the vase’s molecular structure, the way the vase’s constituent molecules are arranged. The idea then goes that what is true of vases is true of human beings and how we are disposed or motivated to behave. We too will have properties that ground our dispositions to thought and behaviour. And I submit that emotions are those things or properties of ours in virtue of which we are disposed to behave and think in the ways that we do.

234  Demian Whiting Sartre identifies emotions with cognitive transformations, and his examples are supposed to illustrate the idea, but the alternative picture being offered here supports a different way of thinking about Sartre’s examples. Instead of viewing emotions as cognitive transformative acts, we are to view them as things that dispose us to such acts. For example, we respond to the wild creature coming towards us with fear. Normally, that emotion might motivate us to behave in a way that keeps us physically safe. However, in the situation at hand, we realize that we cannot behave in any such way, and as a result, our fear disposes us instead into thinking that the creature does not exist. Now, suppose this alternative way of thinking about emotions and the cognitive transformations that Sartre associates with emotions is correct. Does construing things in this way tell us anything about the nature of emotion, about the kinds of things that emotions are? I think construing things in the way suggested points to the view of emotions being mental states that bear no essential relation to the outside world. This is because categorical bases are normally conceived of as being intrinsic, non-relational properties of objects, properties in virtue of which objects bear an important subset of their relational properties, including their dispositional properties. The atomic structure of a vase bears no essential relation to anything external to the vase, unlike the dispositional profile of a vase – the vase’s disposition to break in the event of being struck – which refers to things external to the vase, namely a state of affairs involving the vase breaking in the event of being struck.26 So, the question is, What sort of mental states must emotions be to satisfy this requirement for intrinsicness or non-relationality? Clearly not mental representations, such as beliefs and perceptions, as such states relate their bearers to things separate from themselves. My belief that Paris is the capital of France relates me to Paris and Paris being the capital of France. Also ruled out are desires which make necessary reference to the things desired. For instance, my desire to drink water relates me to a possible state of affairs involving my drinking water.27 But that just seems to leave what are commonly referred to as pure feelings (“original existences” as Hume calls them), qualitative states that make no reference to anything external to themselves. On this picture, emotions dispose us to certain behaviours in virtue of their being feelings, in virtue of their felt properties. And that idea seems to be borne out anecdotally. Firstperson experience attests to the idea that fear disposes us to behave in certain ways (say to flee or suppress in thought an object that is threatening us) in virtue of fear’s edgy quality, and anger motivates us to action (say to attack an adversary) in virtue of anger’s incensed or hot-headed quality. Emotions then plausibly motivate or dispose us to cognitive and behavioural acts, including the cognitive transformations involved in wishful

Sartre, James, and the Transformative Power of Emotion  235 thinking, in virtue of how they feel. But this lends support to a feeling theory of some kind. Of course, left open is the question of what sorts of feelings emotions might be, as to whether the feelings are to be construed in the way William James construes them or in ways other philosophers have construed them,28 and we return to that issue a little later. Nevertheless, emotions serving as those properties of ours that motivate or dispose us to behaviour and thought supports the idea of emotions being feelings and not some other kind of mental state. Of course, this might all seem rather disappointing news for how Sartre thinks about emotion. Emotions turn out to be the very kinds of things that Sartre insists they are not. With that said, acknowledge that it is through recognizing Sartre’s insight about the transformative power of emotion and changing how we understand this insight (understanding emotions as causing the transformations, rather than constituting the transformations) that we come to endorse a feeling theory. In that regard, Sartre’s theory of emotion helps to advance our understanding of emotion, even if we end up disagreeing with much of what Sartre says about emotions. 10.5 Sartre’s Criticisms of James’s Feeling Theory of Emotion Early on in the chapter, we saw that Sartre’s dissatisfaction with James’s feeling theory of emotion led him to a radically different theory, according to which emotions are not foremost sensations or feelings but cognitive transformations. But we have seen that Sartre’s theory falls down in crucial respects. Although emotions might have the power to change how we represent the world as being, emotions are not the cognitive transformations that they help bring about. And then when we probe deeper into the kinds of transformative powers emotions possess, we come to see that emotions might be best understood on the very model that Sartre is keen to reject and improve on – namely, a feeling theory of emotion, whether of the Jamesian or non-Jamesian variety. Still, this leaves unanswered Sartre’s criticisms of James’s feeling theory of emotion. If we are to justify finding in favour of James or a feeling theorist and against Sartre, then something needs to be said in response to Sartre’s criticisms of James. Let us, then, return to those criticisms, with a view to evaluating their strength. Does Sartre succeed in showing that emotions are not types of bodily feelings? I think the answer is negative. To begin with, consider Sartre’s complaint that different emotions – Sartre gives the example of joy and anger – are associated with the same bodily modifications. In fact, the empirical evidence seems inconclusive regarding whether different emotions have similar physiological profiles.29 But whatever the truth turns out to be on that, emotions clearly differ with respect to how they feel. For instance, joy has an agreeable hedonic tone and a

236  Demian Whiting certain lightness to it, whereas anger has an irritable and negative hedonic tone. Joy and anger differ very much with respect to their felt qualities. And likewise, for other emotions: consider the edginess that characterizes fear and the heavy-heartedness distinctive of sorrow, for instance.30 Consequently, if emotions do have similar physiological profiles, then that could give us reason only to think that emotional feelings are not to be described in the way James describes them. If emotions differ with respect to how they feel (as they plainly do) but this could not be the case if emotions are perceptions of bodily changes (say because different emotions have the same bodily signatures), then it follows only that emotional feelings are not feelings or perceptions of bodily changes. And, indeed, I argue elsewhere that the Jamesian model is not the only or best model for how to think about the bodily feelings that make up the emotions.31 Next consider Sartre’s complaint that James’s feeling theory cannot explain how emotions possess a “meaning” or “signification,” by which Sartre means that emotions are a form of purposive or goal-oriented behaviour. But here I think that Sartre misdescribes the experience of emotion. We do not experience emotions as things that we actively do or choose. Rather, we experience them as mental states that we passively and automatically suffer. On this point, a feeling theory is again on much firmer footing, as it identifies emotions with bodily sensations, mental states that overcome us and lie outside our direct control.32 To be sure, someone who has an emotion might often be motivated to engage in certain behaviours, but again, emotions are not themselves purposeful or goal-oriented behaviours. Notice that denying emotions have meaning or signification in the way Sartre thinks they have is not to deny there might be other ways that emotions might “signify” or have “meaning.” These terms have various senses, and emotions may have “meaning” or “signify” in some other sense of those terms. For instance, emotions might be said to have meaning in Paul Grice’s sense of “natural meaning.”33 An emotion might mean or signify something in the same way we might say that smoke means or signifies fire. If a person is feeling sad due to some prior trauma that they suffered, then we can say their sadness means or signifies the prior trauma that they suffered.34 There is a sense here, then, in which an emotion means or signifies something, but again it is not the same sense of “meaning” or “signification” that Sartre wishes to employ in relation to emotion. Emotions might also have “meaning” in the sense of being important to us. For instance, emotions can be important to us in so far as they discharge valuable roles in our lives. We have seen already that one function served by emotion might be to make the world more bearable for us at times of difficulty. Or, as I argue elsewhere, emotions may discharge an important regulatory role by way of helping to ensure our moral judgements and desires are sensitive to what the particular features of our situations demand from us.35

Sartre, James, and the Transformative Power of Emotion  237 Does denying that emotions have signification or meaning in Sartre’s sense, imply that emotion fails to have an intentional or representational character, the property of representing the world as being a certain way? I am not sure that need be implied. It seems to me that mental states can be representational without being goal-oriented. Nevertheless, I think that if emotions are bodily feelings, then they do not have representational or intentional characters. Certainly, we often talk as if emotions are intentional mental states. For instance, we say that someone is frightened of a dog or angry they have been mistreated, where that suggests the person’s emotion contains within itself a representation of an object or situation. But if emotion is a type of feeling, then how can emotion contain within itself a representation of anything? I do not see how that can be possible – and what is more, I do not think that emotions present themselves to consciousness as having representational characters – and for that reason, I think that we are simply misled by how we talk about emotion.36 To accept that emotions are types of bodily feelings is not to deny, however, that when we undergo an emotion our conscious attention is focused primarily on the world. Often when we are afraid or angry (say) our attention is very much directed at the outside world, to the things that trigger our fear or anger, for instance. Indeed, we may only be vaguely aware that we are undergoing fear or anger at the time of undergoing the emotion. But all the same, recognize that in such cases we are not engaging only in disembodied cognition or ways of thinking. Rather, we are thinking about the world and its objects with fear, with anger. And these emotions that accompany our thoughts come with a phenomenology, a way of feeling, that characterizes these emotions and which is palpable to us at the time of having the emotions, even if much of our conscious attention is directed elsewhere. 10.6 Conclusion Sartre is to be applauded for highlighting how emotions can sometimes transform our perspective on the world in ways that might play a valuable psychological role at times of difficulty. But Sartre is mistaken to claim that emotions are the cognitive transformations that we sometimes engage in when undergoing emotions. Emotions have transformative powers, but they are distinct from the cognitive transformations they help bring about. Moreover, on one plausible way of understanding emotion’s transformative powers, emotions turn out to be the very sorts of things that Sartre claims at the outset they are not – namely, types of bodily feelings. Should this trouble us? Only if good reason exists to think that emotions cannot be feelings. Sartre dislikes James’s feeling theory of emotion, but at best, his critique of James succeeds only in showing that James misdescribes

238  Demian Whiting the bodily feelings that make up emotions. Now, of course, other reasons have been given for thinking that emotions are not bodily feelings or sensations. Also, for all that has been said so far, it remains an open question as to whether emotions might be compound states comprising bodily feelings and other mental phenomena (although on that question, I think James’s subtraction argument makes very plausible the idea that emotions are nothing over and above types of bodily feelings). Nevertheless, if my critique of Sartre and defence of James are on the right track, then we can conclude that James’s theory of emotion is superior to Sartre’s theory of emotion.37 Notes 1 Sartre (1939, 41). 2 A similar theory of emotion was proposed by a contemporary of James’s, Carl Lange (1912) who emphasised the primacy of bodily activity in emotion. Hence, the theory is often referred to as the James-Lange theory of emotion. In this chapter though, I will continue to refer to the theory as James’s theory of emotion or James’s feeling theory of emotion. 3 James (1884, 190). 4 James (1884, 193). 5 Sartre can be seen to be echoing here Walter Cannon (1929) who also claimed that different emotions are associated with the same bodily modifications – a view held also by a number of emotion theorists after Sartre, most notably, perhaps, Stanley Schachter and Joseph Singer (1962). 6 Sartre (1939, 61). 7 For Sartre, then, emotions are a form of “behaviour of defeat.” In coming to this view, Sartre was influenced by the views of Pierre Janet. As Sartre writes, “[Janet]…treats emotion as a behaviour that is less well adapted, or, if one prefers, a behaviour of disadaptation, a behaviour of defeat. When the task is too difficult and we cannot maintain the higher behaviour appropriate to it, the psychic energy that has been released takes another path; we adopt an inferior behaviour which necessitates a lesser psychic tension” (1939, 18). The key difference Sartre sees between his and Janet’s theory lies in how they conceive of the “inferior behaviour” that characterizes emotion. Sartre complains that Janet associates the inferior behaviour with mechanical reflexes (thereby coming close to James’s feeling theory), while for Sartre the inferior behaviour is purposeful or goal-oriented. 8 Sartre (1939, 22). 9 Ibid., 39–40. 10 Ibid., 41. 11 Ibid., 41–2. 12 Ibid., 35. Emotional awareness is non-reflective in that it is outward looking and does not involve our reflecting on the emotion we are undergoing. When I project upon the grapes the property of being too green, my attention is caught up in the act of projection, and I am aware only of the grapes and their being too green. To be sure, Sartre tells us, “it is always possible to become aware of emotion as a fact of consciousness, as when we say: I am angry, I am afraid, etc.” (1939, 34). But Sartre’s point is that this reflective act would be distinct from the emotion itself, which is a form of awareness directed on the world and not itself.

Sartre, James, and the Transformative Power of Emotion  239 13 Does this last feature of Sartre’s account promise to pre-empt an objection often levelled at cognitive theories of emotion – namely, that they fail to account for the felt or bodily aspects of emotion? As James writes in relation to the emotion of anger, abstract from anger all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms and “the rage is as completely evaporated as the sensation of its socalled manifestations, and the only thing that can possibly be supposed to take its place is some cold-blooded and dispassionate judicial sentence, confined entirely to the intellectual realm, to the effect that a certain person or persons merit chastisement for their sins” (1884, 193). I think the answer to the question just posed depends largely on what the objection seeks to show. If the objection seeks to show that emotions are sensory or bodily and not cognitive by nature (as I believe James intends the objection), then Sartre’s cognitive theory of emotion is also vulnerable to that objection. 14 Sartre (1939, 51). 15 The view that emotions carry or purport to carry important (evaluative) information about the world is held by many modern-day judgemental theories of emotion, according to which emotions are normative or evaluative judgements (for example, Solomon, 1993; Nussbaum 2001), as well as by many perceptual theories of emotion, according to which emotions are perceptual-like states with evaluative contents (for example, Prinz (2004); Tappolet (2016)). 16 Sartre’s theory of emotion is also distinctive in that Sartre associates different emotions with different kinds of representational contents. Sometimes the properties that Sartre thinks emotions project upon the world look like response dependent properties (e.g. sadness and the bleakness of the universe). Other times, they look like chemical properties (e.g. disdain and the sourness of the grapes). Other times again, the properties look like agential properties (e.g. sadness and powerlessness, joy and possessing something as an instantaneous totality). And, again, at other times the properties look like existential properties (e.g. fear and the property of not existing). In this chapter, I overlook this feature of Sartre’s theory of emotion, although I think it very likely that feature is relevant to an evaluation of Sartre’s theory. 17 See, for example, Solomon (1993), Neu (2000), Nussbaum (2001), and Tappolet (2016). Sartre’s theory can also be viewed as a forerunner to “social role” theories of emotion, which take emotions to be defined in terms of their social roles (see, for instance, Averill, 1980; Harré, 1986; on this point, see also Scarantino and de Sousa, 2018), as well as being influential in the development of evolutionary perspectives on emotion that consider emotions to be evolved strategic or adaptive responses (see, for instance, Griffiths, 2003, who taking inspiration from Sartre claims that emotions “show an evolved sensitivity to strategically significant aspects of the organism’s social context” (2003, 62); see also Griffiths, 2004). 18 Moreover, the long-term effects of such a behaviour on a person if they survive might be very negative. On this point, see Anthony Hatzymosis’s discussion of posttraumatic stress disorder and Sartre’s treatment of passive fear, Hatzymosis (2014). 19 Sartre gives the example of a man who learns that he will soon have something that he desires but realizing the object is not yet his is led to enact “magical behaviour which tries … to realize the possession of the desired object as an instantaneous totality” (1939, 46), a way of construing or relating to the object that on Sartre’s account characterises the man’s joy. 20 See also Weberman (1996); for a sympathetic discussion of Sartre’s treatment of positive emotion, see Elpidorou (2017).

240  Demian Whiting 1 See also Weberman (1996). 2 22 Sartre (1939, 41). 23 Ibid., 42. 24 We could try to rescue Sartre by marking a distinction between the emotion (fear) that is a cognitive act and a more general affective state (the felt urgency of the danger) giving rise to the emotion. This might even be how Sartre intends his example to be taken. Regardless, many of us when reflecting on the example will struggle to separate the fear from the affective state characterizing the felt urgency of the danger and in line with what I say in the main text will consider the example to really show that fear is the source of the cognitive act and not identical with it. 25 Whiting (2020: Chapter 4). 26 By saying the atomic structure of a vase bears no essential relation to anything external to the vase, I mean it is not of the essence or nature of the atomic structure of a vase to bear a relation to anything external to the vase (unlike the vase’s dispositional profile the nature of which does refer to things external to the vase). This is of course consistent with holding that the atomic structure of a vase might nevertheless causally depend on things external to the vase, the ambient temperature and air pressure around the vase, for instance. 27 Also, I consider desires to be motivational or dispositional properties, whereas in the main text, I am construing emotions to be those things that ground or explain our motivational or dispositional properties, our being motivated or disposed to behave or think in certain ways. I take that to rule out emotions being desires since I take it that emotions cannot comprise the very properties that they are grounding or explaining. For elaboration of the point, see Whiting (2020: Chapter 4). 28 Hume, for instance: see Hume (1739) and Whiting (2011; 2020) 29 See Scarantino and de Sousa (2018). 30 To be sure, some mental states comprising emotions share similar feelings. For instance, pride and admiration involve a pleasurable sensation. However, such mental states fail to serve as counterexamples to the idea that emotions are nothing but their characteristic feelings. Plausibly states such as pride and admiration are hybrid mental states, comprising emotions and thoughts. For instance, we might identify pride with a pleasurable sensation along with a thought of personal achievement, and admiration with a pleasurable sensation along with a positive evaluation of some other person. Alternatively, the thoughts involved in these mental states might merely serve as individuating causes. On this alternative picture, a pleasurable sensation counts as pride only if it has been caused by the thought of a personal achievement (in the same way that a burn qualifies as sunburn only if it has been caused by the sun); the thought is not part of pride (in the same way the sun is not part of sunburn) but the thought is needed for the pleasurable feeling that is pride to qualify as pride. See Whiting (2011; 2020: Chapter 3) for further discussion. 31 Whiting (2020: Chapter 3) 32 The claim that emotions are (purposeful or goal-oriented) behaviours need not imply that emotions are within our direct control. And there might even be a reading of Sartre according to which emotions are behaviours we enact automatically or involuntarily when there is a clash between our projects and the brute realities of our situations (see Elpidorou 2017). But even if Sartre’s view were to be read in this way, my complaint against Sartre would essentially still stand since I support that emotions do not present themselves to consciousness

Sartre, James, and the Transformative Power of Emotion  241 as being any form of conduct or behaviour, including behaviour that is automatic or involuntary. Again (and consistent with a feeling theory), emotions present as passions or ways of being acted upon, mental states that overcome or happen to us, rather than things we actively or purposively do. 33 Grice (1957). 34 Sartre himself recognises something like Grice’s sense of natural meaning when discussing the psychoanalytical view of emotion. Sartre writes, “[T]the conscious fact is related to what it signifies, as a thing which is the effect of a certain event is related to that event: as, for example, the ashes of a fire extinct upon a mountain are related to the human beings who lit the fire. Their presence is not contained in the remaining cinders, but connected with them by a relation of causality: the relation is external, the ashes of the fire are passive considered in that causal relation, as every effect is in relation to its cause” (1939, 31). Sartre goes on to reject this conception of “signification” as applied to emotion on the grounds that emotional consciousness contains its signification “within itself as a structure of consciousness” – a point that I take issue with in the main text. 35 Whiting (2020: Chapters 5 and 6). 36 From which it follows that how we talk about emotion needs to be interpreted in a way that does not involve assigning intentional or representational contents to emotion. See Whiting (2020: Chapter 3) for further discussion of the point. 37 I am grateful to Talia Morag and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments.

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242  Demian Whiting Neu, J. A Tear in an Intellectual Thing: The Meaning of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2000). Nussbaum, M. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2001). Prinz, J. Gut Reactions: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2004). Sartre, J-P. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions. Trans. P. Mariet. London: Routledge. ([1939] 2014). Scarantino, A., and de Sousa, R. Emotion. In E. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/ entries/emotion/. (2018). Schachter, S. and Singer, J. Cognitive, social and physiological determinants of emotional states. Psychological Review, 69, (1962). 379–399. Solomon, R. The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. (1993). Tappolet, C. Emotions, Values, and Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (2016). Weberman, D. Sartre, emotions, and wallowing. American Philosophical Quarterly, 33, (1996). 393–407. Whiting, D. The feeling theory of emotion and the object-directed emotions. European Journal of Philosophy, 19, (2011). 281–301. ———. Emotions as Original Existences: A Theory of Emotion, Motivation, and the Self. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. (2020).

11 Sartre and Political Imagining Genevieve Lloyd

Sartre’s theoretical account of imagination dates from early in his long philosophical career. In Prime of Life, the second volume of her autobiography, Simone de Beauvoir describes the origins of his two books on the subject. On her account, they were originally conceived as forming a single continuous work, only the first part of which was published at the time. The status of imaging had been the subject of Sartre’s Diploma d’Etudes, for which he won special distinction. The commissioned book, L’Imagination – published in 1936 – offered a historical and critical survey of theories of imagination, about many of which Sartre had been dissatisfied in his teaching of high school students in psychology.1 The second book, L’Imaginaire – based on the part of the original project in which Sartre was himself most interested – was not published until 1940.2 It was principally in the second book that Sartre presented his own original account of imagination, utilizing phenomenological concepts and methods which would become famous in his later works. Beauvoir observed that it was in discussing “the problem of the image” that Sartre “crystallised the first key concepts of his philosophy: the conscious mind as tabula rasa, and its capacity for annihilation (néantisation).” 3 His diagnosis there of what he saw as problematic in prevailing theories of imagination also anticipated his later central distinction between being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Those anticipations are significant for understanding the political potential of his treatment of imagination. Neither book was directly political in its orientation. Beauvoir reports that, in the period during which Sartre worked on the later, critical part of L’Imagination, Sartre was in an exhausted condition. He also subjected himself voluntarily to injection with mescalin, which induced hallucinatory experiences.4 He drew on personal experience for his material, rather than commenting directly on the politics of his times. Yet reading Sartre on imagination now can offer insights into the consideration of collective imagining as a focus for social critique.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-12

244  Genevieve Lloyd Although the two works are continuous in content, they are somewhat different in style. The second is – like the first – structured as a close critique of psychological theories of imagination. Yet it is more free-flowing – rich in metaphor and in rhetorical strategies. Despite the troubled personal context of its origins, Sartre’s writing in L’Imaginaire is frequently playful in tone. Yet the lightness is at the service of a deeply serious exercise in breaking the grip of what he sees as a powerful “illusion” which has distorted the understanding of consciousness. The stylistic elements are relevant for understanding the political aspects of Sartre’s treatment of the imagination. However, we need first to look briefly at the content of both books. 11.1  Sartre on Images Imagining is for Sartre a distinctive feature of the life of the mind; it is crucial for understanding the very nature of consciousness. As he saw it, the basic “problem” of imagination was a matter of how to characterize its difference from perception in relation to their respective objects. The peculiarity of imagination which intrigued him in his later philosophy was its status as the principal bearer of a mind’s relations to nothingness. He thought that traditional theories of imagining had all, in one way or another, treated mental images as having the kind of being that could be characterized as in itself. They all failed to capture the distinctive relations of imagining to what is irreal. That theme of mind’s relations to nothingness runs through much of Sartre’s mature philosophy, but its foundations are there in his earliest philosophical writing on imagination. In L’Imagination, Sartre diagnosed the fundamental error of previous theories as arising from a “naive metaphysics of the image.” That recurring error consisted, he thought, in giving images a similar status to things – albeit things that are supposed to exist in some mysterious way in consciousness, as copies of external objects. He presented that approach as going right back to ancient Epicurean doctrines of simulacra – shed from the surfaces of things to persist in a ghostly after-existence, flitting around the world. The Epicureans thought that the simulacra were capable of entering the porous bodies of human beings, thus serving as replicas of things previously perceived. Sartre acknowledged that modern versions of that “naive metaphysics” were less literal in their understanding of images as copies of external objects. Yet he saw those later theories of the image as remaining susceptible to what was fundamentally the same confusion, though some forms of it were starker than others. Hence he argued that it was present, not only in Cartesian and Humean “ideas” but also – in a more subtle version – in Bergson’s treatment of consciousness. On Sartre’s analysis, Bergson

Sartre and Political Imagining  245 “softened” the understanding of consciousness, attempting to restore to it “fluidity,” “spontaneity,” and “life.” Bergson nonetheless allowed those thing-like images to remain “inert” at the heart of what he called “pure duration,” like cobblestones at the bottom of water.5 On Sartre’s account, images thus remained for Bergson “things in consciousness.” They were inert and passive items, confronting thought. When speaking of the “fluidity” of thought, Bergsonism was using metaphors which could not be replaced by a literal formulation. The supposed fluidity of thought remained “a pure and simple game of words.”6 Sartre insisted, in contrast, that no image ever “comes to entangle itself with real things.” It was fortunate, he argued, that such mixing is in fact impossible. For, if it could happen, we would be unable to separate with any sharpness the waking world from dreams.7 Against that long-standing tradition of treating images as things, Sartre affirmed the “spontaneity” of imaging. Images for him are not passive items constructed by thought. They are not really a kind of “thing” at all. He tried to break the grip of the prevailing model of images by emphasizing the radical contrast between the mind’s activity and the passivity of “things.” He argued that, even if we say that thought does not create its images but merely “seeks” them, we are still in the grip of a distorting model. In giving images a thing-like status, the theories he opposes misconstrue the activity of thought – treating it as if it were akin to a material force exerted on “passive givens.” Here, he again insists, such theories resort to metaphors when there is nothing behind the metaphor. For Sartre, the spontaneity he attributes to thought is an absolute characteristic of it. It is an “ontological law” that there are only two types of being: existence as a thing of the world, and existence as consciousness. Consciousness alone merits the term “spontaneous.” In contrast, all “inert and opaque” content is to be located, by the very necessity of its type of existence, in the “external” world.”8 He concludes the work by asserting that there are not – and cannot be – images in consciousness. Rather, the image is a certain type of consciousness – an act and not a thing. Rather than being some thing, it is a consciousness “of some thing.”9 Sartre called for a radical new start in the understanding of images. For this, he turned to Husserl’s treatment of intentionality as the essential structure of all consciousness. On Husserl’s approach, the image ceases to be a psychic content in consciousness. It is to be understood, rather, through studying the distinctive intentional relations at stake in the consciousness of a thing as imaged. Sartre illustrated the Husserlian approach by describing the process of imaging his friend Pierre – a character who frequents his texts. In terms that echo his repudiation of the Epicurean model, he says that an image of Pierre is not a “vague phosphorescence” left in consciousness by a perception of that person. It is, rather, a form of

246  Genevieve Lloyd organized consciousness that relates, in its own manner, to Pierre, unmediated through any simulacrum.10 According to Sartre, Husserl, in making this general analysis possible, has “freed the psychic world of a heavy weight.”11 Yet Sartre is not satisfied with where he has now arrived. Husserl has opened the way, offering as yet unexplored rich glimpses of an alternative approach. Yet a full articulation of the differences between mental images and perceptions cannot, he thinks, come from Husserlian intentionality alone. Nor can that approach adequately explain the differences between mental images and material images such as drawings, which also display this intentionality. For a full account of the distinctive character of mental images, Sartre must move on to a detailed “phenomenological psychology” of images, which he develops in L’Imaginaire. Here, he draws out the implications of his version of spontaneity through a sustained critique of what he calls “the illusion of immanence” – a misguided way of thinking of images, which he sees as finding its clearest expression in Hume’s talk of ideas as faint copies of “impressions.” In developing his approach to the study of mental images, Sartre’s emphasis has been on the distinctive spontaneity of the mind – a theme he appropriated from Husserl. It is through this stress on spontaneity that he tries to break the grip of “the illusion of immanence.” In his critique of this illusion, Sartre’s writing style becomes more strategic. He attempts to explain what is appealing in the model of “immanence,” while exposing its philosophical inadequacy. He thus acknowledges that there is an almost irresistible appeal in the passivity which it evokes. Mental images do, after all, often seem to come “unbidden” – even against the resistance of the will. In that respect, it seems that they cannot be treated as acts of the mind. Whereas material images – drawings or diagrams – seem to involve our material activity in the world of things, mental images seem to confront us as inner objects which impose their own presence upon us. In an effort to break the grip of the “illusion,” Sartre resorts to a distinction between “voluntary” and “involuntary” spontaneity. In most cases, he says, mental images spring from a “deep spontaneity” that cannot be assimilated to an act of will. We thus have here, he suggests, two very closely related types of consciousness. The ever helpful Pierre can appear as a “voluntary” image – as if he had been summoned and obligingly came into view from around a corner in a street. Alternatively, his appearance might be unsummoned – perhaps even unwanted – entering my consciousness without any effort on the part of my will. Both modes of presence are for Sartre products of spontaneity. They are both – in the sense made popular by Husserl – “intentional,” having as their object the absent Pierre. Despite his absence, it is Pierre himself that our consciousness reaches – not some immaterial simulacrum which acts as a surrogate for him.12

Sartre and Political Imagining  247 The details of Sartre’s “phenomenological psychology” of images are complex, and their articulation is not always convincing. His notion of “deep spontaneity” may well seem a convenient verbal trick rather than marking a genuine distinction. Despite his criticism of Bergson for being captured by his own metaphors, Sartre’s own analyses are often richly metaphorical in ways that make them difficult to render literally. Yet the contours of his treatment of imagining are sufficiently clear for us to be able to grasp some highly significant consequences for how he thinks of its place in the life of the mind. His insistent rejection of the illusory “immanence” of mental images as objects of consciousness brings Sartre to an important conclusion about the nature of the distinction between real and imaginary “worlds.” Both, he argues, are constituted by the same objects: “Only the grouping and the interpretation of these objects varies. What defines the imaginary world, as with the real world, is an attitude of consciousness.”13 Here we can begin to see more clearly how his early concerns with imagination might readily take on a political orientation. For him, the imaginary is not ontologically distinguished from the real world. The concerns of imagining do not belong in a different order of being. Imagining is a distinctive way of relating to the world, rather than a retreat to fantasy. His treatment of consciousness also bypasses old dichotomies between thought, emotion, and imagination, opening up possibilities for a richer appreciation of the role of imagination in political attitudes and responses. Sartre’s version of imagination has close connections with affectivity. For him, emotion pervades thought, no less than thought pervades imagining. It is integral to the act of imagining, rather than something added on to an inert thing-like presence. Perception itself becomes for Sartre imbued with affectivity. He posits two principles: (1) “All perception is accompanied by an affective reaction,” and (2) “Every feeling is a feeling about something, which is to say it aims at its object in a certain manner, and projects onto it a certain quality.” To like Pierre is thus to be conscious of Pierre as likeable.14 Emotion, then, is not to be construed as irrational subjectivity. “Feeling” shares in the general intentionality of consciousness. Intentionality and affectivity both belong to images of the absent Pierre, no less than to the perception of him as present before me. All emotions are subject to Sartre’s two principles, including those whose intensity may seem to distance them from thought. Joy, anguish, and melancholy alike fall under his “general law of consciousness” that they must be directed to an object. This means that the feeling of hate, for example, should not be construed as the consciousness of hate. Rather, it is the consciousness of someone as hateful – just as love is to be understood as consciousness, not of itself, but of the charms of the loved person.15

248  Genevieve Lloyd This recasting of the language of “feeling” gives a new twist to issues of “objectivity” in relation to both imagination and emotion. They have often been seen as antithetical to reason, which has been construed as the paragon of objectivity. Objectivity itself undergoes a conceptual shift in Sartre’s analysis. It becomes primarily the orientation towards an object, which is common to all consciousness. Each form of consciousness nonetheless has its own peculiar way of thus “aiming at” an object. Sartre’s analysis brings also a fresh approach to the relations between imagination and judgement. Judgement no longer supervenes on a prior image as something added to it. Nor is an image a subsidiary illustration or support of judgement. Rather than being exercised on an image which has been placed before it for consideration, judging now enters into the very structure of the image itself. Sartre’s critique of the crude metaphysics of the image – sketched in L’Imagination – has been significantly refined in his forensic exposure of the “illusion of immanence” in L’Imaginaire. However, the central point remains that mental images are not to be construed as weakened perceptions. They are to be treated, rather, as distinctive acts of the mind – directed towards objects, with their own characteristic mode of “intentionality.” He still distinguishes “mental images” from “material images” such as sketches or diagrams by their different mode of representation of their objects, but their shared symbolic character is now more fully elaborated. Like drawings or diagrams, mental images function symbolically. However, this symbolic functioning of images is not to be regarded as somehow added from the outside. “The image is symbolic in essence and in its very structure. One cannot remove the symbolic function of an image without making the image itself vanish.”16 There remains something puzzling about how a Sartrean mental image can function as a symbol without having some thing-like character of its own. Like a material image, it reaches beyond itself to a thing aimed at. Yet, unlike a material image, it is supposed to do so through some psychic content which has no independent existence. The image is not there as an entity which facilitates comprehension. “Comprehension is realised as imaged but not by the image.”17 In reaching beyond itself – in being representative of the thing aimed at – it has what Sartre calls “transcendence,” but he insists that this is not to be confused with “externality,” though it may come naturally to us to think of it in that way. Sartre articulates the “illusion of immanence” as wrongly “transferring the externality, spatiality, and all the sensible qualities of the thing to the transcendent psychic content.” The psychic content, he says, does not in fact have those qualities; rather, it represents them, though in its own way.18 The argumentation is complex, and Sartre’s talk of “psychic contents” may well seem to evoke something all too close to the ‘“thing-like” inner

Sartre and Political Imagining  249 states he so strongly repudiates. Yet it is worth remembering here Wittgenstein’s arguments in the Philosophical Investigations to show that sensations, though not nothing, are not a something either. Sartre’s diagnosis of the “illusion of immanence” has some affinities with Wittgenstein’s attempts to undermine misleading pictures of mental states as inner objects. There is a shared concern with breaking the grip of the distorting language through which we have come to think of inner experience. In Sartre’s case, that exercise in demystification centres on stressing the activity and intentionality inherent in consciousness. Whatever we make of his philosophical arguments throughout the text, it is striking that his treatment of the relations between consciousness and imagination is itself an exercise in reimagining the life of the mind in the absence of what he dismisses as the “illusion of immanence.” Sartre’s recasting of the familiar model for understanding mental images brings with it a dramatic reconstruction of the relations between the imaginary and the real. Imagination here seems to become more powerful than it could be when construed in terms of weakened perception, persisting in the absence of its original object. However, the power of imagination is now differently construed. Rather than being a source of deception, it has become a positive way of engaging with reality. Sartre argues that, on his new model of imagining, it no longer makes sense to talk of an “imaginary world.” Mental images cannot have the coherence that characterizes the world of perception. The “great law of imagination,” he insists, is that there is no imaginary world. Images remain isolated from one another. They do not sustain between them any persistent relations. They have only those relations that consciousness “can at each moment conceive as constituting them.”19 The claim that an assemblage of mental images must lack coherence may seem counterintuitive if we think of the connections that can seem to be displayed in a dream. Sartre acknowledges that in a dream an image may be given as surrounded by “an undifferentiated mass that is posited as an imaginary world.”20 However, he suggests that this mass might be better described as “the atmosphere of a world.” For it offers only an atmospheric evocation of internal coherence. In one of his most important insights for my purposes here, Sartre goes on to insist that, in what we might be inclined to call “imaginary worlds,” there are no possibilities. For possibilities demand a real world. It is only by starting from the real world that we can consider possibilities of change. A closely related point concerns the relations between imagination and freedom. In another observation that may well seem counterintuitive, Sartre says that an “imaginary world” is given to us as a world without freedom. For him, such a posited “world” is in fact the inverse of freedom. For, in the lack of determinacy, what it displays is “fatality.”21 It is an

250  Genevieve Lloyd intriguing – and perplexing – point. Yet it takes us to the depths of Sartre’s way of construing freedom. An “unreal” world, he argues, can rule out no possibilities of existence. Its imagined existence in fact eliminates nothing. Hence there is nothing about it that can restrict our freedom, and, in the lack of such restriction, there can be no true freedom. Yet, having been denied the coherence of an imaginary “world,” mental images now acquire a stronger connection with the real world. Sartre’s distancing of “imaginary worlds” from alternative possibilities, and hence from freedom, might at first sight suggest that he should regard the imagination as lacking political relevance. However, the opposite is true. With its relocation from a supposed realm of fantasy, imagination takes on a new significance. In the concluding sections of L’Imaginaire, he argues that imagination becomes “the whole of consciousness as it realises its freedom.”22 He sees that “realization” of freedom as demanding, not a “substitution” of the real, but rather a “surpassing” of it. “Every concrete and real situation of consciousness in the world is pregnant with the imaginary in so far as it is always presented as a surpassing of the real.” Sartre is then able to articulate what he sees as “the sense and value of the imaginary.” The imaginary now appears “on the ground of the world.” Yet, reciprocally, all apprehension of the “real” as “world” implies “a hidden surpassing towards the imaginary.” Imagination, far from appearing as an accidental or recreational feature of consciousness, is thus disclosed as its “essential and transcendent condition.”23 For Sartre, imagination – properly construed – is thus essential to consciousness and to freedom. It is essential also to his notion of “nihilation” – the mind’s capacity to grasp “nothingness,” which he goes on to elaborate on in his later works. The apprehension of nothingness is grounded in the mind’s capacity to “surpass the world to the imaginary.” The contours of those later developments – especially his treatment in Being and Nothingness of the flight of consciousness from the thing-like status of being-initself – are set by his early treatment of imagination. How then might we now see Sartre’s radical recasting of the nature of imagination as bearing on its role in political thinking? Sartre himself offers some clues in his rich and strange study of Gustave Flaubert, published in 1971 as L’Idiot de la Famille. Here his early analyses of imagination reverberate in an exploration of collective stupidity. We have seen him attempt to expose the distortions embedded in the common language in which we think of mental images. That exercise is now broadened. Rather than being confined to exposure of the “illusions” of theoretical psychology, Sartre’s preoccupations now shift to a more general consideration of how, within a specific cultural context, stifling stupidities can capture ordinary thought. 24

Sartre and Political Imagining  251 11.2  Sartre on Flaubert and Stupidity Sartre’s study of Flaubert is framed by reflections on the relations between an individual life and the social, cultural, and intellectual contexts in which it is formed. In his “Preface” to the work, he suggests that no individual life is properly understood without attending to the ways in which it is shaped by the prevailing common ways of thinking that encompass it. An individual life is “universalized” by its epoch, and that epoch in turn can be seen as epitomized by being reproduced in the singularity of an individual life. Sartre’s project, then, is to reconfigure the structures of Flaubert’s life as a “product of history.” L’Idiot de la Famille is a grandiose project – and not always a coherent one. The work is itself in many ways a product of creative imagination, rather than a serious intellectual biography. Sartre makes projections between Flaubert’s literary works and his supposed individual psychic structures. Those conjectured features of Flaubert’s intellectual character are then mapped onto Sartre’s own assumptions about common ways of thinking which prevailed in the context of Flaubert’s life. His “Flaubert” becomes an enactment of the mentality of the times. There are many criticisms that can be made of this exercise. It is in many ways an unfair reconstruction of Flaubert. The writer who has been rightly regarded as a brilliant expositor of the varying forms of collective stupidity is presented by Sartre as himself the embodiment of the very stupidities which he satirized. Those stupidities play out in deficiencies of thought and imagination in the persona he constructs as “Flaubert.” However, what is relevant here is not the issue of whether Sartre does justice to the real Flaubert. It is, rather, the details of that model itself. There are insights to be gained from Sartre’s perceptive articulation of forms of collective stupidity which he sees as shaping individual thinking. It is here that we see the continuities with Sartre’s earlier treatment of the philosophers’ “illusion of immanence.” Sartre’s discussion of stupidity in L’Idiot de la Famille resonates with his early works on imagination, as well as with his later treatments of consciousness. The theme of the intersubjectivity of language is crucial. It figures prominently in his reflections on Flaubert’s childhood. The young Gustave is perceived as stupid because of his uneasy relationship with language – his prolonged silences and apparent difficulties in mastering the written word. Sartre recasts that lack of linguistic ability in terms of his own philosophical analyses of consciousness: The impenetrability the child finds in letters is part of a broader lack of connection with the intersubjectivity of language. He experiences language as an external, alien force, viewing words from the outside – as things.

252  Genevieve Lloyd Sartre’s account of Flaubert’s childhood highlights a paradox. This supposedly stupid child is at the same time an intrigued and astute observer of adult stupidities. Sartre sees a connection here between that fascination and the child’s difficult relations with language. The young Gustave’s sense of his own stupidity – imposed on him by the ways in which he is perceived by significant others – develops in tandem with his observations of the inanities which surround him. Sartre describes how, at the age of 9, Gustave writes to a young friend about his practice of collecting stupidities. He records the clichés exchanged at ritual family celebrations. More generally, he becomes an observer of adult propensities to constantly repeat trite commonplaces. Those inanities are apprehended as thoughtless conventional responses, endlessly recycled. The perceived stupidity of the child, his sense of himself as stupid, and his own perceptions of the stupidities of others are all connected. Sartre associates the boy’s “stupidity” with an oppressive sense of a “thickening of language.” It is a telling metaphor, suggesting that a barrier has formed – both between minds and between mind and world. The child’s sense of being oppressed by stifling repetitions persisted into the preoccupations of the adult author. As a child, Flaubert collected “stupid things people say.” In later life, he documented stupidities in his Dictionary of Received Opinions, which was intended to accompany the publication of his uncompleted final novel Bouvard and Pecuchet – a dark comedy of collective stupidity. Sartre acknowledges that the adult Flaubert’s conviction that he was surrounded by stupidity was not unusual among nineteenth-century French intellectuals, who believed that to be bourgeois was to be philistine. However, he sees a significant difference between that familiar attitude and the situation of his “Flaubert.” The stupidity attributed to the bourgeois was seen, scornfully, as an absence – an aberrant privation of intellect, displayed by individuals. Those afflicted by it were considered harmful only to themselves. In contrast, Flaubert’s situation – as reconstructed by Sartre – involved the experience of stupidity as an external, oppressive force, inherent in the mentality of his times. In Sartre’s imaginative realization of that pervasive mentality, the figure of “Flaubert” becomes itself an embodiment of the experience of collective stupidity. The “fool” becomes an “oppressor.” Sartre’s development of this theme of stupidity as self-imposed oppression is directed particularly at Flaubert’s Dictionary of Received Opinions. He complains that Flaubert’s list is a curiously disparate assemblage, observing no real distinction between ready-made ideas and conventional sentiments. It includes failures of emotional intelligence, along with the reiteration of uncritical opinions. Rather than properly cataloguing the citations, Flaubert simply lists them alphabetically, with no indication of who is supposedly speaking, or about what. “Accepted ideas, locutions, puns and wordplays, ‘gems’, are all jumbled together.”25

Sartre and Political Imagining  253 Sartre sees in the construction of this odd list a flawed realization of the intersubjective character of language – an inadequacy connected with a lack of the shared spontaneity which allows the free flow of words. For Sartre, Flaubert’s list evokes passivity and inertia. This stupidity comes from elsewhere – as if from another time, another place. It is inert and opaque, and its laws cannot be modified. It is “a thing” because it possesses “the impassability and impenetrability of natural facts.” Sartre’s language in his description of stupidity resonates both with his early accounts of “the illusion of immanence” and with his subsequent treatments of freedom and spontaneity. In this condition of flawed spontaneity, he says, language has become “materiality aping thought” or “thought haunting matter.” Language for Flaubert, he concludes, is “nothing but stupidity, since verbal materiality, left to itself, is organised semi-externally and produces a kind of thought-matter.”26 In developing this theme of words taking on the concreteness of “things,” Sartre draws on some striking metaphors in letters written by Flaubert while travelling in Egypt. Stupidity, he says there, is “something unshakeable.” Nothing can attack it without being itself broken. It has “the quality of granite, hard and resistant.” He complains bitterly of having seen in Alexandria how “a certain Thompson from Sunderland” had written his name in letters six feet high on Pompei’s column: “This imbecile”, he observes, “has become part of the monument and is perpetuated with it.” All fools, Flaubert laments, are more or less like Thompson from Sunderland, and they always get the better of us. “On a trip you meet a lot of them … but they soon go away; you are amused by them. It’s not like ordinary life, where they manage to drive you crazy.”27 As a biographical reconstruction of the real Flaubert, all this may well seem to be itself an exercise in wild philosophical imagining. Yet, if we can set aside the issue of fairness to Flaubert, there are important insights to be gained. Sartre is describing a kind of collective stupidity which systematically deforms thought through obfuscation. This condition arises from obstruction of the free-flowing intersubjectivity of language. He describes this condition as, in effect, “decapitated reason.” It lacks the capacity for free engagement in active thinking which he sees as the true character of imagination. Intellect is here deprived of its power of ordering and unifying. Rather than actively ordering ideas, it remains passively immersed in “the animal consciousness of the world.” The power of freedom is reduced to a numbing inertia – “the pure boredom with living” which seems especially to be the lot of domestic animals.28 As Sartre sees it, this is a consciousness which – almost literally – instantiates the French term for stupidity: bêtise. Sartre’s analysis can yield important insights into the operations of collective stupidity in maiming the spontaneity of consciousness. It is clear that he

254  Genevieve Lloyd has absorbed from his attentive reading of the real Flaubert insights into the understanding of the creative powers of imagination – and into the contrasted negativities of inert and passive “received opinions.” He was not alone in finding in Flaubert a crucial source for understanding those negative processes. Gilles Deleuze also reflected on Flaubert in his efforts to bring philosophy to bear on the understanding of this form of stupidity. 29 More recently, Jacques Derrida has revived the theme, making it central to his seminars on The Beast and the Sovereign. Those later critiques of collective stupidity are more fully developed than Sartre’s – and more sympathetic to Flaubert. However, Sartre’s treatment in L’Idiot de la Famille of its relations to the intersubjectivity of language remains a significant source of insight into both the flourishing and the maiming of free powers of imagination.30 Sartre’s treatment in L’Idiot de la Famille of the pathologies of imagination, and their connections with language, makes an interesting complement to the amusing and poignant account in his memoir Les Mots – published in 1964 – of his own childhood experience of immersion in language. There – in a more cheerful narrative of mastering words – the child moves from a regard for books as solid “things,” to be cradled like dolls, to a perception of sentences swarming like centipedes with letters and syllables, and eventually to a grasp of the astonishing transformation of words as bearers of transparent thought and communication. “I was wild with delight: those withered voices in their little nature-books, those voices which my grandfather revived with a glance, which he heard and which I did not hear, were mine!” 31 Ideally, the symbolism of words – which Sartre saw as structurally similar to that of mental images – delivers consciousness to the spontaneity and freedom of a shared social world. Yet Sartre also saw the imagination as vulnerable to forces in that shared social world which can thrust consciousness back into the inert passivity of “immanence” – barely distinguishable from the existence of mere “things.” 11.3  Sartre and “Social Imaginaries” More recent treatments of imagination have articulated – more fully than Sartre could have at the time – its collective, social aspects. The “social imaginary” has come to be construed as an implicit network of attitudes, assumptions, and affectivity, which shape enduring patterns of thought within a group. Cornelius Castoriades has drawn on psychoanalytic theories of imagination to offer an influential account of this “context-related” form of imagining. Rather than being seen as a cumulation of individual exercises of imagination, the idea of a “social imaginary” has developed connotations of a collective phenomenon, which can either facilitate or impede the thought of individuals.32 Charles Taylor has offered a helpful elaboration of this

Sartre and Political Imagining  255 concept as extending beyond the immediate background understanding that makes sense of particular practices. This extended background understanding, he observes, supposes a wider grasp of “our whole predicament: how we stand to each other, how we got where we are, how we are related to other groups.” It is appropriate to call it an “imaginary” rather than a “theory,” he suggests, because its unlimited and indefinite nature means that it can never be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines. 33 “Social imaginary” is a useful concept, though a somewhat vague and shifting one. It has been further developed and broadened by Chiara Bottici, in an important discussion of political aspects of imagination. In her terminology, the “imaginal” is the domain of images – whether mental or physical – with which members of a social group identify. Whereas “imaginary” has in its common use connotations of unreality, Bottici’s “imaginal” deliberately makes no assumptions as to the reality of the images that compose it. Thus construed, operations and products of imagination are no longer restricted to either aesthetic or utopian domains. The “imaginal” can be the product of an individual faculty or of a social context, as well as of complex interactions between the two. Bottici's extended concept of “the imaginal” allows us to move readily between the consideration of mental and physical images, and between individual and collective imagining. Through it, she poses a challenging question: How do we respond to the paradox of a contemporary world suffused with images, yet largely deprived of the free exercise of imagination? She argues that the indiscriminate proliferation of images is associated with a current crisis of political imagination – understood as a lack of a radical capacity to start something new. For Bottici, the present dilemma of imagination can be summed up as a polarization between two approaches. If we start with imagination, construed as an individual faculty, then the problem is to account for the at times overwhelming importance of social context. On the other hand, if we begin with the concept of a “social imaginary,” then the problem is how to reconcile that with the free imagination of individuals. She argues that an adequate response to this impasse demands that we re-think the connections between politics and our capacity to imagine.34 It is illuminating to now re-read Sartre’s discussions of imagination against the background of those intervening explorations of the “social imaginary.” It is a particularly interesting exercise to bring his insights together with Bottici’s reflections on the political aspects of imagination. There are some commonalities – along with some revealing contrasts. Some of the content of the notion of a “social imaginary” was already implicit in Sartre’s early analyses of images: in his emphasis on the suffusion of emotion through images; in his repudiation of the treatment of mental images as inner objects of the mind’s perceptions; in his insistence that images are structurally interconnected with thinking, rather than

256  Genevieve Lloyd being its external or ancillary illustrations; and in his stress on the symbolic structure of images. In those Sartrean analyses, imagination was still treated as a psychological faculty of the human mind. Although his diagnosis of the “illusion of immanence” repudiated treating images as inner objects, in favour of an orientation of imagination towards a public world, his treatment of active imaging remained framed by a model of an individual mind’s dealings with that world. As we have seen, there were nonetheless already, in those early works, some strong intimations of insight into the collective dimensions of imagination. Unresolved tensions remain within Sartre’s account of the outward orientation of mental images, and more generally in his treatment of the place of imagination in the relations between individual consciousness and the shared public world. Sartrean mental images have no “real” status as inner objects of perception. Yet they remain “psychic contents.” One of the most intriguing – and puzzling – aspects of their status is that the inner activity of consciousness, which replaces the passivity inherent in the “illusion of immanence,” is itself “real”; yet its operations are defined in terms of an engagement with “nothingness.” Sartre, as we have seen, insisted in his early works that understanding imagination demands that we think of the difference between the “real” and the “irreal,” not as an ontological distinction, but rather in terms of contrasted “intentional” stances towards the one real world. It is an approach to imagination which persists into his later talk of “nothingness” as integral to a deeper understanding of consciousness and of freedom. Free active thinking is directed towards the real in a way which finds its fullest realization in changing or replacing it. “Nothingness” enters the picture here through a deeper understanding of the way imagining apprehends the real. According to Sartre, it “nihilates” the real – not by retreating from it to an inner realm, but by “surpassing” or “transcending” it. Much of the complexity of Sartre’s treatment of the relations between imagination, the real, and the unreal is bypassed in Bottici’s expanded notion of the “imaginal” as incorporating both mental and material images, as well as other forms of symbol. Yet there are some striking similarities between her treatment of the political aspects of imagination and Sartre’s insistence that imagining is a way of relating to “the real world” – a relationship which involves both a grasp of what is possible for that world and an orientation towards changing it. 11.4  Re-reading Sartre Perhaps the most significant thing to emerge from re-reading Sartre in the light of later developments of ideas of “social imaginaries” is the striking way he was able to articulate the interlocking “active” and “passive”

Sartre and Political Imagining  257 dimensions of imagination. Active imagining is the core of his idea of consciousness as spontaneity. At the same time, his treatment of flawed imagining allows us to better understand the oppressive passivities which can impede the free life of the mind – individually and collectively. There are striking convergences to be found between Sartre’s analysis of Flaubert’s preoccupations with “received opinions” and some perceptive analyses offered by Bottici of the processes by which oft-repeated social narratives can become obfuscating “political myths.” In one of her most telling examples, repetitive narratives of “the war on terror” can serve to deaden imagination, while answering to a collective need for meaning. Political mantras can both reflect collective negative emotions of fear and insecurity, while at the same time purporting to allay them.35 The flawed imagination which Sartre articulates – however unfairly – through his figure of “Flaubert” is likewise rendered passive in the face of the circulation of inert, deadened thought. What emerges is that an adequate understanding of imagination demands attention to both its active and its passive aspects – to its connections with both exhilarating freedom and debilitating obfuscation. Many of the “political myths” to which contemporary consciousness is now increasingly susceptible are themselves a product of the ossification, through repetition, of what were once active exercises of imagination. A deeper understanding of the nature of imagination can allow us to see, in the recognition of those obfuscating clichés, opportunities for the fresh exercise of thought. What Sartre called the “spontaneity” of active imagination can bring freedom from the numbing power of “received opinions.” Thus understood, both Flaubert and Sartre can be seen as belonging to a tradition which includes also George Orwell’s demystification of political rhetoric, no less than more recent exercises in bringing to the surface the operations of collective “myths” which continue to deaden our thinking and cloud our judgement. Sartre saw the exercise of active imagination as central to the social importance of literature. That involved seeing beyond individual consciousness to the collectivities that shape and sustain, but also potentially harm, our imagining. At the end of his essay “The Situation of the Writer in 1947,” he observes, “The collectivity passes to reflection and meditation by means of literature; it acquires an unhappy conscience, a lopsided image of itself which it constantly tries to modify and improve.” 36 Words, images, and emotions can come together in the role of literature in a critique of collective self-consciousness. More generally, coming to understand what we have come to be, and what we might yet become, is an exercise of collective imagination. As with other philosophical texts, the exercise of re-reading Sartre in a new context may not readily deliver direct remedies for contemporary conceptual predicaments. Reading him against the background of more recent

258  Genevieve Lloyd philosophy – and more recent political complexities – may well allow us to see inadequacies in his analyses, some of which he could not himself have readily grasped. We should not expect to be able to appropriate his insights ready-made into current situations. Yet the very understanding of the limitations of those insights can bring a deeper understanding of the political ramifications of imagination in our own times, and perhaps allow us to better engage in our own exercises of demystification. Notes 1 Translated as The Imagination: trans. Kenneth Williford and David Rudrauf (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). Subsequent references will use the abbreviation IM. 2 Translated as The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (London and New York: Routledge, 2004) Subsequent references will use the abbreviation IMR. 3 De Beauvoir (1965: 208). 4 Ibid., 208–12. 5 (IM: 53). 6 Ibid., 64. 7 Ibid., 98. 8 Ibid., 113. 9 Ibid., 144. 10 Ibid., 134. 11 Ibid., 133. 12 (IMR: 18–19). 13 Ibid., 20. 14 Ibid., 28. 15 Ibid., 69. 16 Ibid., 98. 17 Ibid., 104. 18 Ibid., 53. 19 Ibid., 167. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 169. 22 Ibid., 186. 23 Ibid., 188. 24 Sartre (1951). 25 Ibid., 627. 26 Ibid., 602–3. 27 As quoted by Sartre, in ibid., 606. 28 Ibid., 627. 29 See Deleuze (1994: 150–53). 30 I discuss Flaubert’s treatment of collective stupidity, and its influence on Deleuze and Derrida, more fully in Lloyd (2018b: Chapters 5 and 7). 31 Sartre (1967: 30–34). 32 See Castoriades (1994: 136–54). 33 Taylor (2004: 25). 34 Bottici (2014).

Sartre and Political Imagining  259 35 I discuss the ramifications of Bottici’s treatment of “political myths” more fully in Lloyd (2018a: 247–263). 36 In Sartre (1965: 291).

References Beauvoir, S. The Prime of Life. Trans. Peter Green. London: Penguin Books. (1965). Bottici, C. Imaginal Politics: Images Beyond Imagination and the Imaginary. New York: Columbia University Press. (2014). Castoriades, C. Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary. In G. Robinson and J. Rundell (eds.), Rethinking Imagination. London and New York: Routledge. (1994). Deleuze, G. Difference and Repetition. Trans. P. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press. (1994). Lloyd, G. The Enlightenment: A Signifier of ‘Western Values’? In G. Boucher & H. Martyn (eds.) Rethinking the Enlightenment: Between History, Philosophy, and Politics, pp. 247–263. London: Lexington Books. (2018a). ———. Reclaiming Wonder: After the Sublime. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. (2018b). Sartre, J.-P. The Imagination. Trans. K. Williford and D. Rudrauf. London and New York: Routledge. (2012). ———. The Imaginary: A phenomenological psychology of the imagination. Trans. J. Webber. London and New York: Routledge. (2004). ———. The Family Idiot: Gustave Flaubert 1821–1857, Vol. 1. Trans. C. Cosman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (1951). ———. Words. Trans. Irene Clephane. London: Penguin books. (1967). ———. The Situation of the Writer in 1947. In What is Literature? Trans. B. Frechtman. New York: Harper Colophon Books. (1965). Taylor, C. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. (2004).

12 Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality in the Critique of Dialectical Reason* Sebastian Gardner

Sartre’s philosophical development poses a puzzle. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre treats intersubjective relations in strictly ahistorical terms and denies the possibility of ethical sociality. Yet in the first volume of the Critique of Dialectical Reason, in 1960, Sartre asserts the reality of collectivity and undertakes a reconstructive defence of Marx, and in the second volume – not completed, but published posthumously in 1985 – he proceeds to affirm man’s ethical fulfilment in the all-comprehending reality of History. Faced with the task of discerning a single intellectual narrative, commentators typically treat the two works as belonging to different projects and concentrate instead on showing how Sartre segues from the one to the other, for which the problem of ethics – Sartre’s acknowledgement of the failure of BN to yield an ethical outlook capable of underpinning his political commitments – provides the obvious connecting term. Typically this is approved as a move away from aprioristic abstraction towards a recognition of concrete realities.1 I will suggest a continuous thread from the earlier to the later work, which has not previously been noted. The standard picture is correct, I will argue, in so far as Sartre does shift to a kind of collectivism, and does move history to centre stage, and the possibility of ethics is key to the change, but the Critique cannot be understood without carrying over the problem of intersubjectivity exposited in BN: the social world which defines its starting point is inherited from BN, and as such it is already problematic. What tends to obscure the continuity of the Critique with BN is the fact that the so-called God-project – to make oneself en-soi-pour-soi – which in BN intersects with the problem of intersubjectivity, fades away in Sartre’s later work. In fact, I will argue, the God-project is not responsible for – it merely aggravates – the *  I am grateful to audiences at the University of Toronto and the Hochschule für Philosophie München for comments on earlier versions of this chapter, which appeared earlier as Sartres Lösung zur Antinomie der sozialen Realität in der Kritik der dialektischen Vernunft, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, Vol. 68, No. 6, 2020, 817-847.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429455919-13

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  261 problem of intersubjectivity, which remains unsolved even when BN’s thesis concerning the metaphysical motivation of the for-itself is abandoned. It may be thought that, issues of Sartre scholarship aside, making the unwieldy and under-shaped Critique dependent on BN will not help to reverse the widely shared negative verdict on the work. I accept that, if Marxism requires turning classical German philosophy on its head, then the Critique fails the test – BN is cast in the mould of idealism, and so too is Sartre’s construal of Marx – but since the antecedent is wide open to challenge, this as such is not an objection.2 As regards the political significance of the Critique, I will suggest that Sartre offers grounds for accepting some theory of history with implications equivalent to those of Marxism, though vindication of Marx’s specific theses – for example, that social classes exist and stand in conflict by virtue of their relation to the process of production, that capitalism involves expropriation of the product of labour – goes beyond my concerns here, which are limited to the claim that the Critique contains an original, intriguing proposal concerning one deep source of the problems of political life, which lies, if Sartre is right, in the nature of social ontology. The philosophy of social theory is occupied largely with issues of methodology: individualism vs. holism, positivism vs. hermeneutics, rational choice theory vs. functionalism, etc. But social reality also poses a pure metaphysical puzzle in its own right, which consists simply in the fact that in one respect or in some sense the social world is determined by and dependent on how we conceive it, while in another it is independent of our conception, hence the familiar conundrum concerning the extent to which our conceptualization of the social world is either a reflection of social fact or alternatively an active creation of it, if only through complicity. Analytic philosophical engagement with the metaphysical puzzle proceeds often as if it can be resolved either by conceptual analysis or by attention to the proper form of social explanation. Sartre by contrast claims that ontology has priority over methodology: what it is to explain a social phenomenon can be determined only if we have understood what it is for something to be a social object. But – and here is the problem – Sartre denies that the metaphysical puzzle can be dissolved; indeed, he uses the word metaphysical to refer to an ontological structure which is contingent, irreducible, and aporetic.3 He allows that we can discriminate social reality from other ontological spheres, and point to the sources of the social world in pre-social consciousness, but these sources themselves have systematically limited intelligibility, which social reality reproduces in magnified form. The reason we cannot make the social world transparent is thus not that more conscientious conceptual analysis is needed, or better knowledge of causal relations, but that social objects are in a special sense, as Sartre puts it, “irrational.”4 The same incoherence reappears in knowledge of the social world: Because their mode of existence has only limited intelligibility, we

262  Sebastian Gardner cannot form a fully coherent concept of what it is to know social facts. Sartre’s undertaking to define “dialectical reason” afresh is designed to shape a new methodology around this ontological problem.5 The “progressive-regressive” method which he develops in the Critique has conscious similarity with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: Social knowledge involves a kind of continual aspect-switching whereby theoretical reflection alternates between granting and denying the independent reality of social objects, treating them on the one hand as a subsistent second nature and on the other as a species of fiction. This bifocal vision allows the genesis, structure, and implications of social reality to be traced, but according to Sartre it leaves its essentially problematic mode of being untouched. Herein lies the difference from Hegel. What follows does not begin to engage with the main body of the Critique. It is concerned only with certain of its foundational elements. My aim is to show, first, its continuity with BN and, second, the originality of Sartre’s diagnosis of the source of social and political ills. If the Critique is to be evaluated in its own terms, we must begin by saying what is at stake in it. 12.1 Sartre’s Critique in Being and Nothingness of Hegel’s Intersubjective Optimism The Phenomenology of Spirit asserts that individual self-consciousness finds its truth and achieves self-certainty in intersubjective relations as such: that is, not on account of their contingent content or character, but by virtue of what it is to be truly related-to-another: Self-consciousness attains its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.6 Differently formulated, self-consciousness finds fulfilment in consciousness of itself as belonging to the new whole which supervenes when a plurality of I’s come to think of itself as a We. Other accounts of Chapter IV of the Phenomenology are of course possible, but this was the reading of Kojève’s that set the agenda for a generation of French philosophers. The claim itself, and Hegel’s argument for it, including his view of the historical conditions required for its Wirklichkeit, raise many interpretative questions, but it is generally supposed that Hegel is advancing a thesis concerning the importance of intersubjectivity which he supposes not to be found in any earlier thinker, including his post-Kantian contemporaries. Sartre takes the thesis very seriously, but he thinks Hegel’s case for it fails, and that its failure has high importance, because it leads us to recognize, first, that intersubjectivity poses a problem without an a priori solution, and, second, that the absence of an a priori ground of intersubjective satisfaction – a guarantee that the Other is congruent with my selfconsciousness in a way that ensures the purposiveness (for me) of intersubjective relations – is the positive discovery of a negative state of affairs.

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  263 In the most abbreviated terms, Sartre’s argument is that Hegel has two routes to intersubjectivism, one through the Phenomenology and the other through the Logic.7 The first fails, and the second implicitly presupposes the first, so the second fails too. What the Phenomenology aims to show is that the self-relation which fails to give satisfaction in the shape of Desire and relation to Nature, comes to be fulfilled in intersubjective recognition. Sartre alleges a dilemma: either the self-relation was available to the subject beforehand, or it was not. If it was, then recognition is not needed, and re-routing the circuit of selfness through the Other, to the extent that this is possible, will simply obscure it. If instead the self-relation was unavailable to the subject beforehand, then it is impossible to understand how entering into relation with the Other – which Hegel accepts must be a movement executed by self-consciousness, not a condition imposed upon it – can produce it: the Other cannot endow the entity which enters into intersubjectivity with a selfhood it never had. So Hegel must appeal to the Logic. But (Sartre’s objection goes) whatever the movement of pure thought may be, it is necessary, in order for me to allow myself to be subsumed under the Logic, that I be reassured in advance that putting myself at the disposal of pure thought does not jeopardize the purposiveness of my self-consciousness. And this reassurance, of the purposiveness of being logically incorporated, corresponds to the transition to intersubjective wholeness which the Phenomenology failed to provide. So the Logic yields only a conditional – if I identify myself as a logical moment (etc.), then recognition is possible and necessary (etc.) – the antecedent of which remains problematic.8 On Sartre’s account, it is not a matter of indifference that Hegel’s teleological derivation fails, for there is nothing between success and failure: relations to others cannot be regarded as teleologically neutral, as if Hegel’s shortfall left matters as they were before, and the value of intersubjective relations could be determined by the particular contingent relations that subjects may institute. The missing a priori bond with the Other becomes one of Sartre’s metaphysical négatités: One of the nothingnesses, like the non-existence of God, that present us with a positive absence; there ought to be an internal teleological relation of self to other, and its absence gives a positive shape to intersubjective consciousness. Sartre’s claim, then, is that although Hegel articulates correctly a commitment of natural consciousness – inevitably, we turn to the Other in pursuit of satisfaction and self-certainty – there are structural reasons why it cannot succeed, and why the project of intersubjective existence, for all that has yet been seen, must fail. There is a deep connection of Sartre’s critique of Hegel with his solution to the pure epistemological problem concerning knowledge of other minds. Spelling it out will make clearer the teleological difficulty that Sartre sees in intersubjectivity.

264  Sebastian Gardner What finally allows us to cross the “reef of solipsism” on which realism and idealism flounder, Sartre claims, is the fact that “something like a cogito” applies to the Other’s existence9: “[T]he slightly expanded cogito [le cogito un peu élargi] […] reveals as a fact the Other’s existence to [me]”10 “the cogito of the Other’s existence merges with [se confond avec] my own cogito.”11 Certain particular consciousnesses, in which I am subjected to the Look of the Other, such as shame in Sartre’s famous keyhole scenario, “bear witness to the cogito both of themselves and of the Other’s existence, indubitably.”12 Awareness of the Other “participates in the apodicticity of the cogito itself.”13 In so far as the Other is known in this pre-reflective mode, it is grasped as a bare “other subject,” and as such, it is simply that which stands in a negative relation to my freedom in symmetry with the way in which a thing in space stands in a negative relation to my apperceptive consciousness (viz., as simply Not-I, possessing an independent reality which must somehow cohere my own). Now, whereas in the context of perception, I must have already situated myself within a unitary spatial matrix (as a geometrical point if not as a body) in order to cognize an external object as “over there,” on Sartre’s account there is no analogous background space within which my freedom, and that of the Other, are given as co-located and coordinated. (The mere physical space that contains our respective bodies cannot, of course, play this role.) Thus when I cognize the Other, I do not know what it is for my self-consciousness to be “with” or “alongside” another – the right preposition is missing – or what defines the nature of the “space” that contains us both.14 Charles Taylor puts this well by saying that social space needs to be (in Kant’s sense) schematized in order that we be able to orientate ourselves within it.15 Sartre thus reinstates the distinction that Hegel’s dialectic overruns, between the second person and collective We-consciousness: the encounter with the singular Other is privileged; and because it is not sublated, the second person never gets to be absorbed into a comprehensive “We.” Sartre accordingly treats collective consciousness in BN as a subsidiary and incomplete formation, contra Hegel: There is a plurality, but no totality of self-consciousnesses. The absence of totality is another metaphysical fact, a positively experienced absence – a “detotalized totality.”16 Sartre admits the “We” as an ontological structure, as opposed to a mere psychological content, but only in its accusative, object form, and therefore once again as an irreality, formed by synthesizing the “outsides” of various for-itselves. The presence of a witness is what makes this We-as-object possible: the third person allows “I am fighting him, and he is fighting me” to be converted into the single reciprocal project, “They (We) are engaged in combat [with one another].”17 Because the object-We presupposes another portion

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  265 of humanity able to collect the I and the Other(s) into a single compound object, it cannot be extended to humanity as such: We are only we in the eyes of the others, and it is on the basis of our being looked at by others that we can affirm ourselves as we. But this implies that an abstract and unrealizable project of the for-itself might exist, aiming at an absolute totalization of himself and all others. This attempt to recuperate the human totality cannot take place without the existence of a third party – distinct, by definition, from humanity – in whose eyes humanity is in its entirety an object. […] This concept is none other than that of the looking-being who can never be looked at, i.e. the idea of God. […T]his humanist “we” remains an empty concept. […W]henever we use the term we in this sense (to refer to a suffering humanity, a transgressing humanity, or to establish an objective meaning of History) […] we are confined to pointing towards a particular experience to be undergone in the presence of the absolute third person. [… T]he limiting concept of humanity (as the totality of the we-object) and the limiting concept of God each imply and are correlative to the other.18 The idea of humanity as a We which Sartre rejects here is, we will see, reinstated in the Critique. 12.2 Irrealizing Consciousness and the Formation of the Psyche Critics have objected that Sartre misunderstands Hegel, or begs the question, and that his critique in any case overshoots the mark, for if Sartre is right, then there cannot be a social world in any sense that goes beyond the contingent empirical distribution of causal powers that Sartre brings under the category of “facticity” – which suffices only for sociality in the sense of a system of instrumental paths through the world, a mere equivalent in the realm of human beings of physical geography. Sartre does have in BN an account of how there comes to be a social world in a stronger sense, though it is indeed one which hovers between being and seeming. To see what underpins it, it is necessary to go back to his earlier writings. In L’Imaginaire (1940), Sartre describes imagination as unanalysable, non-explicable, irreducible, sui generis.19 This does not, however, save it from paradox. The paradox arises because, though we can distinguish imagining from other forms of consciousness, it can be understood only in terms of its neighbours, from which it borrows incompatible features – namely, perception on the one side, and thought on the other. Imagination

266  Sebastian Gardner needs to be both, and to the extent that it is the one, it cannot be the other. The combination is not a confusion on the part of the mind itself, as if consciousness did not know what it is doing. Rather it is how it understands itself in so far as it engages in imaginative activity, in conformity with Sartre’s general requirement that the mind always be theorized as it is-for-itself. This leads directly to the paradox, which can be stated preliminarily in several ways: an object which is absent must be taken as present; a nothingness, a no-thing, must be taken as a something, and vice versa; and the very same thing which is posited as outer must be apprehended as also inner, such that consciousness looks out onto the imagined object, as if onto the world, while also retaining the immunity to error that distinguishes self-consciousness.20 The synthesis which imagination presupposes of representational purport with absolute self-evidence “results in the paradoxical consequence that the object is present for us externally and internally at the same time”:21 imagination means to “deliver” the object at the level of intuition in a way that a sign or linguistic item cannot, but without the hazard of exposure to the real.22 The object of my imagining is consequently open only to what Sartre calls “quasi-observation”:23 it stands midway between objects of thought, which cannot be observed, and perceptual objects, which allow observation because they possess an infinity of features constantly overflowing consciousness. The image exhibits an “essential poverty,”24 for I can never discover in it more than I put into it. What sets the seal of paradox is that, while presenting itself to itself as “a spontaneity which produces and holds on to the object as an image,” and therefore knows itself to be creative, it does not thematize this “creative character.”25 The act of imagination is consequently “magical,” an “incantation destined to make the object of one’s thought” present to me.26 And yet, though it presupposes magic, which is impossible, imagination itself is a reality, for there are truths and falsehoods concerning what one imagines.27 These paradoxes can be avoided by assimilating imagination to either an act of conceiving or an act of perception – reducing it either to an indistinct thought or to a literal picture in the mind. But these rationalist and empiricist accounts are self-defeating since they erase the opposition of the real and the unreal which imaginative consciousness employs to define itself. The paradoxical doubling-up within irrealizing consciousness mirrors the metaphysical problem of social reality, but to draw the connection closer, two sub-forms of imagining must be considered. Under discussion so far has been imagination in its everyday voluntary form – deliberate imaging of visual objects in wakeful consciousness – but imagination of course more often takes a multitude of involuntary forms, including the hypnagogic imagery that precedes sleep, dream, and hallucination. Here we need to speak of consciousness as at a minimum subject

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  267 to fascination and, at the maximum, as self-imprisoning.28 Sartre notes that, even in the weaker hypnagogic case, a kind of complicity or collusion of reflection is discovered: “to maintain the integrity of the primary consciousnesses, the reflective consciousnesses must […] partake of their illusions, posit the objects they posit, follow them into captivity […] a certain indulgence is necessary on my part.”29 And in a dream or full-strength hallucination the power of reflection to shake off the captivation vanishes: “[H]ere thought is chained, and cannot move back on itself.”30 This, then, is an intensified form of the earlier paradox of imagination’s disavowal of its own creativity: though involuntary, it remains essentially a work of intention and spontaneity.31 If it is asked how dreams gain the power of conviction – how the mode and object of consciousness can be believed to be both real and unreal – Sartre’s answer is that an entire sub-structure of selfhood forms around the imagined: unreal objects are posited in a space and time which is not that of reality, rather it is an analogue of the real world. And belief is incorporated within this structure, in which I also, therefore, irrealize myself.32 This last point takes us to the second sub-form of imagination, which is a special case of the first. Sartre locates imagination at the level of intuition, but he breaks the connection with the sensory on which classical theories concentrate; hence, it is properly defined as the irrealizing mode of consciousness.33 Now equally open to irrealization is consciousness itself, and his claim is that the entire realm of (as it is ordinarily called) the mental or the psychological presupposes this operation. Sartre reserves the term psychique for mental states and psychological qualities – dispositions, tendencies, personal characteristics, and so on – in so far as they have been derived from consciousness by irrealization.34 It is by this means, which is of course no more voluntary than it is a matter of theoretical inference, that we can come to take ourselves as possessing a “psychology” or psyché. The idea is put most clearly in The Transcendence of the Ego: [T]he Ego is […] a virtual locus of unity, and consciousness constitutes it as going in the reverse direction from that of real production: what is really first is consciousnesses, through which are constituted states [états], then, through these, the Ego. But, as the order is reversed by a consciousness that imprisons itself in the World in order to flee from itself, consciousnesses are given as emanating from states, and states as produced by the Ego. As a consequence, consciousness projects its own spontaneity into the object Ego so as to confer on it the creative power that is absolutely necessary to it. However, this spontaneity, represented and hypostatized in an object, becomes a bastard, degenerate spontaneity, which magically preserves its creative potentiality while becoming passive. […] We are thus surrounded by magical objects which retain, as

268  Sebastian Gardner it were, a memory of the spontaneity of consciousness, while still being objects of the world. That is why man is always a sorcerer for man. Indeed, this poetic link between two passivities, one of which creates the other spontaneously, is the very basis of sorcery: it is the deep sense of “participation.” That is also why we are sorcerers for ourselves, each time that we consider our Me [Moi].35 Psychic states conserve the original paradoxicality of imagination – again, they seek to make an absence present, for consciousness as néant is an absence – but raise it to a yet higher level.36 Whereas the use of imagination in representing real things, hallucinating, dreaming, and so on, yields an object with a double, contradictory claim to reality and ideality, its objects do not pretend to also have a share in consciousness: But in the psychic, there is a positing (once again, in a single act) of consciousness as unreal, and a corresponding positing of an unreal object as invested with consciousness.37 Is it credible on any but the most dogmatically Cartesian assumptions that consciousness exhausts psychological reality and personhood? We have not however yet seen Sartre’s full account. Although the projection of self-consciousness into personality – the degradation of the Je into a Moi, as it is put in TE – is formed through irrealization, it is not necessarily a dead-end in the manner of images and dreams, for psychic states, unlike dreams, can be understood as claims to be redeemed: they purport to have the reality of consciousness, so it remains to be seen whether, and under what conditions, they may be taken as having Wirklichkeit – that is, as bearing out the consciousness which they objectify. The elements of my personality (my “courage,” “cowardice,” etc.) are things that I have to live up to (or live down). How might this be done? Finally, we arrive at the connection with social ontology. We cannot comport ourselves towards mental images and dreams as if they were real, because they are formed precisely by removing consciousness from the world. But the psychic travels in the opposite direction: it is consciousness making itself worldly, rather than consciousness retreating from it. In the doubling-up of the self which results from the redirection of the power of irrealization towards oneself, a nascent intersubjectivity is introduced: “[W]e are sorcerers for ourselves.” But for as long as I remain the sole witness of my psyche, the purported reality of my psychic states and qualities will perpetually collapse back into my selfconsciousness; my every attempt to count them into my facticity, to make them part of my “situation,” will dissolve on scrutiny into a question of freedom. (“Do I really love Albertine?,” will become: “Shall I love Albertine?” Or: “Shall I comport myself towards Albertine in accordance with the Idea of love?”38)

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  269 And now we see how the problem of imagination in its reflexive form, and the problem of intersubjectivity, promise to solve one another. What is needed in order to relate intelligibly to the Other, is a shared plane or common world, and what I need in order to relate intelligibly to my self, is an assurance that my self-consciousness has objective reality. Neither provides the basis for a solution to the theoretical, metaphysical, problem posed by the other, but jointly they make possible a new project, based on the anticipation that the nascent doubling of the self in the psychic can be rationalized by mapping it onto the duality of self and Other: If the I cannot succeed in being real for-itself, then perhaps it may do so by being real-for-the-Other. Sartre concludes the chapter on the psyche as follows: This world, a virtual presence, is the psychological world, or psychē. In one sense, its existence is purely ideal; in another, it is – since it is-been, since it is disclosed in consciousness; it is “my shadow”, what is disclosed to me when I want to see myself […] Here we find the first draft of an “outside”; the for-itself sees itself almost conferring an “outside” on itself, in its own eyes; but this “outside” is purely virtual. Later on we will see how being-for-the-Other actualizes the first draft of this “outside”.39 12.3 The Antinomy of Social Reality: Sartre, Rousseau, and Jamesian Indeterminacy Man’s first attempt to confer an outside on himself – his only attempt to date – has succeeded in actualizing a common objective sphere, but it has not yielded real relations between free self-consciousnesses. Intersubjective space has been schematized, in so far as it is populated by objects whose ontological status is defined by the intersection of my self-relation with my relation-to-the-Other. The notion of an item that is real-for-me-and-realfor-you is not contradictory. But the social world is a teleological failure, and this is attributable to the fact that the materials out of which it has been fabricated – the psychic, elements of would-be enduring personality put into intersubjective circulation – continue to bear the stamp of the imaginary, whence stems the necessary tendency of social reality to extrude freedom, and of social causality to exhibit a magical character (again: “man is a sorcerer for man”).40 The antinomy consists, therefore, in opposition of (1) what is posited as real (the thesis of the antinomy, in which social objects are defined by their telos), to (2) the inherent irreality of what is posited (the antithesis, in which social objects are defined by their genesis). My aim in this section is to make clear the reasons why candidates for social reality fall short of the mark, meaning that the social world will tend to a victory for the

270  Sebastian Gardner antithesis, and why resolving the antinomy therefore requires the origins of social objects in irreality to be shaken off, allowing the thesis to prevail. Sartre’s conception of political action in the immediate post-war years can fairly be described as moralistic: it asserts freedom against social reality as a whole but not within it, and as such it cannot raise up one (dominated, oppressed) portion of the social world against another. What is immediately problematic – and precipitates Sartre’s change of outlook – is Sartre’s realization that not even the solitary goodwill is possible: in the first place, because the dispersal of power, the instrumental organization of the social world, affords no standpoint from which freedom as such, the universal, can be willed (I have no access to a practical field that does not privilege one freedom at the expense of another); and more profoundly, because the for-itself, which draws the materials of its self-thinking from the social world, cannot fail to internalize the inverse ratios of one freedom to another to which the social world has lent objectivity. Sartre describes the impasse in What Is Literature? (1948): If the city of ends remains an insipid abstraction, it is because it is not realizable without an objective modification of the historical situation. Kant, I believe, saw this very well: but sometimes he counted on a purely subjective transformation of the moral subject and at other times he despaired of ever meeting a good will on this earth. [T]he purely formal intention of treating men as ends […] reveal[s] itself to be futile in practice since the fundamental structures of our society are still oppressive. Such is the present paradox of ethics: if I am absorbed in treating a few chosen persons as absolute ends – my wife, my son, my friends, the needy person I happen to come across – if I am bent on fulfilling all my duties towards them, I will spend my life doing so; I will be led to pass over in silence the injustices of the age, the class struggle, colonialism, Anti-Semitism, etc., and, finally, to take advantage of oppression in order to do good. As elsewhere, the former will be rediscovered in person to person relationships and, more subtly, in my very intentions; the good that I try to do will be vitiated at the roots, it will be turned into radical evil.41 Intersubjectivity would therefore seem as much of a blind alley as imagination: the social world is merely the psyche writ large, with an additional shell of alienation formed around it, in so far as my “first draft” of an outside has been repeatedly redrafted by Others, and become the outside of an outside. The conclusion that intersubjectivity is impossible and social reality an evil, bizarre as it may sound, is foreshadowed in Rousseau. His Second Discourse poses the question: “Must we destroy societies and return to live

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  271 in the forests with bears?”42 That it must, was not, in 1754, Rousseau’s own conclusion, but rather that which, he maintains, his opponents are obliged in all consistency to draw. His own conviction that man is naturally good allows him to avoid it.43 It is not easy to identify the exact nub of Rousseau’s case against society or the basis on which he supposes social evil to be avoidable in principle by means of the social contract, but it is clear that he locates the source of the problem somehow in ill-formed relations of dependence in civil society, where these are a function of (i) the very logic of collective existence, in alliance with (ii) the corruption of social objects by political and civic institutions (including the arts and sciences, the target of his First Discourse). Rousseau seems to say that the one runs into the other: competing claims of self-interest interact with axiological illusions, converting conflict over material resources into an inherently self-defeating competition for nonmaterial markers of value (honour, prestige, etc.). This assertion of a necessary connection of the bulk of non-natural evils suffered by human beings with the logic of intersubjectivity, such that the very structure of social life expels the Good and requires one to exile oneself, makes the challenge posed by Rousseau’s amour propre more than a restatement of the outlook of the ancient Cynics or an exercise in French moralizing. And a quarter-century later, in Reveries of a Solitary Walker, Rousseau reports the destruction of society as having proved exactly necessary in his own case: Alone for the rest of my life, since it is only in myself that I find consolation, hope and peace of mind, my only remaining duty is towards myself and this is all I desire. […] No longer able to do good which does not turn to evil, no longer able to act without harming others or myself, my only duty now is to abstain, and this I do with all my heart. […] These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day when I am completely myself and my own master.44 Rousseau’s self-justification – in terms of the impossibility of doing good which does not turn to evil – is also, as we saw, a crux for Sartre. As noted, Rousseau’s diagnosis has two aspects. One identifies the threat posed by sociality in its aggravation of the preference for self-interest over the Good.45 The other concerns illusion: “It now became the interest of men to appear what they really were not. To be and to seem became two totally different things.”46 Sartre takes this other aspect a step further: He supposes that, though amour propre may begin in egoism, in the end, individuals do not know what constitutes self-interest. They cannot do so, because the medium in which they pursue their interests, the currency they employ, is as Rousseau says inherently illusory: Sorcery may enable me to act on the Other by magical means, but it also entails that what counts as

272  Sebastian Gardner truly “me,” and therefore what counts as (in) my interest, slips out of my grasp. Yet again: “[W]e are sorcerers for ourselves.” That this is properly also an issue for Hegelians has been argued by Robert Pippin. The problem, as Pippin conceives it, concerns the insufficient axiological or normative determinacy of interpersonal relationships in late modern intersubjectivity.47 Whether or not Sartre’s diagnosis of the problem as having an “ontological” source is Hegelian, his characterization of the problem matches well enough what Hegelians may consider a distinctive late modern social pathology: the formation of a novel species of Unhappy Consciousness, where confrontation with the Other casts us into a directionless floating world – the eerily elevated, self-perplexing world of Henry James’s figures in their unending reflective interrogations of themselves and one another. Combining James with Rousseau yields a recognizably Sartrean product. The problem for James’s characters is the converse of Rousseau’s – too little rather than too much determinacy. On Sartre’s account, these are two sides of the same coin: the attribution of characteristics to persons and their actions has a see-saw effect, whereby attempts to fill in the blank (what is she really like? what did he really mean by that?) overshoot the mark, and the attempt to correct what reveals itself to be exaggerated determinacy leads back to something insufficiently determinate. Diderot’s Le Neveu de Rameau is the preeminent description of this condition of mind and social life, in which Rousseauian fake determinacy and Jamesian indefiniteness constitute the two poles between which self- and otherconsciousness, self- and other-ascription, oscillate at high speed. Why should there be this slack between action and being – why are persons short of qualities? Sartre’s answer, that the wrong sort of thing is being asked for, has plausibility. If determinacy always comes in the wrong quantity – there is either too much of it or too little – then there must be something wrong with the unit of measure, something amiss with the conception of what counts as determinacy, a flaw in the currency which undermines the confidence of depositors. And yet this is the material out of which social reality is constructed – we have no concept of an alternative “stuff” out of which it might be made. That the problem presents itself also in a Hegelian perspective, as Pippin argues, counts in favour of Sartre’s diagnosis. 12.4 The Critique of Dialectical Reason: Sartre’s Idea for a Universal History The task, then, is to find a basis for thinking Kant’s goodwill, Rousseau’s volonté générale, and determinate Hegelian recognition, possible, these being in Sartre’s terms different ways of specifying the task of establishing free human relations as “constellations of reciprocity.”48 And this will

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  273 require philosophical assumptions not provided in BN, whether or not they are consistent with it. Needed in the first instance is a theory of the constitution of the social world, which will explain how the historical situation comes to be such as to require an “objective modification,” and what sort of modification is required. The Critique attempts accordingly to show how the social world is built up layer by layer. At its base now stands what Sartre calls the “practico-inert”: synthetic unities of matter and practice, consisting of tools, signs, means of communication, and other objects defined by their impersonal significance, that is, their value for anyone-and-everyone occupied in the relevant praxis. This allows the for-itself to be thought of as having deposited or invested itself in the thinghood of being-in-itself and the praxes correlated with it. This investment, Sartre asserts, must be understood realistically, as a genuine externalization of being-for-itself, and not as a mere imaginary endowment, a merely projected meaning. This constitutes a potentially far-reaching advance beyond the social realm of BN: if the practico-inert constitutes the objective reality of collective beingfor-itself, then a fundamental necessary (albeit insufficient) condition for the notion of objective historical development has been secured.49 What is the basis of this new outlook? Sartre cannot, of course, allow it to rest on either absolute idealism or dialectical materialism. The argument of the Critique begins accordingly with a transcendental account of the conditions of a social world, intended to provide the basis for a reaffirmation, on new grounds and in modified form, of Hegel’s claim that human history achieves teleological totality (“History”), and of Marx’s claim that it consists in a process of material production. Three transcendental claims hold the key. The first inserts individual subjectivity into the “We,” the second into matter, and the third into History. Jointly, therefore, they install the for-itself in a practico-inert exhibiting purposive historical development. (1) The first is an argument beginning with a concrete scenario of a kind with BN’s keyhole/shame cogito-of-the-Other, but which concludes instead with my discovery of the reality of the “We”:50 From my window, I can see a road-mender on the road and a gardener working in a garden. Between them there is a wall with bits of broken glass on top protecting the bourgeois property where the gardener is working. Thus they have no knowledge at all of each other’s presence; absorbed as they are in their work, neither of them even bothers to wonder whether there is anybody on the other side. Meanwhile, I can see them without being seen.51 In my capacity as the third, I set the two workers in reciprocity, more exactly, I see that they are already set in reciprocity. The “objective

274  Sebastian Gardner envelopes” which define their practices, and in which they objectify themselves, are different aspects of a single practico-inert, to which they, and I, are related in manifold ways. Thus a unity is revealed to me, in which I am included, and which therefore cannot merely exist for me. Although it is indeed I who, as Sartre puts it, constitute the workers in their “reciprocity of ignorance” – they are “ignorant of one another through me” – this is true only on the condition “that I become what I am through them”: the relation of reciprocity which has been established in my perceptual field “transcends my perception,” and makes me “a real and objective mediation” between the workers. I comprehend myself accordingly as given within a non-egocentric unity.52 This “We” is relatively minimal – it does not have the overt collective character of a group – but it is not given as a mere natural fact, since the plane on which the workers are set is also that of my freedom. Nor does it rest on the quasi-logical necessity envisaged (Sartre supposes) in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Hence its transcendentality. We may compare this scenario with an example Sartre uses in BN to explain his grounds for denying the reality of the We-as-subject. As a theatregoer, I am engrossed by an imaginary object, the performance on stage. It is true that I have a “lateral” consciousness of fellow members of the audience, but this involves no more positive consciousness of a “We” than I have in my anonymous capacity as the user of a tool.53 In the Critique’s window scenario, by contrast, the world which I spectate is also my own world: though at the moment I am engaged in mere contemplation, I belong on the same plane as the workers; they define me as of another social class, a bourgeois intellectual. It is therefore as if, in terms of BN’s theatre scenario, the drama had come to embrace the theatre’s auditorium: through my being a spectator, I find myself also numbered among the cast on stage. Now it is true that, watching from the window, I am not logically required to conceptualize what I see in terms of triadic reciprocity since I have the option of describing what is given to me simply as my perception of a plurality-of-workers – that is, of constituting the Others as merely a compound object-for-me. But I am not compelled to accept this conceptualization, and if I do decline the richer, then I can be regarded as having elected to avert my gaze from the reality of the collective – that is, as having decided to reduce the social world to a mere spectacle from which I have, à la Rousseau, chosen to exile myself.54 This argument, far from being discontinuous with BN, pursues to the limit its logic of failure. What can now be seen is that there was from the beginning an error in my project of being-for-the-Other, for when I employed the Other to solve my problem of unifying my transcendence with my facticity, I made implicit use of the assumption that the Other’s selfrelation is not similarly problematic (since a witness who is in doubt of

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  275 their own reality cannot be adduced to attest in favour of my reality). But this assumption was ungrounded, since the Other was not given to me as unified with their facticity; in fact, I knew them to lack such unity. And this elision of the true symmetry of self and other – my motivated “forgetting” that the Other shares my own predicament – recapitulated another, even more basic, equally erroneous assumption of asymmetry: in order for my cogito-of-the-Other to open up for me the new realm of intersubjectivity, I needed to assume that the Other is able to cognize me as a subject – that is, that she possesses antecedently the kind of cognition of me that I was unable, before experiencing her Look, to have of her. The social world constructed in BN rested, therefore, on incoherent assumptions: in order to accede to intersubjectivity, and embark on the project of being-for-the-Other, I needed to credit the Other with a cognitive power and ontological status asymmetrical with my own. Exposure of the incoherence of this asymmetry is the logical basis for the advance to the “We” in the Critique.55 (2) The basis of the materiality of the “I” which Sartre now affirms in the Critique categorically cannot be that he has now decided that human subjects are fundamentally natural beings and only secondarily being-foritself.56 The change of outlook is more complex. In BN, the for-itself’s original self-apprehension was simply the pure metaphysical event (“surgissement”) of finding oneself as a for-itself confronted by the in-itself. Sartre’s claim in the Critique is that the subject, while continuing to understand itself a priori as an upsurge of freedom, also understands itself a priori as materially necessitated by scarcity to engage in production, and thus to occupy a position in collective praxis.57 The second necessity is subordinated to the first: scarcity operates exclusively through consciousness of need;58 hence, human production falls under no natural law or compulsion. In BN, facticity consisted merely in imposing contingent meanings on the tabula rasa of the in-itself, but in the Critique, the in-itself has an a priori form: Nature is encountered as “worked” in one way or another, and this working-on-Nature has its source in being-for-itself’s having-to-conserve its material existence in the face of scarcity.59 Human reality has therefore not been naturalized. The ontological and ethical problems of BN are not as yet disposed of, and no natural law guarantees that they will be, but the possibility of a solution is discernible. The exterior of the for-itself, which in BN could not get beyond a kind of fictionality, has acquired an objective anchor:60 if I am committed a priori to occupy some-or-other determinate position in the productive process, then, although I may relate practically to this position in different ways – I may embrace or contest it – the determinacy is not inherently alien to my freedom. In this sense, I now find myself precommitted to taking responsibility for my socio-historical embedding.61

276  Sebastian Gardner (3) The third transcendental necessity is that the practico-inert should have a historical meaning.62 Sartre’s thesis here is that a targeting of human totality is implicit in collective practice. Praxis encounters limits to its power, but it cannot cease striving to push these back, and this Trieb (as Fichte would call it) within each human act – which projects an end-point at which all natural frontiers have been overcome and all social antagonisms resolved – is immanent in praxis: it “qualifies praxis-process within its very interiority.”63 History is totalizing, for “there is a totalization of struggle as such,” and its dialectical comprehensibility is guaranteed by the necessity that it be “possible through investigation to grasp the individuals or groups in struggle as de facto collaborating in a common task,” which is “perpetually given.”64 The task is of course not known by historical agents under this description,65 but it is necessitated by the dynamic of the One and Many which is implied by the relation of the I to the We.66 Thus even if historical study reveals some struggle as “refractory” to totalization – that is, any given attempt to write the history of such-and-such may fail to disclose a purpose within it – it remains true that every struggle “is the incarnation of all others,” and as such, it implies the necessity of their all being overcome.67 The Critique’s revision of Marx – which Sartre reports as an amplification, though really it is a correction – demonstrates that features which Marx takes to be specific to capitalism derive from sociality per se: social existence contains the possibility of the irrationality and inhumanity which Marx regards as distinctive of capitalist society. Marx explained the material conditions for the appearance of capital, a social force which ultimately imposes itself on individuals as anti-social. But our concern is to carry out a concrete investigation of the general, dialectical conditions which produce a determinate inversion in the relations of man and matter as a moment of the overall process; and which produce, within that determinate moment, through the praxis of Others, and through his own praxis as Other, the domination of man by matter (by this particular already-worked matter) and the domination of matter by man. It is within this complex of dialectical relations that the possibility of the capitalist process constitutes itself as one of the possible historical moments of alienation.68 The negation of man by materiality entails that “alienation becomes the rule of objectification in a historical society,” but by making this negativity “the implicit motive force of the historical dialectic,” we are equipped to understand the possibility of classes and capitalist production and able to make history intelligible: “[T]he possibility of these social relations becoming contradictory is itself due to an inert and material negation

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  277 re-interiorised by man.”69 The negation of man by matter is translated into the negation of man by man – that is, relations of domination, but this can take place only because the medium of sociality is quasi-fictive. It is therefore not the “economic factor” which is decisive, as Marx believes: The real action takes place, not in the development of the productive forces and corresponding relations of production, but in their uptake and transformation in the extra-economic dimension of subjectivity. The transcendental social theory with which Sartre began, absent from Marx, restores continuity between the analysis of capitalism and general socio-historical theory. So we begin to see how being-for-itself, which in the early Sartre is always defeated at the end of the day by being-in-itself, can hope to avoid a tragic outcome. The task identified in the Critique is extended to infinity in the sense that Nature or the in-itself will never be absolutely transcended, and the plurality of self-consciousnesses will never fuse into a single universal self-consciousness in Hegel’s sense.70 But nothing stands in the way of supposing that collective historical development may at least succeed in eradicating the structures of domination which are inscribed in the practico-inert since this end is implicitly constitutive of all praxis. Once again, nothing can ensure the goodwill,71 but if History can be realized at least to the extent of eliminating the resistance to freedom and invitation to domination inhering in the practico-inert, then an individual who chooses to negate freedom will no longer be simply following the contours of social reality.72 The third claim in particular will raise doubts. A puzzle is unquestionably posed by Sartre’s insistence that knowledge of History must have “all the marks of apodictic certainty,”73 and that Engels’ materialism is crippled by its failure to yield more than an appearance of empirical truth.74 What exactly does Sartre hope to show? Mere conceptual possibility is obviously too little, but certainty of future actuality would be equivalent on the face of it to knowledge of historical inevitability; and this would seem to make it a matter of theoretical cognition, resolving historical development into the sphere of the merely “factical” and returning us to the anti-humanistic determinism of Engels’ Anti-Dühring. At a minimum, Sartre may be read as aiming to secure what Kant calls practical faith, moral certainty that hope of the Good is sufficiently grounded in social reality.75 But there is more to the argument of the Critique, which does not claim to be pure transcendental theory. What Sartre extracts from transcendental reflection at the outset is strictly speaking only a conjecture. His strong speculative thesis in the philosophy of history, which the Critique’s transcendental social theory sponsors but cannot confirm, presupposes the additional application of the progressive-regressive method – elaborated in a series of case histories, ranging from LévyStrauss on the potlach, to the Reformation and peasant’s revolt, the French

278  Sebastian Gardner Revolution, and Soviet Russia (to cite but a few). It is on this basis that Sartre seeks to demonstrate the actual tendency of all praxis to realize History. The indispensability of historical detail to his argument is reflected in the sheer scale and detail of the work.76 The method involves a double characterization of moments in the architecture and historical development of the human world: (i) one aspect corresponds to what is purported by a collective formation or historical event – that, its implicit significance qua the realization of History; (ii) the other aspect corresponds to the actuality which purports to have that meaning. The two aspects, which might be called ideal and real, are unified but not identified. Reflection on the a posteriori social and historical world is thus interwoven with the a priori teleology of the for-itself.77 And this distinction and opposition of aspects, employed in comprehending history, is grounded in the object theorized: corresponding to the methodological duality is a dynamic between two species of collectivity, (i) “the group,” which asserts at a collective level the a priori spontaneity of being-for-itself, and (ii) “seriality,” tends towards an assimilation of social existence to the inert passivity of inorganic matter, whereby it acquires the reality of something given a posteriori. That the latter is never final and must always yield to the former – a reiteration of BN’s claim that in the perspective of the for-itself all facticity points to transcendence, but which has now been exemplified in the historical case studies of the Critique – is the key to Sartre’s speculative historical thesis. This methodology needs fuller discussion, and Sartre’s employment of it to show that the historical dynamic takes determinate form as class struggle would require an independent exposition.78 What in any case merits emphasis is the originality of Sartre’s entire strategy. Nature’s negation of man, he proposes, is responsible for relations of domination, but only in the weak sense that humanity takes possession of this negation and redirects it against itself; it is a mere occasioning cause of man’s failure to realize Freedom. And it also plays a positive role in relation to Freedom: contra Hegel’s idea that the dialectic of Freedom leaves Nature behind, and Marx’s Aristotelian idea that Freedom will be found inside Nature once it has run its course, Sartre’s thesis is that Nature affords human reality the necessary means to resolve the otherwise insoluble problem that Freedom creates for-itself independently from Nature, for it permits being-for-itself to exit from the frictionless and contrapurposive fictionality of the social world, and to advance into a condition that merits being affirmed as social reality.79 The pure, theoretical, metaphysical puzzle of how social objects can be both ideal and real will thereby remain unsolved – it has no solution, just as the puzzle of the imaginary has no solution – but the real problem of intersubjectivity, which Hegel rightly saw but left unresolved, will be disposed of, in so far as the metaphysical puzzle will no longer manifest itself as an existential, ethical, and political problem.

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  279 12.5 Sartre and Classical German Philosophy It is appropriate to add some brief remarks concerning how Sartre stands in relation to classical German philosophy, in view of the loud echoes in BN and the Critique of systems other than Hegel’s, some of which I hope to have evoked. In particular, we have seen parallels in Sartre of Fichte’s conceptions of (1) the Other as an Anstoß and Aufforderung; (2) the realization of subjectivity as involving a sacrifice of the Agilität of consciousness and the acquisition of inertia (Trägheit); (3) man’s relation to Nature and sociality as having the end of absolute self-sufficiency, which sets a task of infinite approximation; and (4) which is capable of warranting otherwise problematic theoretical assumptions, on the model of Kant’s postulates of practical reason.80 Comparison with Schelling is also invited. Manfred Frank has argued that Marx’s famous identification of the “naturalization of man” with the “humanization of Nature” derives from Schelling and is evidence of Marx’s rejection of Feuerbach’s one-sidedly naturalistic rejection of Hegel.81 It might therefore be asked, If Marx arrives at that notion by restoring a dimension of idealism that Feuerbach’s materialism had stripped away, and thereby returns to Schelling, and if Sartre is endeavouring to restore to Marx a subjectivity that dialectical materialism has stripped away, is Sartre also returning to Schelling?82 What stands in the way is Sartre’s doctrine of being-in-itself, which lacks the living interior of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie (just as it implies Sartre’s rejection of Fichte’s transcendental idealist construction of Nature). It is true that in numerous passages, Sartre locates matter inside the human world,83 but it is always on the condition that it has been “worked”: It is not matter or Nature per se. The “autonomy” of being-in-itself – its irreducibility to matter-as-worked – remains a conceptual pillar of the Critique, presupposed according to Sartre by its account of the dynamic of human history: “[W]e find the being-in-itself of praxis-process as what might be termed its unassimilable and non-recuperable reality, an exterior limit of totalization […] it on principle eludes knowledge.”84 This calls to mind Schelling’s unvordenkliches Seyn, but again, the parallel is limited since Sartre’s being-in-itself is not similarly embedded in a theory of determinate actuality designed to make the genesis of man intelligible. Thus, although Sartre – in reaction against Hegelian idealism and Marxian materialism – travels a considerable distance in the direction of Fichte and Schelling, his system remains distinct from theirs. It may be asked why Sartre should continue in the Critique to maintain an unassimilable remainder of alien being, and whether the explanation is not perhaps that he is still in the grip of the Manichaeism of BN. I suggest that, if so, this would not necessarily signify a failure to discard old habits

280  Sebastian Gardner of thought. The picture of human solidarity as recruiting its motivation, not only from insight into the reality of the “We,” the materiality of the “I,” and the historical conditions of an ethics of freedom, but also from the indifference of human reality’s Other, is coherent: Nature cannot be conceived as malign, but History can be conceived coherently as man’s negation of the absence of Freedom from the Nature which conditions him. On this account, Nature does not take God’s (absent) place as the witness of humanity’s totalization, nor is it strictly man’s antagonist, but it is nonetheless true that man is moved to consummate his reality in spite of – so to speak, in the teeth of – Nature’s inhumanity and God’s absence. In this light, the Critique of Dialectical Reason may be regarded, as Deleuze put it, as the necessary complement of Being and Nothingness.85 Notes 1 References to the main works of Sartre’s discussed are abbreviated as follows:

BN = Being and Nothingness (2018 [1943]) CDR1 = Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles (1982 [1960]) CDR2 = Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 2: The Intelligibility of History (1991 [1985]) IM = The Imaginary (2004 [1940]) TE = The Transcendence of the Ego (2004 [1936–7]) 2 Sartre is clear that his Marxism is no transcendental realism: CDR1, pp. 21, 27. 3 See IM, p. 179: “a primary and irreducible fact that is given as a contingent and irrational specification of the noematic essence of world.” 4 The ontological problem is not thematized in political philosophy conceived as normative theory, but it nonetheless lies in the background. 5 Begun in Search for a Method (1968 [1957]). 6 Phenomenology of Spirit (2018 [1807]), pp. 75–6, §175. 7 Discussed more fully in Gardner (2017), of which the present piece is a continuation. 8 These conclusions are briefly recapitulated in the Critique: CDR1, pp. 24–5. 9 (CDR1 p. 345). 10 (CDR1 p. 384). 11 (CDR1 p. 346). 12 (CDR1 p. 372). 13 (CDR1 p. 344). 14 Comparison may be drawn with Fichte’s argument that the third principle of his Wissenschaftslehre requires that I and Not-I, once set in opposition, be codetermined as “quantity” in order that they may determine one another. My exposition of Sartre here under-describes his view, which is (in full) that the primary relation to the Other is an ontological antagonism, an insight he attributes to Hegel (BN, p. 326). But this notion is not needed for what follows. 15 Taylor (2003), p. 30. 16 (BN, p. 347).

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  281 7 (BN, p. 551). 1 18 (BN, pp. 556–7). 19 See IM, pp. 3–5, 20, 179. 20 A mental image of a dog cannot be mistaken for an image of a cat. 21 (IM, p. 11). 22 See IM, p. 10. The object is “intuitive-absent” (p. 14). 23 See IM, pp. 8–11. 24 (IM, p. 9). 25 (IM, p. 14). 26 (IM, p. 125). 27 As Sartre puts it, though enquiry leads to contradiction, it is “not enough to denounce” it, for it pertains to the nature of imagining (IM, p. 86). 28 Fascinare was commonly employed in texts on witchcraft, denoting a visual power to bind, curse, or kill (whence the proverbial “evil eye”). 29 (IM, pp. 44–5). 30 (IM, p. 46). 31 See IM (pp. 18–19). 32 See IM (pp. 131–2). 33 More precisely, imagination consists in the pairing of (i) irrealizing consciousness, with (ii) its noematic correlate, the imaginary (IM, p. 3). 34 Rudimentary instances are what we ordinarily call “imaginary feelings”: see IM (pp. 141–7). 35 TE, p. 20 (translation modified). In BN, Sartre does not talk of imagination as being at work, but rather “impure reflection.” Nonetheless, what is said of the Moi in TE and of the psyché in BN assumes the possibility of positing irrealities at the level of intuition, and replicates much what is said of imaginary objects in IM. The difference is that the psyche is posited as real, not unreal, but this can be understood in the following terms: the formation of the psychic subordinates the “irrealistic” intention in imagination to a new “realistic” intention, suspending its original ontological aim, and yielding a double negation, a negation of the irreality of imagination. Involuntary imagining such as dream, as we have seen, already exhibits this character. In so far as the double negation does not directly yield a positive, the project is not a straightforward success, but nor is it a straightforward failure: It is suspended between them; hence, it comprises, as I will shortly put it, a claim to be redeemed. 36 What Sartre describes here is the systematic equivalent of Fichte’s derivation of feeling, drive, and the body in the System of Ethics (2005 [1798]). 37 See BN (pp. 227–42). 38 See IM (p. 144). 39 (BN, p. 243). 40 Inverting Spinoza’s “Man is a God to man,” Ethics, IVp35s (2006, p. 338). 41 Sartre (1967 [1948]: pp. 203–4) translation modified. The “We” of the Critique is prefigured in the standpoint of the engaged writer in What Is Literature? See, for example, Sartre (1967 [1948]: p. 23). 42 Rousseau (1973, p. 112). 43 Ibid., p. 106. 44 Rousseau (1979 [1776–8; pub. post. 1782]: pp. 27, 32, 35). 45 Rousseau’s concern is restated in Kant’s Religion book: human beings “mutually corrupt one another’s moral predisposition and, even with the good will of each individual, […] they deviate through their dissensions from the common goal of goodness, as though they were instruments of evil” (p. 132; 6:97).

282  Sebastian Gardner Sartre cannot of course accept Kant’s postulate of ecclesiastical faith as a means to achieve ethical community, any more than he accepts the possibility of Rousseau’s de-socialization of the self. The Reveries are riddled with Sartrean contradictions, starting with Rousseau’s ambition to justify himself in writing and hence in the eyes of those whose authority he says he has repudiated. 46 Rousseau (1973: p. 86). 47 Pippin explores the idea in many places, but most intensively in his study of Henry James (2000): see, for example, Ibid., pp. 5–6, 9, 17. 48 (CDR1, p. 134). 49 Sartre begins to consider the interlacing of objective historical structures (class interest) with sorcery – “petrified values,” a magical “right to play with reason” – in Anti-Semite and Jew (1948 [1946]: pp. 23–7). The impossibility of ethics under conditions where values serve sorcery is restated in (CDR1: pp. 248–9). 50 (CDR1, Bk. I, Ch. 2, Sect. 2, pp. 100–9). 51 (CDR1: p. 100). 52 (CDR1: p. 103). 53 (BN: p. 544). 54 The argument, differently put (CDR1: pp. 108–9), is that the relevant Wethoughts, even though purely conceptual considerations cannot stop someone from disavowing them, are otherwise unaccountable, since triadic consciousness cannot be constructed out of binary, I-Thou, consciousness. 55 Cf. BN’s restricted account of class solidarity (BN: pp. 551–3). 56 Our reflection cannot begin by “immediately locating ourselves in the world of productive forces” (CDR1: p. 97). 57 See (CDR1: p. 106), concerning synthetic a priority. Need, le besoin, is the Critique’s re-determination of BN’s indeterminate lack, le manque (BN, pp. 137–40). 58 By way of illustration, see, for example, (CDR2: pp. 248–9). 59 The vehicle of which is knowledge of mortality: (CDR1: pp. 81–2, 132–4, 735–6). Cf. BN’s anti-Heideggerean treatment of death (BN: pp. 689–718). 60 The “real relation” between men is “inscribed in being, that is to say, in the materiality of individuals” (CDR1: p. 109); “there is nothing magical about” institutional action (CDR1: pp. 694–5). 61 Previously Sartre tried to secure this global responsibility by an original choice of self (BN: pp. 647–8, 718–19. 62 The question is succinctly put: “For the transcendent totalization of all History, who will do it?” (CDR2: p. 447; italics added). 63 (CDR2: p. 308). Echoing the early Sartre’s Kantian assertion that in choosing for myself I choose for mankind (2007 [1946]: p. 24). 64 (CDR2: p. 12). 65 It can be said of them that they “know and do not know what they are doing” (CDR2: 10). Relevant here is the distinction of compréhension and intellection drawn in (CDR1: pp. 74–6). 66 See CDR1, Bk. I, Ch. 1, “Individual Praxis as Totalization” (pp. 79–94). “The entire historical dialectic rests on individual praxis in so far as it is already dialectical” (ibid., p. 80). 67 (CDR2: p. 50). 68 (CDR1: p. 152). 69 (CDR1: pp. 152–3 n35). 70 The “untranscendable limit of History” where “all synthesis is impossible,” the “limit of unification” in mutual recognition, is reaffirmed against Hegel (CDR1: pp. 114, 559), whose position is now described as “human idealism” (CDR2: pp. 308–9).

Sartre’s Solution to the Antinomy of Social Reality  283 71 With these transcendental results we have not yet “entered the kingdom of ends” (CDR1: pp. 111–12). 72 In the manner of the mine-owner whose “free response to the exigencies of the situation can be realized only in the form of oppression” (CDR1, p. 739). Sartre also talks of exorcizing tendencies of ethical thought (CDR1: pp. 132–4). 73 (CDR1: p. 21). 74 History must appear “as necessity” (CDR1: p. 37). See also (CDR1: pp. 25, 70–4, 140). 75 Thus in a late interview, Sartre allows this “hope” to be described as also an “obligation” (1996 [1980]: pp. 69–70). 76 Because they do not take account of this methodological complexity, Hartmann (1966: p. 123) and Theunissen (1984 [1965]: pp. 206–7) find a confusion of “subjective” and “objective” approaches in the Critique. 77 See esp. CDR1 (p. 70–4). Analogy may be drawn with Schelling’s Naturphilosophie, which involves a similar intermeshing of an a priori hypothesis or Idea and its a posteriori filling-out with the results of natural science. Sartre’s historical case histories take the place of scientific experiments. 78 See CDR1, Bk. II, Chs. 7–8. To repeat the earlier point, the balance Sartre must strike is a fine one, for he admits the possibility in some sense that “praxisprocesses” are without rationality, “devoid of practical meaning,” and that historical significance is “an epiphenomenon, an anthropological illusion”: Engels’ economistic reduction of historical development to quantitative laws may “kill the dialectic,” but Sartre grants that it is not wholly unfounded (CDR1: pp. 698–9, 710–13). What Sartre must furnish, therefore, is a justification for thinking that, if history does appear to be a mere causal sequence, and collectivity a mere “thing,” this point of view corresponds “only to an arrest of the total process of comprehension” (CDR1: p. 698). I have suggested that the “progressive-regressive method” may provide this much reassurance. What Sartre does leave unresolved, I think, is the extent to which cognizing the dialectical intelligibility of History (and repudiating the “empirical irrationality” of analytical Reason) presupposes an exercise of freedom: Do we in some sense will the existence of the dialectical intelligibility that we discover in History? But this issue does not need to be resolved in order for the progressive-method to do its suasive work. 79 Inorganic matter “as worked” – the for-itself in its externality – is “the inert motive force of History,” “the only possible basis for the novelty” of historical development, “the absolute requirement that there must be a necessity in History at the very heart of intelligibility” (CDR1: p. 72). 80 In so far as the Critique can be regarded, as I have suggested, as steering the demands of the Fichtean summons in Marx’s direction, the later Sartre as well as the earlier belongs to the tradition identified in Wood (2014). Also evoked, I hope, are the numerous points where, despite Sartre’s apparent lack of exposure to Frankfurt School writings, the CDR comes into systematic contact with Critical Theory, though the relationship is far too intricate and far-reaching to embark on here. 81 Frank (1992), pp. 303–13. Marx’s formula, “der durchgeführte Naturalismus des Menschen und der durchgeführte Humanismus der Natur,” is from the 1844 manuscripts of Marx and Engels (1968: p. 538). 82 There are other affinities. The strategy in Schelling’s 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism – which treats the mechanism implanted by Nature in human development not as a contingent prerequisite, as in Kant, but as integral to

284  Sebastian Gardner securing human freedom (1978 [1800]: pp. 193–212) – is of a kind with the freedom-engendering use Sartre wishes to make of Nature: rationality must be seen as the “dialectical unity of freedom and necessity” (CDR1: p. 35). 83 And that there are echoes of Naturphilosophie: “[T]he history of man is an adventure of nature” (CDR1: p. 71). Reason “makes itself into a system of inertia in order to rediscover sequences in exteriority” (CDR1: p. 75). Regarding Sartre’s conception of matter in the Critique, see especially (CDR1: pp. 97–8, 113–14, 161–66, 180–92). 84 (CDR2: p. 309). 85 Deleuze (2004: p. 79).

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Index

Pages followed by “n” refer to notes. aesthetics 155 agency 53–54, 56, 61, 67–69, 83–85, 214, 276; see also Sartre, J.-P.: on freedom analytic philosophy 1–2; and existentialism 131; in contrast to continental philosophy 2–11 passim; see also Sartre, J.-P.: reception in Anglo-American philosophy angst see anguish anguish 213–221 passim; and anxiety 212–214 Anscombe, G. E. M. 67–68, 72–81, 87n76, 82–84 anthropocentrism: against 175 anxiety 213–215, 218–220; and fear 214–215; see also anguish: and anxiety Aristotle 38n12 association 199–203, 209n51, 205–207 Austin, J. L. 120; on criteria 158n30; see also Cavell, S.: on criteria; Wittgenstein, L.: on criteria axiology see value bad faith 66, 71, 78, 84, 85n29, 98–104, 113, 185, 190–197, 200–202, 204–205, 207, 208n21 Badiou, A. 16n34, 36–37 behaviourism see Sartre, J.-P.: as behaviourist, Wittgenstein, L.: as behaviourist being: for-itself 23–25, 28, 31–37, 61, 113, 243, 245, 261, 270, 273, 275,

277; in-itself 22, 25, 28, 34–35, 61, 243, 245, 273, 275, 279 Bergson, H. 244–245 Berkeley, G. 48 Bolzano, B. 19 Carnap, R. 38n19 Cartesian dualism 71 Cavell, S. 7; on acknowledgment 148; causal theories of action, mind, and perception 45, 51–56; The Claim of Reason 156n3; on the connection between literature and philosophy 131–132, 149, 151; on criteria 130, 132–134, 137–138, 143–145, 146, 150, 152; on epistemology 148; on language 151–152; the ‘ordinary’ 130; the problem of the other 132, 159n47, 137–138; on reason 157n18; on romanticism 151, 153–155, 162n110, 162n113; on skepticism 128–135, 137, 140, 142, 146–147, 150 cogito 66, 71, 115, 124n54, 264 continental philosophy see analytic philosophy: in contrast to continental philosophy Davidson, D. 51, 54–55 de Beauvoir, S. 243 Deleuze, G. 254, 280 Dennett, D. 91, 98–99 Derrida, J. 9–10, 254

Index  287 Descartes R. 24, 35, 66, 99, 113, 115, 124n55, 157n27; see also Cartesian dualism; cogito Descombes, V. 65, 67, 83–84 direct realism 43–46, 51 disjunctivism 51 Dummett, M. 39n35 emotion 233–237; philosophical accounts of 225, 230, 239n15, 239n17; see also James, W.: on emotion; phenomenology: of emotion; Sartre, J.-P.: on emotion Engels, F. 277 Epicureanism 244–246 error theory 58–59; about agency 56; about value 57 Evans, G. 49, 56, 72–73; see also Wittgenstein, L.: Wittgensteinian accounts of the first-person evil 270–271 experience 43, 55, 94–98; see also analytic philosophy: and existentialism; psychoanalysis: and existentialism; Sartre, J.-P.: activity-based model of experience existentialism expressionism: in film 177 facticity 190, 265, 275 Fichte, J. G. 280n14, 276, 279 film see expressionism: in film, psychoanalysis: and film, Sartre, J.-P.: on film first-person perspective 89–91, 94–98, 103–104; see also Wittgenstein, L.: Wittgensteinian accounts of the first-person free will: compatibilism about 56–57; see also Sartre, J.-P.: on freedom Frege, G.: content-force distinction 19–20; on negation 18–22, 38n12, 38n19, 26, 39n33, 28–29; on reference 28–29, 48–49 Freud, S. 12, 186–187, 198–200; on condensation 13, 202–203; on displacement 203; primary processes 185, 187; see also Sartre, J.-P.: on Freudian psychoanalysis Freud: The Secret Passion 166–175, 177–181

givenness 94–97 Grice, H. P. 51, 236 Harris, S. 56, 62n34 Hegel, G. W. F. 262, 272–273; see also Sartre, J.-P.: on Hegel Heidegger, M. 7, 38n19, 215 Hume, D. 46–50, 128, 234, 246 Husserl, E. 19, 22, 26, 48, 67, 94, 99, 157n20, 245–246 Huston, J. 166–168, 170, 174–175 imagination 243, 254, 257; and philosophy 5–8; see also Sartre, J.-P.: on imagination; social imaginary individuation of self 69–70 intentionality 25, 94–96, 215–216, 245–248 intentional stance 91 Jackson, F. 91–92 Jacobi, F. H. 154, 162n116 James, H. 272 James, W.: on emotion 225–227 Kant, I. 128, 131, 140–141, 149, 155, 270, 281n45, 277; and skepticism 129–131, 136, 138, 153–154; see also Sartre, J.-P.: on Kant Kojève, A. 262 know-how 91–92, 101, 104 knowledge 160n64; by acquaintance 48–50; in contrast to certainty 115–116 Kuhn, T. S. 59 language 48; see also Frege, G.: content/force distinction; Frege, G.: on reference lekton 19, 22–24 Lewis, C. I. 49–50 Lewis, D. 51–52 Lloyd, G. 7, 15n29, 243–258 passim Locke, J. 45–46, 66–67 logic: and ontology 18–19, 27–37; see also metalogic logical atomism 7, 21 Lotze, H. 19 Lyotard, J.-F. 3

288 Index Mackie, J. L. 57 Marx, K. 261, 273, 279; see also Sartre, J.-P.: on Marx McDowell J. 69–70, 72, 111, 118 mental images 244–249, 266 Merleau-Ponty, M. 99, 110, 120 metalogic 32–37; see also logic: and ontology metaphysics 34–36, 128; see also logic: and ontology; Sartre, J.-P.: on metaphysics methodological solipsism 45 #metoo 191–197 Mill, J. S. 50 mind/body relation 69–71, 112 Moran, R. 105n18 naturalism 11, 89–91, 93; and disenchantment 151, 162n110; liberal 91; placement problem 57–58 negation 27, 29; see also Frege, G.: on negation; Sartre, J.-P.: on negation nihilism 143–145, 151–152, 154 ontology see being, logic: and ontology Orwell, G. 257 other 8–12, 114–116, 124n54, 175, 181, 262–264, 269, 274–276, 279–280 perception: and action 51–56, 59–61; theory-ladenness of 59 personal identity 67, 83, 220–221 phenomenology 23–26, 43–44, 70, 112–113; of emotion 216–218, 221n17, 221n24; see also intentionality; Sartre, J.-P.: on emotion; spontaneity philosophy: originality in 11; tribalism in 2–4, 8–12 philosophy of action 66–67 philosophy of perception 45, 51; see also direct realism; disjunctivism philosophy of social theory 261; see also social imaginary physicalism 91–92; see also naturalism Pitcher, G. 51 Plato 12, 38n12 pragmatism 60 praxis see agency

projection 8–12, 220–221, 228 psychoanalysis 186, 197, 206; criticisms of 185; and existentialism 167, 169, 175; and film 167, 176–177; and myth 199, 209n47; philosophical accounts of 205–206, 210n53; see also Sartre, J.-P.: on Freudian psychoanalysis Quine, W. V. O. 8 responsibility 8–9, 191, 208n21, 196, 209n43 Rorty, R. 129–130 Rousseau, J.-J. 270–271, 281n45 Russell, B. 30 Russell’s paradox 30–34 Ryle, G. 105n12 Sartre, J.-P. 18–19, 170, 243, 260; on action 67; activity-based model of experience 42–43, 46, 54; on anguish 214–215, 219–221; as behaviourist 122n3; Being and Nothingness 22–25, 31–32, 34–35, 42, 44, 212, 260, 264; on the body 113, 225; on consciousness 23–25, 28, 61, 71, 81, 84–85, 93–94, 96–98, 106n46, 103, 228–229, 238n12, 244–245, 256, 265–268; see also thetic/non-thetic consciousness; on creativity 170–171; Critique of Dialectical Reason 260–262, 273–278 passim; on emotion 221n25, 220, 222n35, 225, 238n7, 227–230, 239n16, 230–233, 235–236, 241n34, 247; on ethics 260; The Family Idiot 170–171, 251–254; on film 176; on freedom 249–250, 253, 256, 275, 278; on Freudian psychoanalysis 98–99, 167–169, 171, 180–181, 188–189, 195; the ‘gaze’ 116–117, 175, 181, 264; and German philosophy 279–280, 283n82; on God 260, 265, 280; on Hegel 262–264, 278; on history 260–261, 273, 276–278, 283n78; on imagination 243–258 passim, 265–269, 281n35; on intersubjectivity 251–254, 260,

Index  289 262–264, 268–270, 272–278; on judgment 248; on Kant 270; on language 251–254; on literature 257; on Marx 276–278; on metaphysics 261; Nausea 138–145, 151–152; on negation 18–19, 22–28, 31–33; on nothingness 23, 38n19, 27, 244, 250, 256, 263; on objectivity 248; on our knowledge of the other 115–117, 121; and politics 256–258, 261, 270, 272–278; reception in AngloAmerican philosophy 1, 12–13, 95, 208n18; on responsibility 209n42, 220, 275, 278; on self-knowledge 101–102; on stupidity 251–254; on transcendence 190, 248; and Wittgenstein 249; see also being: for-itself; being: in-itself; facticity Schelling, F. W. J. 279 screenwriting 169 self-consciousness 66–70, 83–84, 93–98, 262–264, 267–269, 271–272 self-deception 188–191, 208n18, 228; see also bad faith self-knowledge 68, 71, 89–90, 104n3, 92, 105n18, 98–99, 101–104, 175 self-transformation 99 self-transparency 93–94 Sellars, W. 90 sense-data 44–50 passim sense-datum theory 45–46 set theory 30, 36–37; see also Russell’s paradox shame 117 skepticism 128–129, 158n34, 136, 161n86; external-world 46–47, 133–134; Humean 46–50; of other minds 109, 121n2, 122n6, 110–111, 118–121, 263–264;

see also Cavell, S.: problem of the other; Cavell, S.: on skepticism social imaginary 5–11 passim, 254–258, 269 socialisation 117 social reality 261, 269–272, 276–278 sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK) 60 solipsism 111–112; see also skepticism: of other minds sophism 12 spontaneity 245–247, 253–254, 257 substance dualism 35 Taylor, C. 254–255, 264 thetic/non-thetic consciousness 68–71, 73, 81, 93; see also Sartre, J.-P.: on consciousness; self-consciousness unconscious 8–9, 65, 175, 180, 185–190, 197–203 value 43–44, 57, 144–145, 151–152, 155, 271, 273; deflationism about 58–59; see also nihilism Williams, B. 4, 12 wishful thinking 229–231; see also self-deception Wittgenstein, L. 21, 65, 68, 86n69, 109, 123n31, 115, 120–121, 130, 132, 149–150, 205; as behaviourist 122n3; Blue Book 71–72, 78–79; on criteria 117; ‘hinge’ propositions 116; on sensation 92; Wittgensteinian accounts of the first-person 66, 68–69, 72–81; Wittgensteinian pictures 6–8, 11–13; see also Sartre, J.-P.: and Wittgenstein