Freedom and Rule-Following in Wittgenstein and Sartre

Abstract

My aim in this essay is to establish what might initially and superficially seem to be an implausible if not bizarre claim, viz., that some central themes and arguments of the philosophies of the early Sartre and the later Wittgenstein are virtually identical. My strategy is to begin by outlining the strong family resemblance between Wittgenstein's approach to and treatment of his major topics language, meaning, and rule-following and Sartre's handling of his major topics the nature of consciousness, human existence, and freedom. In this case the tracing of family resemblances leads to the establishment of blood relations. I don't mean that either Sartre or Wittgenstein influenced the other. Rather, to change the Wittgensteinian metaphor, it becomes, I believe, evident that the landscape sketched in the album which is Philosophical Investigations' is essentially the one captured in the montage footage of Being and Nothingness' and that the story told about that landscape, in both the album and the film noir, is essentially the same. To begin with Sartre, a favourite formula of his concerning consciousness, or the 'for-itself', or 'human reality', or freedom these are all ultimately the same thing for Sartre is that 'their existence precedes their essence'. In Being and Nothingness he sees this formula exemplified in the necessary self-consciousness of consciousness. Consciousness, says Sartre, is necessarily consciousness of an independent external ('transcendent') object, and it is also necessarily thereby, consciousness of itself. If it were not conscious of itself as consciousness of something, it would then be, he says, an unconscious consciousness, which for Sartre is