Two Dogmas of Sartrean Existentialism

Abstract

Sartre's early commitment to two basic claims, namely, that consciousness is non-egological1 and freedom is absolute2 is well known. Opponents see these claims as leading to intractable problems.3 Sympathizers go to great lengths to defend Sartre against these problems.4 But neither opponents nor sympathizers ever doubt Sartre's commitment to either claim. In light of this, let us call these "the two dogmas of Sartrean existentialism." Contesting dogma is often met with great alarm. So be it. No one, to my mind, has recognized that Sartre rejects both of these claims in the second half of Being and Nothingness, or so I aim to show.5 By the end of this essay, I will demonstrate that, contrary to popular opinion, Sartre neither ascribes, speaking strictly, to a non-egological view of consciousness nor maintains that freedom is unconditioned by social and historical forces. Put another way, Being and Nothingness contains two views of freedom and subjectivity, a highly recognized but implausible view, and an unrecognized but plausible view. However, rather than developing Sartre's second view, my aims here are less ambitious. I want to establish Sartre's rejection of the two dogmas, show why it has gone unnoticed, and in the process point towards a novel manner of reading Being and Nothingness. To these ends, my interpretive strategy involves clarifying what we might call Sartre's problem of self-objectification, while paying close attention to his methodology. Let me begin with his methodology because my sense is that the primary reason Sartre's rejection of the two dogmas goes unnoticed is largely due to the fact that commentators overlook Sartre's analytic method. As Jo-seph Catalano remarks, "failure to recognize that all of Sartre's major philosophic writings proceed from the abstract to the concrete . . . accounts for much of the present misreading of these works."6 The importance of this observation should not be underestimated. As is well known, Sartre begins his analysis with the painfully abstract concepts being-for-itself and being-in-itself. It is worth recalling that in the very dense preface these two regions of being cannot initially be identified with either consciousness or things, but must rather be understood as the being of consciousness and the being of things, whatever exactly this may mean. Sartre quickly associates these two regions of being with disembodied consciousness and things, and this provides the first very small step towards concreteness. I say "disembodied" because Sartre does not take up an analysis of the body until Part Three. We should also note that being-for-itself exists in isolation without Others until this point. In short, the movement in Being and Nothingness towards a complex whole proceeds from the being of consciousness, to disembodied consciousness, to disembodied consciousness plus others, to embodied intersubjectivity. This analytic procedure demands that Sartre employ a methodological solipsism in the first two Parts of Being and Nothingness, a point he does not explicitly mention until Parts Three and Four, and then only briefly, which makes it easy to overlook (BN 260, 525). Sartre's methodological solipsism, however, should come as no surprise, given his Cartesian background and the likelihood that he was under the influence of Husserl's similar strategy found in the Cartesian Med-itations.7 Importantly, failure to recognize this point may lead one to overlook the fact that the introduction of the existence of Others, which comes quite late in the text, demands significant revision to claims made in Parts One and Two. The revisions result from Sartre's claim that the Other's objectifying gaze creates a "radical modification in my structure" that results in the personalization of prereflective consciousness (BN 260). And once Sartre recognizes that Others constitute one's social identity, his view of freedom changes rather dramatically (BN 525). However, because the dogmas are so entrenched, simply quoting the passages in which the revisions take place is unconvincing. …