Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed series of books promises to offer "clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging." Sartre certainly counts as a challenging writer. More than one perplexed reader of Being and Nothingness (1943) [BN] has been known to toss the text across the room in despair. The complex analysis and the multi-hyphenated-subtle-but- necessary-terms that sprinkle the pages of BN have been responsible for some level of anguish in the facticity-of-the-intellectual-world. Gary Cox's guide can help to reduce that frustration.

Sartre's philosophical influences clearly include Descartes, Kant, Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger. Employing the methods of descriptive phenomenology to new effect, his Being and Nothingness offers an account of existence in general, including both the being-in-itself of objects that simply are and the being-for-itself by which humans engage in independent action. We remember Sartre for his analysis and criticism of Descartes' cogito and for his insistence on a radical freedom for human persons. Descartes thought he had discovered the essence of humans: the mind, a thinking thing unextended and embodied. Sartre insists, contra Descartes, that we have no essence; that consciousness is always consciousness of something, and that we are forced to be free. Religious essentialists who state that persons are essentially evil also wilt under the Sartrean project.

Like "rationalism" and "empiricism," "existentialism" is a term that belongs to intellectual history. The term was explicitly adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and through the wide dissemination of the postwar literary and philosophical output of Sartre and his associates — notably Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Albert Camus — existentialism became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. Among the major philosophers identified as existentialists (many of whom — for instance Camus and Heidegger — repudiated the label) were Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, and Martin Buber. The nineteenth century philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement named existentialism, which was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one.

On the existential view, to understand what a human being is it is not enough to know all the truths that natural science — including the science of psychology — could tell us. Nor will it suffice to adopt the point of view of practice and add categories drawn from moral theory: neither scientific nor moral inquiry can fully capture what it is that makes me myself, my "ownmost" inner self. Without denying the validity of scientific categories (governed by the norm of truth) or moral categories (governed by norms of the good and the right), "existentialism" may be defined as the philosophical theory which holds that a further set of categories, governed by the norm of authenticity, is necessary to grasp human existence. The major existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather uncommon in analytic philosophy, and while the idea that philosophy cannot be practiced in the disinterested manner of an objective science is indeed central to existentialism, it is equally true that all the themes popularly associated with existentialism — dread, anguish, alienation, the absurd, radical freedom, commitment, nothingness, and so on — find their philosophical significance in the context of the search for a new way of doing philosophy.

Sartre's slogan — "existence precedes essence" —  serves to introduce what is most distinctive of existentialism: the idea that no general, non-formal account of what it means to be human can be given, because that meaning is decided in and through existing itself. Existence is "self-making-in-a-situation" (Fackenheim 1961:37). In contrast to other entities, whose essential properties are fixed by the kind of entities they are, what is essential to a human being — what makes her who she is — is not fixed but always becoming, by choices she makes herself. The fundamental contribution of existential thought lies in the idea that one's identity is constituted neither by nature nor by culture, since to "exist" is precisely to constitute such an identity. It is in light of this idea that key existential notions such as facticity, transcendence, alienation, bad faith, and authenticity must be understood. Because existence is co-constituted by facticity and transcendence, the self cannot be conceived as a Cartesian ego but is embodied being-in-the-world, a self-making in situation.

Sartre (1905-1980) is arguably one of the best known philosophers of the twentieth century. His public lecture "Existentialism and Humanism," delivered to an enthusiastic Parisian crowd October 28, 1945 may be one of the most read "manifestoes" of the century. Even though Sartre openly regretted seeing in print it continues to be the major introduction to his philosophy for the general public and freshman students. Like Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre distinguished ontology from metaphysics and favored the former. In his case, ontology is primarily descriptive and classificatory, whereas metaphysics purports to be causally explanatory, offering accounts about the ultimate origins and ends of individuals and of the universe as a whole. He subtitles Being and Nothingness a "Phenomenological Ontology." Its descriptive method moves from the most abstract to the highly concrete. It begins by analyzing two distinct and irreducible categories or kinds of being: the in-itself (en-soi) and the for-itself (pour-soi), roughly the nonconscious and consciousness respectively, adding a third, the for-others (pour-autrui), later in the book, and concludes with a sketch of the practice of "existential psychoanalysis" that interprets our actions to uncover the fundamental project that unifies our lives.

Cox's book is divided as follows:

1. Consciousness
2. Freedom
3. Bad Faith
4. Authenticity
5. Followed by a complete set of informative notes, index, bibliography, and further readings.

Cox writes in his preface "The structure of this book is dictated by the fact that Sartre's view of authenticity makes sense only in light of his view of bad faith, his view of bad faith only in light of his view of freedom and his view of freedom only in light of his view of consciousness." It works. The long first section on consciousness is a detailed and informative discussion of, not only Sartre's position, but also of criticisms of his position, and an assessment of those criticisms. In that respect Cox's book is much more than an introduction to Sartre; it serves also as a review of the salient literature of about Sartre's key philosophical notions. Cox is particularly good in developing the inter-relationships among key ideas in the Sartrean project. On temporality, e.g., "The present must be equated with the for-itself and defined negatively. Equating the for-itself with the present and describing it in temporal terms reveals the sense of the apparently absurd claim that the for-itself is not what it is and is what it is not. If the for-itself was a self-identical positivity instead of an express negation then humna reality would be impossible." [Cox, 35]

Cox is particularly good in the final section of the book when discussing authenticity. He writes: " … inauthenticity is the denial of the cardinal truth that we are free and responsible; whereas authenticity, as the antithesis of inauthenticity, is the acceptance or affirmation of this cardinal truth. Sartre argues that authenticity involves a person confronting reality and facing up to the hard truth that they are a limitlessly free being that will never obtain coincidence with itself as a for-itself-in-itself." [135] That's exactly right and explains concisely why it is that sincerity is a second-class virtue.

 Existentialists are disappointed rationalists. Even though rationalism could not deliver on its promises, it is difficult if not impossible to separate "reason" from the history of philosophy for an analysis, per simpliciter; for every philosopher has some take on reason since it is the heart of the philosophical enterprise.

1. Historically the conversation has been one of the pre-eminence of reason as a faculty for knowing. In that respect the initial conflict in modern philosophy was between revelation and reason. Descartes tried to bridge that gap by arguing that one could reason one's way to one's own existence and then to the necessary existence of God. He then attempted to build an epistemology on that foundation.
2.  Descartes argued that consciousness is axiomatic because you cannot logically deny your mind's existence at the same time as using your mind to do the denying.  
3. The empiricists found flaws in Cartesian epistemology arguing that there were no innate ideas at all and that we humans are blank slates written upon by experience.
4. Kant tried valiantly to put the humpty-dumpty together again by bringing empiricism and rationalism together in his synthetic-aprioris.
5. Psychology, as it broke away from philosophy, proposed behaviourism as the theory, a variation on some stimulus, response, reward (SRR) description.
6. Linguistics, in the person of Noam Chomsky, argued (see his Cartesian Grammar) that we know more than we should if behaviourism is true. The famous debates between Chomsky and Skinner are central to understanding these ideas.
7.  Russell's work in logic and mathematics shows us that knowing how is more important than knowing that, since all logical systems including complex mathematical systems are based upon tautologies.
8. Phenomenology is the study of structures of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view. The central structure of an experience is its intentionality, its being directed toward something, as it is an experience of or about some object.
9. Biology takes the forefront with fascinating science showing that brains just are minds, and that reason is a "faculty" to be found not only in male philosophers, but also in females and in other "lower" species.

Reason, it seems, has an evolutionary benefit for survival of our species. It is far superior to magic, religious mumbo-jumbo, pot smoking, channeling, ESP, crystal gazing, Freudian repressed urges, authority of church or state, Sartre's radical freedom, and the like at presenting us with testable information about the world and ourselves. It allows us to search for causal relations even though we cannot prove that the proposition "Every event has a cause" is true. It would be worthwhile to use Cox's section on consciousness in a course on the philosophy of mind, and to compare and contrast Sartre on consciousness with, say, Susan Blackmore, John Searle, and Daniel Dennett.

Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed is well worth reading and thinking about. It would be useful in existentialism classes, history of philosophy classes, philosophy of mind, and in Great Books programs which focus on the chronological development of ideas in the Western world.

I'll close with a playful paraphrase from the book [102]: The performance of a reviewer who takes himself to be nothing, least of all a reviewer, is dull and unconvincing because his project of being his own nothingness detracts from his project of performing his role as a reviewer.

 

© 2007 Bob Lane

 

Bob Lane is a retired teacher of English and Philosophy who is currently an Honourary Research Associate in Philosophy at Malaspina University-College in British Columbia, Canada. He is the author of "Albert Camus: The Absurd Hero" available online at http://www.mala.bc.ca/www/ipp/bob/acamus.htm

Categories: Philosophical