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In many ways, Sartre’s Existentialism has its antecedents in Husserl’s phenomenology and Heidegger’s existential phenomenology. We see Sartre’s debt to the idea of the central role of consciousness in his early work “The Transcendental Ego” as well as in his more mature works, “Being and Nothingness”, The Psychology of the imagination”, and “Sketch for a theory of the Emotions”.
Being and Nothingness has been described by Mary Warnock in her introduction to that work in the following terms:
“The culmination of a mood—anti-rational, anti-political”(Introduction P.xvii)
This could also be fair comment on the works from earlier on the century by Husserl and Heidegger. We have charted the history of the fate of Kant’s Philosophy (but not Kantianism) at the hands of his major successor, Hegel, earlier in this work. One could also add to the above list of Warnock’s negative predicates the following: anti-ethical, and anti-anthropological (in the senses intended by Aristotle and Kant)
Sartre’s later work then moved into the realm of the political in line with his conviction that Marxism was the most important Philosophy produced in the 20th century. Existentialism, he argued in this context was merely an ideology. This position probably had its roots in an early commitment to Hegel’s dialectical method of reflection. This commitment , together with a commitment to phenomenology and its concrete description of phenomena, and a later commitment to the existentialism of Heidegger’s concept of praxis and instrumentalities explain Sartre’s adventure of reflection and its philosophical landscape. A dismissal of rationality and reason as the key faculty of the mind in favour of the transcendental imagination and an implied criticism of the rational form of transcendental idealism of Kantian philosophy are also important aspects of Sartre’s anti-rationalism.
Rousseau’s reference to amour proper and its role in the antagonistic relations between men who use this attitude to subjugate each other, concretely influenced Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. This dialectic was intended to question the fundamental moral attitude of Respect laid down by Kant as the fundamental pillar of social and ethical life. Hegel, of course, rejected the Kantian system of ought concepts regulated by reason, preferring to view the world as a totality of facts, of which we have absolute knowledge via a process of dialectical reflection: this absolute knowledge involved the movement of a world-spirit in accordance with the mechanism of Negation that inhabited consciousness and its perceptual and imaginative aspects.
Sartre begins his exploration of consciousness at what he referred to as the ontological level in accordance with the above notion of Negation. Consciousness, on his account, was a negation of Beings-in-themselves (en soi) that he defined in terms of the independent existence of their essences. Beings-for-themselves(pour soi) are the pure negation of Beings-in-themselves and Beings-for-themselves are conscious of Being-in-the-world but this consciousness is not an epistemological entity that “knows” in some mysterious fashion what we perceive or imagine. Being-for-itself is, in turn, embedded in the world of things and actions (including instrumentalities). Sartre attempts to concretely “describe” the relations between the two kinds of Being but fails to close the dualistic gap that he has opened up between them. It could also be argued that this framework sets up a solipsistically constituted form of consciousness that must call into the question of the existence of Other consciousnesses. Mary Warnock in her Introduction to Being and Nothingness points to a reciprocal movement of Sartre’s argument from the above ontological characterisation of the kinds of Being to a concrete description of the forms of consciousness that Sartre claims follow from such an ontological characterisation. She mentions Aristotle in this context (P.ix) but although one can perhaps see some relevance of what has been said to Aristotle’s claim that “Being has many meanings”, it has to be acknowledged that the central meaning of “Being” for Sartre is more connected to the early work of Aristotle than to the later work in which it was claimed that the meaning of substance was “form” or “principle”. The problem with Sartre’s account that Nothingness or Negation is at the heart of Being-for- itself makes it, in turn, difficult to conceive of Being and consciousness as an aspect of Nothingness. It is also difficult to conceive of Nothingness in terms of “principle” because as Wittgenstein said of the consciousness of pain, it is not something but it is not a nothing either. It can therefore be claimed that a principle is not a something but it is not a nothing either. Principles give us reasons for believing something concrete if we are speaking about knowledge or reasons for doing something if we are dealing with actions of different kinds (instrumentalities or ethical actions)
Heidegger thought that that the Transcendental Imagination played a larger role in the thinking processes of the mind than Kant believed was the case, in spite of the fact that Kant altered the first edition of his First Critique in a second edition exactly to avoid such a misreading of his text. The question to raise is whether this combination of the transcendental solipsism (Transcendental Ego), Transcendental Imagination(The Psychology of the Imagination) and Nothingness or Negation gives rise to a serious alternative to the forms of rationalism we encounter in Aristotelian Hylomorphism and Kantian Critical Philosophy.
Sartre in his work on the imagination (The Psychology of the Imagination) began his analysis of the phenomenon of the imagination by adopting Brentano’s idea that all forms of consciousness were intentional(directed at some object). Three forms of consciousness in particular spring to mind in such a context: perceptual, imaginative and emotional. This definition of consciousness is questioned by Mary Warnock, in her Introduction to The Psychology of the Imagination:
“Now the very fact of having something as its object means that consciousness is separate from that object and not only is it distinct from its object but it is capable of distinguishing itself from it. A space emerges between the thinking subject and that which is the object of its thought, between the perceiving subject and that which it perceives. A conscious being, that is, in the terminology later borrowed from Heidegger, a Being-for-itself, is always at a distance from this world, from Being-In-Themselves.”(Introduction P.ix)
The object, Sartre claims, can be grasped in various ways. Heidegger interestingly also claimed that an essential structure of Being-in-the-World is that the Beings that we are, are essentially constituted by an attitude of questioning. The question that arises in connection with Sartre’s account is whether that questioning attitude always possesses a negative structure. Sartre’s famous example of Perception is in the context of a café in which it is claimed that I “see” that my friend Pierre is not in the café. This raises the question of whether I can perceive something that is not present. We recall in relation to this question that for Aristotle and Kant it is awe and wonder at the existence of the world and the moral personality, that constitutes our metaphysical relation to the world. This, in contrast to Sartre, is a positive attitude toward existence as a whole rather than a piecemeal atomistic response to someone who is not where he is supposed to be. On Aristotelian and Kantian accounts it is the expectation that Pierre would be in the café that naturally led to the “inference” or “belief” that he was not there when a sensory exploration of the café revealed “No Pierre”. In this situation, we find ourselves in what is called a context of exploration and we are using our powers of perception to answer a question we ask ourselves about the existence of a particular concrete object in the world. What we should be asking ourselves instead is whether this state of affairs belongs naturally in the context of the explanation/justification of existence, i.e. “Why does consciousness present itself as Nothingness or Negation?”. Aristotle and Kant would both claim that the answer to this question has to do with an analysis of the logical conditions of the above experience, namely, the expectation in which we posited the presence of Pierre in the café( perhaps via the imagination). This leads us back to questioning the role of the imagination and its role in Being-in-the-World.
Sartre’s response to this question comes in his work on the Imagination in which he focuses conveniently and critically on a psychological conception of “the image” which he argues places images “In” consciousness. This is a mistake, he argues, essentially because “the image” is a relational term denoting the way in which, for example, Pierre is “grasped” by consciousness in an imaginative mode. There is, however, as Mary Warnock points out considerable ambiguity in the way in which Sartre characterises this mode of consciousness. One of the critical issues involved in determining the essence or nature of the imagination is whether we should regard this mode of consciousness as merely thinking something or rather in terms of the more complex act of thinking something about something. Involved in this issue is whether we can be said to see the café as not containing the presence of Pierre. It would be absurd to claim that no thinking was occurring in this situation so the question remains: is this thinking something, e.g. “No Pierre!” or is it a case rather of thinking something about something, e.g. “Pierre is not here!”
Spinoza’s form of “proto-phenomenology” is a useful guide to consult in this context. When I think about a winged horses, Spinoza argues, my thought asserts that the horse is winged. Further thought about the matter may take us to a higher level of assertion in which it is asserted, “No horses are winged”. If this first assertion was the product of the imagination then we see that it is sublimated by this second “assertion” which appears to rely on a truth-functional form of thinking that seeks to think something about something. For Spinoza, this latter form of conceptualisation of a product of the imagination by an understanding form of consciousness refers to a more adequate idea of Reality. Spinoza in his reflections also contributes to complementing Aristotelian hylomorphism by claiming that sensations in general and pain in particular “assert” the state of the body to the mind, thus giving content to the otherwise mysterious claim of Spinoza’s, that the first idea of the mind is the idea of the body. Spinoza also claims that the body is a complex entity composed of simpler bodies each of which possesses an energy that it uses to endeavour to maintain itself in existence. At some level of simplicity, one can infer that consciousness or thought are no longer possible as powers of the organism. This is certainly true of the cell level of the organism but probably (if we exclude the brain) true of the level of the organs of the body. This kind of explanation reminds us of the material and efficient explanations of change in living systems that are provided by hylomorphic theory. For contemporary biologists, the physical power of the smallest living unit uses its power to unite with other units to produce more complex entities that in turn possess more complex powers. The hylomorphic actualisation process of becoming a human life form continues until the power or telos of rationality emerges and one can think “No horses are winged” or “Pierre is not in the café”.
In Spinoza’s proto-phenomenological approach every mental event “asserts” the existence of something. If I think, “This horse is winged” this assertion is clearly in the hypothetical mode of possibilities and the full analysis of this possibility is perhaps best expressed in the hypothetical claim “If horses could fly”. But what is the point of the hypothetical? According to Spinoza, complex life systems desire to preserve themselves and pleasure and pain is the means or one of the main principles Spinoza uses to describe and explain those complex life systems we call human beings. Aristotle and Freud would have thought this approach insufficient in accordance with the principle of sufficient reason and added both an energy regulation principle (ERP) and reality principle (RP) to this pleasure-pain principle (PPP).
The desire to meet Pierre at the café, the perception of the state of affairs and the subsequent realisation that he is not there affects the homeostasis of the perceiver (ERP), causes a form of pain(PPP) and these elements then give rise to the true assertion in the mind that “Pierre is not in the café”(RP). Kant would have regarded this latter moment of this experience as the moment in which the whole experience is organised by a judgment of the understanding. If I become angry about this state of affairs( feel a higher level pain) the judgment “Pierre ought to have been in the café”(because he promised to meet me there) is subsequently formed. This assertion is an ought judgement of the faculty of the understanding. If we think further about the matter by wondering whether something beyond his control prevented Pierre from keeping his promise then this permits us to hold our previous categorical judgments concerning Pierre’s particular promise and the universal generalisation that “Promises ought to be kept”, in suspension (in favour of the hypothetical judgment “he would have come if he could”)
In volume one we characterised Spinoza’s position in the following terms:
“the more complex a body is the greater are its powers. Animals, in comparison, are finite modes of life with fewer powers. They may for example not possess any idea of their minds—only human beings possess ideas of their bodies.”
We are for Spinoza and Aristotle subsystems of Nature and conceived thus can diminish in significance or importance when standing, for example at the foot of a powerful waterfall or alternatively standing on the deck of a ship in the midst of a storm at sea. In another sense, however, especially on Kant’s theory, we possess powers neither the waterfall nor the unruly sea possesses, the powers, namely, of animality consciousness, language and rationality. These complex powers in turn give rise to a major task for us insofar Spinoza, Kant, and Heidegger are concerned: the task of resolving the nature of our Being. We are for all three of these Philosophers, Beings for whom our Being is an issue. For Spinoza, however, his proto-phenomenological approach does not rest in a theoretical search for existentialia but rather in an ethically adequate idea of ourselves as ethical beings. He thus fulfils to a greater extent than either Heidegger or Sartre the oracular challenge or proclamation to “Know thyself”.
The judgement “Pierre is not in the café” is a theoretical judgement in a practical context and illustrates well the relationship of theoretical and practical understanding and by implication theoretical and practical rationality. These Aristotelian and Kantian analyses are not, however, available to Sartre and his penchant for the ideas of Nothingness, Negation, and the dialectical logic that appeals to these very abstract theoretical notions.
It must be admitted that the idea of the Other person is better described in Kant. Kant claims that the relationship we have to others is antagonistic but the outcome is positive for civilisation. He also claims that the relationship ought to be Respectful which clearly delineates his moral theory and its logic of the categorical imperative. The Other Person is also more clearly represented in the Philosophy of Spinoza. The Other person that I love, for example, is linked to a fundamental non-solipsistic desire to preserve the Other in his/her existence.
Sartre is a modernist who not only questions the Freudian idea of Love as being important to the strength of a strong Ego, but he also would have questioned the Freudian idea of forms of consciousness such as the preconscious and the unconscious. Sartre also distances himself from the (hylomorphic?) idea of the body that we find in the work of his friend and contemporary, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Spinoza’s claims also do not accord with many of Sartre’s assumptions. One such claim is the thesis that the first idea of the mind is the idea of the body: that we do not have an adequate idea of the body is to be interpreted in terms of the powers of the body as they express themselves in the mind. Spinoza also has a hylomorphic account of the relation of the body to mind whereas Sartre’s account reminds one of the accounts we find in Husserl and Heidegger. Conscious awareness of changes in the body that become relevant for the mind is not necessary for Spinoza’s account, e.g. I may be thirsty but not be aware that the cause/reason for this is a slight fever. For Spinoza, there is a logical or conceptual connection between these two elements of my experience which Sartre would have difficulty connecting and explaining. Spinoza’s ultimate aim of viewing all existence in the world sub specie aeternitatis would not have accorded well with Sartre’s tendency to view man’s consciousness sub specie humanitatis (through a glass darkly). There is no trace of the fundamental Greek conception of the relation of psuche (life) to that of the mind in Sartre, as there is in Spinoza. In Sartre we encounter a dualistic account of Being or substance (en soi, pour soi). Spinoza also begins his account with Substance that in itself is logically characterised. He characterises the modifications of Substance more concretely but there is no trace in these characterisations of Nothingness, Negation, or dualism. His modifications are conceptual modifications of the kind we might find in hylomorphic theory, e.g. thought and extension.
The Principle of Sufficient Reason that we encounter in the Philosophy of Kant probably had its origins in the Philosophy of Aristotle but it is also suggested in Spinoza’s conception of “adequate cause”, which is a logical or conceptual idea of cause where the effect of the cause can also be clearly and distinctly perceived. Sartre’s so-called ontology of substance and pools of nothingness makes the above form of rationality difficult to characterise. In Volume one we of this work we stated:
“Adequate ideas acknowledge adequate causes or conditions”(P.264)
For Spinoza, for example, the idea of fear connected to the idea of a ghost caused partly by frightening sensory conditions, and partly by a personal failure to care sufficiently for people in one’s past will only be dissipated by adequate ideas, e.g. reflected in the judgement “There are no ghosts they are figments of the imagination”. Such a movement of the mind is a movement from a lower imperfect state to a higher state of perfection. This movement is essentially hylomorphic indicating as it does the actualisation process from the path of animality to rational discourse. The imagination of ghosts, according to Spinoza, diminishes or hinders the power of acting of the body and causes an appeal to memory or understanding in order to reorganise our ideas. The imagination is obviously superseded in this movement and the higher powers of judgement, understanding, and Reason are responsible for the transition from the fearful phantasy of “Ghost!” to the judgement “There are no ghosts, they are figments of the imagination”. This judgment is not merely a bloodless cognitive movement of the mind but rather a manifestation of an ethical movement of the mind toward the Platonic/Aristotelian idea of “The Good”: an idea that moves us toward the state of greater perfection. Here we are reminded once again of the statement “The truth will set you free” because we see here in Spinoza’s conception of an adequate idea and adequate cause the importance of the role of knowledge to the ethical sphere of our existence. As we pointed out in volume one, however, the overall view of Spinoza falls short of the Greek ideal, in particular when we encounter the following quote:
“The knowledge of good or evil is nothing else than the emotion of pleasure or pain insofar as we are conscious of it.”(Spinoza’s Ethics P.149)
We note the appeal to consciousness instead of the appeal to the Principle of Sufficient Reason we would have found in the works of Plato or Aristotle. This is problematic because it suggests that consciousness and not rationality is the final telos of human potentiality. The further suggestion that conatus is connected to consciousness rather than rationality requires further defence which we do not find in Spinoza’s Ethics. This is what prevents Spinoza’s ethics from being a deontological form of ethics of the kind we find in Kant. Consciousness we know is a founding idea of the later Philosophies of Husserl and Sartre as it was in Descartes Philosophy. This is one reason for referring to Spinoza as a proto-phenomenologist.
Being and Nothingness replaces universal categorical judgement such as “All men are mortal”(theoretical judgement) and “Promises ought to be kept”(practical judgement) with concrete judgements that presuppose a desire for something concrete and particular and that presupposes a desire for something that is absent and can be imagined. Such concrete judgements characterize our relation to Others who also manifest themselves as modes of existence.
The example that Sartre provides us with in order to demonstrate how the Other becomes present to us is that of an eavesdropper at a door. The eavesdropper is circumspectively engaged in his task until the form of consciousness involved is transformed by an awareness of a witness, observing his activity. The emotion of shame supervenes but it is not clear that this is a function of the pleasure-pain principle, a sensible form of consciousness (PPP) or whether it is a function of an conceptual form of consciousness, e.g. that this is an activity one ought not to be engaged in. Sartre probably inclines toward the former and claims that the eavesdropper “sees” himself as the other sees him: perception is perhaps best construed as a sensible form of consciousness in Sartre’s account. This still leaves us pondering the question as to whether we have an accurate characterisation of shame: that characteristic Zeus was so concerned to provide the human species with(along with an understanding of justice or “The Good”). Insofar as Greek philosophy is concerned the emotion of shame contains a consciousness of a lack that the idea of justice provides a rational principle for organising. It would, of course, be absurd to embrace the mode of consciousness of shame and its organising principle and at the same time refuse to acknowledge the logical consequence of the existence of other consciousnesses manifested in our experience of the presence of Others.
We can see in the presentation of the above example of the negative emotion of shame, the presence of Negation in Sartre’s ontology. Spinoza, on the other hand, chose to define the positive aspect of mans existence via the emotion of love which he characterised as the practical desire to preserve the existence of the loved Other. Sartre also chose ideas of the positive and negative(Being and Nothingness) but these were essentially theoretical ideas. This raises again the issue of whether our questioning attitude relating to our own Being is a positive or a negative question: whether, that is, we are referencing the Philosophy of Aristotle and Kant or Sartre. Sartre’s theoretical and practical negativity poses the question of whether Rousseau’s “amour proper” or the Hegelian master-slave dialectic are more important in the characterisation of Being-for-itself than the positive forms of consciousness of awe and wonder we find at the source of Aristotelian and Kantian reflections.
Sebastian Gardner in his work “Sartre’s Being and Nothingness”(London, Continuum books, 2009) provides us with a very useful account of Sartre’s ontology that enables us to see how Sartre envisaged overcoming the incipient dualism that Warnock criticised in her critique of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. This criticism takes another more metaphysical form in Merleau-Ponty’s “The Visible and the Invisible” in which it is claimed that Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself could never be reconciled in the thought of the whole that Philosophy requires. Gardner claims that Sartre has a counterargument to both these criticisms:
“In the Conclusion Sartre returns to the question of whether or not Being “ as a general category belonging to all existents” is divided by a hiatus into “two incommensurable regions, in each of which the notion of Being must be taken in an original and original sense” (617/711) Sartre declares that our research in the course of the book allows us to answer the question of how the two regions are related to one another: “the for-itself and the in-itself are required by a synthetic connection which is nothing other than the for itself itself “(617/711). This relation has the character of a tiny nihilation which has its origin at the heart of Being, a nihilation made-to-be by the in-itself” “sufficient to cause a total upheaval to happen to the in-itself. This upheaval is the world.”(P.200)
This reminds one of Spinoza’s causa sui, something that is a cause of itself. Presumably, this “happening”, if that is the correct term here, founds itself in the process of becoming conscious, or making itself into consciousness. Yet dialectically there can be no antecedent rationally constituted beginning point(no principle) and Sartre suggests that we regard this “happening” as hypothetical. Metaphysics, as a consequence, instead of being an investigation into first principles as is the case with Aristotle and Kant becomes a hypothetical dialectical adventure of reflection. The study of Being qua Being seems in Sartre’s account to have stalled at the starting point and we are instead invited to reflect upon what he calls a “disintegrated ensemble”, a polite way of saying that dualistic contradictions may be present. Spinoza’s account rested upon ideas of God or Nature at the expense of Freedom. Sartre’s account on the other hand takes the road in the opposite direction and attempts to show that any form of the relation of God to man or man to God would destroy mans freedom. Kant, in the context of this debate, saw God to be a theoretical transcendental idea of theoretical reasoning and freedom to be a practical transcendental idea of practical reasoning. Each idea has its own domain and therefore there is no contradiction in construing the free human being as choosing to be moral through his understanding of the Moral Law, or being determined by “causes” outside of his practical control. Aristotle’s hylomorphism could also house the above seeming antonymy under the same roof without contradiction. For Aristotle there are explanations that refer to archeological “causes”, explanations that are teleological causes, and explanations that are formal or ontological.
One of the consequences of Sartre’s reflection upon these issues is that the discipline of Contemporary Psychology can indeed without exaggeration be described as a “disintegrated ensemble”(e.g. man as a biological organism, man as a social being, man as a subjective individual, etc). This tragic anarchism is, of course then held together not by phenomenological reductions but rather by pseudo-scientific reductions that relate man to Nature in a Darwinian domain of scarcity which unsurprisingly supports the dialectics of master-slave relations. Sartre presented some of these dialectical consequences in a work entitled “Critique of Dialectical Reason”(trans Alan Sheridan Smith/New Left books) which was part of an earlier promise to produce what many scholars thought impossible, namely an Existential Ethics.
Returning to the influence of Sartre’s work in Psychology on the field of Emotions requires a close look at his work “Sketch for a Theory of Emotions”. Sartre criticises Psychologists for treating Emotion as a “topic” alongside others such as “attention” and “memory”. The “disintegrated ensemble” we encounter here involves a reduction of psychological phenomena to three variables: bodily reactions, behaviour, and states of consciousness. Psychological theories then attempt to find values for these variables and relations between them that will provide a logic of psuche. Sartre rejects this strategy with the words:
“even when duly described and explained, the emotion will never be more than one fact among others, a fact enclosed in itself, which will never enable anyone to understand anything else, nor to look through it into the essential reality of man”
These words were published in 1939 on the eve of destruction and perhaps they are directly or indirectly attacking one of the intellectual “final solutions” of Philosophy, namely that “the world is a totality of facts”(Wittgenstein’s Tractatus 1922). Final solutions always inevitably deny origins, and this early work of Wittgenstein was no exception denying as it did the origins of the idea of the world as a whole that lies behind the study of Being qua Being.
The Existentialism of Sartre responds to logical atomism with dialectical dualism. Sartre promised in his “Sketch” to restore action and Value to the Philosophical arena of debate. We do, Sartre insists, have access to the idea of the essence of emotion which in turn is related to what he refers to as “the apriori essence of the human being”(P.22) The “facts” of the contemporary Psychologist presuppose the transcendental and constitutive consciousness that is revealed to us when we “put the world in brackets” and perform a phenomenological reduction. This consciousness, it is claimed, somewhat ambiguously, is mine. It exists insofar as it is identical with consciousness of my existence. This might paradoxically suggest the move toward transcendental solipsism that Husserl feared and which was also incidentally a consequence of the logical atomism of the early Wittgenstein. Sartre describes what he is doing in the name of Philosophical Psychology as Anthropology. He starts from the idea of the synthetic totality of man’s consciousness. For Sartre, the difference between a phenomenon and a fact is that the former “announces itself to consciousness” whereas the fact is defined by scientists as independent of consciousness. Sartre claims, of course, that nothing is completely independent of consciousness but like Berkeley claims that there is a Being-in-itself. He differs from Berkeley in that he refuses to accept that Being-in-itself is an idea in the mind of God. Instead he insists that it is with this idea that the dialectical journey begins. Our consciousness is not Being-in-itself and this places nothingness and negation at the heart of consciousness.
If, against this background we interrogate emotional consciousness, its essence will appear to us, its meaning will appear to us. Scientific interrogation, in contrast, concentrates upon the fact and its truth. It is the belief of the fact that has the universal connection with the state of affairs it is related to. On the scientific account, however, there cannot be any such “phenomenon” as a way of believing something (emotionally, imaginatively, for example)to be the case. There cannot on the scientific account, be a way in which the emotional consciousness grasps its object. Emotion, Sartre argues:
“is the human reality asserting itself and “emotionally directing itself towards the world” “(Sketch P.25)
Emotional forms of consciousness, Sartre argues has its own principles and it is these we seek to interrogate this form of consciousness. We begin by placing man as a Being-in-the-world and this is the beginning of the Anthropology we seek to construct that will in its turn serve as a foundation for Psychology. Anthropology will interrogate the phenomena systematically and discover the principles that reveal or disclose the existentialia of Being-in-the-world. The world, in the above formula, is an important element because emotional consciousness is always of the world or of an object that is in the world. Sartre notes that the emotion characteristically feeds upon the object and returns again and again to it until homeostasis returns to the Conscious Being. Sartre illuminates this point by contrasting what he calls an unreflective consciousness of an instrumentality engaging with an instrumental object and the unreflective consciousness where something fails to function and the world is viewed as “difficult”. Sartre dramatises this phenomenon of the difficult world and claims that this transforms the world into what he calls a “hateful” world. In this transformation it certainly appears to be the case that we are dealing with a way of believing something about a world that is recalcitrant to my wants and actions.
There is an active awareness, Sartre also argues, of the words I write, as I write them. In this account Sartre rejects the scientific account of consciousness which will attempt to causally explain the appearance of the words on the page in terms of habitual knowledge (William James). It is important to note, however that Sartre surprisingly leads us in a hylomorphic direction when he writes that the words that I write on the page are:
“potentialities to be realised”(Sketch P.60)
It is also important to point out that Sartre does not invoke the reasoning of Aristotle nor does he explicitly admit that he is using the idea of an Aristotelian power. Indeed, there is, on the contrary, every reason to believe that he would deny many of the premises of hylomorphic theory. Rather than focus on ideas of Reason Sartre concentrates on, for example, forms of unreflective awareness, that:
“constitutes an existential stratum in the world”(Sketch P.61)
This form of consciousness is, to use Elisabeth Anscombe’s term “non-observational. The world for Sartre is not a world of facts discovered in observation but rather a world of potentialities to be realised. We form what Sartre calls “hodological “ maps of the world that may or may not answer to our powers. This suggests an intimate relationship between potentialities and powers but the world is nevertheless a difficult place to be thrown into, especially considering the scarcity of objects that can fulfil our needs. This difficulty of the world, according to Sartre is an objective property of the world that is revealed when we use our power of perception. All this reveals an essential feature of an emotion, which is its power to transform the world from something to be manipulated to a “difficult” place. When, for example, all the paths of my hodological map are blocked because of the difficulty of the world, the world is magically transformed into a place where activity is more an inward expression of agency than an outward accomplishment of a task. The desire to write a paper, for example, may be frustrated by an insult about my writing that calls into question my agency. Instead of changing the world with my writing I change my desire and thereby transform how I see the world. The example Sartre gives in the context of this discussion is that of attempting to pick some grapes that are out of one’s reach. The realisation that the grapes cannot be picked gives rise to an emotional state in which the agent believes that the grapes were too green to be eaten anyway. This undoubtedly involves some form of denial of reality. A more dramatic example of passive fear involves an agent fainting in a state of passive fear in the face of an attacking ferocious beast. The danger of the beast is thus denied in this fearful reaction. What we are witnessing in this case, Sartre argues, is a magical transformation of the world by removing the consciousness of the danger. This is an interesting example because the behaviour from an external perspective could be described as irrational. A fearful consciousness on this account aims to negate something in the external world by means of what Sartre describes as “magical” activity. Sartre also discusses the phenomenon of depression where the transformation of the world occurs via a lowering of the “flame of life to a pinpoint”(Sketch P.69). The difficulty of the world becomes too much for the consciousness to bear and the response is to diminish the level of consciousness. Sartre criticises William James’ attempt to separate the physiological phenomena associated with the above cases from emotional behaviour. The physiological phenomena argues Sartre, symbolises to a greater extent the state of consciousness of the agent. Running away in fear cannot he would argue be separated from the trembling and both plus the state of consciousness constitute the synthetic whole that constitutes the fear. In a fearful state of consciousness, I may also stop myself from running and stand frozen to the spot, but physiological changes to the body are still occurring in response to the fearful circumstances in the world that they relate to. Here Sartre could be interpreted as adopting the position of Spinoza. He could be interpreted as attempting to provide us with an adequate idea of the body and its potentialities and powers. There remains, however, in Sartre’s position an inevitable dualism. Sartre believes, as does Merleau-Ponty, that I can touch my left hand with my right hand and two “potentialities” can be actualised in this activity. Firstly my left hand may be experienced as an inanimate object until secondly the left hand becomes “animate” or “alive” to what is happening to it in a form of non-observational awareness (touch—being touched, touching). In this second moment of the experience the left hand becomes the source of an exploratory power, the touched object becomes a possible touching hand and a type of non-observational reflection occurs. Subject and object are synthesised. There is, in Sartre’s view no projection of affective meanings onto the world but rather the explanation takes instead the form of a lived body that is the source of our explorations of the world. In my “fear” or my “sorrow” I “live” these respectively magically constituted worlds. I slip into these worlds as I slip into the state of sleep or as the touched hand “slips” into being a source of exploration of a world in which it is aware of the happening of having been touched by another source of exploration.
In the situation of the agent having been frustrated by a world that is difficult and recalcitrant to my wants and needs, e.g. the head falls off the hammer in the act of hammering nails into the wood as part of the task of building a house. Postulate that I continue the hammering action in a frustrated manner with the wooden shaft of the hammer. This behaviour has an incantatory feel to it especially when viewed from the perspective of the rational activity of hammering nails into the wood but it is perfectly adapted to this newly constituted magical world I have constituted by my magical response to the nail. This response additionally is symbolic of an “assertion” of the synthetic totality of my agency. Viewing this behaviour from the perspective of Aristotelian hylomorphic theory and his three principles(ERP, PPP, RP) allows the following interpretation: the fearful, sorrowful and frustrated behaviour is no longer motivated by the Reality Principle(e.g. doing x in order to build a house) but rather by the energy regulation and pleasure-pain principles. The telos we encounter in these contexts is no longer the telos of the rational world we live in but rather a telos that perhaps “archeologically” reaches into a distant past where “incantation” played a larger role than it does today. Objects in magically constituted worlds no longer have essences or forms but rather cast a spell over consciousness in the way in which a dream does. In a dream-world, houses can get built in strange ways. What we are witnessing is the power of one form of the imagination to constitute such a dream world where, for example, causality does not operate in a space-time continuum but constitutes a space-time in which incantations and discontinuities construct very different phenomena. We are captives in a magical world as we are in a dream world. This takes us back to a reflection of Rousseau’s in which it is claimed that a man’s gaze can magically attempt to enslave one in a magically constructed social world in which the emotion of amour proper is the dominating animus of consciousness. Words can also have a similar hypnotic effect in the above kinds of transformed forms of consciousness. The gaze and the word can, Sartre argues demolish the fragile superstructures of Reason we have built with our theoretical and practical thought and action. The presence of a face, a gaze, a gesture or a word suffices to cause shame in the eavesdropper and he becomes aware of another sorcerer whose aim is to transform and enslave consciousness by turning it into an in-itself, an object. Awareness of the eavesdropper may produce emotions of shame or horror and may produce “magical” behaviour of the eavesdropper in its turn that denies the meaning of what has been observed. Such behaviour is not by any stretch of the imagination “free”.
Both Rousseau and Sartre believe that it does not take much for the structures of rationality to crumble in the consciousness of man. The question that needs to be asked is what is the role of the imagination when we “slip” (the world “happens” for Sartre) into the magical worlds of frustration, depression, horror, and shame. For Spinoza the solution to this problem is simple—shame and horror, for example, are bodily responses that can be overcome by an adequate idea of the body. This idea would include conceiving of the body as a physical object and as a source of exploration. The horror and shame in the eavesdropping circumstances could be removed with a “confession” or an acknowledgment that I was categorically wrong to violate other people’s privacy. Such an acknowledgment brings us back to the real world governed by a Reality principle that objectively categorises my act in rational terms. In this “moment” of the experience, my understanding subjugates the power of the body to respond to magically conceived gazes, words, and gestures. The imagination is sublimated by the understanding to use Kantian terms to describe ad explain what is happening to the agent.
The imagination too, is a form of consciousness directed upon an object that may not be real. I expect Pierre to be in the café. This expectation is not composed of the representation of Pierre but rather contains Pierre in what Aquinas terms the first intention. It is Pierre I wish to see, greet, and converse with not his representation. Sartre goes on to argue that the notion of “representation” is a parasitic notion because it is in fact connected fundamentally to its object. Sartre denies however that the power of the imagination is connected to the power of representation. Instead he maintains that the power of imagination generates “meaning”. The winged horse for example may not exist in our instrumentally/categorically constituted worlds but the image nevertheless has meaning because as Spinoza claimed it is “asserted” hypothetically. Sartre would probably deny this and insist that when I posit the presence of Pierre in the café I am about to visit what I grasp is a nothingness which has meaning in a similar way to the way in which the winged horse has a hypothetical meaning.
A negative act is then at the root of the imaginative form of consciousness. This negative act is an important element in being-for-itself because all action presupposes not merely a power to perceive the world as it is but also as it is not. This point is discussed in Mary Warnock’s Introduction to Sartre’s “The Psychology of the Imagination”:
“Not only in Being and Nothingness, but even in his later works, he insists that man’s freedom to act in the world is a function of his ability to perceive things not only as they are but as they are not. If man could not, first, describe a present given situation both as it is and as it is not: and if he could not, secondly and consequently, envisage a given situation as possibly being otherwise than how it is, then he would have no power to intervene in the world to change it…Merely to experience something as given is not enough. One must have the power of imagining it as well as perceiving it: that is, of imagining it otherwise. For the power to see things in different ways and to form images about a so far distant future is identical with the power of imagination.”(P xvii)
Imagination is for Sartre obviously involved in the expectation of seeing Pierre in the café but it might also be involved in the more complex expectation of bringing about the religious De Civitate Dei or the more secular Kantian Kingdom of ends. The important point Sartre is making, however, is that imagination is a power intimately related to activity and action. The major problem with the account is that both De Civitate Dei and the Kingdom of ends are connected to the power of Kantian Practical Reasoning or Aristotelian Virtue which is defined as doing the right thing in the right way at the right time(a rational power par excellence).
“The truth will set you free” (a Biblical quote) is in fact also an assumption of Ancient Greek philosophy. This statement places its finger on the pulse of an urgent philosophical problem, the problem, namely, of the relation of practical reason about action to theoretical reasoning about thought. Socrates assumed, for example, that just actions required Knowledge. Sartre’s account, however, seeks to diminish the importance of truth and knowledge by suggesting that consciousness is more related to meaning than to truth and also by suggesting that consciousness is Nothingness and tied to Negation rather than “assertion”(as Spinoza claimed).
O Shaughnessy in his work “Consciousness and the World”(Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2000) questions Sartre’s ontology on essentially metaphysical grounds. He claims, for example, that there can be no intuition of the absence of Pierre simply because absence cannot be perceived(which raises the more difficult question about whether Nothingness can indeed be conceived) but is rather a belief that is inferred from the perception of a state of affairs. Negation, in other words occurs because of an assertive expectation, a belief that Pierre will be in the café(P 330-1). Furthermore Sartre’s account denies the existence of cognitive awareness of experience (P.286 footnote). It seems that if the imagination is one of the primary powers of consciousness, this compromises our relation to Being simply because of the phenomenon of self-deception. I am, for example, deceived in the dream into believing I am experiencing an X when in reality I am merely imagining it. Dreams are putatively about reality whereas consciousness, according to O Shaughnessy is “in touch with Reality”(P.12). Given this state of affairs Sartre would find the following words paradoxical:
“The essential concern of consciousness with truth also sheds light upon another important property of consciousness. Namely, the fact that consciousness in the self-conscious necessitates rationality of state…The truth orientation of consciousness manages also to explain the wholly general fact that consciousness necessitates rationality of state.”(P.13)
This is, O Shaughnessy argues, a logical point. It is the truth-orientation of consciousness that eschews solipsism and ensures that consciousness can explain what lies outside of its own confines. Powers build upon powers (Aristotle) and rationality builds upon the truth and both elements constitute the Knowledge that Aristotle thought would be provided by our Theoretical, Practical and Productive Sciences. O Shaughnessy claims that Experience begins with Perception, and perception, he also believes, is an a priori power and definable in general a priori terms. This must lead us to believe that consciousness must, upon seeing lightning strike a tree, become immediately aware of the truth that the tree was struck by lightning. If this is, as O Shaughnessy claims, then there must be a logical connection between Consciousness and Perception. This is also implied by the Kantian statement that there is a logical connection between intuitions and concepts: intuitions without concept are blind and concepts without intuitions are empty. All of this raises questions about the overall strategy of Sartre.
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