Why is sartre important

Sartre had long been fascinated with the French novelist Gustave Flaubert. In this work, Sartre joins his Existentialist vocabulary of the s and early s with his Marxian lexicon of the late s and s to ask what we can know about a man in the present state of our knowledge.

These features doubtless contributed to his being awarded the Nobel prize for literature, which he characteristically refused along with its substantial cash grant lest his acceptance be read as approval of the bourgeois values that the honor seemed to emblemize. In his last years, Sartre, who had lost the use of one eye in childhood, became almost totally blind. 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. Unlike Heidegger, however, Sartre does not try to combat metaphysics as a deleterious undertaking. He simply notes in a Kantian manner that it raises questions we cannot answer.

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. Being-in-itself and being-for-itself have mutually exclusive characteristics and yet we human reality are entities that combine both, which is the ontological root of our ambiguity.

The in-itself is solid, self-identical, passive and inert. One can see why Sartre is often described as a Cartesian dualist but this is imprecise. The principle of identity holds only for being-in-itself. The for-itself is an exception to this rule. The category or ontological principle of the for-others comes into play as soon as the other subject or Other appears on the scene.

The Other cannot be deduced from the two previous principles but must be encountered. Praxis is dialectical in the Hegelian sense that it surpasses and subsumes its other, the practico-inert. Thus speech acts would be examples of praxis but language would be practico-inert; social institutions are practico-inert but the actions they both foster and limit are praxes.

The Other in Being and Nothingness alienates or objectifies us in this work Sartre seems to use these terms equivalently and the third party is simply this Other writ large. The concepts of praxis, practico-inert and mediating third form the basis of a social ontology that merits closer attention than the prolix Critique encourages. Sartre's gifts of psychological description and analysis are widely recognized.

His early studies of emotive and imaging consciousness in the late s press the Husserlian principle of intentionality farther than their author seemed willing to go. For example, in The Psychology of Imagination , Sartre argues that Husserl remains captive to the idealist principle of immanence the object of consciousness lies within consciousness , despite his stated goal of combating idealism, when he seems to consider images as miniatures of the perceptual object reproduced or retained in the mind.

If emotion is a joke, he warns, it is a joke we believe in. These are all spontaneous, prereflective relations. They are not the products of reflective decision. Yet insofar as they are even prereflectively conscious, we are responsible for them. And this raises the question of freedom, a necessary condition for ascribing responsibility and the heart of his philosophy. But it would be better to speak of it as criterion-constituting in the sense that it grounds the set of criteria on the basis of which our subsequent choices are made.

It resembles what ethicist R. Sartre's use of intentionality is the backbone of his psychology. And his psychology is the key to his ontology that is being fashioned at this time. In fact, the concept of imaging consciousness as the locus of possibility, negativity and lack emerges as the model for consciousness in general being-for-itself in Being and Nothingness.

That said, it would not be an exaggeration to describe Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, so important a role does imaging consciousness or its equivalent play in his work. Sartre was a moralist but scarcely a moralizer. His earliest studies, though phenomenological, underscored the freedom and by implication the responsibility of the practitioner of the phenomenological method. Thus his first major work, Transcendence of the Ego , in addition to constituting an argument against the transcendental ego the epistemological subject that cannot be an object central to German idealism and Hussserlian phenomenology, introduces an ethical dimension into what was traditionally an epistemological project by asserting that this appeal to a transcendental ego conceals a conscious flight from freedom.

Authenticity is achieved, Sartre claims, by a conversion that entails abandonment of our original choice to coincide with ourselves consciously the futile desire to be in-itself-for-itself or God and thereby free ourselves from identification with our egos as being-in-itself. In our present alienated condition, we are responsible for our egos as we are for any object of consciousness.

The former is egoistic, Sartre now implies, where the latter is outgoing and generous. This resonates with what he will say about the creative artist's work as a gift, an appeal to another freedom and an act of generosity. It is now common to distinguish three distinct ethical positions in Sartre's writings. The first and best known, existentialist ethics is one of disalienation and authenticity.

It assumes that we live in a society of oppression and exploitation. The former is primary and personal, the latter structural and impersonal. As Merleau-Ponty observed, Sartre stressed oppression over exploitation, individual moral responsibility over structural causation but without denying the importance of the latter. Admittedly, it does seem compatible with a wide variety of life choices.

We could say that authenticity is fundamentally living this ontological truth of one's situation, namely, that one is never identical with one's current state but remains responsible for sustaining it.

The former is the more prevalent form of self deception but the latter is common to people who lack a sense of the real in their lives. Sartre sometimes talks as if any choice could be authentic so long as it is lived with a clear awareness of its contingency and responsibility. But his considered opinion excludes choices that oppress or consciously exploit others. In other words, authenticity is not entirely style; there is a general content and that content is freedom.

Sartre's thesis is that freedom is the implicit object of any choice, a claim he makes but does not adequately defend in his Humanism lecture. In fact, his entire career could be summarized in these words that carry an ethical as well as a critical message. As he grew more cognizant of the social dimension of individual life, the political and the ethical tended to coalesce.

It purports to question many of the main propositions of his ethics of authenticity, yet what has appeared in print chiefly elaborates claims already stated in his earlier works. But since the tapes on which these remarks were recorded are unavailable to the public and Sartre's illness at the time they were made was serious, their authority as revisionary of his general philosophy remains doubtful.

If ever released in its entirety, this text will constitute a serious hermeneutical challenge. He emerged committed to social reform and convinced that the writer had the obligation to address the social issues of the day. He founded the influential journal of opinion, Les Temps modernes , with his partner Simone de Beauvoir, as well as Merleau-Ponty, Raymond Aron and others.

After a brief unsuccessful attempt to help organize a nonCommunist leftist political organization, he began his long love-hate relationship with the French Communist Party, which he never joined but which for years he considered the legitimate voice of the working class in France. This continued till the Soviet invasions of Hungary in Still, Sartre continued to sympathize with the movement, if not the Party, for some time afterwards.

Each suspended his or her personal interests for the sake of the common goal. No doubt these practices hardened into institutions and freedom was compromised once more in bureaucratic machinery.

In effect, Sartre inverts this premise to say: Sum ergo cogito , I am therefore I think, which is for Sartre the natural arbitrary but actual order of things. For Sartre, by contrast with Descartes, consciousness is necessarily embodied: it comes into being only with our advent in the world at birth, and goes out of being with our exit from the world in death.

In life, however, consciousness itself is nothing, except insofar as it is consciousness of something. Take away all the things of which consciousness is conscious, and you would have nothing left. Whereas, Sartre argues, consciousness can seize itself as conscious of something, it cannot seize itself as conscious exclusively of itself, without being grounded in some material object of which it is conscious.

We might well have the impression that the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter is an accurate summary of our condition, but this impression is a delusion. The understanding of ourselves as individuated is an empirical process of learning over time, not an innate awareness. For Sartre, however, it is not so much the absence of God which he postulates a priori as the nature of consciousness that makes humans the authors of all moral value.

The discriminating power of self-consciousness, enabling us to stand outside ourselves as if we were things in the world much like other things, also enables us to discern that any present situation could be different, and that we could make it so: we can always ought always, Sartre implies have a project to amend the status quo.

Moreover, in most situations, we can conceive of more than one way to change things: in short, we can — indeed, we have to — choose. Freedom is not itself a matter of choice, Sartre insists; it is the ineluctable, inherent and foundational quality of human being. Because we are conscious of our moral responsibility, we feel anguish in the face of our freedom, and we are naturally inclined to flee from that anguish.

Sartre says in his early philosophy that we always choose how to act , whatever the circumstances might be. The exhausted athlete chooses the moment at which she is too tired to continue; the terrified victim chooses to faint in order to blot out the insufferable situation. He even goes so far as to say that the tortured man chooses when to cry out in pain — and so on.

Despite the extreme quality of some of his examples, it seems to me that Sartre is right to be concerned by the fact that, very commonly, we tend to deny or to disguise our freedom in order to evade responsibility for our actions. A typical strategy is role-playing, behaving in a way that we feel is dictated or required by the functions we fulfil. Sartre insists that orders can never cause us to act against our will: they only ever have the force or authority with which the agent himself invests them.

The agent always chooses to assent or disobey, to resist or to acquiesce. Sartre considers the phenomenalist option of viewing the world as a construct based upon the series of appearances. He points out that the being of the phenomenon is not like its essence, i. Just as the being of the phenomenon transcends the phenomenon of being, consciousness also transcends it. Sartre thus establishes that if there is perceiving, there must be a consciousness doing the perceiving.

How are these two transphenomenal forms of being related? As opposed to a conceptualising consciousness in a relation of knowledge to an object, as in Husserl and the epistemological tradition he inherits, Sartre introduces a relation of being: consciousness in a pre-reflective form is directly related to the being of the phenomenon. It differs from the latter in two essential respects. First, it is not a practical relation, and thus distinct from a relation to the ready-to-hand.

Rather, it is simply given by consciousness. Second, it does not lead to any further question of Being.

For Sartre, all there is to being is given in the transphenomenality of existing objects, and there is no further issue of the Being of all beings as for Heidegger. As we have seen, both consciousness and the being of the phenomenon transcend the phenomenon of being. It exists in a fully determinate and non-relational way. This fully characterizes its transcendence of the conscious experience. In contrast with the in-itself, the for-itself is mainly characterised by a lack of identity with itself.

This is a consequence of the following. It has no nature beyond this and is thus completely translucent. Insofar as the for-itself always transcends the particular conscious experience because of the spontaneity of consciousness , any attempt to grasp it within a conscious experience is doomed to failure. Indeed, as we have already seen in the distinction between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness, a conscious grasp of the first transforms it.

This means that it is not possible to identify the for-itself, since the most basic form of identification, i. This picture is clearly one in which the problematic region of being is that of the for-itself, and that is what Being and Nothingness will focus upon.

But at the same time, another important question arises. Indeed, insofar Sartre has rejected the notion of a grounding of all beings in Being, one may ask how something like a relation of being between consciousness and the world is possible. This issue translates in terms of understanding the meaning of the totality formed by the for-itself and the in-itself and its division into these two regions of being. By addressing this latter issue, Sartre finds the key concept that enables him to investigate the nature of the for-itself.

The nothingness in question is also not simply the result of applying a logical operator, negation, to a proposition. The first is a purely logical construction that reveals nothing about the world, while the second does. Sartre says it points to an objective fact.

However, this objective fact is not simply given independently of human beings. Rather, it is produced by consciousness. Thus Sartre considers the phenomenon of destruction. When an earthquake brings about a landslide, it modifies the terrain. If, however, a town is thereby annihilated, the earthquake is viewed as having destroyed it.

This means that it is the very negation involved in characterising something as destructible which makes destruction possible.

How is such a negation possible? The answer lies in the claim that the power of negation is an intrinsic feature of the intentionality of consciousness. When I question something, I posit the possibility of a negative reply. Sartre then notes that this requires that the questioner be able to detach himself from the causal series of being. And, by nihilating the given, he detaches himself from any deterministic constraints. Our power to negate is thus the clue which reveals our nature as free.

The structure and characteristics of the for-itself are the main focal point of the phenomenological analyses of Being and Nothingness. The analysis of nothingness provides the key to the phenomenological understanding of the for-itself chapter 1, Part Two. For the negating power of consciousness is at work within the self BN, By applying the account of this negating power to the case of reflection, Sartre shows how reflective consciousness negates the pre-reflective consciousness it takes as its object.

This creates an instability within the self which emerges in reflection: it is torn between being posited as a unity and being reflexively grasped as a duality. This lack of self-identity is given another twist by Sartre: it is posited as a task. The lack of coincidence of the for-itself with itself is at the heart of what it is to be a for-itself. Indeed, the for-itself is not identical with its past nor its future. It is already no longer what it was, and it is not yet what it will be.

Thus, when I make who I am the object of my reflection, I can take that which now lies in my past as my object, while I have actually moved beyond this. Sartre says that I am therefore no longer who I am. Similarly with the future: I never coincide with that which I shall be.

Temporality constitutes another aspect of the way in which negation is at work within the for-itself. These temporal ecstases also map onto fundamental features of the for-itself. First, the past corresponds to the facticity of a human life that cannot choose what is already given about itself.

Second, the future opens up possibilities for the freedom of the for-itself. The coordination of freedom and facticity is however generally incoherent, and thus represents another aspect of the essential instability at the heart of the for-itself.

The way in which the incoherence of the dichotomy of facticity and freedom is manifested, is through the project of bad faith chapter 2, Part One. The fact that the self-identity of the for-itself is set as a task for the for-itself, amounts to defining projects for the for-itself. This specifies the way in which the for-itself understands itself and defines herself as this, rather than another, individual. We shall return to the issue of the fundamental project below. Among the different types of project, that of bad faith is of generic importance for an existential understanding of what it is to be human.

This importance derives ultimately from its ethical relevance. In thus behaving, the waiter is identifying himself with his role as waiter in the mode of being in-itself. In other words, the waiter is discarding his real nature as for-itself, i. He is thus denying his transcendence as for-itself in favour of the kind of transcendence characterising the in-itself. In this way, the burden of his freedom, i.

The mechanism involved in such a project involves an inherent contradiction. Indeed, the very identification at the heart of bad faith is only possible because the waiter is a for-itself, and can indeed choose to adopt such a project.

So the freedom of the for-itself is a pre-condition for the project of bad faith which denies it. This misrepresentation is however one the agent is responsible for. Ultimately, nothing is hidden, since consciousness is transparent and therefore the project of bad faith is pursued while the agent is fully aware of how things are in pre-reflective consciousness. Insofar as bad faith is self-deceit, it raises the problem of accounting for contradictory beliefs.

The examples of bad faith which Sartre gives, serve to underline how this conception of self-deceit in fact involves a project based upon inadequate representations of what one is. There is therefore no need to have recourse to a notion of unconscious to explain such phenomena. A first consequence is that this represents an alternative to psychoanalytical accounts of self-deceit.

To explain how existential psychoanalysis works requires that we first examine the notion of fundamental project BN, If the project of bad faith involves a misrepresentation of what it is to be a for-itself, and thus provides a powerful account of certain types of self-deceit, we have, as yet, no account of the motivation that lies behind the adoption of such a project.

As we saw above, all projects can be viewed as parts of the fundamental project, and we shall therefore focus upon the motivation for the latter chapter 2, Part Four.

This desire is universal, and it can take on one of three forms. First, it may be aimed at a direct transformation of the for-itself into an in-itself. Second, the for-itself may affirm its freedom that distinguishes it from an in-itself, so that it seeks through this to become its own foundation i.

None of the aims described in these three moments are realisable. Moreover, the triad of these three moments is, unlike a Hegelian thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad, inherently instable: if the for-itself attempts to achieve one of them, it will conflict with the others.

Since all human lives are characterised by such a desire albeit in different individuated forms , Sartre has thus provided a description of the human condition which is dominated by the irrationality of particular projects. This picture is in particular illustrated in Being and Nothingness by an account of the projects of love, sadism and masochism, and in other works, by biographical accounts of the lives of Baudelaire, Flaubert and Jean Genet.

With this notion of desire for being, the motivation for the fundamental project is ultimately accounted for in terms of the metaphysical nature of the for-itself. This means that the source of motivation for the fundamental project lies within consciousness.

Thus, in particular, bad faith, as a type of project, is motivated in this way. The individual choice of fundamental project is an original choice BN, Consequently, an understanding of what it is to be Flaubert for instance, must involve an attempt to decipher his original choice. This hermeneutic exercise aims to reveal what makes an individual a unity. This provides existential psychoanalysis with its principle.

Its method involves an analysis of all the empirical behaviour of the subject, aimed at grasping the nature of this unity.

The fundamental project has been presented as motivated by a desire for being. How does this enable Sartre to provide an account of desires as in fact directed towards being although they are generally thought to be rather aimed at having? Sartre discusses desire in chapter I of Part One and then again in chapter II of Part Four, after presenting the notion of fundamental project. In the first short discussion of desire, Sartre presents it as seeking a coincidence with itself that is not possible BN, 87, Thus, in thirst, there is a lack that seeks to be satisfied.