Philosophy and Philosophers - an Introduction to Western Philosophy - Chapter 9
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CHAPTER NINE
Phenomenology and existentialism: Husserl, Sartre
Historically and intellectually there are complex connections between
phenomenology and the later manifestations of existentialism. The
phenomenology of Husserl was one of the major influences on Sartre,
although Sartre came to reject some of Husserl’s most distinctive
doctrines. Some of the connecting and discussed doctrines are: that the
defining feature of consciousness is intentionality so that every and
only acts of consciousness are directed to a meant or intended object;
the nature of the ego or I; the question of which is logically prior,
essence or existence; and the possibility and adequacy of a
disinterested or pure transcendental conceptualization of reality or
being.
Husserl
Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) was born in Prossnitz, a village in
Czechoslovakian Moravia, at that time part of the Austrian Empire.
His early university studies at Leipzig and Berlin were in
mathematics, and he received his PhD in mathematics in 1881. He also
attended the philosophy lectures of Wilhelm Wundt at the University
of Leipzig. Husserl decided to devote himself entirely to philosophy
and he moved to Vienna, where he attended philosophy lectures by
Franz Brentano (1838–1917), at which students were acquainted with
the philosophy of David Hume and John Stuart Mill. Husserl taught
at the universities of Halle and Göttingen, and from 1916 to 1929 at
Freiburg, where he spent the rest of his life. Husserl was an important
influence on Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), who became Rector of
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Freiburg University in 1933. Husserl had a dedicated attitude to
philosophy and saw it as a calling rather than merely a job. During
the thirties, following the rise of Nazism, life became increasingly
difficult for Husserl because of his Jewishness. If he had not died in
1938, he might well have gone the way of multitudes of other
European Jews. At his death his unpublished manuscripts were under
threat of being lost. High drama accompanied their removal to safety;
following some failed attempts to transport the manuscripts over the
Swiss border, they were eventually taken in the diplomatic baggage of
the Belgian Embassy to Louvain, where the Husserl Archives were
established.
The chief concern of the philosophy of Husserl is that philosophy
should develop as a truly universal “rigorous science”. Philosophy
must be a science that begins right at the beginning, taking nothing for
granted; that is to say, it must be a presuppositionless science of
sciences. All deductive or inductive reasoning depends for its validity
on the immediate, intuitive apprehension of truths for which further
justification neither can be given nor is required; such apodictic
(necessary) evident truths require no further foundation. If there is not
to be an infinite regress of justification, so that nothing is in fact ever
categorically justifiable, there must be such apodictic truths; not
everything can be justified. In this sense Husserl’s project of
establishing a unified certain foundation for all knowledge is close to
that of Descartes.
Husserl’s first major work in philosophy was closely connected
with mathematics. In the Philosophy of arithmetic he sought an
epistemological account of the origin of our ideas, understanding and
knowledge of the central concepts of arithmetic: numbers, functions,
arithmetical truths and the like. For example, the foundation of the
possession of the concept of number derives from intuitions of
aggregates as such. This was construed by the mathematician and
logician Gottlob Frege (1824–1925) as an attempt to set out a
naturalistic, and specifically a psychologistic or subjective, account of
arithmetical objects and truths themselves, and Husserl consequently
encountered Frege’s fierce criticism. The conventional opinion is that,
partly as a result of Frege’s criticism, Husserl did a complete
intellectual turnabout in his early philosophical studies from a view
supporting psychologism to a view rejecting it which resulted in the
philosophy of phenomenology. However, it can be argued that
Frege’s view of the Philosophy of arithmetic has spawned
misinterpretation, and that Husserl was concerned to study the
nature and origin of our ideas of arithmetical concepts and truths,
and that that inquiry is neutral with regard to the objectivity or
otherwise of those concepts and truths themselves. Indeed, it seems
clear that Husserl was fully aware of the need to distinguish our
ideas of numbers from numbers themselves.
Husserl 233
Whatever is the truth of the matter, Husserl’s later work does
involve an attack on psychologism. The psychologistic account of
deductive reasoning suggests that the justification of deductive
reasoning and of logical or mathematical truths such as 2+2=4 rests
upon their displaying certain very fundamental facts about the way we
think, even if such logical truths are not dependent on facts about the
physical world. This position, however, rests on a confusion; such a
view both removes the absolute necessity of logical truths and is also
question-begging. If logical truths did rest on any kind of facts—even
universally true facts about the way human beings think—then they
would rest upon facts that might have been otherwise since such facts
are always contingent. If we take the deductive inference involving
any two propositions “p” and “q”, “If p then q, p, therefore q”, it is
tempting to regard this as receiving its justification as a valid inference
from its describing a psychological fact about the way people must
think: if someone thinks “If p then q,” and thinks “p”, then they must
think “q”, or must see that “q” follows. This, however, confuses a
factual causal psychological compulsion, which is contingent even if
universal, with a logical inference which is necessary regardless of
whether anyone in fact makes the inference or not. Now the inference
may describe the way all people think—although that is extremely
doubtful—but that is not what the validity of the inference rests on.
The validity of the deduction does not depend on any general facts
about psychological processes; and, indeed, a rejection of all forms of
naturalism holds that logical truths do not depend on any facts at all.
Logic is prescriptive, not descriptive. Moreover, any such naturalistic
attempt to give logic a psychological justification would be viciously
circular, since all reasoning, including that required to do psychology
and produce arguments in psychology, already assumes the validity of
logical rules of inference. In short, the natural sciences presuppose the
validity of the rules of logic and so arguments using the propositions
of natural science cannot be used to justify the rules of logic. Such
naturalism would encourage various forms of relativism: if logical
rules describe psychological laws of thought, then these laws might for
us, or other beings, in another time or place, be different. The
connections in logic between premises and conclusions, between
evidence and conclusions—reasons and their logical consequences
generally—are not mechanical or causal but are conceptual and
concern meanings. Husserl rejects, in the Logical investigations,
psychologism and the universalization of naturalism, and the
misplacing of naturalistic explanation.
One of the initial motivations of Husserl’s philosophy can, then, be
seen as a reaction against scientism: the belief that everything is
explicable in naturalistic scientific terms. Husserl is not hostile to
science, he merely wants to point to its limitations: it makes
presuppositions about the nature and existence of reality which it does
234 Phenomenology and existentialism
not question, and so cannot give fundamental explanations in the
required sense of an ultimate starting-point for a rational explanation
of the world. Naturalism has its place: in natural science. Natural
science is too underpinned by unquestioned presuppositions, which
cannot be questioned within naturalism, to be a certain foundation for
all knowledge. For philosophy to be a rigorous science it must return
to what is given in experience in its generality prior to all theorizing
and interpretation, and approach what is given with an attitude shorn
of preconceptions or assumptions both apparent and hidden.
Philosophy must aim to reach apodictic certain truths: absolutely
necessary and certain truths which are devoid of the presuppositions
that would undermine their absoluteness. Philosophy seeks what
remains and self-evidently must be the case once all that need not be
the case—the contingent—is set aside: we are left with that which must
be presupposed in every form of rational inquiry.
Husserl speaks of the “crisis of European man”, by which he
means that the inability to establish rationalism on firm foundations
has led to irrationalism and barbarism; however, it is not the essence
of rationalism that is at fault, but the misconception that rationalism
and scientific naturalism are one, and that scientific naturalism can
provide ultimate rational explanations. When this is seen to fail,
rationalism itself is in danger of abandonment, whereas it is the false
identification of rationalism with naturalism that should be rejected.
That naturalistic science fails to deliver ultimate certain truths about
the universe should not be seen as a failure of that rationalist project
itself.
The historical starting-point of Husserl’s phenomenology is
Brentano. Brentano believed he had discovered the essence of the
mental or consciousness: that which is common to all and only the
mental. This common defining feature is intentionality: what the mental
is—what its existence consists in—is uniquely characterized by its
being intentional. Each mental act (or mental attitude) is directed
towards an object, an intentional object. Consciousness in its various
modes (thinking, believing, desiring, loving, hating, remembering etc.)
always has an object or content. In the different mental acts,
intentional objects will be related to consciousness in different ways.
But in all cases consciousness is consciousness of something: it always
has an object, and it is moreover directed upon or towards—it
“intends”—some object. The intentional object is the object of one’s
attention in a mental act. The notion of intentionality developed when
it was realized that consciousness is distinguished by its directedness
towards an intended object regardless of whether that object actually
exists in the world or not. The objects of mental acts may be
“intentionally inexistent” in being neither physical nor minddependent.
Thus if I am scared of the spider in the room, the
intentional object is the spider of which I am scared; the intentional
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object is the content of that mental act of being afraid, regardless of
whether there is actually a spider or not. I might believe I see a man
walking towards me in the fog: the intentional object of what I believe
I see is the man I believe I see, although the extensional object in the
world may turn out to be a tree. It is always indisputably true that my
mental act has such-and-such an object; my consciousness, and its acts
(recognizing, believing, remembering, etc.) are not accidently
associated with their intentional objects which are a necessary part of
the mental act whether the object turns out to exist or not: the
intentional object is immanent in the act. By contrast, any physical (nonmental)
act always requires an existent object on which to perform the
act: kicking a chair requires a chair that exists which is kicked, but
thinking of a chair does not require any chair to exist.
The view that intentionality is the essence of the mental seems to
work well as a defining feature of some mental acts, such as believing,
judging, and remembering, but it seems less applicable to other mental
occurrences, such as general moods like anxiety or well being, which
appear to be objectless. Brentano’s answer to this, which maintains
intentionality as the essence of the mental, is that in the cases of
occurrences such as moods the mood itself is its own object. The notion
that the mental is essentially intentional undermines the dualism of
Descartes’ view of mind as an autonomous mental substance which
might exist independently of all objects of consciousness; for,
according to the thesis of intentionality, thought (the cogito) and the
object of thought (the cogitatum) are inextricably linked: there is no
consciousness without consciousness of objects—there is no such thing
as bare consciousness devoid of an object—there can be no objects with
meanings without consciousness.
Husserl’s acceptance of the role played by intentionality in defining
consciousness further expresses the limitations of causal naturalism;
the realm of conscious acts and of their meant or intended objects
gives a field where the connections are understood only through the
notion of a connection of meanings and rational justification, which is
irreducible to merely causal or associationist psychological
explanations. The intelligibility of the sequences of mental acts and
their objects as meanings (believing x because of believing y) is one
where the connections require an account in terms of concepts, reasons
and purposes, not in terms of the causal or mechanical association of
mental events. “What justifies your certain belief that 1,574×6,266
=9,862,684?” or “Why do you hate the man who sold you the cat?”
require not causal answers or explanations, but reasons or evidence:
rational or logical justification. There are, on the one hand, situations
where someone as a matter of causal psychological fact holds a belief
or draws a certain conclusion, even though it does not rationally or
logically follow; and, on the other hand, there are cases where a belief
or conclusion does rationally or logically follow, but as a matter of
236 Phenomenology and existentialism
causal psychological fact people do not hold that belief or draw that
conclusion. So the question of the causal circumstances in which
someone as a matter of psychological fact does hold a certain belief or
draw a certain conclusion is distinct from the question of whether he is
rationally or logically justified in doing so.
Husserl is not really so concerned to argue for the conclusion that
intentionality is the distinguishing feature of the mental; what is
important for Husserl is that the realm of intentional objects or
meanings gives philosophy an autonomous guaranteed subject for
study independent of, and irreducible to, any wider naturalistic causal
assumptions concerning the nature or existence of those objects: we
have in any case objects as meanings of which we are conscious if we
are conscious at all. Whatever assumptions we make about the nature
of reality, it is nevertheless the case that our mental acts will be
possessed of certain contents or meant objects in virtue of their
intentionality: things appear to us a certain way. The mental always
involves reference to an object or content which in any sense other
than as the object intended in our mental act need not exist. The
subject matter of phenomenology is the essential nature of these
contents taken or viewed purely as the intentional objects of mental
acts. It is important to note that “object of consciousness” does not just
denote the sensuous objects of empirical experience. Anything that can
be an object of consciousness—colours, physical objects, mathematical
equations, love, time, comradeship, etc.—is a potential subject for
phenomenological study: it can be studied as it is as a phenomenon.
What underpins phenomenology is the idea that in coming to view
objects (in the most general sense) just as appearances to consciousness
we can see certain and necessary truths concerning the essential
features of those objects, for we can then see those features of things
which cannot, without self-contradiction as to what they are, be
thought away; we thereby understand objects as they are in themselves
stripped of all presuppositions and added-on interpretation of any
sort. The essential—necessary and sufficient—invariable features of
objects, of which we can be certain, are those features which, if they
appear to us at all, cannot be thought away if those objects are to
appear to us as objects of such-and-such a sort. The way objects must be
if they are to appear to us at all as those objects constitutes their
essence.
The word “phenomenology” derives from the Greek phainomenon
meaning an appearance, and logos meaning a reason or law. The
ultimate objects of presuppositionless science are phenomena: the
word “phenomenon” designates that which is what it appears to be,
which is therefore something seen as it is in itself. Phenomenology is in
fact the science of the intentional objects of consciousness; it consists of
laws based on meanings which describe the necessary structural or
formal features of appearances of various sorts. In the case of
Husserl 237
phenomenal objects there can be no appearance/reality distinction:
what they are is what they appear to be, for we are concerned with
them only as they appear. One cannot be mistaken that things appear in
a certain way: and as long as one does not go beyond (transcend)
things as appearances, one has a realm of objects about which one can
form necessary and certain descriptive truths. Appearances themselves
cannot present themselves in varying perspectives, although we can
have various different appearances. The force of the slogan of
phenomenology “To the things themselves” (Zu den Sachen selbst) is
that we must confront things just as experienced by consciousness,
independently of any theoretical or metaphysical presuppositions,
rather than as objects in any other sense—as physical objects for
example. We must return to experiences themselves, to
“transcendental experience”: a realm of “pure consciousness” or “pure
subjectivity”. That there is subjectivity or consciousness as such
Husserl called “the wonder of all wonders”. The wonder resides not in
being or existence itself but in that there is a being that is aware of
being.
Beneath the various natural sciences and the common-sense view of
the world there is a network of presuppositions as to the nature of
reality which are trans-phenomenal or “transcendent”: we make
assumptions about objects which go beyond what the objects are when
considered as pure phenomena. These assumptions go beyond what is
essential to those objects as phenomena. The pre-philosophical view of
the world Husserl calls the “natural attitude”. Even logic and
mathematics do not have the required presuppositionlessness, for they
do not within their subject question all the grounds of their basic
concepts and rules of inference. Indeed, it became apparent by the end
of the nineteenth century that it was possible to set up a variety of
equally consistent but mutually contradictory formal systems. There
are for example several different geometries.
The means of achieving the lowest level of presuppositionless
awareness which is required for a truly philosophical attitude is through
what Husserl calls the phenomenological reduction, “bracketing”, or
“epoché” (from the Greek word “epoche¯” referring to a “suspension”, in
this case of belief or judgement). The phenomenological epoché is the
heart of the phenomenological method. What we are left with when all
presuppositions concerning objects are set aside is only what is certain
and necessary about those objects. In fact the phenomenological
reduction has two stages:
(I) That in which we suspend judgement as to the existence or nonexistence
of the objects of consciousness so we can concentrate on
them as pure phenomena: that is, as they are as appearances.
(II) That in which we view the objects reduced to pure phenomena
not in their particularity, but in their generality and essence: we
238 Phenomenology and existentialism
are to concern ourselves with phenomena only as samples or
examples of types or sorts of phenomena, not with what makes
them particular “thises”; we thus bracket off the particularities of
phenomena. This is termed the “eidetic reduction” because it
reduces phenomena to the residue of whatever makes them the
type or sort of phenomena they are, without which they could
not appear at all. “Eidetic” derives from the Greek “eidos” for
“form”, which alludes to Platonic Forms which are essences.
In order to concentrate on objects merely as they are given to
consciousness as such, we bracket off all our normal everyday and
scientific theories and presuppositions as to the nature and existence of
those objects. In this way we set aside the presuppositions which are
unquestioned in both the common-sense and the natural scientific
views of the world in order to study the contents of pure “reduced”
consciousness as such. Whatever assumptions we previously made
about the contents of consciousness—concerning their cause, their
existence, their nature, their representing or not representing objects in
the external world—are suspended. Independently of all these
assumptions, everything that can come before the mind can be studied
as purely phenomenal objects: as they appear to consciousness. This
epoché involves neither denying nor affirming the existence or being of
the external world; the reality of the external world is not eliminated
but simply set aside from consideration, as are judgements concerning
the truth or falsity of the claim. In this way one attains the proper
philosophical attitude.
Philosophy, once it has attained the required phenomenological
attitude to the “reduced” objects of consciousness, is not concerned
with them as the contents of particular mental events, rather it is
concerned with them in their significance or meaning. The epoché
detaches the pure phenomenal objects of consciousness from both their
existence or non-existence and all that is inessential for them to be
what they are: we then see them as they are in themselves: as they must
be from any point of view in order for them to be whatever kind of
phenomenal object they are. Phenomenology is concerned with
phenomenal objects in themselves and as essences: the “whatness”
whereby the phenomenal object is an object of the kind it is. Husserl
uses “eidos” to mean “essence” or “pure essence”. We are concerned
with objects as appearances to consciousness in their universal or
essential aspects, whereby all and only objects of that sort must
possess such-and-such a set of characteristics if they are to be that kind
of object at all. Phenomenology, and indeed true philosophy, aims in
Husserl’s view to be nothing less than a “science of essences” or
“eidetic science”.
These essences are independent of any individual consciousness,
and are absolutely objective and universally valid, for they reveal to us
Husserl 239
what, if a certain object or content is present to consciousness at all,
must be part of the consciousness of that object. Indeed, knowledge of
essences is independent of all questions or knowledge of existence or
fact: the “whatness” of an object is totally independent of whether any
instances of that object actually exist.
Husserl is further convinced that such essences are intuited: there is
an immediate intellectual vision or grasping of essences (Wesensschau).
In a sense we confusedly apprehend essence all the time. When a
certain object is present to consciousness, it is always present as suchand-such
an appearance, not as mere appearance: that is, it has a
significance or meaning. That significance or meaning is captured by
its essence. Without these essences or significances, objects would be
nothing to us at all. But objects have a significance, and whatever the
accidental circumstances or features of their presentation, their
essential features deliver the significance or meaning of that
experience. Essences—giving significances as…—are the ultimate
phenomena of consciousness. In the Cartesian manner Husserl argues
that the essences of a thing are those features which it has beyond
doubt, for without them it would not be presented as that sort of thing
at all. It is this common meaning that is invariant in all our varying
perspectival presentations of a thing (for example as we move round
an object), that unites those varying presentations in referring to the
same object. Thus the consciousness-of-house means house only in
virtue of its including the essence of house: in this way the various acts
of consciousness are related and directed towards a house, rather than
something else.
This is related to an idea in Frege. Expressions can have meaning or
sense (Sinn) even though no object or reference (Bedeutung) exists that
satisfies that sense: the sense has a reference only if something satisfies
the sense, otherwise it has no existing meant object or reference. Thus
sense is independent of whether anything satisfies that sense, that is,
whether the meant or intended object exists or not. In addition
different singular naming expressions or signs and definite
descriptions can designate the same object either through their having
the same sense or through their different senses being different senses
for—modes of presenting—one and the same object: as with “the
Morning Star” and “the Evening Star” picking out Venus, or “1+1” and
“5–3” designating the number 2. If the meaning of an expression were
identified with its reference, then if I understood two expressions I
would as a consequence know whether they referred to the same
object or to different objects. If understanding the meaning of an
expression is knowing its reference, it is impossible, if I understand
what is meant by “the Morning Star” and “the Evening Star”, not to
realize that the two expressions refer to the same object: Venus. For to
understand the meaning of the expressions would involve in each case
being acquainted with their common reference. Such a consequence is
240 Phenomenology and existentialism
clearly false. It is obviously the case that the statement “the Morning
Star=the Evening Star” is an informative discovery of astronomy and
is not equivalent to the trivial logical statement “a=a”. The upshot of
this is to make it clear that there can be meaningful expressions which
may or may not have references; so the meanings are not to be
identified with their references and are independent of them. There is
no need to postulate the mysterious “subsistence” of Pegasus in order
for the expression “Pegasus” to have a sense and hence be meaningful.
Husserl accepts that we will need to experience individual cases of
white in order to grasp the essence “whiteness”; but one then
immediately grasps the essence of whiteness, since one sees the object
as white. Seeing an object as white implies that one already
understands what whiteness is. Objects are perceived with a certain
significance. It is a mistake to think that our grasp of the essence or
concept “whiteness” derives from inductively abstracting from a series
of particular white objects some feature they all and only they have in
common, for this process already involves the ability to pick out white
objects; we are already picking out some objects, and rejecting other
objects, as white objects. It is rather that in seeing something as white
we do, in that very mental act of seeing as, intuitively “see” the essence
of white. We already have the ability to pick out white objects:
phenomenology articulates the awareness of the essence implicit in
that ability. An analogy might be the way in which we could recognize
the man who robbed the bank (“I would know him if I saw him”—
which gives the point to identity parades) although we are quite
incapable of giving any defining description of the man.
Phenomenology aims to produce a state of mind where such an
intuitive descriptive articulation of essence is possible by setting aside
all that is neither necessary nor sufficient for a phenomenal object to be
the phenomenal object it is; we are left with an essential residue of
necessary and sufficient features which will give us certain and
necessary truths.
Particular objects of consciousness may be used as examples in
order to identify essences, rather in the way that a particular geometric
drawing of a triangle may be used to illustrate some theorem of
geometry such as Pythagoras’ theorem; but the truth concerning the
nature of the essence in no way depends upon the existence of the
particular item used as an example or on any other item existing. In
using examples, we describe what Husserl terms the “horizon” of a
thing; by the free play of the imagination—“free variation”—we
determine the limits within which a thing can vary while still
remaining the kind of thing it is. Thus we transform our experience of
an individual entity into experience of essence: we have then a nonsensuous
eidetic intuition.
Another way of looking at this is to say that in intuiting essences,
we are aware of pure possibilities independent of actual being: that
Husserl 241
which is essential to any actualization of that sort of object. Without its
essence no concrete actualization of the object whose essence it is
could occur, whatever else may be true of the object. It must therefore
be present in any possible experience of that object. For example, the
essence of any physical object, or a man, or a colour, is not identical
with any individual physical object, man or colour; the essence is what
is common to all and only things of those kinds, which describes what
is required for them to be things of those kinds, and without which
they would not be those things at all.
Through intuitions we describe the essential structure of our
experiences viewed as pure phenomena. The phenomena include
reflexively mental acts and the phenomenal objects of those acts: the
thought and the object of thought. Phenomenology, and hence
philosophy, is the foundation of any science whatsoever because any
intelligible awareness of the world at all must begin with this
fundamental grasping of essences: without these essences the world
would have no significance for us at all. In this sense Husserl regards
phenomenology as a priori: the apprehension of fundamental essential
meanings, significances, and “whatnesses” is logically prior to all
theorizing and independent of all contingent facts; phenomenology is
concerned with the characteristics known to be necessarily connected
with kinds of phenomena. Phenomenology aims to produce absolutely
certain objective necessary truths that are pure in having no relativity
to cognitive, spatial or temporal perspective. Such truths are in this
sense absolutely categorical: they are directly intuited from experience
and do not depend for their acceptance on the acceptance of any other
truths. Thus such truths cannot be argued for, inferred, or derived, for
then their truth would not be guaranteed as absolute because we
would not have to accept them until we had accepted other truths.
Such basic truths concerning the structure of phenomenal objects must
be seen immediately or not seen at all. They cannot be argued for
because any argument would presuppose the most basic level at which
intelligibility or significance arises. Such intuitions of essences are selfgiven
because there is nothing else from which the essence could be
inferred which does not itself assume an intuitive grasp of categories
of meaning or concepts. So, unlike in Kant, the preconditions for any
significant experience are not deduced, but intuited directly. Any
attempt at deduction, since the deduction itself is also a phenomenon
with significance as a deduction, already assumes the lowest level of
classificatory categories of consciousness without which no experience
would have any significance at all, and an experience without any
significance at all—not of an object of a certain sort—would be no
experience at all. To construct any argument presupposes that we can
understand what an argument is; so understanding what an argument
is cannot itself be derived from an argument. We cannot in any way
derive the essences of phenomena from anything more fundamental.
242 Phenomenology and existentialism
We may need through experience to acquaint ourselves with the
various kinds of intentional objects and mental acts there are: but the
essence, in virtue of which any mental act is aware of a certain kind of
object, is utterly independent of whether there is such an object or
anyone in particular experiencing that object as a content of
consciousness. If phenomena were utterly neutral with no significance
or meaning at all, there would be no hope of getting any science off the
ground; the absence of the basic meanings or significances of the
objects of consciousness would destroy any possibility of a science
connecting items in our experience into any intelligible repeatable
patterns whatsoever. The aim of phenomenology is to return to the
ultimate original or primordial significances of experiences shorn of
the baggage of accumulated significances embodied in the theories of
science and everyday assumptions. We then view the world with new
wonder and freshness.
The philosophy of Husserl involves a further radical application of
the epoché. The phenomenological reduction brackets the natural
external world, and all of the assumptions associated with belief in
such a world. But something still remains to be subject to epoché: the
individual ego or consciousness. Any act of consciousness
presupposes an ego: but the particularity of the ego is unimportant;
what is important is what is essential to the ego. The individual ego
too must be bracketed in order to intuit the essence of the thinking
individual itself. As with other essences, the existence of any
particular ego is irrelevant to the identification of the universal
“whatness” of ego in general which is pure intentionality. That which
is engaged in the process of bracketing the natural world, including
the empirical ego itself, must be something, and Husserl calls it the
transcendental ego, which stands outside the world. The essence of this
transcendental ego is that it stands as a precondition of any mental act
or experience whatsoever, including all acts of phenomenological
reduction. We now have a triadic structure for consciousness, egocogito-cogitatum;
these are the three logically linked elements of: pure
ego (the “I”, what it is that thinks), mental act (thought), and content
(the object of thought). This gives us full transcendental
phenomenology, the ultimate objects of which are a vast variety of
sorts of meaning or significance (noema, adjective noematic) which are
correlated with meaningful acts (noesis, adjective noetic) of the
transcendental ego. The ultimate phenomenological noetic-noematic
relation is not between psychic elements and empirical objects, but
between their essential meanings. The transcendental ego is,
ultimately, the only absolute, for it remains after all bracketing: it is
presupposed in every act of consciousness or experience whatsoever,
even the activity of bracketing itself. The transcendental ego is the
precondition of all meaning: it alone cannot be thought away because
it is presupposed in all thinking.
Husserl 243
The later philosophy of Husserl led him to give an active role to the
transcendental ego; the conclusion is that not the individual ego, but
the transcendental ego, actively constitutes or constructs the
significance or meaning of the objects of consciousness. Pure ego gives
objects their meaning or significance which makes them objects for
consciousness. This does not necessarily lead to idealism—that reality
is existentially dependent on consciousness—because it might be the
case that the transcendental ego simply places an existentially
independent reality under intelligible categories or concepts and so
makes that reality an object for consciousness. If, however, the only
reality an object can be said to have is that significance actively given
to it by the transcendental ego, then reality or the world is existentially
dependent on the transcendental ego, and that is idealism. If a world
without significance for consciousness is existentially impossible, and
all significance is a product of the transcendental ego, it follows that
the world is existentially dependent on the transcendental ego. This
suggests that the transcendental ego is the only absolute because
everything is existentially dependent on it, and it is not existentially
dependent on anything else.
Husserl’s view points towards a form of subjective idealism—reality
is existentially dependent on the subject—where existence is exhausted
by and tied to the meaning given to objects by the transcendental
subject or the subject as such. It might still be argued that such
significances in the form of essences are objective by being
independent of the existence of any particular consciousness and are
common to all consciousness as such: that objects present themselves
with the meanings or essences that they do is not an accidental feature
of any empirical ego but a product of consciousness as such. Husserl’s
later views tend towards idealism because he holds that to speak of the
world really existing, independently of the categories of significance
which are dependent on pure consciousness, is senseless and absurd.
Still, it might be said that the world would continue to exist
independently of pure consciousness. If this were granted, then it can
be replied that the world so characterized would be without
significance in the same way that a written sentence would be without
significance if there were no minds to grasp its sense; it would be a
“world” that is literally inconceivable. Husserl moves from the view
that nothing can be conceived except as an object for consciousness to
the view that nothing can exist except as an object of consciousness.
His answer to scepticism about the nature and existence of the external
world is to say that the world that appears with meaning just is the
real world and the positing of some other world which might exist or
fail to exist is senseless.
Husserl also became concerned with a phenomenological analysis of
time: the experience of duration itself as it appears to consciousness.
Time is particularly fundamental to the constitution of experiences.
244 Phenomenology and existentialism
The phenomenological analysis of time concerns the essence of time as
it appears: that is, what is necessarily and invariably involved in an
appearance which is temporal. He says that every real experience is
one that endures, and this duration takes place within the stream of an
endless filled continuum of durations which forms an infinite unity;
every present moment of experience—every now—is fringed by a
before and after as limits.
In the last part of Husserl’s life he introduced the concept of
Lebenswelt: the “lived-world”. Before any theorizing, including
philosophizing, one is confronted with the world as it appears in life.
The Lebenswelt is in some sense primary: the theoretical sciences are
derivative of, or parasitic on, its meanings. Objects already appear to
us loaded with a significance that points beyond themselves: their
meaning points to their own horizon, which is not currently present in
the experience, and defines them as the objects they are and indicates
the context in which the objects occur. The meaning of experiencing
the front of a house includes, among many other things, the presently
unseen back of the house. Husserl also became concerned with
avoiding solipsism by discussing the dependence of intentional
objects on the intersubjectivity of a community of individual egos. The
essence or meaning of objects as experienced often points beyond my
subjective awareness and depends on the awareness of others. This is
obvious if we think of the meaning to us of a great work of art. On the
face of it this seems like a rejection of eidetic phenomenology. Some
commentators have taken it that way, but Husserl seems to have seen
no discontinuity between his earlier and later work. Others have
viewed the later Lebenswelt as an indication that the eidetic
intuitions—the essences—we seek are to be found in the objects of the
world as lived.
Sartre
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) was born in Paris. In 1924 he went to the
École Normale Supérieure where he studied philosophy, and in 1929
he began teaching philosophy. From 1933 to 1935 he studied in Berlin
and Freiburg. While still a student Sartre met Simone de Beauvoir with
whom he had lifelong connections. In 1939 he joined the French Army;
because of his poor eyesight his duties were non-combatant; in 1940 he
was taken prisoner by the Germans. His experience of captivity was to
hone his views on the true nature of human freedom. The war also
aroused his interest in politics. In 1941 he was repatriated; he returned
to Paris where he taught philosophy and took an active part in the
Resistance.
There is a strong German influence on Sartre’s philosophy, which
started with his Protestant Calvinist upbringing. Many of the
Sartre 245
philosophers most influential on Sartre are from the German
intellectual tradition, such as Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger
(1889–1976). But an ever present influence for a French thinker such as
Sartre is Descartes. Talk of influence does not necessarily entail
agreement, of course. At one time Sartre was also in close contact with
philosopher and contemporary Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61).
After the war Sartre became one of the founders of the literary and
political journal Les temps modernes. He was increasingly involved in
contemporary political and ideological controversy; he was part of an
unsuccessful attempt to found a socialist, but non-communist, political
party. His later political writing espouses a form of Marxism which he
attempts to reconcile with his underlying philosophy of existentialism.
It is difficult to give any general characterization of existentialism.
Existentialism has been characterized as a form of anti-intellectualism,
or irrationalism or subjectivism; but the view of existentialism put
forward here accepts none of these accounts. The view advocated here
is that existentialism is a philosophy concerned to go back to what it
regards as the logically prior description of what it is like to be a
human being in the world before the accretion of a world-view based
on supposedly detached or disinterested theorizing. The philosophical
significance of this is the existentialist’s view that the-world-as-it-isfor-human-beings,
the human-world, the humanness of the world,
before metaphysical and scientific speculation, is logically
presupposed by any such speculation. The reason for this is that our
possessing any concepts and categories, some of which must be
involved in all possible talk about the world, logically depends on our
practices and interests as human beings without which concepts and
categories—more generally meanings and significances—would not
arise at all. The significance of the world and its objects arising from
practice and action is presupposed by the distilled categories of a
disinterested intellectual observer or spectator. Being a detached
spectator is not the logically primary way of our being-in-the-world.
That there is “a world”, objects with various significances and
meanings, depends upon and cannot be separated from the
significances and meanings that they have for human beings as a result
of human interests and agency.
The existentialist position requires us to shake off the grip of various
ingrained metaphysical assumptions about the world and ourselves.
One of the most profound of these is the view that we could, logically
speaking, exist as pure autonomous consciousness or thought
regardless of whether any external world existed at all. Another
metaphysical speculation is that reality can be reduced to either mental
or material substance. The existentialist’s contention is that we must be
reminded that such metaphysical speculations use concepts whose
meanings are parasitic on our concrete engagement as human beings
through practices, actions and interests; metaphysical speculations
246 Phenomenology and existentialism
logically depend for their possible intelligible articulation on terms
whose meanings only arise at all out of our not having a disinterested
or detached point of view. There are useful comparisons to be made
here between existentialism and the philosophy of the later
Wittgenstein in which he says the “form of life” is what is given. The
meanings and significances of objects as such-and-such, which are
logically necessary for any “view” of the world—any intelligible
description and theorizing about the world—would not arise as they
do but for specifically human partisan characteristics, concerns, and
activities or for being sufficiently like human beings; and objects with
meanings and significances would not arise at all but for some form of
active engagement with the world.
The general aim of Western thought in metaphysics and science has
been quite other than that of existentialism. The aim of science, for
example, is to evolve what is regarded as a superior “objective”
description of the world abstracted from specific perspectives: to
generate a body of truths about the world whose validity holds across
the contingencies of spatial, temporal or cognitive perspectives and
which mirror the world independently of the practical or instrumental
uses of objects in the world. The most obvious examples of such nonperspectival
truths are those of mathematics and logic such as 2+2=4,
which is true however you look at it, so to speak; such a truth is a
necessary truth. Literally perspectival truths such as “The tower is very
small” (from the hill overlooking it) or “The bath water is hot” (to my
cold right hand) are true only relative to a perspective and would be
false if the conditions determining the perspective changed—if I came
down the hill, or inserted in the water my warm left hand. What
existentialism argues is that the concepts used to describe a world as
such-and-such a sort, a world said to contain certain kinds of objects,
would not arise at all except for some practical mode of relating to the
world, which in our case arises from our humanness. True or false
descriptions of the world depend for their articulation on meanings
which arise only because of practical human projects. The concept of a
“desk” and a world containing desks would not arise if no one ever
wrote anything and did the usual things which lead us to call a certain
object a “desk”; without a certain sort of behaviour the concept “desk”
would never emerge. Existentialism undermines the aspiration of there
being, and our possessing, the one true systematic description of
everything, for existentialism denies that any kind of description
would arise at all if in the cause of a universally valid account, the
attempt were made to describe the world from an utterly detached
spectatorial standpoint. Such a standpoint would be a “view from
nowhere”, a phrase which perhaps only thinly disguises the fact that it
would be no view at all.
All this does not mean that science and abstraction are wrong in
some way, rather it is to argue that our ordinary view of the world, in
Sartre 247
which objects, events, and ourselves have various meanings or
significances, cannot be thought away as quirks of the merely
contingent way we happen to encounter the world in favour of, and
possibly to be replaced by, a supposedly superior system of descriptive
categories that are more universally valid through being detached
from the contingency of our situation as human beings concretely
dealing with the world. For meanings and significances, and hence the
possibility of description whether true or false, would not arise in the
world without our engaged perspectival interests, practices, projects,
and actions. Objects—for example hammers—have the meanings they
have for us because of their function as obstacles to, or instruments in,
human projects. Existentialism regards it as a mistake to propound
either a subjectivist or an objectivist philosophy: both positions are
based on the misconception that reality can be completely separated
from all conceptions; that somehow we can have direct access to reality
apart from all descriptions.
Many of these points are brought out by examining the reaction of
Sartre to the phenomenology of Husserl. In Being and nothingness
Sartre requires a phenomenology that is existential. It is important to
note in this matter the significant influence on Sartre of Heidegger’s
monumental work Being and time (1927). The seeds of Sartre’s
existential phenomenology are found in his short work The
transcendence of the ego. Husserl’s philosophy of pure phenomenology
derives much of its inspiration from Descartes. Husserl contends that
consciousness is essentially intentional; that is, consciousness is
defined and uniquely distinguished by its “aboutness”; if we are
conscious at all we are always conscious of something with such-andsuch
a significance or meaning. With this point Sartre agrees
completely. But the meanings to which Husserl’s phenomenology
aspires are the pure, essential, or defining features of the objects of
which we are aware. In Husserl’s account, to get at the pure essences
of objects of consciousness it is necessary first to think away all those
characteristics which are unnecessary for the thing of which we are
aware to be just what it is. The immediate result of this “bracketing”
is the suspension of judgement concerning the existence or nonexistence
of that of which we are conscious. The aim is to seek the
features something must have from any “point of view” if it is to
remain that kind of thing. The thought here is again the Cartesian
one that what is true of an object from any point of view
whatsoever—and so is non-perspectivally true and not true merely
from a certain perspective—describes how things really are in
themselves with the contingencies of what is added by our point of
view, in its most general sense, subtracted. This gives the possibility
of a transcendental perspective on the world and a science of
essences. Husserl supposes that the bracketing process suspends
judgement not only on the existence of the physical world but also on
248 Phenomenology and existentialism
the contingent individual empirical ego; what remains is what
Husserl calls the transcendental ego, which is the common essence of
consciousness or consciousness as such. The picture that remains is
one of a transcendental or pure spectatorial ego which intuits pure
essences or meanings that are present or immanent in consciousness
and experience, which are devoid of any contingent assumptions
about the existence of the world or individual selves or the practical
use we make of objects in specifically human projects.
The two notions of the transcendental perspective and the
transcendental ego are interrelated and fall together as the chief targets
of Sartre’s attack on Husserl. Sartre’s position is that there is no such
transcendental pure disinterested perspective and no transcendental
ego. The transcendental ego betrays the doctrine of the essential
intentionality of consciousness for it posits a pure consciousness of
objects which are themselves modes of consciousness, disengaged
from concrete acts of awareness of particular intentional objects in the
world. Sartre rejects the subjectivization of the doctrine of
intentionality. His view is that there is no transcendental perspective
and no pure or transcendental consciousness detached from the world,
for consciousness makes sense only in relation to an awareness of
objects in the world which are not modes of consciousness. A
disinterested, passive and pure view of the world is impossible, in
Sartre’s view, because without particular intentional acts arising from
our existence as beings-in-the-world engaged with what concretely
concerns human beings, consciousness would not arise at all, since the
being of consciousness is defined by its “aboutness” of something
other than consciousness itself: something that is not-consciousness.
Consciousness is not a thing at all, not even a transcendental thing
“outside” the world. If all actual intentional acts, directed to something
other than consciousness—in sum, all awarenesses of—are removed,
then consciousness simply evaporates; so there can be no disinterested
transcendental ego “outside” the world.
Phenomenology becomes existential when it is realized that
consciousness and the world are logically interlinked: that is, no sense
can be given to consciousness in the form of a transcendental ego if it
is separated from its intentional awareness of objects which are not
themselves modes of consciousness. The converse is also true: that no
sense can be given to “the world” if separated from the sense of what
the world is that arises from an actual engagement of human beings
with the world in pursuit of their human concerns. One of the
consequences of this view is the collapse of the mind-body dualism
which supposes we could still make sense of consciousness if all the
world was destroyed, and still make sense of “the world” devoid of
the sense that arises from consciousness engaged in the embodied
pursuit of human interests, purposes and aims. The world for us is a
world of significances and meanings which it would not have without
Sartre 249
us. There are no pure meanings or essences of things waiting to be
discovered by a disinterested pure consciousness; that there are
recognizable separate things with certain significances only arises from
our practical contact with the world in pursuit of various human
purposes and interests. No sense can be given to what a hammer is—
what is meant by a “hammer”—independently of a network of other
objects and what embodied humans do. The significance of an object
such as a hammer would not arise as it does if no one ever made
anything; a hammer emerges as an object of the kind it is because of the
sorts of things human beings do. In the case of a being which was
merely spectatorial or contemplative, totally detached from the world,
the meanings and significances of objects, whereby a particular object
is a such-and-such, would not arise at all. Consciousness consists
strictly of intentional acts—we are conscious as an awareness of objects
as such-and-such a sort—but such intentional or meant objects would
not arise if we were purely passive spectators. Human beings exist as
active beings-in-the-world, not as pure egos; we are consciousnesses
“thrown” into the world, and have to cope with it, and it is only as
coping agents that the vast and intricate network of meanings and
significances of objects we encounter arises. Any abstract theorizing
about the world is logically dependent on our initial natural active
engagement with the world. Phenomenology becomes existential in
not dealing with the structure of a supposed realm of abstract pure
essences which remain after we put ourselves in the transcendental
position separated from practical involvement with the world: instead
existential phenomenology examines the structure of the meanings
and significances the world has as it appears to us everyday in life as a
lived-world. We are embedded in the world: the-world-as-it-is-forhuman-beings.
The world does not cease to exist with our ceasing to exist; but in so
far as the world is a system of meanings and significances it is a
human world because significances and meanings are a product of our
human activities and interests. In this sense when a man dies a world
dies with him.
We find the same existentialist points in Heidegger’s Being and time.
Again there is the emphasis on our “thrownness” into the world of
significances-for-human-beings. The significance the world has as an
instrument, through our active concrete engagement with the world in
pursuit of human purposes and interests, is the world as “ready-tohand”
(zuhanden), which is logically presupposed by the passive
detached description of the world “present-at-hand” (vorhanden) which
is found in natural science.
In this way existentialism undermines the picture of man alienated
or estranged from the world. The world is not primarily a place from
which we stand apart, which is not amenable to human values and
significances. The world is first a place which has human
250 Phenomenology and existentialism
significance—it is our world—and there is no reason to denigrate the
world as a network of significant objects for human beings in order to
replace it by a detached view of the world “as it really is” rendered
alien and devoid of human significance. Human reality is a Dasein
(being-there): that is, we always exist as beings-in-the-world, not
detached from it. As Heidegger points out, we are “cast” or “thrown”
(geworfen) into the world to which the primary relation of our Dasein is
one of “concern” or “care” (Sorge) where some objects are more
important than others; the world is not neutral or flat with all
significances being on the same level. The significance that things have
is inextricably linked to the kind of being we are; we do not relate to
the world as disembodied disinterested consciousnesses but as
embodied agents.
In Sartre’s novel Nausea we find him beginning to deal with the
issues outlined above. In Nausea Sartre’s protagonist Roquentin is a
disappointed rationalist. We can begin by distinguishing between the
notions of existence and essence: the existence of a thing refers to the
fact that it is, the essence of a thing refers to what it is. Particular,
actually existing, things like trees are always inadequately captured or
explained in rational systems of concepts designed to render the world
ordered and intelligible. Sartre seems to have in mind here a stringent
notion of explanation which involves relations of deduction or
entailment between concepts. We find such relationships in a field
such as geometry: all the properties of a triangle follow necessarily
from its initial definition, that is, from its essence or “whatness”;
nothing about a triangle as such is “superfluous”; everything about it
is explained as a necessity that follows from what it is; there is nothing
about a triangle that is left over from what is entailed by its essence. In
other words, all the properties of a triangle follow from its essence, so
nothing is left unexplained. However, neither the existence of objects
in the world, nor the nature of their existence in their full particularity
can be explained by any conceptual system of essences. The “thatness”
of an object—that it exists—and the features in virtue of which it exists
as that particular object are not explained by being deducible from any
system of universal concepts. Only in the realm of essences which do
not exist do we have full explanations for why things are as they are,
for in the realm of essences the properties a thing has are all and only
those logically entailed by its essence: its “whatness”.
The relations between different essences also produce necessary
connections. But there are no such necessary connections between
objects in the world, for the objects in both their individual existence
and nature transcend and are not exhausted by universal concepts
purporting to reveal their essence. In so far as objects in the world are
brought under universal concepts, necessary relations can exist
between them; but no existing particular object can, just in virtue of its
existence and particularity, ever be fully explained or described by
Sartre 251
universal concepts; so the causal relations we aim to describe as
existing between existing particular objects are contingent and have no
logical necessity. Essences are necessarily inadequate in fully
describing all that can be said about particular objects in the world, for
they cannot capture their particularity and their “thatness”. There is a
logically necessary connection between X being what it is, a triangle,
and X having internal angles equal to 180 degrees; but no such
necessary, deductive connection exists between events in the world.
There is no logical entailment between putting the kettle on the heat
and the kettle boiling, no matter how often we have observed the
conjunction of those events in the past; the one event cannot be
deduced from the other. In this sense Sartre expresses a position in
Nausea that is very close to that of Hume. By its very universality a
concept considers and explains an object—gives a reason for why an
object is as it is—only in so far as it falls into some general class not in
its concrete particularity. We may consider an object, for example, in so
far as it falls into the class of trees; but that does not explain the
existence of, or all the features of, that thing over there we have called
a “tree”. Its existence—its “thatness”—does not follow from its
description as a tree, nor do most of its features peculiar to that
individual tree—its roughness, its colour, its hardness—these are all left
out of the concept of “treeness”. They are contingent, unexplained,
excessive, accidental; they are “absurd” in being without sufficient
explanation or reason; there is no sufficient reason as to why they are
one way rather than another.
In Nausea Sartre mentions other things besides geometry that have
the characteristic of complete intelligibility, such as music and stories;
there is a sufficient reason for their being one way rather than another,
for these have a complete internal logic that can be distinguished from
any manifest individual existence. One can smash or damage a record
of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but not smash or damage the Fifth
Symphony itself, for it consists, as a symphony, of abstract relations
between idealized non-actual musical events. Nothing is superfluous
about a work of art: it is what it is.
One way of looking at Nausea is to think of it as the realization of
the Humean nightmare or the collapse of all the supposedly necessary
Kantian concepts: we are reminded in the book of the brute
contingency of relations between objects and events in the world by
the depiction of a world in which the causal order we take for granted
does actually break down. In the extreme case our ability to bring
objects under any intelligible categories also breaks down. That
particular root over there has features not exhausted by its description
as a kind of pump. There is a central scene in Nausea in a park when
the root of a tree manifests itself as a bare individual unclassified
“thatness”—its pure existence is manifest devoid of its identification as
a neatly pigeon-holed sort of thing. The world is experienced as failing
252 Phenomenology and existentialism
to behave according to our ordering conceptualization of it, in virtue of
which we render what happens intelligible and explicable; that and the
rationally inexplicable excess both of the particular features of things
and existence itself generally induces the disorientating “nausea” of
which Sartre speaks. The picture we have of the world is that this
object, because it is of a specific kind, will do such-and-such; but in
Nausea Sartre depicts a world in which individual objects cease to act
according to their kind, because as individual objects they are not
exhausted by essences.
There is something else of importance that emerges in Nausea: that
we are free. We are free, and in Sartre’s sense “absurd”, in that, even
more than physical objects such as trees, we are not determined by an
essence; indeed we have no essence. Our existence (“thatness”)
precedes our essence (“whatness”): we first are, and it is then through
what we do that we give ourselves any “whatness” or defining identity.
We do not have a predetermined essence or nature that assigns to us a
place in the world and a given character: we are forced to be free and
make ourselves through our actions. We cannot pass the responsibility
for what we are to any objective standards that lie outside ourselves:
we must take responsibility for our choices, which determine what we
are. Awareness of the responsibility arising out of the truth that there is
no pre-existing self which is the “real I”, and that the self is identifiable
only through what we do following an initial, ultimately groundless,
choice, gives rise to Angst. The passing of responsibility for what we
do to something other than ourselves is what Sartre calls “inauthentic”
or living in “bad faith” (mauvaise foi); the abdication of our
responsibility for what we are and do Sartre sees as a kind of selfdeception;
it is as if really we know we are responsible for what we are
through what we choose to do, but we often fail to face that
uncomfortable truth. Freedom is not something we can avoid, but is an
inseparable part of being human. For example, by not killing ourselves
we choose to live. We cannot, of course, divorce ourselves from the
situations in which choices are made, but there is always some room
for free choice—even if it only consists of dissent and saying “no”.
Living with consciousness of the truth of my freedom is to live with
“authenticity”.
A person is never simply identifiable with any label applied to him
which aims to define his essence. Thus a waiter is a waiter in the
predicative sense of “is”, but that is not what he is in the identity sense
of “is”; being a waiter is not his essence—“person X=waiter” is false—
so what a person does is not logically determined by an essence.
Indeed, there is nothing that I am in the identity sense of “is”. What I
am is constantly remade through my actions: only in death is there the
possibility of final judgements being passed upon what kind of man I
am which I can no longer confute. The most blatantly “inauthentic”
life would be one in which I negate my own freedom altogether by
Sartre 253
regarding my self as being as fixed as an object; this may be because
that is how others regard me. An act of “bad faith” involves my simply
giving up any attempt to determine and take reponsibility for my
future because I regard a label I have given myself as binding on, and
sufficient to determine, what I will do; but such facts about me are
never sufficient to determine my actions, for I can always try to revolt
against the facts of my situation.
Nothing about the existentialist belief that we are free implies that
we should act wildly or capriciously, as is sometimes suggested, for to
choose to act wildly or capriciously is only one of the choices we can
make. What is important is that whatever choice we make is accepted
as our choice; we must take responsibility for it and its consequences. It
is in this way that our lives are said by the existentialist to be
“authentic”. Existentialism does not argue, as is again sometimes
suggested, that the aim should be to return to some inner “real self”,
for there is no sense to self other than the sum of what one does; rather
than there being a persistent self existing over time independently of
what one does, the self is constantly remade through action. The
notion of a self independent of actions would indeed be another route
to “bad faith”, for it suggests that I can do one thing but be another in
some inner sanctum of the “real self”. I cannot betray my friend, but
refuse to accept the kind of person that makes me, by saying that in my
“inner self” I was loyal to him, for the self—what I am—is constructed
out of the choices I make.
The attempt fully to rationalize the existing world of particular
concrete things in a system of abstract universal concepts or
“whatnesses” fails. Although any language which can function
descriptively cannot do without some degree of abstraction, we can
maximize the concrete and particular and not regard it as an inferior
view of the world to be “reduced” to something more universalizable.
The attempt to impose such a universally valid intelligible structure in
fact falsifies the world: it falsifies the uniqueness and particularity of
our experiences of, and our encounters with, the world. Even if we
merely say x and y are both red, we ignore the differences—perhaps
the shade of red—that make x and y distinct concrete particulars, and
so distort reality in the attempt to fit x and y into a scheme of
descriptive categories. The uniqueness and particularity of our
experiences are not to be rejected as worthless in favour of
considering the experiences as merely examples of certain general
classes or types.
The connected but distinct nature of consciousness and the world is
reflected in the ontology described in Sartre’s Being and nothingness.
The fundamental kinds of being there are underpin the notion that
consciousness cannot be an autonomous, isolated, “inner” realm
unrelated to the awareness of an existent objective world that is not a
part of consciousness, and the world has significance primarily as it
254 Phenomenology and existentialism
figures in human projects and actions. Sartre identifies two basic
categories or sorts of being.
(a) être-en-soi: being-in-itself. Things or non-human being.
(b) être-pour-soi: being-for-itself. Conscious or self-aware being.
However, he identifies an additional important category of being:
(c) être-pour-autrui: being-for-others. Being, especially of persons,
which arises from relations to others.
Together these are Sartre’s complete irreducible, uneliminable list of
sorts of being or ontological categories; these are what we are
committed to saying there must be, whatever else there may be, given
the nature or structure of consciousness.
Being-in-itself is the kind of being that inanimate, inert, non-human
objects have. In contrast being-for-itself is the kind of being that
consciousness has. The two are brought together as being-in- theworld.
Consciousness, the for-itself, arises only through its intentional
awareness of something other than itself; that is, it is awareness of the
in-itself, of not-consciousness, and that it is not the in-itself of which it
is aware. Sartre is anxious to maintain that consciousness is not any
kind of thing; consciousness is a negativity, a lack, or a no-thing-ness.
Consciousness is not-a-thing which arises as a negation of objects of
awareness. The primary nature of consciousness is its intentionality: it
depends for its existence on things other than itself of which it is
aware. Consciousness comes into being as an awareness of not being—
as a separateness from—the objects of which it is conscious. We are
conscious of an object X, and the being of consciousness is a negation
through a simultaneous awareness of not-being-X. Consciousness is
not an absolute nothingness, but is the awareness of itself as not
being—as not being absorbed into—whatever objects are objects of
consciousness. If I am aware of a table, the being of consciousness
consists in my self-awareness of not- being-a-table. In our awareness of
objects of consciousness we are at the same time pre-reflectively aware
of our being aware. Awareness of our own awareness or consciousness
cannot be a relation of subject and object or we would embark on an
infinite regress of awarenesses, and awareness of ourselves as aware
would never arise at all. To be conscious of X at all is to be conscious
that we are not-X, because the being of consciousness in our
consciousness of X is the consciousness of not-being-X. The logical
dependence of the existence of consciousness on something other than
itself ensures that it does not exist as an in-itself. Consciousness is not
some thing that can be separated from the world as a pure ego; rather,
consciousness and ego arise only in acts of awareness of objects and
awareness of the separateness from those objects. Consciousness arises
as a self-awareness of being not-the-objects-of-awareness; in this way
consciousness is a kind of nothingness or negation. Consciousness is
Sartre 255
not what it is and is what it is not, since it has yet unfulfilled potential
as to what it can be.
Sartre’s concept of the nature of consciousness ties in with his
concept of freedom. It is the nature of consciousness, the for-itself, that
it is not an object or thing. That our being is as not-a-thing frees us from
the causal nexus that determines the realm of the in-itself. There is no
fixed ego or self in the Cartesian sense and consciousness is not to be
identified with ego. The ego or self is our view of the sum of free
intentional choices consciousness has made in the past, so that what
the ego is can change in the future through its as yet unfulfilled or
potential free choices. We create our own essence—what we are—
through our choices and are therefore totally responsible for what we
are. We are our freedom; our “whatness” is our choice. “Bad faith”
arises when we treat the predicative “is” as to what we are—we are a
waiter, a soldier, a coward, a liar, a Frenchman—as if it were the “is” of
identity defining an essence, and abdicate our responsibility as to what
we do by virtue of an explanation following from our supposedly fixed
essential nature which, we might argue, is imposed upon us. The
overarching exemplification of “bad faith” is thus to see ourselves as an
object, as fixed: as a being-in-itself. Similarly it is “bad faith” to live as
though values and attitudes were derived from the world and not
derived from us. To overcome the Angst involved in our awareness of
our freedom we tend to retreat to the pretence that we have no choice
by adopting roles, characters, values and attitudes, as if they were
imposed upon us. I do not choose the condition or situation that is
forced on me from the outside, which is my “facticity”, but I am always
free in what I make of it. We try to fill our nothingness with actions to
define what we are, but what we are is always, unto death, incomplete,
since future choices characterizing the kind of persons we are always
remain open to us. Our incom-pleteness as a for-itself means we can be
free because we have the power, unlike the in-itself which is just what
it is, to be not what we are and to be what we are not.
With respect to being-for-others, Sartre first rejects the dualistic
presuppositions of the “problem of other minds”. The problem is said
to arise from the problematic inference from the bodily behaviour of
others to the hypothesis that they are conscious like ourselves. Sartre’s
dissolution of the problem denies that the bifurcation of other people
into body and mind in our experience is possible in the first place. We
immediately recognize important modes of our being—such as shame
and guilt—which are a result of existing in relation to other people and
depend on there being other people aware of us. In perceiving others
we immediately perceive them as persons, and this is a primitive
feature of our experience. There is no inference to “other minds” to
justify because such an inference does not occur at all.
Many of the most fundamental meanings of the human world, the
world-as-it-is-for-us, involve an intersubjectivity that depends on the
256 Phenomenology and existentialism
existence of other persons. The meanings that the world has for us
depend on the recognition of there being others. My experience of the
world as a public world, and of myself, in various important ways
depends on my acceptance of the existence of others. To deny the
existence of others would, among other things, be to abandon some of
the most fundamental ways in which the world and myself have
significance for me.
One of the basic ways in which I relate to others is through my
consciousness of being looked at by another person, which Sartre calls
“The Look” (Le Regard). My relation with others is a struggle not to be
fixed by The Look as an object for the other. The struggle is to maintain
my freedom when The Look of others fixes me as an identifiable
object. To preserve my freedom I may attempt to turn others into
objects for me and so attempt to destroy others as a source of The
Look. Thus each person is apparently a threat to the other’s freedom.
At the same time, however, my reflective (as opposed to pre-reflective)
self-consciousness arises only from my awareness of how others see
me. That I am ashamed of myself, for example, is necessarily
connected to my seeing myself as being seen by others doing
disreputable things. My self-consciousness derives from my taking
another’s view of my behaviour.
The mutual recognition of freedom is constantly compromised as
people fix others as objects. To fix another as someone who loves me,
for example, involves the paradox that, on the one hand, we wish the
love of the other to be unconditionally given, while on the other
hand, if it is to have its value as the love of another, it must be given
freely.
The ethical implications of Sartre’s philosophy are complex, but
central is existential freedom. Existentialism does not imply that one
should simply do what one likes and there are no moral considerations
guiding us; rather, it implies that what moral considerations we choose
to guide us are our responsibility. But that does not mean that what is
morally good or bad is itself dependent on mere individual subjective
appraisal or whim. Existentialism does not entail accepting that there
are no reasons or justifications for actions independently of subjective
predilections. If this were the case, then no moral dilemmas would
ever arise in my free choices; that such dilemmas do arise is clearly
something existentialism accepts and through which freedom to
choose is given its importance.
Since the notion of freedom and living an “authentic” life in the
awareness of that freedom are central to existentialist philosophy in
general, and values in particular, it is important to see whether any
fairly specific moral “directives” emerge from the notion of
“authenticity”. One point that emerges is that the notion of an
“authentic” life—one lived in awareness of freedom—is increased in
proportion as we are not aware of ourselves fixed as objects by others.
Sartre 257
But the strategy of evading the fixity ensuing from The Look of others
by in turn objectifying others is in the end self-defeating. For as I
regard others as objects, so I come to regard myself as an object like
them, which is the paradigm of “bad faith” or “inauthenticity”. This
seems to imply a moral directive on action concerning the treatment of
others whereby both we ourselves and others can collaborate in
maximizing the awareness of the freedom of our lives—their
“authenticity”—by increasing the extent to which we refuse to fix each
other as objects. We thereby move in the opposite direction from the
downward spiral of mutual objectification by trying not to start the
fixing of each other as objects in the first place. Whether actual human
relations with others can allow, or easily allow, such reciprocal support
of freedom, and if so what such relations would be like, are further
problems.
258 Phenomenology and existentialism
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