Sartre

by Iris Murdoch

  Sartre says that he wishes to describe consciousness ‘not as the totality of the human world but as its instantaneous kernel’ (L’Etre et le Néant, p. 111). He wishes to retain the truth which the idealists discovered when they thought of the observer as the source of meaning; and yet not to fall into their error of transforming the world into a set of meanings which are simply the correlatives of acts of attention. Their original mistake, Sartre holds, is to think of reflective awareness as a kind of knowledge, and then to model all consciousness upon reflective consciousness. Sartre wishes to show ‘what the world is like’ by giving an account of ‘how we see the world’ which does not reduce our ‘self-presence’ to a static self-reflexion, but portrays both the elusive nature of momentary awareness and the dramatic nature of our more extended views of ourselves. In doing so he is anxious to avoid equally the error (which he attributes to Heidegger) of describing the world in terms of modes of experience from which the element of reflective self-awareness is omitted and the error (which he would no doubt attribute to Ryle) of skirting behaviourism by neglecting the self-conceptualising and self-dramatising nature of the human mind.

  The Marxists were not the only ones to turn Hegel’s ‘rational’ dialectic into a ‘real’ dialectic. Kierkegaard did the same, but in a very different way. Developments which Hegel conceived as the rational evolving of one idea from another, a process having the objectivity and inevitability of a deduction, Kierkegaard pictured as real spiritual (or psychological) movements of a personality from one phase (mood, or type of outlook) to another. These movements were subjective, reversible, and by no means inevitable. Sartre too thinks of consciousness as ‘dialectical’, but the dialectic consists of actual shifts of awareness from one condition to another. Only whereas Kierkegaard’s ‘stages’ correspond to types of character or at least deep psychological phases in which a person might persist for long, Sartre is including also in his description the shifts which a consciousness may undergo from one moment to the next. These are real changes, experienced by the individual; not metaphysical motions, transcendentally deduced, which ‘must be presumed’ to have taken place.

  The consciousness, according to Sartre, has three modes: unreflective awareness, reflexion, and being for others. The consciousness itself ‘is’ nothing; it is a slope on which I cannot stay. I cannot examine and hold my awareness as I can examine and hold that which I am aware of. The consciousness in all its modes has a quality of inertia: that tendency to remain empâtée or envoûtée of which mention has been made before. We do not, at every moment, spring back into a reflective condition and explicitly notice how it is that we are ‘taking’ our surroundings. At ‘ordinary’ times the possibility of reflecting simply does not occur to us—at other times (in certain emotional conditions for instance) it is envisaged but rejected.

  In an unreflective condition we are implicitly aware of ourselves. This implicit awareness Sartre calls conscience (de) soi, and sometimes he calls it ‘the pre-reflective cogito’. It is that on which the reflective awareness may at any moment turn back. It is the condition which classical philosophy has neglected in favour of the reflective cogito (or the ‘simple idea’, which represents the same starting point). What we are explicitly aware of at such times however is not ourselves being aware, nor even a particular determinate mental datum as such—but the world provoking or inviting us in some particular way or charged with some particular properties.

  This view of the world we may at any moment call into question. Such reflexion will usually take the form of a reshuffling of the pattern ‘out in the world’, without any very clear awareness of our own activities of ordering and estimating. Sometimes however the doubt will bite us in such a way as to make us very much aware of ourselves as the source of a certain way of seeing things—in a case of moral doubt, for instance (‘am I distorting this situation?’) or amid the uneasiness induced by the sudden presence of an observer. Attention is now fixed, not on the world of tasks and provocations, but upon the mind which permits itself to be provoked and apprenticed. Yet such a reflexion is not a steady contemplation of psychic data, since psychic data cannot be contemplated. Psychologists have only thought they could be because they seemed to be able to characterise state of mind in the recent past. (Compare Ryle again here, who agrees that introspection is really retrospection—The Concept of Mind, p. 166.) We are tempted, however, to create for ourselves at this point a spurious object: our character or nature, which we may imagine to be causally related to our conduct. This is what Sartre calls la réflexion complice, or bad faith. The ‘reason’ in whose power of purifying reflexion he believes is not contemplative, is not a form of knowledge. From the more satisfying activities of la réflexion complice arise not only my uncritical pictures of the inner forces that rule me, but also, Sartre would say (and again Ryle would agree, though he would put it differently), most of contemporary psychology, and much of traditional philosophy. The determination to regard consciousness itself as a source of knowledge, illuminating its own acts, leads easily to the creation of a suitable variety of mental objects, whose mode of existence subsequently seems puzzling. Such contemplation is not what Sartre is exhorting us to when he exhorts us to reflect; his réflexion purifiante is something more difficult and less satisfying.

  The temptation to think of our psychic life as a thing is of course increased by the fact that this is how other people think of it. Serious reflexion about one’s own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness’ and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.) But usually one views other people as compact finished products to whom labels (‘jealous’, ‘bad-tempered’, ‘shrewd’, ‘vivacious’) are attached on the strength of their conduct; and since the myth of ‘the ghost in the machine’ is so deep in our language we inevitably think of the person as composed of psychic forces which issue in the performances that justify the names. (It is exclusively this aspect of our knowledge of mind which is dealt with in The Concept of Mind. The problems of motivation and self-knowledge which Ryle omits and Sartre discusses do not arise if we consider only the sort of knowledge involved in the everyday labelling of our acquaintances.) Our consciousness of how other people label us in this sort of way, and how they see us, is often very acute. This concern is our être-pour-autrui of which Sartre has given so many brilliant analyses both in the novels and (more particularly) in L’Etre et le Néant. To see ourselves through the eyes of another is to see ourselves suddenly fixed, opaque, complete; and we may well be tempted to accept such a valuation as our own, as a relief from the apparent emptiness of self-examination. On the other hand if we disown that which we apprehend the other as seeing, the experience may be distressing or maddening.

  It may now be a little easier to see what sort of a middle way it is that Sartre is trying to take. Traditional metaphysical descriptions of the mind’s operations made it seem a strange unobservable entity, separated from our overt doings by a void in which ‘psychological experiences’ lived uneasily, unable to attach themselves properly to either side. Modern positivism achieves a monistic position by resolving the mind into its outward manifestations. Sartre wishes to do justice to the way in which the mind itself hesitates between monism and dualism—a hesitation which is manifested in real observable modes of experience.

  How does Sartre believe that we can defeat our tendency to bad faith? If this were clear the nature of bad faith itself would be clearer. We have already seen that Sartre rejects the idea that ‘sincerity’, in the sense of a transparent coincidence with oneself (the ideal of Roquentin and Daniel), is impossible. We have seen too that the realisation of ‘value’ seems to depend upon the reflective breaking up of the empâtement of consciousness. A value which is identified with a thing, whether material or psychic, is not a value. ‘Any value which founded its ideal nature on its being would ipso facto cease to be value, and would realise a heteronomy of t
he will’ (L’Etre et le Néant, p. 76). This is the rediscovery of Kant upon which positivist ethics also rests. But while Kant certainly believed (as firmly as Freud) that one should not take one’s psychic life at its face value, the rational will which alone was good remained separate from the world of empirical phenomena and unseen in its operation. Kant did not identify value with any empirical act or object—but he did identify it with a particular non-empirical kind of action.

  Many aspects of mind can readily be explained in terms of observable functions in such a way as to prepare us to let go of the search for the inner substance. In a way, character is conduct. Or, if a ‘deeper’ description is preferred, character is the play of unconscious psychic forces. But what about the act of choice itself? This alone seems to bring us back to the egocentric viewpoint which was abandoned when our units of analysis were operations which an outsider could observe. Kant excepted the act of moral choice from the world of phenomena; although in a way he defined it, yet he left its operation mysterious. (I do not know the working of the rational will in myself.) Kierkegaard objected to Hegel’s dialectical barrel-organ because the egocentric privacy of the act of choice seemed to be lost in the objectively determined rational movement of the dialectic. Sartre, too, cannot accept a reduction of mind to observable phenomena, whether Rylean routines or Freudian forces. To do this would be to destroy the world’s instantaneous kernel, to neglect that which is the sovereign source of meaning. The consciousness moreover is at all times sovereign, at all times responsible, since there is no ‘rational nature’ in Sartre’s metaphysic to take over the job of fixing the meaning of even a part of the universe.

  Sartre objects to Freud’s analysis of action not only because Freud seems to make the meaning of the act something which is in principle determinable by an outside observer independently of the consciousness of the actor, but also because Freud refers the meaning of the act to the past. Sartre wishes to refer it to the future; but in doing so he wishes to avoid an opposition (such as Kant’s picture might suggest) of blind causes to transparent reasons. (As if the act were an unintelligible leap out of a given empirical situation.) The distinction to be made in analysing choice is rather that between the motif, or explicit reflective seizure of the world as pointing towards a certain end, and its correlative, the mobile, which is my unreflective consciousness of the situation coloured in a certain way. It is the mobile, the pre-reflective consciousness of how we grasp the situation, that we often mistake for a causal factor. Motivation is not a rational causality (Kant) or a psychic causality (Freud). It has the magical self-enchanting quality which Sartre has analysed in the Essay on the Emotions. ‘The act of will’, the moral reflexion, is already framed in my unreflective and self-prolonging conception of how things lie. Liberty lies deeper than will. It is I who confer value on both the motifs and the mobiles; I am not an independent rational observer who estimates objectively a given situation for which I am not responsible. Moral reflexion is no more than the choice of a volitional mode of action rather than an unreflective mode. La délibération volontaire est toujours truquée . . . Quand je délibére les jeux sont faits.3

  This analysis of choice, negatively considered, seems not unlike that which is offered by certain positivists. (See for instance Stuart Hampshire’s article in Mind for October 1949. ‘The crux is in the labelling.’) Such an account would seem either to run the behaviouristic risks which Sartre was anxious to avoid (choice is the de facto pattern of my life) or else, if the psychic background is filled in, to be a more sophisticated kind of determinism. What of the openness of the future, in relation to which Sartre wished to give meaning to the projet of consciousness, what of this liberty which lies deeper than will? This is to be sought at the level of the projet fondamental, which is the level of a purifying reflexion, as distinct from the réflexion complice which accompanies the willed deliberation. Elsewhere in a revealing phrase Sartre says: ‘The circularity of: to speak I must know my thought but how am I to fix my thought except in words? is the form of all human reality.’ The existent is determined by the not-yet-existent, and vice versa. Our acts teach us our intention just as our language teaches us our thoughts; and this is not the same as to say that our intentions are nothing but our acts, or our thoughts nothing but our words. Yet what is the fundamental project, is it a ‘free’ project?

  It is difficult to give a clear answer, or even a clear sense, to this question. It is a matter of, as it were, catching myself at the moment in which I ‘give value’ to the motifs and mobiles which seem to determine my choice? To think this would simply be to repeat one stage further back the error of imagining that freedom consists in an immediate act of will. The instantaneous kernel of the world does not exercise a total sovereignty in any moment-to-moment sense. True choice, according to Sartre, consists in the more long term attempt to assume our own being by a purifying reflexion. Liberty is not just the ‘lighting up’ of our own contingency, it is its comprehension and interiorisation. Liberty, like the cure of the neurotic, lies at the level of a total understanding: an understanding which, I think Sartre would agree, we have no guarantee of reaching or foolproof criterion for recognising, although we know well enough in what direction it lies. It seems, after all, to be like Kant’s rational will, magnetic and mysterious.

  If someone complains that this means that half the time we do not know what we are doing and that it makes the task of living into a perpetual psychoanalysis, then the answer is that this is indeed how Sartre sees the matter. Sartre has complained that traditional philosophy arose from la réflexion complice; true philosophy is a systematic kind of purifying reflexion, and its end products are the first principles of’ existential psychoanalysis’. Sartre, like Freud, sees life as an egocentric drama; ‘the world is my world’ in that it is shaped by my values, projects and possibilities. Sartre wishes however, while attempting to lay bare by a pure reflexion (which corresponds to Husserl’s phenomenological reduction) the nature of consciousness, to preserve the sovereignty of the individual psyche as a source of meaning. For him the psyche is coextensive with consciousness. Whereas for Freud the deepest human impulse is sexual, for Sartre it is the urge towards ‘self-coincidence’ which is the key to our being. Sartre would doubtless not deny that many of his own favourite symbols can be given a sexual meaning (grasped as ways of thinking of the sexual) by this or that person. But he would maintain that the root cause of the fascination of these things is that they symbolise the consciousness itself.4

  * * *

  1 See for instance Locke’s Essay II, xiv, 9.

  2 Sartre was of course not the first to be struck by these problems. Consider the character of Stavrogin in The Possessed.

  3 ‘Willed deliberation is always faked . . . When I deliberate the die is already cast’ (L’Etre et le Néant, p. 527).

  4 The striking symbol of the petrifying Medusa is interpreted by Freud as a castration fear (Collected Papers, vol. v). Sartre of course regards as its basic sense our general fear of being observed (L’Etre et le Néant, p. 502). It is interesting to speculate on how one would set about deciding which interpretation was ‘correct’.

  IX

  THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF INCARNATION

  There are two kinds of objections to be made to Sartre’s theory of consciousness, although it contains, as part of its ‘evidence’, a vast amount of subtle and revealing psychological analysis. The first objection, taking the whole descriptive project as a possible one, is that it is arbitrary and incomplete. The second objection is methodological, to the effect that Sartre is doing in a different way just what he has accused traditional philosophy of doing, that is, hypostatising the mind in the form of an imaginary and indemonstrable substance.

  The speculative arbitrariness of the structure is I think undeniable. Sartre offers nothing like a convincing deduction of his categories. The three modes of consciousness are unrefective awareness, reflexion, and being-for-others. The main world-making categories of c
onsciousness are the forms of our relations with others: language, love, hate, indifference, desire, sadism and masochism. But why should one stop there? According to Sartre the awareness of others is a radical form of our awareness of the world; we do not have to ‘infer our friends’. On the other hand, a sense of communal belongingness, a sense of ‘we’, which is something we often experience, is not fundamental to our being, does not make part of the ‘ontological structure of the human world’ (L’Etre et le Neant, p. 485). There is something arbitrary about the idea of a radical or basic category here. Suppose someone maintains that in his case the most profound category of the real is his relation to his work—and that he is completely unaware of the attention of his neighbours? Sartre’s arguments against such a position could only consist, as do all his arguments in this matter, of very persuasive descriptions, which either ‘ring the bell’ or not. The appeal is to our experience, and as a matter of fact the answers are various. What Sartre certainly has given is a brilliant and generally instructive self-analysis. We are tempted to say to him: this is one kind of person, yes: but there are others.