The third of our major figures in phenomenology, Jean-Paul Sartre, was born in Paris in 1905. Unlike I fussed and Heidegger, Sartre did not lead the life of an academic philosopher. Although he did teach philosophy at certain points in his life, he did not occupy a professorship. Instead, he led the life of an author, playwright and public intellectual.
In this chapter, our interest will be restricted to Sartre's work during ten to fifteen years of his life, beginning in roughly 1933, when he
Sartre meets phenomenology
In The Prime of Life, Simone de Beauvoir recounts Sartre's first encounter with phenomenology. As she recalls the episode, she and Sartre were spending an evening with their friend Raymond Aran, who was at the time studying Husserl at the French Institute in Berlin. Pointing to an apricot cocktail, Aron: demonstrated the importance of phenomenological method to Sartre: "You see, my dear fellow, if you are a phenomenolagist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!" At these words, Sartre is reported to have "turned pale with emotion". The change in pallor was due to the realization that he could using phenomenological methods, "describe objects just as he saw and touched them, and extract philosophy from them". Phenomenology thus appeared to "affirm simultaneously both the supremacy of reason and the reality of the visible world as it appears to our senses". Immediately after this episode, Sartre purchased a copy of Levinas's early study of Husserl. According to de Beauvoir, when Sartre first read it his "heart missed a beat" (all quotations from de Beauvoir 1962:112).
received a grant to study at the French Institute in Berlin, Here, Sartre immersed himself in phenomenology and the works of Husserl. This immersion led quickly to the publication of The Transcendence of the Ego, a slim volume that sharply criticizes Husserl's conception of the ego and its role in phenomenology. The ensuing years were productive for Sartre. He published his novel Nausea (1938), as well as works in philosophical psychology: Imagination, a Psychological Critique (1936), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939) and The Imaginary (1940). At the outbreak of the Second World War, Sartre served as an officer in the French army, and was taken prisoner by occupying German forces (he used this time to teach Heidegger to his fellow prisoners). After his release, Sartre resumed teaching philosophy and writing works in both philosophy and literature. In 1943, he published both his play The Flies and his major work in philosophy, Being and Nothingness, subtitled "A Phenomenological Essay in Ontology". These works were quickly followed by the play No Exit and the novel The Age of Reason, the first of an eventual trilogy that Sartre collectively titled The Roads to Freedom. He also founded the journal Les Temps modernes, which published works by such figures as Albert Camus and Merleau-Ponty. In 1946, Sartre published a shorter philosophical essay, The Humanism of Existentialism, which began as a public lecture given in 1945. In this work, Sartre for the first time characterized his philosophy as existentialism (the term was first coined by Sartre's friend, Gabriel Marcel, but Sartre initially resisted the label), which quickly developed into a widespread intellectual movement, finding devotees not just in philosophy, but also in psychology, literature, drama and film.
Sartre continued to write in the ensuing decades, including a study of the writer Jean Genet, as well as works on Mallarmé, Flaubert and Freud. In 1960, he published Critique of Dialectical Reason, which brought together the existentialist and Marxist strands of his thinking. During these years, Sartre was outspokenly political, taking stands against French colonialism and the Vietnam War, and first for, then against, the Soviet Union and Cuba. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1964, but he declined the award on political grounds. He died in 1980.
The phenomenological tradition is, of course, but a part of the modern philosophical tradition that begins with Descartes. A cornerstone of Descartes's philosophy is the discovery of the "I" or "self" as the epistemological foundation for any knowledge whatsoever. In the second of his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes puts an end to his "radical doubt" by announcing that his own existence ("I am, I exist") admits of complete certainty. Vouchsafed as well is Descartes's thinking; even his doubting, as a species of thought, attests to the reality of his thinking, and so "I think" has credentials equally strong as "I exist". In the Second Meditation, Descartes notes further how any of his experiences, regardless of their focus (the example he fastens on is looking at a piece of wax), serve to testify to his own existence as a thinking thing: the existence of the "I" or the "self" is confirmed at every moment of one's awareness.
Modern philosophy begins with Descartes, but by no means ends there. Not every subsequent philosopher has shared his confidence concerning the discovery of a self or "I", a thinking thing at the heart of all thought or experience. A particularly vivid example of this lack of sympathy is that of Hume, who, in a famous passage, announces with equal confidence that no such self is to be found:
For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception .... If any one upon serious and unprejudic'd reflexion, thinks he has a different notion of himself, I must confess I can no longer reason with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; tho' I am certain there is no such principle in me.
([1739/40] 1978: I, IV, §VI)
I rehearse these perhaps familiar moments from early modern philosophy because the disagreements they record can be discerned within the phenomenological tradition. Indeed, each of these two positions can be located within Husserl's philosophy alone. In Chapter 1, our discussion was confined primarily to Husserl's conception of phenomenology after his "transcendental turn", which occurred around 1905. However, in his "breakthrough" work, Logical Investigations, Husserl's views concerning the ego or self have a distinctly Humean ring to them, as can be seen in the following passage, wherein he, like Hume before him, "confesses" his inability to find an ever-present ego at the centre of experience:
I must frankly confess, however, that I am quite unable to find this ego, this primitive, necessary centre of relations.* The only thing I can take note of, and therefore perceive, are the empirical ego and its empirical relations to its own experiences, or to such external objects as are receiving special attention at the moment, while much remains, whether "without" or "within", which has no such relation to the ego.
(LI: 549-50)
The asterisk at the end of the first sentence signals a footnote that Husserl added in the second edition of Logical Investigations, which appeared after the publication of the first volume of Ideas. Although Husserl did not undertake a complete revision of Logical Investigations so as to align it with his then current conception of phenomenology, he did add qualifications and corrections by way of notes and appendices (as well as the occasional deletion of whole sections). This particular note is especially striking as it constitutes a complete reversal in his position. In the note, Husserl announces the discovery of what had previously eluded his every effort at detection. The note reads: "I have since managed to find it, i.e. have learnt not to be led astray from a pure grasp of the given through corrupt forms of ego-metaphysic" (LI: 549).
As Husserl's conception of phenomenology develops, his view concerning the place of the ego within phenomenology works its way back, in terms of historical precedent, from a more or less Humean position to one more closely aligned with that of Descartes. The "pure grasp of the given" achieved through the phenomenological reduction includes a grasp of the pure or transcendental ego as an essential element of the given. Three passages from the aptly titled Cartesian Meditations may be illustrative here:
If I keep purely what comes into view - for me, the one who is meditating - by virtue of the free epoché with respect to the being of the experienced world, the momentous fact is that I, with my life, remain untouched in my existential status, regardless of whether or not the world exists and regardless of what my eventual decision concerning its being or non-being might be. This Ego, with his Ego-life, who necessarily remains for me, by virtue of such epoché, is not a piece of the world; and if he says, "I exist, ego cogito", that no longer signifies, "I, this man, exist".
(CM: §11)
The truly first utterance, however, is the Cartesian utterance of the ego cogito - for example: "I perceive - this house" or "I remember - a certain commotion in the street".
(CM: §16)
I exist for myself and am continually given to myself, by experiential evidence, as "I myself". This is true of the transcendental ego, and, correspondingly, of the psychologically pure ego; it is true, moreover, with respect to any sense of the word ego.
(CM: §33)
Notice how in each of these passages Husserl appeals to the presence or givenness of the ego as pervasive: the ego remains after the performance of the reduction as an essential feature of consciousness, is involved in the "truly first utterance" and is "continually given".
The claim that an "I" is persistently given in experience is Sartre's principal target in The Transcendence of the Ego. As Sartre says on the opening page: "We should like to show here that the ego is neither formally nor materially in consciousness: it is outside, in the world. It is a being of the world, like the ego of another" (TE: 31). Sartre's claim, if borne out, constitutes an especially acute criticism of Husserlian phenomenology, since it carries critical weight even if one accepts the basic framework of the phenomenological reduction. As a "being of the world", the ego cannot survive the phenomenological reduction as a constitutive element of "pure consciousness", any more than can my desk or coffee cup, understood as entities existing in the world.
We saw in the passages from Cartesian Meditations that the phenomenological reduction affirms that "I exist for myself and am continually given to myself". The affirmation of a "continually given 'I' or ego" is integral to Husserl's broader claims about the essential tripartite structure of all intentional experience:
Ego ---------- Cogito ---------- Cogitatum
[I ---------- Noesis ---------- Noema]
Every experience, Husserl claims, has this structure, where the I and the "cogitatum", that is, the ego and the object-as-intended, form the two "poles" of the experience. The middle term, the cogito or noesis, designates the kind or mode of the experience, for example perception, recollection, desire, hope, fear and so on.
Does all conscious experience really have this tripartite structure? If we recall a slogan introduced early on in our discussion that "all consciousness is consciousness of something", that is, that intentionality is the defining feature of consciousness, then the middle and rightmost elements of this three-part formula do indeed appear essential. Every (intentional) experience requires an object (cogitatum/noema) and that object must be experienced in some way or other, for example, perceived, desired, feared, recollected and so on (cogito/noesis). Whereas Husserl argues that the left-most element is equally essential, Sartre claims that careful attention to experience shows this not to be so. That is, Sartre argues that when we restrict our attention to the flow of experience strictly as experienced, which, after all, is what the phenomenological reduction purports to facilitate, no "I", "self" or "ego" is manifest as part of that flow. This, at least, is true of what Sartre calls "first-degree consciousness".
Consider the following example. I am in my kitchen making bread. My large green ceramic bowl stands before me on the counter. I have already added warm water and yeast to the bowl, and I am now stirring in flour to make the dough. Hie interior of the bowl nearly exhausts my visual held as I intently watch the slowly forming dough (too much flour yields a solid cannonball, unworthy of baking, let alone eating; too little makes for a sticky mess), but I am peripherally aware of the surrounding countertop, the measuring cup and bag of flour just to the right, the corner of the cookbook just to the left, the toaster sitting unused behind the bowl. At the same time, I smell the familiar, yeasty odours that are integral to making bread, along with the lingering, although fainter, aroma of the mornings coffee. I hear the spoon as it knocks against the side of the bowl, but I have the radio on and intermittently attend to the music being played or the words of the programmes host. My left hand grips the side of the bowl, which is cool and smooth, and my right hand holds the rougher wooden spoon. I quickly feel a dull ache in my right bicep as the added flour increases the resistance of the mixture.
If we reflect on this sketch of a description, it would all seem to be just so much grist for Husserl's mill. After all, every sentence of the description contains at least one occurrence of "I" or "my" (or both), and so each sentence refers explicitly to an ego or self: I am in the kitchen, I smell the yeast, my left hand grips the bowl and so on. Thus, it is hard, on the face of it, to make out Sartre's claim that the I or ego is not a manifest part of first-degree consciousness. However, we should not be so hasty in drawing such a conclusion, since the proffered description of my activity is not purely phenomenological. Consider, for example, the third sentence, which begins "I have already added ...". This sentence may be part of a narrative account of my making bread, something that I might recite while doing so if I were, say, teaching someone else how to make bread or perhaps demonstrating the bread-making process as a talk-show guest ("Ok, Rosie, I'm now going to begin kneading the dough ...".), but it is unlikely that anything corresponding to this sentence figures in my experience while I am alone in the kitchen. A narrative account is something of a mixed description, containing both objective and subjective elements, recounting both what I am doing and my experience of what I am doing. A phenomenological description, by contrast, confines itself entirely to how things are manifest in experience, the activity as experienced, and here, Sartre would claim, the many occurrences of "I" and "my" that populate the narrative account are out of place. As I dissolve the yeast, stir in the flour and so on, the content of my experience is simply the dissolving yeast smelled in the bowl, the bowl and flour seen on the countertop, the music heard on the radio, the ache felt in the arm and so on, but there need not be, and usually is not, any experience of an I that is doing all this smelling, seeing, hearing and feeling. My absorption may, of course, be disrupted at any point, such that I might then reflectively apprehend what I have been up to, perhaps even to the point of explicitly thinking to myself such thoughts as, "Here I am making bread", or "I really love the smell of yeast", or "Now I have nearly finished stirring in the flour", but it would be a mistake, Sartre contends, to impose the structure of this reflective apprehension onto non-reflective experience. (We also need to be careful, Sartre thinks, in how we describe the structure of this reflective apprehension, but more on that later.) Although Sartre accepts the Kantian idea that it must always be possible to attach an "I think" (or, better, "I experience") to each of my experiences, we should not inflate that possibility into an actuality.
At this juncture, we might imagine the following Husserlian objection: why think of the structure of reflective apprehension as an imposition; why not instead a revelation? The reflective apprehension of my experience reveals the ego or I as an essential element of that experience. Does not the fact that I can label all of these experiences as mine show this to be the case? For Sartre, these questions provide little in the way of argumentative leverage. To begin with the most basic issue, nothing is gained by substituting "revelation" for "imposition", since to speak of reflection as revealing an ego implies that such an ego was hidden prior to reflection and so not manifest in non-reflective experience, which is precisely Sartre's point. Anything that requires reflection to bring it to the level of manifestation could not be part of the content of first-degree consciousness; the very idea of an unexperienced content of experience displays its own absurdity.
This initial response to our imagined objection can be further developed so as to reveal an even deeper problem with an appeal to an I or ego as an essential element in all experience. If we allow that reflection reveals the I or ego, and so concede that the I or ego is not manifest in first-degree consciousness before the act of reflection, then to posit that the ego is always a structural feature of consciousness is to violate the most fundamental principle of phenomenology. That is, phenomenology casts itself as a non-speculative, non-hypothetical enterprise. The whole point of the phenomenological reduction, as Husserl develops it, is to work in accordance with his "principle of all principles", which, it will be recalled, demands "that everything originarily (so to speak, in its 'personal' actuality) offered to us in 'intuition' is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, but also only within the limits in which it is presented there" (Ideas I: §24). The Anal clause is what is most important for our purposes, since the postalation of an ever-present ego amounts to an inference that goes beyond the "limits" of what is presented in experience. The content of experience is nothing other than what is experienced: there are no non-experienced elements of experience. Careful phenomenological description shows that Husserl's transcendental ego is just such a non-experienced element. To posit an ego at the level of first-degree consciousness is to introduce an "opaque" element into consciousness, thereby occluding what Sartre calls its "translucency", and so, as Sartre rather colourfully puts it, the transcendental ego is "the death of consciousness" (TE: 40).
We are now in the vicinity of Sartre's second main objection to Husserl's conception of the transcendental ego, namely, that the I or ego does not serve to unite consciousness. More strongly put, Sartre's claim is that such an I or ego could not play this role, since, as we have seen, the introduction of a non-experienced element marks "the death of consciousness", rather than establishing its unity. According to Sartre, consciousness needs nothing beyond itself for its unity; the intentionality of consciousness, its synthetic-horizonal structure, confers all the unity it requires. To return to the example of my experience of making bread, the moments and modalities of that stretch of experience all form an interconnected, united flow - the adumbrational presentations of the bowl as it turns, the unseen sides predictably becoming seen, the simultaneity of the smells of yeast and the hearing of the radio - without any further synthesizing agent lying behind or beneath them, that is, without any subject. For Sartre, then, the ego is not a source of unity, but instead Is founded on a prior unity that it did not create.
Sartre certainly does not want to deny that an I or ego is ever manifest in or to consciousness; reflective, or second-degree, consciousness is a genuine phenomenon, and here an I or ego does indeed make an appearance. However, Sartre contends that careful attention to reflective consciousness further illustrates the flaws in Husserl's conception of the ego and its place in phenomenology. Rather than a transcendental, structurally essential feature of consciousness, the ego is a transcendent object for consciousness, no different in this respect than any other worldly entity. What this means is that even acts of reflection, of second-degree consciousness, are still in an important sense subjectless; the I appears as an object, as part of the intentional content of the experience, and not as its subject. This transcendent, objective character of the I dictates, by Husserl's own criteria, that it must "fall before the stroke of the phenomenological reduction" (TE: 53). Here we can see the way in which Sartre intends his critique of Husserlian phenomenology to constitute a series of internal criticisms, amounting to a more careful observance of Husserl's own strictures and methods. In The Transcendence of the Ego, at least, Sartre does not reject the phenomenological reduction (as Heidegger does in Being and Time, for example), as much as reconsider the results of that procedure.
Despite the desire to maintain a certain fidelity to Husserl's mature conception of phenomenology (minus, of course, what Sartre views as the mistaken inclusion of a transcendental ego), Sartre's actual practice of phenomenology, and so his conception of phenomenological method, in effect constitutes a significant departure. What I mean here is that Husserl regards reflection as integral to phenomenological method. As we have seen, "acts of the second degree", that is, reflective acts, constitute "the fundamental field of phenomenology" (Ideas I: §50). Now, Husserl recognizes that reflection does constitute a "modification" of first-degree experience. Reflection, Husserl acknowledges, "alters the original subjective process", so that it "loses its original mode, 'straightforward', by the very fact that reflection makes an object out of what was previously a subjective process but not objective" (CM: §15). At the same time, Husserl is unworried by these alterations, since the "task of reflection ... is not to repeat the original process"; instead, the goal of reflection is to "consider ... and explicate what can be found" in the original process (ibid.). In The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre writes:
Husserl would be the first to acknowledge that an unreflected thought undergoes a radical modification in becoming reflected. But need one confine this modification to the loss of "naivete"? Would not the appearance of the I be what is essential in this change?
(TE: 45-6)
The critical weight of Sartre's second question should not be underestimated, since if he is right, the modifications effected by reflection reach into the content, as opposed to just the "mode", of first-degree consciousness, radically and misleadingly altering it. But if this is so, reflection cannot be the proper method for "considering and explicating" acts of first-degree consciousness, since it will inevitably claim as essential features what are in fact artifacts of its own operation, the claimed presence of the I or ego being a principal case in point.
Sartre's criticisms force not just a re-evaluation of the results of phenomenological procedures, but reconsideration of those procedures themselves. Proper phenomenological description of first-degree consciousness cannot be via reflection, since reflection fails to preserve the subjectless character of non-reflective experience. But how then should phenomenology proceed? How does one establish that first-degree consciousness lacks an I or ego if reflection leads us astray by introducing one? After all, does Sartre himself not claim to be carefully attending to first-degree consciousness, describing and explicating it, and is not such careful attention just the kind of reflective apprehension Husserl recommends? How could there be phenomenology without reflection? Rather than reflecting on his non-reflective experience, Sartre instead characterizes himself as "conspiring" with that experience, where that means reviving the experience while following alongside it. As Sartre puts it: "I must direct my attention to the revived objects, but without losing sight of the unreflected consciousness, by joining in a sort of conspiracy with it and by drawing up an inventory of its content in a non-positional manner" (TE: 46). This conspiratorial phenomenological practice of observing experience as it is re-enacted in memory rather than interrupting it as it occurs is inherently retrospective for Sartre. If, while making bread, I were to stop and reflect, my absorption in my activity would be broken and I would have the experience of myself seeing, hearing, smelling and feeling, and I would go wrong, phenomenologically, were I to read that appearing self back into my experience up until that moment of reflection. Instead, I apprehend that my experience while making bread lacked an I or ego by reliving it after it has transpired. By calling it to mind as it was lived initially, I can now apprehend that no I or ego figured in that episode of awareness.
Consider as a further example those times where we, as it is commonly put, "lose ourselves" in thought. During any such time where I am so "lost", I do not apprehend that an I is absent from my experience. Were I to be struck by such a thought, I would no longer be lost, but instead would thereby be reflectively aware of myself. In other words, I cannot have the thought, "Here I am having I-less experiences", since the very occurrence of that kind of thought introduces precisely what was until then missing. Nonetheless, when I am roused from my musings, I can at that time acknowledge that I was indeed lost in thought and I can also rehearse the episode in considerable detail: what I was thinking; the order of my thoughts; the feelings attendant on such thoughts, including the character of the episode as marked by my being lost. As long as such retrospective, rather than reflective, appraisals are possible (and Sartre claims that it "by definition is always possible" to "reconstitute the complete moment" (TE: 46) of unreflected consciousness), then there is ample material for phenomenological description.
The qualification with which this final claim is entered may turn out to be considerably more severe than Sartre's confidence would suggest. Lacking in Sartre is any argument to the effect that it is "by definition always possible" to reconstitute first-degree consciousness, and certainly nothing that tells us how to ensure that any such "reconstitution" faithfully reproduces the original experience. That is, Sartre does not answer the question of how we separate accurate from inaccurate revivals of previously enjoyed experiences, so as to determine, for example, that one re-enactment is a more faithful reproduction than another; nor does he tell us how to guard against the introduction of features that were not present the first time around. Leaving such worries unaddressed at the very least threatens to place Sartre's "retrospective conspiring" in the same boat as reflection, namely, as a source of distortion and corruption rather than guarantor of descriptive fidelity. As we shall see in Chapter 5, these worries run even deeper, such that ignoring them is no minor oversight or omission on Sartre's part; on the contrary, some have argued that these worries, sufficiently developed, undermine the very possibility of phenomenology.
If the ego is an object transcendent to consciousness, appearing to it in second-degree, reflective acts, what kind of an object is it? This question is intended as a purely phenomenological one, that is, as asking after the ways in which the ego appears in and to consciousness; the question is thus one concerning the constitution of the ego in precisely the same manner as phenomenology asks after the constitution of other transcendent entities, such as the rock and the melody explored in Chapter 1. That for Sartre the ego is transcendent to consciousness, a "being of the world", as he puts it, provides a clue as to how an account of its constitution should go. That is, in Husserl's phenomenology a defining feature of transcendent entities is that they are given adumbrationally, by partial, perspectival presentations: I always hear the melody note by note; I always see the rock from one side or another; and so on. On Sartre's account, this is the case with the ego as well: its appearance in second-degree consciousness is always partial, a matter of presentations that afford only incomplete perspectives on it. Consider one of Sartre's own examples: the transition from a momentary feeling of revulsion in the presence of Peter to the more reflective conclusion that I hate Peter. The momentary feeling, as an episode of first-degree consciousness, is unowned and so ego-less; moreover, the feeling is entirely present in the episode. There is no distinction to be made here between seeming to feel revulsion in the presence of Peter and really feeling revulsion, which indicates the non-adumbrational character of the feeling's manifestation to consciousness. The case of hatred, however, is markedly different, extending well beyond any momentary episode of consciousness. Hatred is an enduring state, attaching to the I, and so to conclude that I hate Peter is to stake myself to a future pattern of feelings and attitudes. To say that I hate Peter is to say more than that present to consciousness right now is a rush of revulsion, even an intense one. Actually hating Peter means, for example, that when I wake up tomorrow, it will still be the case that I hate him; that thinking of him will occasion similar feelings; that I shall be inclined to say, or at least think to myself, that I hate him; that I shall not go out of my way to be nice to him, except hypocritically, and so on. As Sartre artfully puts it, the reflective postulation of hatred involves a "passage to infinity" (TE: 63). (The case is precisely analogous to concluding "I see a chair" on the basis of one, perspectival presentation, since that presentation's being of a (real) chair means, among other things, that I can see it from other sides, that if I reach out to touch it my hand will not pass through it, that I can sit down on it, that it will not disappear and reappear several times in the next five minutes and so on.) And of course I can be wrong about such things: the feeling may subside; Peter and I may "make nice"; the many envisaged episodes of unpleasantness may not come to pass. Thus, unlike in the case of the feeling of revulsion, a distinction between seeming to hate and really hating can be drawn; I might only seem to hate Peter. That I hate him is a hasty conclusion, drawn from what turns out to be merely a fleeting episode of bad feelings.
The example of hatred can be both generalized and extended, since for Sartre the ego that appears in reflective consciousness is ultimately the unity of states such as hatred, as well as actions (although Sartre also includes a third category, qualities, as a kind of optional intermediary between states and actions: for example, as a spiteful (quality) person, I am inclined to hate (state) Peter and wish (action) him dead). By "actions" here, Sartre does not mean bodily actions (those occupy a separate category, discussed briefly below), but rather "psychic" ones, such as the actions of doubting, believing, wishing and the like. The I appears in these reflective states and actions as one and the same, such that, for example, the I who hates Peter is the same I who doubts that Paul will be on time. There is, however, a peculiarity Sartre notes in the constitution of the I or ego. On the one hand, whatever content the I has is given via the reflective states and actions of second-degree consciousness, that is, there appears to be nothing more to the I than the role it plays in uniting these various states and actions (here is a place where, despite their overarching disagreement, Sartre's ideas are akin to Husserl's concerning the constitution of the pure ego). Sartre says, variously, that the ego is "the infinite totality of states and of actions which is never reducible to an action or a state" (TE: 74), and that "it does not seem that we could find a skeletal pole if we took away, one after the other, all the qualities ... at the end of this plundering nothing would remain; the ego would have vanished" (TE: 78). On the other hand, the I appears in reflection as something like the source or substrate of these very states, actions and qualities and so as having a kind of priority relative to them. Paradoxically, "reflection intends a relation which traverses time backwards and which gives the me as the source of the state" (TE: 77).
The ego whose constitution we have been considering is an object exclusively available to and for second-degree consciousness, that is, for reflective acts. There is, however, another sense of "I" that Sartre considers that does not involve reflection. This non-reflective I appears when, while making bread for example, I am asked what I am doing and I reply, without interrupting my activity, "I am making bread". The "I" here, Sartre maintains, is "empty", as nothing determinate is presented in connection with it; an I does not show itself here, however adumbratively, as the "source" of the doing, as the owner of the action, and so as the referent of the report. When I use "I" in this way, I am almost using it in a third-person manner, as another way to pick out something going on in the objective world, rather than revealing or reporting my interior existence. In so far as anything is picked out by this use of "I", it would be my body as the locus or centre of these activities. Sartre refers to the body here as constituting an "illusory fulfillment" (TE: 90), by which I take him to mean that my body is not in any particular way manifest to consciousness on the occasion of these sorts of reports. Think here of the peculiarity of replacing "I" with "my body": "My body is making bread", instead of "I am making bread". The artificiality of the substitution indicates that my body does not really serve to fulfil the sense of "I" when used in a non-reflective way.
One consequence of Sartre's commitment to the transcendence of the ego is a sharp distinction between consciousness and the psychic. As Sartre puts it, "The psychic is the transcendent object of reflective consciousness", and is also "the object of the science called 'psychology'" (TE: 71). Whereas consciousness is "translucent", immediately and exhaustively manifest (indeed, consciousness is nothing but manifestation), the psychic in general, as a transcendent object, enjoys no special epistemological status in comparison with any other category of transcendent entities; knowledge in all of these categories is equally partial, incomplete, fallible and revisable. More radically, perhaps, Sartre draws this conclusion even when it comes to self-knowledge: to knowledge, so to speak, of my own I or ego. I occupy no special position, have no special access, when it comes to acquiring knowledge of my own ego: I am manifest to myself no less adumbrationally than I am to you; my conclusions about my own states and actions are as fallible and open to revision as my conclusions about yours; and so on. There still is, for Sartre, a kind of asymmetry between the first-person and third-person perspective with respect to any particular ego, but this is only a matter of what Sartre calls "intimacy", by which he means that my ego constitutes, for me, a kind of interiority, a psychic life of which I partake. As such, my ego is manifest to me from within this ongoing life. The ego who hates Peter is manifest to me via feelings of revulsion that ego has, when I am that ego, whereas someone else would have to draw that conclusion about me by other means (and certainly not by feeling my feelings). But although I am more intimately connected with my feelings of revulsion, that is, by having or undergoing them, I can still be wrong about my conclusion that I hate Peter, that such a state actually attaches to my ego. Someone else, only watching my fit of rage rather than living it, may nonetheless be more correct in concluding that I do not really hate Peter, that my anger will pass and that tomorrow it will be as though nothing happened. Intimacy, then, is not to be conflated with authority.
Sartre's worries about self-knowledge run even deeper, and these worries arise ultimately from his conclusions concerning the peculiar status of the ego relative to other transcendent entities. What I mean here is that even if we, as Sartre does, deny any kind of first-person authority when it comes to self-knowledge, so that I have no "privileged access" to myself, that on its own does not totally foreclose the possibility of self-knowledge. Such a denial only means that self-knowledge is not as special as philosophers have often made it out to be: that it is fallible, open to revision, liable to correction even from a third-person perspective and so on. That, as I have suggested, is already a radical conclusion, relative to many philosophical points of view, but Sartre appears to go further even than this. At some points, he suggests not just that self-knowledge is no more authoritative than knowledge of another, but rather that it is invariably less so. The very intimacy with which the ego is given in my own case stands in the way of my coming to know it. All of what Sartre regards as the standard procedures for knowing a transcendent entity (Sartre lists observation, approximation and anticipation as examples of such procedures - see TE: 86) involve taking up an external point of view on the entity to be known, and so, owing to the internality of my perspective on the ego, these procedures are ill-suited to the project of my gathering knowledge about myself. Although I may try to achieve some detachment with respect to my own ego, gathering information in the same manner as I would in the task of learning about someone else, in doing so I lose sight of the very thing I want to know. The quest for detachment negates the very intimacy with which the ego is given, thereby effacing the object of my investigation. As Sartre concludes, "Thus, 'really to know oneself' is inevitably to take toward oneself the point of view of others, that is to say, a point of view which is necessarily false" (TE: 87).
Recall the passage from Hume quoted near the start of this chapter. There Hume suggests that any attempt through introspection to locate his self - that is, that which has his various perceptions - comes up empty; all Hume reports being able to find are just more perceptions, various thoughts and feelings. Hume concludes that nothing corresponds to the notion of a self: the notion fails to pick anything out above and beyond the various perceptions detected through introspection. The self is thus a kind of fiction, according to Hume, and so in that sense self-knowledge is impossible, not through any difficulties with respect to access or perspective, but because there is no self to know. Sartre's position on the ego may at first appear to be wholly contrary to Hume's. For example, while the ego is only given adumbrationally, and so possesses the kind of "opacity" common to all transcendent entities, Sartre insists that the ego is not given only hypothetically. Even though, for any given state or action that I judge my ego to have or perform, I can always entertain the possibility that such a judgement is mistaken ("Perhaps I do not hate Peter", "Perhaps I do not doubt Paul's friendship" and so on), it makes no sense, Sartre thinks, to reason in this fashion about the ego itself. "Perhaps I have no ego" is patently absurd, as is the conjecture "Perhaps I have an ego". Although Sartre's rejection of the idea that the ego's existence is hypothetical may appear to confer a kind of certainty on its existence, this is not the case. Instead, the absurdity of these two hypothetical statements stems, according to Sartre, from the idea that ascribing states and actions to an ego adds nothing to them and so I do not incur a further commitment through such an ascription. Indeed, Sartre likens the relation between the ego and its states to one of "poetic production" (TE: 77), in keeping with his depiction of the ego's manifestation as involving a backwards traversal of time that lends to the ego a rather magical aura. Indeed, Sartre claims that "it is exclusively in magical terms that we should speak of the relations of the me to consciousness" (TE: 68), and that "we are sorcerers of ourselves each time we view our me" (TE: 82). Sartre thus appears here rather closer to Hume than one may have initially thought. The "poetic", even "magical", manifestation of the ego recalls Hume's general strategy of explaining the origin of ideas for which there is no corresponding impression by appealing to the workings of the imagination.
Equally magical is Sartre's talk of the "vanishing" of the ego on the removal of all the states, actions and qualities it shows itself as uniting. Now this idea need not be construed as undermining the reality of the ego. After all, for any transcendent entity, we might well wonder what remains when all of its various properties or qualities are imagined away. To maintain that a transcendent entity is real, we need not be committed to the idea that it exists as some sort of bare substratum, independent of any and every quality it may possess. However, what Sartre has in mind here goes further, suggesting something disanalogous to what holds for other transcendent objects. The point may be put like this. Even if we maintain that a chair, for example, is nothing over and above its various properties or qualities, still we by and large think that when we apprehend those qualities, we thereby apprehend the chair. The chair is open to view when its qualities are manifest, even if we concede that the view is partial, incomplete, open to revision and so on. According to Sartre, things are otherwise in the case of the ego: "The ego never appears, in fact, except when one is not looking at it" (TE: 88). (Try saying this about a chair!) To understand why Sartre holds this view, recall his central idea, namely, that the ego is manifest in reflective consciousness as the unity of states and actions. The ego is apprehended in these moments of consciousness via the states and actions; the ego appears "behind the state, at the horizon" (TE: 88). To try to apprehend the ego directly, to make it alone the object of consciousness, breaks the hold of reflection: "I fall back onto the unreflected level, and the ego disappears along with the reflected act" (TE: 88-9). The disappearance noted here again signals a sharp disanalogy between the ego and other transcendent entities. "The ego", Sartre writes, "is an object which appears only to reflection, and which is thereby radically cut off from the World [sic.]" (TE: 83). (I should note here that there is a rather obvious tension between this last claim and the opening claim of The Transcendence of the Ego, namely, that the ego "is outside, in the world ... a being of the world, like the ego of another". For his part, Sartre does not address this apparent contradiction.) The futility of trying to get a direct "look" at the ego, front and centre in one's conscious awareness rather than lurking at the horizon, leads Sartre to conclude that "the ego is by nature fugitive" (TE: 89). Although not exactly Hume's position, Sartre's is perhaps an explanation of it; that is, if Sartre is correct, then we can understand why Hume's search was doomed from the start.
As mentioned at the start of the chapter, The Transcendence of the Ego is an early work of Sartre's, written shortly after his introduction to phenomenology, over a decade before his own self-description as an "existentialist", and nearly a decade before the publication of his massive Being and Nothingness in 1943. Despite this lapse in time, and despite the roughly tenfold increase in size from the first work to the second, many central themes of Being and Nothingness are foreshadowed by The Transcendence of the Ego. In the remainder of this chapter, rather than attempt anything like a comprehensive summary of Being and Nothingness, I shall try to sketch some of those lines of continuity, in order to show how Sartre's early criticisms of Husserl initiated the development of an elaborate, richly textured philosophical view.
As we have seen, in The Transcendence of the Ego Sartre still conceives of phenomenology as operating within a largely Husserlian framework: his dispute with Husserl concerning the question of the transcendental ego is, we might say, an intramural one. Sartre thus conceives of consciousness, at least as studied by phenomenology, in terms of purity and translucency, and so in terms of the phenomenological reduction. Indeed, Sartre sees his practice of the reduction as more rigorous than Husserl's, purging the field of conscious awareness of all transcendent entities, including the I or ego. The resultant field is entirely devoid of objects, and so, odd as this may sound, is not really a something at all. As Sartre puts it towards the end of The Transcendence of the Ego:
The Transcendental Field, purified of all egological structure, recovers its primary transparency. In a sense, it is a nothing, since all physical, psycho-physical, and psychic objects, all truths, all values are outside of it; since my me has itself ceased to be any part of it.
(TE: 93)
Sartre's equating of consciousness with nothingness anticipates the opening sections of Being and Nothingness, wherein he argues that human existence, an essential aspect of which is consciousness or what Sartre comes to call "being-for-itself" (where the "for" indicates self-presence or self-awareness, rather than selfishness, as when we say that someone is only out for himself) is the source of non-being. That is, Sartre argues that if we try to conceive of reality in and of itself, what he calls the "in-itself", then we find "pure positivity", that is, what is real or purely actual includes nothing unreal or non-existent. Nonetheless, when we describe the world as we experience it, we characterize it in both positive and negative terms. I say, for example, that my coffee cup is on my desk, but also that it is not downstairs; that my keys are missing from the key-hooks by the door; that I no longer have a favourite sweater because it was destroyed by moths. All of these descriptions incorporate some kind of negativity, depicting the world both in terms of how it is and how it is not.
If we reflect on these examples, we may come to notice the ubiquity of these modes of description, so much so that it may begin to appear difficult to describe the world without availing oneself of negatively charged terms. Indeed, the difficulty here is not just one concerning how we might describe the world, but concerns, more basically, all of our ways of encountering and acting in the world. Hence my saying above that "if we try to conceive of reality in and of itself", since Sartre thinks that in so far as we perceive and describe the world in determinate ways, those perceptions and descriptions incorporate some kind of negativity. Indeed, the very idea of determination presupposes this: when something is determinate, then it exists in some particular way and not another (my dog is, in being a dog, not a cat; my coffee cup, in being a coffee cup, is not a dog; and so on). The most sense we can make of reality in and of itself is an undifferentiated fullness of existence, something that Sartre thinks is just barely manifest in moments of what he calls "nausea", when we experience reality as just a bare, sickening that-it-is.
Although his account of the origin of nothingness holds that consciousness or subjectivity is somehow the source of it, Sartre argues against the idea that nothingness is to be accounted for by deriving it from the subjective act of negation, through the making of negative judgements. Negativity is, Sartre insists, "pre-judicative", which means that negative judgements are founded on nothingness, and not vice versa. To use Sartre's example (see BN: 40-44), when I am looking for Pierre in the cafe and find him to be missing, his absence is as much a part of my perceptual experience of the cafe as the tables and chairs that are there. That is, I do not merely judge that Pierre is absent on the basis of what I perceive; rather, I perceive his absence along with the tables and chairs (indeed, he argues that Pierre's absence is the more prominent object of my perceptual experience, the other, actually present items in the cafe forming only the background). The palpable absence of Pierre is markedly different from absences that I might note in a more purely intellectual way, for example, if I were to judge that Abraham Lincoln was also not in the cafe, along with Socrates, Napoleon and a whole host of others. These latter cases are exclusively creatures of judgement, superadded to the cafe as I experience it. Pierre's absence, by contrast, is an example of what Sartre calls "negatités": negatively charged features of the world; "pools of nothingness" populating reality as we perceive and conceive it. Although nothingness cannot be conceived as a subjective imposition via the act of judgement, nonetheless I am inextricably involved in Pierre's absence being a perceptual feature of the situation. It is only because I am looking for Pierre, only because I expect to find him at the cafe, and so on, that Pierre is absent from the cafe. Minus those expectations, Pierre's absence is no more a feature of the cafe than Napoleon's. This point can be generalized: the negative features of the world, all of the negatités, cannot be accounted for except in relation to human attitudes towards the world. "Man is the being through whom nothingness comes to the world" (BN: 59).
This appeal to human attitudes places us squarely in the domain of intentionality, in the domain of consciousness, and this provides deeper insight into the origins of nothingness. As we saw in the passage cited from The Transcendence of the Ego, the very idea of consciousness involves the idea of nothingness. Consciousness "is a nothing", and this can be discerned in the notion of intentionality itself. Conscious states are of objects but are not those objects. Intentionality thus involves a kind of slippage or gap, presenting and representing objects without literally having or being those objects. Consciousness is of something that it is not, and so in that sense is what it is not. Sartre thus thinks that a defining feature of the for-itself, of human existence understood in terms of consciousness, is the failure of the principle of identity (Bishop Butler's maxim that "everything is what it is and not another thing" fails to hold true in the domain of the for-itself). Again, this idea is foreshadowed in The Transcendence of the Ego, where Sartre concludes that conscious states, as a kind of nothing, cannot be accounted for by any preceding actualities:
Thus each instant of our conscious lite reveals to us a creation ex nihilo. Not a new arrangement, but a new existence. There is something distressing for each of us, to catch in the act this tireless creation of existence of which we are not the creators. At this level man has the impression of ceaselessly escaping from himself, of overflowing himself, of being surprised by riches which are always unexpected
(TE: 98-9)
I want to emphasize especially the conclusion of this passage, with its imagery of escape and overflow. These images anticipate the later rejection of the principle of identity in defining the for-itself. As nonself-coinciding, human existence is inherently paradoxical, as can be seen in many of Sartre's formulations, for example when he says that a human being is "a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is" (BN: 107), and, writing in the first-person, "I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it" (BN: 68). These formulations, built on ideas in The Transcendence of the Ego, but not fully formed until Being and Nothingness, in turn underwrite Sartre's claim that in the case of human beings, "existence precedes essence" (see BN: 438, 439, 480), which would become the defining slogan of Sartre's existentialism (see HE: 34).
There is a further anticipatory element of the above passage, along with the imagery of escape and overflow, and that is Sartre's suggestion that these images are "distressing". The inherent paradoxically of human existence means that human beings are ineliminably prone to anguish. Because human existence is unsettled, it is therefore also unsettling. Here we see an echo of Heidegger's earlier ideas about Dasein; as a being whose "being is an issue", and so a being whose being always involves a "not-yet", anxiety is a standing possibility. There is a further echo of Heidegger in Sartre's view. Just as Dasein devises strategies to evade the threat of anxiety and its revelation of the ineliminable "not-yet", so too do human beings on Sartre's account often strive to cover over this unhappy fact about our manner of existence. Rather than inauthenticity, Sartre writes instead of "bad faith". The idea of bad faith is again foreshadowed by Sartre's earlier account of the ego, which manifests
Existentialism
The term "existentialism" (actually its French equivalent) was coined by Marcel, who applied it to the thought of Sartre and de Bealivoir. Sartre at first rejected the label, claiming not to: know what it meant. Shortly thereafter, in his The Humanism of Existentialism, Sartre happily applied the term both to his own view and to those of others before him, including Heidegger, despite the roughly two-decade lag between the appearance of Being and Time and Marcel's neologism. The term has come to be associated not just with Heidegger, but also other earlier twentieth-century figures such as Karl Jaspers (whose "Existenzphilosophie" was no doubt a source of inspiration for Marcel's coinage) and Martin Buber, and nineteenth-century figures such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Søren Kierkegaard. Various of Sartre's contemporaries were also labelled as existentialist thinkers, including Merleau-Ponty and Albert Camus. For Sartre, the defining commitments of existentialism are first that, in the case of human beings, "existence precedes essence" and secondly, that "subjectivity must be the starting point". What these two statements indicate is existentialism's concern With the special character of human existence, as something irreducibly subjective and so incapable of being fully appreciated or explained from an objective point of View. For the existentialist, this concern is not merely of theoretical importance, but carries practical significance as well. A genuinely human life can only be lived in the recognition of this insight about human existence; at the same time, the existentialist worries that we all too often lose or efface our freedom, and live out our lives afflicted instead with "despair" (Kierkegaard), as members of "the herd" (Nietzsche), as mired in "inauthenticity" (Heidegger), or in "bad faith" (Sartre).
itself to consciousness both as a transcendent object and as the source of consciousness. Consciousness is thus lured to identify with this ego, and the various, futile quests to experience and know this self indicate consciousness's struggle to achieve a kind of fixity or stasis. Writing in the Conclusion of The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre characterizes a possible relation between consciousness and the ego that anticipates one of the patterns characteristic of bad faith:
Everything happens, therefore, as if consciousness constituted the ego as a false representation of itself, as if consciousness hypnotized itself before this ego which it has constituted, absorbing itself in the ego as if to make the ego its guardian and its law.
(TE: 101)
Sartre's appeals in this passage to false representation, hypnosis ana absorption indicate attempts by consciousness to evade its own nothingness: to quell the anguish inherent to it. Bad faith, as Sartre comes to conceive of these attempts in Being and Nothingness, shares in this imagery, but the structure of bad faith is more complex than his earlier formulations, owing to his more comprehensive departure from Husserlian phenomenology In particular, at the start of Part I of Being and Nothingness, Sartre disavows the phenomenological reduction as the appropriate starting-point for a phenomenological ontology Any attempt to purify or isolate consciousness, or being-for-itself, rigorously quarantined from being-in-itself, is a species of abstraction, and Sartre suggests that one will be unable to bring the for-itself and the in-itself back together again once abstracted; like Humpty Dumpty after his fall, these two regions of being will be irreparably broken apart. (If Sartre is correct here, the conclusion is devastating for Husserl's transcendental project, which seeks to answer the question of how it is possible for consciousness to "reach" or "contact" an object. Sartre likens a Husserlian conception of conscious states to "flies bumping their noses on the window without being able to clear the glass" (BN: 153).) Instead, phenomenology must proceed "concretely", by investigating human existence as it plays out in the world. Sartre's account of the origins of nothingness illustrates this concrete method, as he moves seamlessly between aspects of objective reality and various, more subjective ways of apprehending reality, showing how the two are ultimately intertwined (no negatités without human existence, but no human existence without a world as a locus for its "conducts"). Human existence is not purely a matter of being-for-itself, but nor can it be reduced to being-in-itself (as, for example, various scientifically informed versions of materialism might have it). Human existence is a blend of the two, a combination of what Sartre calls "facticity" and "transcendence". Facticity refers to the ways in which human existence always has some measure of objective determination and accumulated history, and "transcendence" registers the ways in which human existence is always not fully determined, and so "ahead of itself". (The terminology, read in close proximity to our discussion of Sartre's earlier work, is apt to be confusing, since the sense of "transcendence" here must not be conflated with his prior talk of the ego's transcendence. Whereas it formerly marked the ego's being transcendent to consciousness, an object appearing in it, but as outside of it, "transcendence" now registers the idea that consciousness is always outside itself, surpassing any momentary determination.) That human existence has this combinatorial structure again signals its paradoxical nature. Bad faith, as a strategy to quell this sense of paradox and its attending feeling of anguish, can move in either direction. Whereas in The Transcendence of the Ego, the forerunner of bad faith was a matter of consciousness striving for the fixity and determination tantalizingly offered by the manifestation of the ego, in Being and Nothingness, human existence can, through bad faith, strive either to be more object-like or to deny its objectivity altogether, that is, I can be in bad faith by regarding myself as pure facticity or as pure transcendence. As we shall see shortly, this last formulation is misleading, since talk of "regarding myself" in one way or another sounds too active, as though I explicitly think of myself in one way or another. Bad faith cannot be a matter of explicit thoughts, but rather patterns of activity that manifest this self-understanding.
The combinatorial structure of human existence not only provides the motivation for bad faith, but also serves to explain its possibility. That bad faith requires a special explanation can be seen in Sartre's discussion of self-deception, since "bad faith is a lie to oneself" (BN: 87). Such lies, Sartre cautions, must be carefully distinguished from the kinds of lies we tell to one another. Consider first ordinary deception, or what Sartre calls "cynical consciousness" (ibid.). There is nothing particularly mysterious or puzzling about ordinary deception. When I deceive someone else, I keep hidden away from him what I know to be true, usually while endeavouring to get him to believe, or at least maintain his believing, the opposite. As a relation between two or more consciousnesses, it is easy to understand how the truth can remain hidden; that my consciousness and the consciousness of the one I wish to deceive are separate from one another ensures that I shall be able to keep what I know to be true secreted away, unavailable to the one I wish to deceive (provided, of course, that I am careful and clever, so as not to give myself away or let the truth be discovered).
Self-deception, by contrast, cannot partake of this straightforward model: "Bad faith ... has in appearance the structure of falsehood. Only what changes everything is the fact that in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth" (BN: 89). Since the deceiver and the one deceived are one and the same consciousness, it is far from clear how anything can both be known by me to be true (which is necessary for me to play the role of the deceiver) and at the same time be kept hidden from me (which is necessary for me to play the role of the deceived). If I know something to be true, then I cannot hide that fact from myself, and if something is hidden from me, then I cannot know it to be true. The very idea of self-deception appears to pull itself apart by involving requirements that cannot be simultaneously met. If self-deception is indeed possible, then we need an account of consciousness and human existence that makes that possibility intelligible.
One way we might try to understand the possibility of self-deception (and so the possibility of bad faith) is by introducing a split or division within consciousness, so as to replicate the structure of ordinary deception; the truth is kept hidden away in one part of the mind, while the opposite is held to be true in the other. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre devotes considerable attention to one extremely influential conception of such a split or division, namely, Freud's conception of the mind as involving both consciousness and a more subterranean region, the "unconscious" (see BN: 90-96). Freud's bifurcated model of the mind, together with the mechanism of "repression", would appear to solve the puzzle of self-deception. The deep, dark truth is kept repressed in the region of the unconscious, while consciousness blithely carries on in blissful ignorance of that truth. Despite its allure, however, Sartre finds Freud's model highly unsatisfactory. I will not rehearse the entirety of Sartre's argument here, but the basic idea is that Freud's model, to serve as an explanation of self-deception, ultimately presupposes the idea of bad faith, and so is no explanation at all. That is, Freud's division in the mind runs the danger of treating the mind in terms of the in-itself, as two repositories, one marked "conscious", the other "unconscious", filled with various items (beliefs, wishes, desires, etc.). So conceived, the mind is purely passive, and so cannot be conceived of as doing anything with respect to itself. To avoid this passivity, Freud can, of course, appeal to the activity of repression, and so postulate a censor that stands between the unconscious and consciousness, not allowing the problematic items to leave the unconscious and enter consciousness. But how does the censor "know" which items are problematic? To be problematic, they must be ones that the person whose consciousness it is would find disturbing or disruptive, and so these various, repressed items must be both known to be problematic in order to be repressed and they must, as repressed, remain unknown. As both known and unknown, we find ourselves simply duplicating the paradox of self-deception rather than accounting for it, and that, Sartre thinks, is no explanation at all. In order for someone to succeed in repressing unwanted truths, that person must be in bad faith with respect to himself. Repression thus presupposes, rather than makes intelligible, the possibility of bad faith.
Ultimately, Sartre thinks that what makes bad faith possible is precisely the combinatorial structure of human existence: that human beings are a combination of facticity and transcendence. Because this combination is inherently unstable, human beings are in danger of accentuating one rather than the other combinatorial aspect. Human beings can live, and likewise regard themselves, in predominantly objective terms (e.g. when I become "set in my ways" and think of my patterns and routines as fully determined) or in predominantly transcendent terms (e.g. when I disavow my past entirely, claiming that it has nothing whatsoever to do with me or who I am). In other words, human beings lapse into bad faith whenever they are tempted to assert identity claims with any finality (this is who I am or what I am all about) or to deny that anything serves to identify them. Sartre refers to bad faith as "metastable", by which he means that it is an inherently unstable, effervescent phenomenon, something we slip into and out of at various times and in various moods.
Consider Sartre's most famous example of bad faith: the cafe waiter (see BN: 101-3). Sartre imagines himself sitting at a table, watching the waiter ply his trade. The waiter, Sartre notes, is precise and dutiful in his actions. His gait as he moves from one table to another, the manner in which he carries the tray so as to appear both precarious and secure, the angle of his head as he inclines towards a customer to take an order: all of these would appear to exemplify perfectly the defining patterns of a cafe waiter. They exemplify them, Sartre notes, almost too perfectly, which leads him to conclude that the waiter is playing at being a waiter: treating his occupation as a role that he inhabits rather than something with which he identifies. Now, given the lack of self-coincidence in human existence, there would not appear to be anything especially problematic about the waiter, but Sartre declares that he is in bad faith. The tension in the cafe waiter can be discerned in the oscillation between different senses in which he might assert identity claims with respect to himself. That is, there are various ways in which he might assert, "I am not a cafe waiter", and his manner of comporting himself betrays a conflation of these different senses. In one sense, "I am not a cafe waiter", asserted of himself by the waiter, is perfectly in order, since he is not a waiter in the way that, for example, my coffee cup is a coffee cup; since human beings lack fixed identities, no identity statement is fully true of them. Still, there is something misleading in the waiter's assertion, in the sense that it is less true when asserted by him than by, for example, the grocer down the street: the cafe waiter is a cafe waiter in a way that the grocer is not, in the sense that being a waiter does pick out one of his patterns of activity, and not one of the grocer's. The waiter, by only playing at being a waiter, thus exemplifies this latter sense of "I am not a cafe waiter", thereby denying that being a waiter has anything to do with who he is. He thus denies his facticity, identifying exclusively with his transcendence, and so is in bad faith.
Given the instability and paradoxicality of human existence, one might well wonder how bad faith can be avoided: we are always, it appears, in danger of overemphasizing one rather than the other of our constitutive dimensions. This may be so, but Sartre also claims that "these two aspects of human reality are and ought to be capable of valid coordination" (BN: 98). Whatever this "valid coordination" ultimately looks like, Sartre is clear that the antidote to the deceiving patterns of bad faith is not to be found in notions such as sincerity, honesty and good faith. Indeed, Sartre argues that sincerity is itself a pattern of bad faith, since the admonition to "be who you really are" affirms of human existence precisely the kind of fixity and determination that it lacks. But if good faith is no better than bad, what further possibilities are there?
To answer this last question, we need to consider a further idea that I have until this point omitted from our discussion. Sartre holds that since human beings, as conscious beings, are non-self-coinciding, they are also beings whose mode of existence is freedom. We are, as Sartre famously puts it, "condemned to be free" (HE: 41), precisely because we are not fully determined, and so incapable of being summarized by a standing body of facts. Our anguish and our freedom are bound up with one another (hence the idea that we are condemned to freedom). Our existence is something we have to confront and determine through existing, through the choices and decisions that we make. Human beings, Sartre thinks, can always confront their existence in terms of choice, as patterns of activity they can either continue or discontinue projecting into the future.
The idea that human beings are free beings means too that human beings, through their capacity for choice, are always and fully responsible for the shape of their existence, and this idea of responsibility, I would suggest, provides the antidote to bad faith. That is, I avoid bad faith when I actively and openly affirm my full responsibility for everything about my existence (and live accordingly). At first blush this may just sound like another pattern of bad faith, since the notion of "full responsibility" is apt to sound like a variation on "pure transcendence", equally shot through with fantasy and distortion. When I regard myself as fully responsible, however, I do not disown or disavow my facticity; being fully responsible requires recognition of, and responsiveness to, the patterns of activity that have served to define me up until the present. Rather than simply denying those patterns, declaring their irrelevance to who I currently am, in taking responsibility for them, I acknowledge that their continuation is up to me: that I can either project those patterns into the future or choose not to. Doing the latter may not always be easy, and certainly requires more than just deciding not to project them or live in the manner that I have until now. To view such life changes as turning on a momentary decision or declaration would mean lapsing once again into bad faith.
That Sartre's phenomenology ultimately implies the human subject's full responsibility for his or her own existence reveals the overarching ethical dimension of his philosophy Condemned to be free, conscious beings confront the world in terms of choices and decisions, and so they must evaluate their actions in the light of that freedom. To opt out of the task of evaluation is once more a kind of bad faith, since doing so involves a refusal to own up to the distinctive character of human existence. The task of phenomenology, by contrast, is precisely to combat this refusal: to awaken the for-itself to its own self-responsibility. Although we have not given it much attention, the idea that phenomenology has an ethical dimension is not new with Sartre's conception. Being and Time is likewise concerned to awaken Dasein to the possibility of its "authenticity", and even Husserl, despite his often cooler theoretical approach, sees phenomenology as bound up with the attainment of a kind of cognitive and ethical autonomy. Although phenomenology often, if not always, characterizes itself as a purely descriptive enterprise, its descriptions are not without practical significance; indeed, hitting on the right descriptions can be thoroughly transformative, converting us from passive, thing-like beings to lucid, active, fully attentive subjects of experience.