two approaches to sartre

Review Article

Two Approaches to Sartre

Thomas Baldwin

Using Sartre. By G. McCulloch. London: Routledge, 1994, xii+144 pp. ISBN 0415-1094-X

Sartre, le dernier philosophe. By A. Renaut. Paris: Grasset, 1993, 252 pp. ISBN 2-246-44431-4

For a long time Sartre’s early philosophy, especially Being and Nothingness, occupied a special position in the English-speaking world - as the representative example of an exotic species of philosophical discourse which was supposed to flourish in post-war France and Germany. Characteristic features of this discourse, all exemplified in Sartre’s early work, included a concern for aspects of human life that it was thought to be a bit daring for philosophers to discuss, such as ‘bad faith’, death, and sex, together with an apparent disregard for the eternal verities of analytical philosophy, such as the principle of non- contradiction. To study Sartre’s philosophy was, therefore, the intellectual equivalent of spending a dirty weekend in Paris, before returning to the logical analysis of common sense amidst the homely comforts of suburban England. Within this atmosphere of intellectual puritanism was born that peculiarly condescending conception continental philosophy - a term which perfectly captures the attitude of cultural chauvinism according to which the inhabitants of the ‘continent’ of Europe (i.e. all of Europe except the British Isles) were supposed to practise a rather different and intellectually inferior, kind of philosophical reflection from that practised by those not on the ’continent’ (i.e. in the British Isles, North America, Australia etc.). Admittedly, the pre-war achievements of the Vienna Circle, the Lvov-Warsaw school, and other central European centres, were generally acknowledged by those who went on to talk disparagingly of ’continental philosophy’; but, it was supposed, in post-war continental Europe they had no respectable successors.

One of the excellent features of this journal has been to puncture the presuppositions of this mythical conception that deserves now only to be relegated to the dustbin. It is, roughly speaking, one thing to recognize the distinctiveness of the phenomenological movement: it is quite a different thing to suppose that all ’continental’ philosophers can be characterized as pheno- menologists or indeed as of any single intrinsic philosophical school, let alone to suppose that this should lead them into the enquiries of the kind that can be

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found in Sartre’s early works. As with all chauvinist stereotypes, only a little careful inquiry is needed to see through the idiocies that lie at the heart of the conception of continental philosophy, even if the name lingers on in the English- speaking world as the title for a variety of undergraduate and postgraduate courses that in fact have some substantial and serious content - though having just read my way through a pile of exam scripts for a course which bears this title, most of which just uncritically celebrate ’Satre’s’ (sic) accounts of bad faith, freedom, and anguish, I find in their mindless enthusiasm just the other side of the old condescending disparagement.

Nonetheless, it is in principle now possible to look afresh at the work of philosophers such as Sartre without the condescending presumptions of the past, and Greg McCulloch’s new book, Using Sartre, well exemplifies one way of approaching this enterprise. For, as the title suggests, his book is not just an attempt at a critical exposition and analysis of themes from Sartre’s early philosophy for its own sake: McCulloch also seeks to enlist Sartre as a proponent of some of the philosophical theses that he himself subscribes to, especially in the philosophy of mind. Thus his aim is to liberate Sartre’s philosophy from the sterile classification of it as ’continental philosophy’ by showing how some of the lines of thought that Sartre advanced in his early writings, when properly understood, can be put to good use in contemporary philosophical debate. This is clearly a bold strategy - for it is bound to be open to criticism both from purists who will dislike any attempt to situate Sartre’s philosophy in relation to contemporary debates, and from those contemporary theorists who do not want their positions polluted by contact with ‘continental philosophy’. So let me say at the start that I myself find much to admire in McCulloch’s attempt, even though, as I shall explain below, I find some of his detailed discussion unpersuasive and I think that there are important merits in a more historically sensitive approach to Sartre’s philosophy, as is exemplified by the other book under review here - Sartre, le dernier philosophe, by Alain Renaut.

I shall discuss Renaut’s book, and his methodology, later; for the moment, I shall concentrate on McCulloch’s book. McCulloch’s central claim is that study of Sartre’s early philosophy is an excellent way of recognizing the errors of contemporary representational theories of mind that construe the concepts of mental states such as belief and desire which we employ in our ordinary folk psychology as concepts of inner representations whose content derives from their functional role in directing the life of the animal whose states they are. There is, of course, a great variety of positions of this kind; but although McCulloch does not specify his target precisely, it is clear that Fodor’s work is a good example of the kind of position he has in mind, and his basic thought is that Sartre’s objections to the old 17th and 18th century theories of ideas can be recycled as objections to contemporary representational theories of this kind. Concerning this, there are, I think, three points to be made: first, McCulloch is quite right to say that the critique of the theory of ideas is a central feature of Sartre’s early philosophy. As is well known, Sartre’s first major philosophical project (dating from 1937) was to write a book (La Psycht) in which he would

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explore this critical thought; as with all his other major projects, however, this one was never completed, and his Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions is the only identifiable published fragment of it, although the general purport is clearly laid out in Being and Nothingness, chapter 2, part 111. The second thing to say is that, as with the expression ‘continental philosophy’, the presumed unity of ’the theory of ideas’ disappears under even cursory examination of the variety of positions advanced by Descartes, Malebranche, Arnauld, Locke etc. So broad denunciations of positions of this kind, whether by Sartre or by McCulloch, are in danger of relying on facile oversimplifications. Third, supposing (wrongly - but for the sake of argument) we take it that all theorists of ideas have thought that perception, imagination, and other propositional attitudes involve direct awareness of inner ideas, and that there are conclusive objections to positions of this kind, it still remains to be shown how those objections apply to contemporary theories which, even though they postulate inner representations, certainly do not treat these representations as primarily objects of privileged direct awareness.

McCulloch does not confront this last point as such, but it is not difficult to extract from his book his response to it. He writes

It is not that the sciences of the body have no story to tell, simply that it can never be the whole story. This is the profound claim shared by existentialism and other forms of real externalism: that to be minded is to be embedded in a world or ‘situation’, and that there is an aspect of the manner of embeddedness which is in a sense ‘magical’ ( B b N p. 295; EDN p. 356), or (more soberly) inaccessible from an objective point of view. [p. 111 - the reference here to ’magic’ is misleading, as will be obvious to anyone who looks up the passage to which McCulloch refers.]

Thus McCulloch’s claim will be that existentialism, at least in its Sartrean form, includes a commitment both to ’real externalism’ and to the priority of ’the subjective point of view‘ which together show the mistakenness of the objectivist approaches characteristic of contemporary representational theories of mind. In thinking about this, we need to separate the externalist and the subjectivist theses. Both of these are certainly in some form features of Sartre’s theory of consciousness, but the interesting issue is whether Sartre’s positions on these matters constitute serious challenges to contemporary theory. On the externalism issue, it is hard to see what the challenge amounts to, for if there are good reasons for thinking that certain aspects of mental content are ’object- dependent‘, then these are reasons which any adequate theory of mental representation will need to take on board. For example, in the writings of Sartre, and more especially those of Heidegger and MerIeau-Ponty, the Kantian theme of the spatial content of perception is much stressed and interpreted as involving reference to regions of the subject’s egocentric space; but there is nothing here that any decent theory of perception, however much it involves inner representations (which any decent theory will have to involve), will not accommodate. What is more tricky, however, is the issue of the priority of the

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‘subjective’ point of view. As I have just indicated, the bare phenomenon of egocentricity, though much stressed by Sartre, itself cuts no ice; what matters more is the claim that there is a kind of understanding of the ’phenomenological’ contents of experience that is only attainable from a first-person subjective point of view. For this claim is not easily accommodated within the third-person ’objective’ perspective of contemporary representational theories; but, equally, it is much less easy to substantiate the claim itself.

Does McCulloch provide any substantiation of this claim? Not, I think, where one might first look for it, in his discussion of perception, since he jumps straight from his criticisms of the old theory of ideas to affirmation of the priority of first-person appearances (thus, for example, the whole ’qualia’ debate passes undiscussed). Yet since he says at the start that failure to grasp this point is ’arguably the principal shortcoming of analytical philosophy’ (p. 3) and implies that his book aims to exhibit and correct this shortcoming, the point should come somewhere. I think that the proper place for it is in the discussion of Sartre’s conception of consciousness, for there is no question but that this conception is not compatible with the approaches McCulloch wants to reject, but because McCulloch’s discussion here is largely dominated by an eccentric aspiration to exhibit Sartre as a ’realist’ (a point to which I shall return below), the essential points do not really come to the surface.

The absolutely fundamental feature of the Sartrean conception of consciousness is that ’it exists only to the degree to which it appears’ (B&N p. xxxii; EDN p. 23) - i.e. for consciousness, reality just is appearance. This is not an epistemological thesis, concerning the self-intimation of consciousness; for, on the contrary, Sartre maintains that there is a crucial distinction between consciousness of self and knowledge of self (so it is a mistake for McCulloch to gloss Sartre’s non-thetic consciousness (of) self as ‘a primitive way of knowing itself‘). Sartre’s thesis is, instead, ontological - it is a characterization of the ’being’ of consciousness. As such, as Sartre acknowledges, his conception of consciousness is prima facie paradoxical; for we are strongly inclined to suppose that, for anything concerning which there is a question of the objective truth or falsehood of our judgments, it must be possible to be mistaken through a failure of coincidence between reality and appearance (one way of construing Wittgenstein’s private language argument is precisely as an argument to this effect). Sartre, however, does not directly challenge this thesis - rather he sidesteps it precisely by denying that there is any objective truth to be had concerning consciousness, which is instead a ’non-substantial absolute’. McCulloch, incidentally, glosses this remark by saying that, for Sartre, consciousness ‘has its own solid mode of being’ (p. 102); this is just a slip, but it is nonetheless a revealing one, since solidity is exactly not what consciousness in any way possesses, for it is only a frisson of pure appearance shimmering on the surface of being.

Given that this Sartrean conception of consciousness precisely excludes the kind of third-person objective truth that the theories of mind McCulloch rejects aspire to, it is now easier to see the connections here. But what now needs more



exploration is the question as to why one should take this Sartrean conception at all seriously. From Sartre’s point of view the answer to this lies in the connections between consciousness (thus understood), negation, and intentionality. For, for better or worse, Sartre holds (i) that consciousness, as non- substantial absolute, is a pure ntant - ’nothingness’ (though I myself think ’non- being’ would be a better translation); and (ii) that intentionality always involves some kind of internal negation (’Presence incloses a radical negation as presence to that which one is not‘ - B&N p. 173; E 6 N p. 222) which draws on the nothingness of consciousness. Hence, according to Sartre, his paradoxical conception of consciousness as no thing is a condition of the possibility of intentionality and thus for all the familiar psychological phenomena that a theory of mind needs to deal with. So, if Sartre is right about these matters then the aspiration to conceive of psychological phenomena as a domain for objective third-person theorizing is wholly mistaken.

But is Sartre right about these matters? I think not, but it would take a great deal of exposition and critical analysis to demonstrate this, and this is not the place to pursue these matters further, though I shall say a bit more below when discussing Renaut’s book. What is more to the point, however, is the fact that McCulloch, so far from attempting to vindicate Sartre’s position in this respect, does not even present this central aspect of his theory; with the result that, so far I can see, the central line of thought of Being and Nothingness passes largely undiscussed in his book. Of course McCulloch might protest that it was never his aim to provide a critical analysis of Sartre’s book, since all he wanted to do was to use some of Sartre’s ideas to advance his own philosophy of mind. And I am indeed extremely sympathetic to the position of anyone who seeks to avoid the necessity of grappling with the baffling barrage of metaphors through which Sartre expounds his theory of consciousness. Nonetheless, as I have tried to indicate above, I think that anyone who wants to use Sartre’s account of consciousness as a tool with which to criticize other theories of mind really has to get much closer to it than McCulloch does here.

There are several points which show how McCulloch has not really got to grips with Sartre’s strange position. One concerns freedom: as every student knows, according to Sartre we are ‘condemned to freedom’. But what does this mean, and why does Sartre think it? According to McCulloch, Sartre is primarily concerned to deny the view of the ‘psychological determinist’ that past choices inexorably determine future behaviour, and this is not a view which he argues for, since he just ‘assumes’ its truth. Yet once we bring back the conception of consciousness as pure appearance, and therefore as non-being, we can see that Sartre’s doctrine is in fact quite different: the ’freedom’ of consciousness consists precisely in its detachment from being - a detachment which is inevitable because of its inherent non-being; and it is not difficult for Sartre to argue for this, since as he observes, a real cause can only be the cause of a real effect - and consciousness qua pure appearance cannot be a ’real effect’ ( B 6 N p. 23; E&N p. 59). One may well find Sartre’s thought here too paradoxical to be fully intelligible, but then one has to go back to those fundamental theses concerning


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consciousness, negation, and intentionality in order to disentangle what is going on here.

McCulloch’s discussion of what he calls ’Sartre’s realism’ confirms this impression of someone not really tuned in to Sartre‘s wavelength. McCulloch is primarily keen to situate Sartre in relation to Descartes and Berkeley: so, unlike Berkeley, Sartre is not a subjective idealist; and, unlike Descartes, Sartre does not think that the mind (consciousness) is independent of the rest of the world. These are indeed fair points; but do they suffice to make Sartre a ’realist’ who thinks that ’the world’ is mind-independent? No - for Sartre follows Heidegger in making the world and the self inter-dependent - ’without the world there is no selfness, no person; without selfness, without the person, there is no world’ (B&N p. 104; E&N p. 149). McCulloch shows himself to be aware of, and worried by, passages such as these, in which Sartre sounds like a transcendental idealist; but he thinks he can show that we should set them to one side by noting Sartre’s dissociation of himself from Kant’s account of space and time and from his conception of noumena. But the truth is surely that Sartre, to some extent following Heidegger, proposes a variant of Kant’s idealism, whereby, roughly, the Kantian a priori is subsumed within his existentialist account of the constitution of the self. Thus the result is an ’existential idealism’ according to which the conception of the world, and all its spatio-temporal, instrumental, and causal structures, are internally related to an existentialist account of the constitution of a self which comprises a stream of consciousness unified by its non-thetic apperception of itself in terms of a fundamental project. The similarities with Kant are close, and Sartre’s rejection of Kantian noumena is I think to be understood in the light of his presumption of a traditional ’two world’ interpretation of Kant’s phenomenahoumena distinction (for Sartre’s Being-in-itself is not in that way noumenal). But once that interpretation of Kant is replaced by Allison’s preferable ’two standpoint’ interpretation (see Allison 1983), the equation of Kantian noumena and Sartre’s Being-in-itself is straightforward, and seems well justified by remarks such as that: ’there remains an unnameable and unthinkable residuum which belongs to the in-itself considered’ (B&N p. 482 - I have corrected the excessive italics in the translation; E 6 N p. 562).

I could continue with further evidence of the distance between Sartre’s actual position and that attributed to him by McCulloch, but this would be largely tedious, and I think it is more interesting to ask at this stage whether his project, certainly prima facie worth undertaking, of establishing a dialogue between Sartre‘s philosophy and contemporary debates can be brought off successfully. The pessimistic conclusion would be that Sartre’s philosophy is just too strange for there to be much opportunity for effective dialogue, and I certainly find myself drawn to this conclusion whenever I attempt to summon up intellectual sympathy for his accounts of consciousness and nothingness (especially in comparison with the positions of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty which are much more intriguing). But I do also think that there is something to his core existential doctrines concerning the self and the relationship between subjectivity



and values; and Alain Renaut’s book Sartre, le dernier philosophe provides a good context in which to explore further this thought.

Renaut, whose previous work has primarily concerned Fichte, of course comes to Sartre without the preconceptions associated with the Anglophone conception of ’continental philosophy’. Instead, as he nicely explains, he comes to this study of Sartre from a position which has been deeply influenced by the ’heideggerianization‘ of philosophy in France, and which has therefore tended to look rather condescendingly on Sartre as an amateur philosopher whose pretensions were thoroughly exposed by Heidegger in his Letfer on Humanism. Renaut’s exclamations at the brilliance of some of Sartre’s writings are perhaps indicative of the fact that the writing of this book was for him something of a rediscovery of Sartre’s work, whose merits he now wants to reassess. Renaut takes his title from that arch anti-humanist, Michel Foucault, whose description of Sartre as ‘the last philosopher’ was intended to mark him out as someone who belonged to a now obsolete tradition in which philosophers were supposed to settle the fundamental questions of life, death, and the meaning of the universe. But Renaut’s own use of this title is deliberately ironic: even if he regretfully agrees with Foucault that there can be no return to the Sartre’s monumental (and forever incomplete) Hegelian projects of ’onto-theology’ - of excogitating an account of the meaning of everything from bare reflections on ’being’, - unlike Foucault he thinks that Sartre’s reflections on the place of values in human life do not belong to an altogether obsolete tradition in philosophy.

Renaut’s main interest in Sartre derives, however, from Renaut’s own sense of himself as a ‘post-heideggerian’ philosopher. He describes how he came to feel, after the work of Farias, Ott and others, that there may be deep connections between Heidegger’s hostility to democracy and his anti-humanism, in the light of which it seemed to him important to re-open the old humanism debate between Sartre and Heidegger and then to pursue further the very different ways in which these two philosophers responded to the phenomenological problematic that they both found in Husserl‘s work. Thus the core of Renaut‘s book is an extended, though of course highly selective, critical comparison of central themes from Heidegger and Sartre, starting from a brief account of Husserl’s conception of intentionality. He describes his method here as an attempt to ‘reconstruct’ a logic for the history of this philosophy, and deliberately distances himself from the aspiration to conduct a Derriderean ’deconstruction’ of this material. I am not sure whether in fact his method has any novel features, for it reads much as any good critical history of philosophy reads. But it certainly enables him to develop interesting lines of argument and to include some striking incidental details - such as those concerning Sartre’s early failures to make contact with the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger. Renaut tells how, in 1929, when Sartre was still a student at the Ecole Normale, he did not bother to walk over to the Sorbonne to hear Husserl deliver his Cartesian Meditations as lectures; and how two years later, when his earliest quasi- philosophical piece ’The Legend of Truth’ was published in the journal Bifur, the very same issue of the journal included a translation of part of Heidegger’s


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inaugural lecture ‘What is metaphysics?‘ which Sartre can have never read, since he later described his reading, in 1938, of the complete translation of Heidegger’s very same lecture as the event which first led him to appreciate Heidegger’s work properly.

The first theme of Renaut’s critical history concerns intentionality: after describing Husserl’s reaction against ’psychologism’ and his development of his phenomenological method as a way of exploring the intentionality of consciousness, Renaut describes the different reactions of Heidegger and Sartre to Husserl’s treatment of intentionality. There are many complex issues here, and I think it would have been helpful if Renaut had been a bit more explicit about his own position, which remains somewhat veiled. The story begins, familiarly enough, with Brentano and then Husserl’s first Logical Investigation. Renaut repeats, approvingly, Husserl’s criticisms of ’psychologism’ in a way which indicates that he has not realized that the positions being criticized by Husserl were in fact largely misunderstood by him (see Skorupski 1989, pp. 164-6, for a cogent defence of Mill). Renaut then describes the evolution of Husserl’s method in the direction of ’transcendental subjectivity’, and his discussion here appears to indicate some approval of this theme, though just what its relationship to intentionality might be is not explicitly set out. Instead, Renaut now sets out Heidegger’s critical reaction to Husserl’s treatment of intentionality, especially to Husserl’s conception of subjectivity and to the notion of ‘constitution’. Renaut’s discussion here is always interesting, and draws heavily on Heidegger‘s 1927 lectures on The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, though not (a little surprisingly) on Heidegger’s 1925 lectures History of the Concept of Time, where his criticisms of Husserl are set out in a very straightforward manner. Finally, Renaut turns to Sartre’s rather different response to Husserl (which, of course, pre-dates his study of Heidegger), where he argues that, although Sartre agrees with Heidegger that Husserl’s conception of constitutive role of the ‘transcendental ego’ is a mistake, unlike Heidegger Sartre retains an approach which assigns primacy to subjective consciousness by associating this with the conception of intentionality as ’nihilation’ or ‘differentiation’.

This is difficult material, and although Renaut shows that he has the story well under control, I think it is fair to say that he does not attempt to elucidate in detail just how the various metaphors in play here - ’constitution’ (Husserl), ’opening’ (Heidegger), ’nihilation’ (Sartre) - might be thought to provide genuinely satisfactory accounts of intentionality. There is an interesting contrast in this respect between McCulloch and Renaut: Renaut shows that he knows the texts well, but he does not attempt in detail to elucidate their merits; by contrast, McCulloch makes effective use of Sartre, though (as I have indicated) sometimes he does so in ways which leave me wondering whether he has understood the text. My own view (very briefly) is that in thinking about these varied treatments of intentionality it is helpful to introduce one more, namely Merleau-Ponty’s hypothesis that there are different levels of intentionality - including bodily, non-conceptual, intentionality and reflective, conceptual, intentionality. For the positions of Heidegger and Sartre at any rate are best regarded as appropriate, if

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at all, to different levels or types of intentionality, rather than as direct competitors (I think this was indeed Merleau-Ponty’s view of the matter; just where he wanted to fit Husserl in depends on which of Husserl’s many positions one is thinking about). Thus Heidegger’s conception of intentionality as an ‘opening to Being’ arising from Dasein’s being-in-the-world can be readily associated with the conception of a fundamental non-conceptual, bodily, intentionality; Sartre’s conception of the intentionality of consciousness as nihilation or detachment, by contrast, seems more appropriate to a level of reflective thought in which the detached consideration of mere possibilities is taking place - though it remains, for me, difficult to see how much merit there is in Sartre’s metaphors. Like Merleau-Ponty, I recognize that this strategy of ‘divide and rule’ is not how Heidegger and Sartre conceive of the matter: they each think their position is both fundamental and comprehensive. But it may yet be that we can get most out of their positions by rejecting this aspect.

The other main theme of Renaut’s book arises from his concern with the ’humanism’ debate between Sartre and Heidegger, and with his general wish to examine whether there is not something to be said for Sartre’s concern for the practical implications of philosophy. Rather disappointingly, Renaut ducks the challenge of elucidating Heidegger’s enigmatic remarks about values in his Letter on Humanism. The result is that the anti-humanist position is never explored and he concentrates exclusively on Sartre’s side of the argument, focusing on his writings from the 1939 War Diaries to the 1947 Notebooks (Cahiers pour une morale). Sartre’s later writings are briefly alluded to, but Renaut sets them aside because he does not want to grapple with Sartre’s Marxism, which he thinks was not a successful theoretical exercise. I think myself that this restriction means that full justice cannot be done to Sartre’s later attempts to respond to the issues which Renaut raises, and I shall say a little below on the matter; but, equally, it is very difficult to know where to draw the line when one is discussing Sartre’s work, and there is no doubt that Renaut’s decision is defensible.

Renaut begins from the thought that Sartre’s famous slogan ‘existence precedes essence’, even if used as a premise to repudiate old-fashioned naturalist theories of value, is nevertheless also intended by Sartre to be used as the basis for a higher-order, more abstract, foundation for values. This seems to me clearly right, but there is a passage from Sartre’s War Diaries which is worth quoting in this context:

But if human reality is for its own end, if morality is the law that regulates through the world the relationship between human reality and itself, the first consequence is that human reality is obliged to account only to itself for its morality . . . The second consequence is that there’s no way to determine the prescriptions of that morality, except by determining the nature of human reality. We must take care here not to fall into the error which consists in deriving values from facts. For human reality is not a fact. (trans. Hoare - Verso, London 1984 - pp. 108-9)


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The difficult qhestion for any account of Sartre’s ethical theory is just what the significance of the final three sentences is intended to be. We have seen already that ’human reality’ (i.e. consciousness) is not a ‘fact’ because it is a ’neant’, a ’non-fact’; but then how can we ‘determine the prescriptions of morality’ on the basis of ’non-facts’? The standard challenge to Sartre is this: if there is really no substance to human reality (which is one way of glossing ’existence precedes essence’), then how is any specific morality determined or excluded? Renaut, I think, would want to respond by saying that when it is denied that human reality has any substance, it is only some determinate specification altogether independent of the subject’s self-consciousness (such as that implied by F. H. Bradley‘s conception ‘My station and its duties’ in Bradley 1927) that is excluded. What is not denied is the conception of the subject as that which ’creates itself through its own choices’, and, according to Renaut, the implied conception of the subject as ‘autonomous’ does then connect up in familiar ways with Kantian values. So Sartre should have been a Kantian, and, according to Renaut, the only reason he was not is that his ethical thought is derailed by an existentialist individualism which makes it impossible for him to coherently allow that we can treat others as ends.

One question here is whether this higher-order conception of human reality, as ultimately autonomous, is really consistent with the conception of human reality as a ’neant‘? For, it can be objected, as long as there is some positive specification of human reality, there is potentially some objective truth here which may diverge from subjective appearances - e.g. in the mind of a thorough-going materialist - in a way which is fundamentally alien to Sartre’s conception of consciousness. Sartre of course might well invoke his conception of ’bad faith’ at this point to suggest that even in such a case subjective appearances actually fit with his account of human reality. But this strategy is dangerous: it engenders the suspicion that Sartre’s position has become trivially unfalsifiable through stipulation on his part about what is, and what is not, subjectively apparent to consciousness. I myself think that this problem goes deep, and points to the ultimate incoherence of his via negativa - his attempt to characterize consciousness, and thus human reality, in wholly negative terms. But in this context we should leave that issue to one side and suppose that, somehow, it is legitimate for Sartre to employ the kind of conception of human reality that Renaut attributes to him; for the (interesting) questions that still remain are whether Renaut is right to think that this conception should warrant a Kantian ethical theory, and that Sartre himself fails to develop this properly only because of his excessive existentialist individualism.

On this latter point, I think that there is more to be said than Renaut allows. Renaut recognizes that in the 1947 Notebooks and elsewhere Sartre represents ‘Morality’ (La Morale) as the attainment of the Kantian ’kingdom of ends’, but argues that when one looks at the detail of Sartre’s discussion in part I1 of the 1947 Notebooks one finds that Sartre has not really moved substantially beyond the individualist perspective of part 111 of Being and Nothingness which explicitly precludes the kind of concern for others which morality requires.



I myself think that this is a somewhat uncharitable interpretation of Sartre’s position which fails to do justice to the switch from the perspective of ’impure’ (inauthentic) reflection explicitly characteristic of Being and Nothingness to that of ’pure’ (authentic) reflection explored in the 1947 Notebooks. For once one adds that Sartre explicitly characterizes pure reflection as a mode of consciousness which has overcome the ‘alienation’ of a life which inevitably started out in childhood dominated by an inauthentic mode of understanding acquired from others, it becomes comprehensible that Sartre can say of pure reflection that it is a state in which genuine reciprocity is achieved. Furthermore, Sartre does not just say this in his 1947 Notebooks: he does try to fill it out within the context of his general conception of consciousness (see especially Cahiers pp. 514-24), albeit one which here includes some explicit qualifications on this score to the account presented in Being and Nothingness (e.g. see the account ot’ love in Cahiers p. 430).

One could debate this issue further (I have discussed it in Baldwin 1986), but I want to tdrn instead to the question as to whether Renaut is right to think that, setting aside the issue of his existentialist individualism, Sartre should have embraced a Kantian ethical theory. This is, of course, a possibility that Sartre himself considered, but, despite his use of the Kantian talk of a ’kingdom of ends’ to describe ’morality’, he regularly distances himself from Kant for the reason that Kant’s theory is too ’formal’ and ’universal’, since ’principles that are too abstract break down when we come to defining action’ (’Existentialism and Humanism’ p. 52) - a point Sartre illustrates with his well-known story of the young man in occupied France caught in a dilemma between his duty to his mother and his duty to his country. Renaut, by contrast, gives the impression that he thinks that Kant’s abstract, formalist, approach to morality is correct. Some may object here that this is not the right way to read Kant, but that issue need not be debated here; for what I want to suggest is that, whatever one may think of the rest of Sartre’s theory, on this point at least Sartre appears to be right -in that abstract rationalist universalism in ethics does need to be qualified by an understanding of the import of the particular, concrete, contingent circumstances of action. This thought can be filled out in many ways - e.g. by reference to the ineliminable role of ’agent-relative’ values alongside ’agent-neutral’ ones, or to the requirements of an agent’s ’integrity’ as expressed in their sense of their own identity; and although these ideas are not explicitly thematized by Sartre, they fit well with his stress on the inescapable ’situatedness’ of human action. So, in my view, Sartre should be read, not as a Kantian-manque (which is Renaut’s position), but as a genuine post-Kantian, who has assimilated the purport of Hegel’s famous criticisms of Kant’s theory. Furthermore, I suggest, one should consider Sartre’s Marxism in this context: for at the level of ethical theory, the appeal to Sartre of Marx’s historical materialism was precisely that it seemed to him to incorporate the kind of respect for the particular concrete situations of action that was missing from abstract ethical theories such as Kant’s. Whether this is a sensible way of thinking about Marxism is, of course, disputable (I have discussed this matter in Baldwin 1993); but I think that one needs to take this


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aspect of his pssition into account (in a way that Renaut does not attempt) before proposing a final verdict on Sartre’s success, or not, as a moral philosopher.

Despite this omission, and my other reservations, I want finally to make it clear that, in my view, Renaut does provide an excellent historical introduction to the reading of Sartre. 1 do not know the French literature on Sartre, but I can confidently assert that there is nothing comparable in the English literature. If Renaut’s book has a drawback, it is in the limitations of his analytic, critical, aspirations (which may well derive from the series in which the book appears). Hence there is an interesting contrast between these two books, by McCulloch and Renaut: where McCulloch‘s strength lies in his analytic discussions of substantive issues, his weakness lies in his unfamiliarity with the dialectical context of Sartre’s writings. By contrast, Renaut illuminates this context very helpfully, but then does not have much to say about the issues under discussion. Is this contrast illustrative of a difference of philosophical style between England and France? I do not know, though I am temperamentally wary of new sterotypes to replace the old conception of continental philosophy. A more interesting question is whether there is an intrinsic conflict between the approaches of these two books, between (to put it very briefly) the ’analytic’ and the ‘historical’ approach; and perhaps a comparison with Sartre will suggest an answer. In his early writings Sartre used to say that there is an intrinsic conflict between perception and imagination, that one cannot combine these two modes of consciousness; yet it is clear, in fact, that the concept of ’play’ Qeu) in Being and Nothingncss Part IV, chapter 11 section 2, which is explicitly conceived to transcend the level of inauthentic activity described in most of the book, is a conception of aesthetic activity that precisely does combine perception and imagination. Likewise, it seems that it should be possible to combine what is best in the analytic and historical approaches to philosophical writing in the study of a philosopher such as Sartre. It may well appear that because his writing is so diverse, and much of it is so obscure, that one could have no confidence that such an enterprise could be successfully carried off; nonetheless i t might be precisely by focusing on the important aesthetic dimension of his work (which neither McCulloch nor Renaut mention at all) that such an enterprise could be successfully carried off.

Thomas Baldwin University of York

REFERENCES

Allison, H. (1983), Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. London:

Baldwin, T. (1986), ’Sartre Existentialism and Humanism’, in Philosophers Ancient and

Baldwin, T. (1993), ’Sartre and Cohen on Marx’, in Stanford French Review 17, pp. 207-20. Bradley, F. H. (1927), Ethical Studies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Skorupski, J. (1989), 1. S. Mill . London: Routledge.

Yale University Press.

Modern, ed. G. Vesey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


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