Jean Paul Sartre

3. Psychology

Sartre's gifts of psychological description and analysis are widely recognized. What made him so successful a novelist and playwright contributed to the vivacity and force of his phenomenological “arguments” as well. His early studies of emotive and imaging consciousness in the late 1930s press the Husserlian principle of intentionality farther than their author seemed willing to go. For example, in The Psychology of Imagination (1940), Sartre argues that Husserl remains captive to the idealist principle of immanence (the object of consciousness lies within consciousness), despite his stated goal of combating idealism, when he seems to consider images as miniatures of the perceptual object reproduced or retained in the mind. On the contrary, Sartre argues, if one insists that all consciousness is intentional in nature, one must conclude that even so-called “images” are not objects “in the mind” but are ways of relating to items “in the world” in a properly imaginative manner, namely, by what he calls “derealizing” them or rendering them “present-absent.”

It should be admitted that Sartre never read Husserl's posthumously published lectures on the image that might have corrected his criticism. Though Husserl struggled with the notion of mental image for the first thirty years of his career and distinguished imaging consciousness Bildbewusstsein from the imagination Phantasie, he resisted any account that would employ what Sartre calls “the principle of immanence” and so invite an infinite regress in the vain attempt to reach the transcendent. Still Husserl continued to appeal to mental images in his account of imaging consciousness while eventually avoiding them in analyzing the imagination.

Similarly, our emotions are not “inner states” but are ways of relating to the world; they too are “intentional.” In this case, emotive behavior involves physical changes and what he calls a quasi “magical” attempt to transform the world by changing ourselves. The person who gets “worked up” when failing to hit the golf ball or to open the jar lid, is, on Sartre's reading, “intending” a world where physiological changes “conjure up” solutions in the problematic world. The person who literally “jumps for joy,” to cite another of his examples, is trying by a kind of incantation to possess a good “all at once” that can be realized only across a temporal spread. If emotion is a joke, he warns, it is a joke we believe in. These are all spontaneous, prereflective relations. They are not the products of reflective decision. Yet insofar as they are even prereflectively conscious, we are responsible for them. And this raises the question of freedom, a necessary condition for ascribing responsibility and the heart of his philosophy.

The basis of Sartrean freedom is ontological: we are free because we are not a self (an in-itself) but a presence-to-self (the transcendence or “nihilation” of our self). This implies that we are “other” to our selves, that whatever we are or whatever others may ascribe to us, we are “in the manner of not being it,” that is, in the manner of being able to assume a perspective in its regard. This inner distance reflects not only the nonself-identity of the for-itself and the ekstatic temporality that it generates but forms the site of what Sartre calls “freedom as the definition of man.” To that freedom corresponds a coextensive responsibility. We are responsible for our “world” as the horizon of meaning in which we operate and thus for everything in it insofar as their meaning and value are assigned by virtue of our life-orienting fundamental “choice.” At this point the ontological and the psychological overlap while remaining distinct as occurs so often in phenomenology.

Such fundamental “choice” has been criticized as being criterionless and hence arbitrary. But it would be better to speak of it as criterion-constituting in the sense that it grounds the set of criteria on the basis of which our subsequent choices are made. It resembles what ethicist R. M. Hare calls “decisions of principle” (that establish the principles for subsequent decisions but are themselves unprincipled) and what Kierkegaard would describe as “conversion.” In fact, Sartre sometimes employed this term himself to denote a radical change in one's basic project. It is this original sustaining “choice” that Existential psychoanalysis seeks to uncover.

Sartre's use of intentionality is the backbone of his psychology. And his psychology is the key to his ontology that is being fashioned at this time. In fact, the concept of imaging consciousness as the locus of possibility, negativity and lack emerges as the model for consciousness in general (being-for-itself) in Being and Nothingness. That said, it would not be an exaggeration to describe Sartre as a philosopher of the imaginary, so important a role does imaging consciousness or its equivalent play in his work.

4. Ethics

Sartre was a moralist but scarcely a moralizer. His earliest studies, though phenomenological, underscored the freedom and by implication the responsibility of the practitioner of the phenomenological method. Thus his first major work, Transcendence of the Ego, in addition to constituting an argument against the transcendental ego (the epistemological subject that cannot be an object) central to German idealism and Hussserlian phenomenology, introduces an ethical dimension into what was traditionally an epistemological project by asserting that this appeal to a transcendental ego conceals a conscious flight from freedom. The phenomenological reduction that constitutes the objects of consciousness as pure meanings or significations devoid of the existential claims that render them liable to skeptical doubt-such a reduction or “bracketing of the being question” carries a moral significance as well. The “authentic” subject, as Sartre will later explain in his Notebooks for an Ethics, will learn to live without an ego, whether transcendental or empirical, in the sense that the transcendental ego is superfluous and the empirical ego (of scientific psychology) is an object for consciousness when it reflects on itself in an objectifying act that he calls “accessory reflection.” His works take pains either to ascribe moral responsibility to agents individually or collectively or to set the ontological foundations for such ascriptions.

Authenticity is achieved, Sartre claims, by a conversion that entails abandonment of our original choice to coincide with ourselves consciously (the futile desire to be in-itself-for-itself or God) and thereby free ourselves from identification with our egos as being-in-itself.

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