## 1. Life and Works



Sartre's life has been examined by many biographies, starting
with Simone de Beauvoir's *Adieux* (and, subsequently,
Cohen-Solal 1985; Levy 2003; Flynn 2014; Cox 2019). Sartre's
own literary "life" exemplifies trends he thematized in
both *Words* and *Being and Nothingness*, summed up by
his claim that "to be dead is to be prey for the living"
(Sartre 1943 [1956: 543]). Sartre himself was one of the first to
undertake such an autobiographical effort, via his evocation of his
own childhood in *Words* (1964a)--in which Sartre applies
to himself his method of existential psychoanalysis, thereby
complicating this life/death binary.



Like many of his generation, Sartre lived through a series of major
cultural and historical events that his existential philosophy
responded to and attempted to shape. He was born in 1905 and died in
1980, spanning most of the twentieth century and the trajectory that
the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm refers to as the "age of
extremes", a period that was also well-described in the middle
of that century in Albert Camus' *The Rebel*,
notwithstanding that the reception of Camus' book in *Les
Temps Modernes* in 1951-2 caused Sartre and Camus to very
publicly fall out.



The major events of Sartre's life seem relatively clear, at
least viewed from an external perspective. A child throughout World
War 1, he was a young man during the Great Depression but born into
relative affluence, brought up by his grandmother. At least as
presented in *Word*s, Sartre's childhood was filled with
books, the dream of posterity and immortality in those books, and in
which he grappled with his loss of the use of one eye and encountered
the realities of his own appearance revealed through his
mother's look after a haircut--suffice to say, he was not
classically beautiful.



Sartre's education, by contrast, was classical--the
Ecole Normale Superieure. His education at the ENS was
oriented around the history of philosophy, and the influential
bifurcation of that time between the neo-Kantianism of Brunschvicg and
the vitalism of Bergson. While Sartre failed his first attempt at the
aggregation, apparently by virtue of being overly ambitious, on
repeating the year he topped the class (de Beauvoir was second, at her
first attempt and at the age of 21, then the youngest to complete).
Sartre then taught philosophy at various schools, notably at Le Havre
from 1931-36 and while he was composing his early philosophy and
his great philosophical novel, *Nausea*. He never entered a
classical university position.



Although Sartre's philosophical encounter with phenomenology had
already occurred (around 1933), which de Beauvoir described as causing
him to turn pale with emotion (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 112]), with the
onset of World War 2 Sartre merged those philosophical concerns with
more obviously existential themes like freedom, authenticity,
responsibility, and anguish, as translated into English from the
French *angoisse* by both Hazel Barnes and Sarah Richmond. He
was a Meteorologist in Alsace in the war and was captured by the
German Army in 1940 and imprisoned for just under a year (see *War
Diaries*). During this socio-political turmoil, Sartre remained
remarkably prolific. Notable publications include his play, *No
Exit* (1947), *Being and Nothingness* (1943), and then
completing *Existentialism is a Humanism*
(1946), *Anti-semite and Jew* (1946), and founding and
coediting *Les Temps Modernes*, commencing from 1943
(Sartre's major contributions are collected in his
series *Situations*, especially volume V).



Sartre continued to lead various social and political protests after
that period, especially concerning French colonialism (see
 section 7
 below). By the time of the student revolutions in May 1968 he was no
longer quite the dominant cultural and intellectual force he had been,
but he did not retreat from public life and engagement and died in
1980. Estimates of the numbers of those attending his funeral
procession in Paris range from 50-100,000 people. Sartre had
been in the midst of a collaboration with Benny Levy regarding ethics,
the so-called "Hope Now" interviews, whose status remain
somewhat controversial in Sartrean scholarship, given the interviews
were produced in the midst of Sartre's illness and shortly
before he died, and the fact that the relevant audio-recordings are
not publicly available.


## 2. Transcendence of the Ego: The Discovery of Intentionality



One of the most famous foundational moments of existentialism concerns
Sartre's discovery of phenomenology around the turn of 1932/3,
when in a Parisian bar listening to his friend Raymond Aron's
description of an apricot cocktail (de Beauvoir 1960 [1962: 135]).
From this moment, Sartre was fascinated by the originality and novelty
of Husserl's method, which he identified straight away as a
means to fulfil his own philosophical expectations: overcoming the
opposition between idealism and realism; getting a view on the world
that would allow him "to describe objects just as he saw and
touched them, and extract philosophy from the process". Sartre
became immediately acquainted with Emmanuel Levinas's early
translation of Husserl's *Cartesian Meditations* and his
introductory book on Husserl's theory of intuition. He spent the
following year in Berlin, so as to study more closely Husserl's
method and to familiarise himself with the works of his students,
Heidegger and Scheler. With Levinas, and then later with
Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, and Tran Duc Thao, Sartre became one of
the first serious interpreters and proponent of Husserl's
phenomenology in France.



While he was studying in Berlin, Sartre tried to convert his study of
Husserl into an article that documents his enthusiastic discovery of
intentionality. It was published a few years later under the title
"Intentionality: a fundamental idea of Husserl's
phenomenology". This article, which had considerable influence
over the early French reception of phenomenology, makes explicit the
reasons Sartre had to be fascinated by Husserl's descriptive
approach to consciousness, and how he managed to merge it with his
previous philosophical concerns. Purposefully leaving aside the
idealist aspects of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology,
Sartre proposes a radicalisation of intentionality that stresses its
anti-idealistic potential. Against the French contemporary versions of
neo-Kantianism (Brochard, Lachelier), and more particularly against
the kind of idealism advocated by Leon Brunschvicg, Sartre
famously claims that intentionality allows us to discard the
metaphysical oppositions between the inner and outer and to renounce
to the very notion of the interiority of consciousness. If it is true,
as Husserl states, that every consciousness is consciousness
*of* something, and if intentionality accounts for this
fundamental direction that orients consciousness towards its object
and beyond itself, then, Sartre concludes, the phenomenological
description of intentionality does away with the illusion that makes
us responsible for the way the world appears to us. According to
Sartre's radicalised reading of Husserl's thesis,
intentionality is intrinsically realistic: it lets the world appear to
consciousness *as it really is*, and not as a mere correlate of
an intellectual act. This realistic interpretation, being perfectly in
tune with Sartre's lifelong ambition to provide a philosophical
account of the contingency of being--its non-negotiable lack of
necessity--convinced him to adopt Husserl's method of
phenomenological description. 



While he was still in Berlin, Sartre also began to work on a more
personal essay, which a few years later resulted in his first
significant philosophical contribution, *Transcendence of the
Ego*. With this influential essay Sartre engages in a much more
critical way with the conception of the "transcendental
ego" presented in Husserl's *Ideas* and defends his
realistic interpretation of intentionality against the idealistic
tendencies of Husserl's own phenomenology after the publication
of *Logical Investigations*. Stressing the irreducible
transparency of intentional experience--its fundamental
orientation beyond itself towards its object, whatever this object may
be--Sartre distinguishes between the dimensions of our subjective
experiences that are pre-reflectively lived through, and the
reflective stance thanks to which one can always make their experience
the intentional object towards which consciousness is oriented. One of
Sartre's most fundamental claims in *Transcendence of the
Ego* is that these two forms of consciousness cannot and must not
be mistaken with one another: reflexive consciousness is a form of
intentional consciousness that takes one's own lived-experiences
as its specific object, whereas pre-reflexive consciousness need not
involve the intentional distance to the object that the act of
reflection entails. In regard to self-consciousness, Sartre argues
there is an immediate and non-cognitive form of self-awareness, as
well as reflective forms of self-consciousness. The latter is unable
to give access to oneself as the *subject* of unreflected
consciousness, but only as the intentional *object* of the act
of reflection, i.e., the Ego in Sartre's terminology. The Ego is
the specific object that intentional consciousness is directed upon
when performing reflection--an object that consciousness
"posits and grasps [...] in the same act" (Sartre
1936a [1957: 41; 2004: 5]), and that is constituted in and by the act
of reflection (Sartre 1936a [1957: 80-1; 2004: 20]). Instead of
a transcendental subject, the Ego must consequently be understood as a
transcendent object similar to any other object, with the only
difference that it is given to us through a particular kind of
experience, i.e., reflection. The Ego, Sartre argues, "is
outside, *in the world*. It is a being of the world, like the
Ego of another" (Sartre 1936a [1957: 31; 2004: 1]).



This critique of the transcendental Ego is less opposed to Husserl
than it may seem, notwithstanding Sartre's reservations about
the transcendental radicalisation of Husserl's phenomenology.
The neo-Humean claim that the "I" or Ego is nowhere to be
found "within" ourselves remains faithful to the 5th
*Logical Investigation*, in which Husserl had initially
followed the very same line of reasoning (see Husserl 1901 [2001: vol.
2, 91-93]), before developing a transcendental methodology that
substantially modified his approach to subjectivity (as exposed in
particular in Husserl 1913 [1983]). However, for the Husserl of the
*Ideas Pertaining to a Phenomenology* (published in 1913), the
sense in which a perceptual object, which is necessarily seen from one
side but also presented to us as a unified object (involving other
unseen sides), requires that there be a unifying structure within
consciousness itself: the transcendental ego. Sartre argues that such
an account would entail that the perception of an object would always
also involve an intermediary perception--such as some kind of
perception or consciousness of the transcendental ego--thus
threatening to disrupt the "transparency" or
"translucidity" of consciousness. All forms of perception
and consciousness would involve (at least) these two components, and
there would be an opaqueness to consciousness that is not
phenomenologically apparent. In addition, it appears that
Husserl's transcendental ego would have to pre-exist all of our
particular actions and perceptions, which is something that the
existentialist dictum "existence precedes essence", which
we will explicate shortly, seems committed to denying. Without
considering here the extent to which Husserl can be defended against
these charges, Sartre's general claim is that the notion of a
self or ego is not given in experience. Rather, it is something that
is not immanent but transcendent to pre-reflective experience. The Ego
is the transcendent *object* of one's reflexive
experience, and not the subject of the pre-reflective experience that
was initially lived (but not known).



Sartre devotes a great deal of effort to establishing the impersonal
(or "pre-personal") character of consciousness, which
stems from its non-egological structure and results directly from the
absence of the *I* in the transcendental field. According to
him, intentional (positional) consciousness typically involves an
anonymous and "impersonal" relation to a transcendent
object: 



> 
> 
> When I run after a streetcar, when I look at the time, when I am
> absorbed in contemplating a portrait, there is no *I.*
> [...] In fact I am plunged in the world of objects; it is they
> which constitute the unity of my consciousness; [...] but
> *me,* I have disappeared; I have annihilated myself. There is
> no place for *me* on this level. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 49; 2004:
> 8]) 
> 
> 
> 



The tram appears to me *in a specific way* (as
"having-to-be-overtaken", in this case) that is
experienced as its *own* mode of phenomenalization, and not as
a mere relational aspect of its appearing to *me*. The object
presents itself as carrying a set of objective properties that are
strictly independent from one's personal relation to it. The
streetcar is experienced as a transcendent object, in a way that
obliterates and *overrides*, so to speak, the subjective
features of conscious experience; its
"having-to-be-overtaken-ness" does not belong to my
*subjective* experience of the world but to the
*objective* description of the way the world is (see also
Sartre 1936a [1957: 56; 2004: 10-11]). When I run after the
streetcar, my consciousness is absorbed in the relation to its
intentional object, "*the
streetcar-having-to-be-overtaken*", and there is no trace of
the "I" in such lived-experience. I do not need to be
aware of my intention to take the streetcar, since the object itself
appears as having-to-be-overtaken, and the subjective properties of my
experience disappear in the intentional relation to the object. They
are lived-through without any reference to the experiencing subject
(or to the fact that this experience has to be experienced *by
someone*). This particular feature derives from the diaphanousness
of lived-experiences. In a different example of this, Sartre argues
that when I perceive Pierre as loathsome, say, I do not perceive my
feeling of hatred; rather, Pierre repulses me and I experience
*him* as repulsive (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63-4; 2004: 13]).
Repulsiveness constitutes an essential feature of *his*
distinctive mode of appearing, rather than a trait of *my*
feelings towards him. Sartre concludes that reflective statements
about one's Ego cannot be logically derived from non-reflective
("*irreflechies*") lived-experiences:




> 
> 
> Thus to say "I hate" or "I love" on the
> occasion of a singular consciousness of attraction or repulsion, is to
> carry out a veritable passage to the infinite [...] Nothing more
> is needed for the rights of reflection to be singularly limited: it is
> certain that Pierre repulses me, yet it is and will remain forever
> doubtful that I hate him. Indeed, this affirmation infinitely exceeds
> the power of reflection. (Sartre 1936a [1957: 63-4; 2004: 13])
> 
> 
> 
> 



This critique of the powers of reflection forms one important part of
Sartre's argument for the primacy of pre-reflective
consciousness over reflective consciousness, which is central to many
of the pivotal arguments of *Being and Nothingness*, as we
indicate in the relevant sections below.


## 3. Imagination, Phenomenology and Literature



For many of his readers, the book on the *Imaginary* that
Sartre published in 1940 constitutes one of the most rigorous and
fruitful developments of his Husserl-inspired phenomenological
investigations. Along with the *The Emotions: Outline of a
Theory* which was published one year before (Sartre 1939b), Sartre
presented this study of imagination as an essay in phenomenological
psychology, which drew on his lifetime interest in psychological
studies and brought to completion the research on imagination he had
undertaken since the very beginning of his philosophical career. With
this new essay, Sartre continues to explore the relationship between
intentional consciousness and reality by focusing upon the specific
case of the intentional relations to the unreal and the fictional, so
as to produce an in-depth analysis of "the great
'irrealizing' function of consciousness". Engaging
in a detailed discussion with recent psychological research that
Sartre juxtaposes with (and against) fine-grained phenomenological
descriptions of the structures of imagination, his essay proposes his
own theory of the imaginary as the corollary of a specific intentional
attitude that orients consciousness towards the unreal.



In a similar fashion to his analysis of the world-shaping powers of
emotions (Sartre 1939b), Sartre describes and highlights how
imagination presents us with a coherent world, although made of
objects that do not precede but *result* from the imaging
capacities of consciousness. "The object as imaged, Sartre
claims, is never anything more than the consciousness one has of
it" (Sartre 1940 [2004: 15]). Contrary to other modes of
consciousness such as perception or memory, which connect us to a
world that is essentially one and the same, the objects to which
imaginative consciousness connects us belong to imaginary worlds,
which may not only be extremely diverse, but also follow their own
rules, having their own spatiality and temporality. The island of
Thrinacia where Odysseus lands on his way back to Ithaca needs not be
located anywhere on our maps nor have existed at a specific time: its
mode of existence is that of a fictional object, which possesses its
own spatiality and temporality within the imaginary world it belongs
to.



Sartre stresses that the intentional dimension of imaging
consciousness is essentially characterised by its *negativity.*
The negative act, Sartre writes, is "constitutive of the
image" (Sartre 1940 [2004: 183]): an image consciousness is a
consciousness of something that *is not*, whether its object is
absent, non-existing, or fictional. When we picture Odysseus sailing
back to his native island, Odysseus is given to us "as absent to
intuition". In this sense, Sartre concludes, 



> 
> 
> one can say that the image has wrapped within it a certain
> nothingness. [...] However lively, appealing, strong the image,
> it gives its object as not being. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 14]) 
> 
> 
> 



The irrealizing function of imagination results from this immediate
consciousness of the nothingness of its object. Sartre's essay
investigates how imaging consciousness allows us to operate with its
objects as if they were present, even though these very objects are
given to us as non-existing or absent. This is for instance what
happens when we go to the theatre or read a novel: 



> 
> 
> To be present at a play is to apprehend the characters on the actors,
> the forest of *As You Like It* on the cardboard trees. To read
> is to realize contact with the irreal world on the signs. In this
> world there are plants, animals, fields, towns, people: initially
> those mentioned in the book and then a host of others that are not
> named but are in the background and give this world its depth. (Sartre
> 1940 [2004: 64]) 
> 
> 
> 



The irreality of imaginary worlds does not prevent the spectator or
reader from projecting herself into this world *as if it was
real*. The acts of imagination can consequently be described as
"magical acts" (Sartre 1940 [2004: 125]), similar to
incantations with respect to the way they operate, since they are
designed to make the object of one's thought or desire appear in
such a way that one can take possession of it.



In the conclusion of his essay, Sartre stresses the philosophical
significance of the relationship between imagination and freedom,
which are both necessarily involved in our relationship to the world.
Imagination, Sartre writes, "is the whole of consciousness as it
realizes its freedom" (Sartre 1940 [2004: 186]). Imaging
consciousness posits its object as "out of reach" in
relation to the world understood as the synthetic totality within
which consciousness situates itself. For Sartre, the imaginary
creation is only possible if consciousness is not placed
"in-the-midst-of-the-world" as one existent among others.




> 
> 
> For consciousness to be able to imagine, it must be able to escape
> from the world by its very nature, it must be able to stand back from
> the world by its own efforts. In a word, it must be free. (Sartre 1940
> [2004: 184]) 
> 
> 
> 



In that respect, the irrealizing function of imagination allows
consciousness to "surpass the real" so as to constitute it
as a proper *world*: "the nihilation of the real is
always implied by its constitution as a world". This capacity of
surpassing the real to make it a proper world defines the very notion
of "situation" that becomes central in Sartre's
philosophical thought after the publication of the *Imaginary*.
Situations are nothing but "the different immediate modes of
apprehension of the real as a world" (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185]).
Consciousness' situation-in-the-world is precisely that which
motivates the constitution of any irreal object and accounts for the
creation of imaginary worlds--for instance, and perhaps above
all, in art: 



> 
> 
> Every apprehension of the real as a world tends of its own accord to
> end up with the production of irreal objects since it is always, in a
> sense, free nihilation of the world and this always from a particular
> point of view. (Sartre 1940 [2004: 185]) 
> 
> 
> 



With this conclusion, which prioritises the question of the world over
that of reality, Sartre begins to move away from the realist
perspective he was initially aiming at when he first discovered
phenomenology, so as to make the phenomenological investigation of our
"being-in-the-world" (influenced by his careful rereading
of Heidegger in the late 30s) his new priority. 



Although Sartre never stated it explicitly, his interest in the
question of the unreal and imaging consciousness appears to be
intimately connected with his general conception of literature and his
self-understanding of his own literary production. The concluding
remarks of the *Imaginary* extend the scope of Sartre's
phenomenological analyses of the irrealizing powers of imagination, by
applying them to the domain of aesthetics so as to answer the question
about the ontological status of works of art. For Sartre, any product
of artistic creation--a novel, a painting, a piece of music, or a
theatre play--is just as irreal an object as the imaginary world
it gives rise to. The irreality of the work of art allows us to
experience--though only imaginatively--the world it gives
flesh to as an "analogon" of reality. Even a cubist
painting, which might not depict nor represent anything, still
functions as an analogon, which manifests 



> 
> 
> an irreal ensemble of *new things*, of objects that I have
> never seen nor will ever see but that are nonetheless irreal objects.
> (Sartre 1940 [2004: 191]) 
> 
> 
> 



Likewise, the novelist, the poet, the dramatist, constitute irreal
objects through verbal analogons.



This original conception of the nature of the work of art dominates
Sartre's critical approach to literature in the many essays he
dedicates to the art of the novel. This includes his critical analyses
of recent writers' novels in the 30s--Faulkner, Dos Passos,
Hemingway, Mauriac, etc.--and the publication in the late 40s of
his own summative view, *What is literature?* (Sartre 1948a
[1988]). In a series of articles gathered in the first volume of his
*Situations* (1947, *Sit. I*), Sartre defends a strong
version of literary realism that can, somewhat paradoxically, be read
as a consequence of his theory of the irreality of the work of art. If
imagination projects the spectator within the imaginary world created
by the artist, then the success of the artistic process is
proportional to the capacity of the artwork to let the spectator
experience it as a reality of its own, giving rise to a full-fledged
world. Sartre applies in particular this analysis to novels, which
must aim, according to him, at immersing the reader within the
fictional world they depict so as to make her experience the events
and adventures of the characters *as if* she was living them in
first person. The complete absorption of the reader within the
imaginary world created by the novelist must ultimately recreate the
particular feel of reality that defines Sartre's
*phenomenological* kind of literary realism (Renaudie 2017),
which became highly influential over the following decades in French
literature. The reader must be able to experience the actions of the
characters of the novel as if they did not result from the imagination
of the novelist, but proceeded from the character's own
freedom--and Sartre goes as far as to claim that this radical
"spellbinding" ("envoutante", Sartre
1940 [2004: 175])) quality of literary fiction defines the touchstone
of the art of the novel (See "Francois Mauriac and
Freedom", in Sartre *Sit. I*).



This original version of literary realism is intrinsically tied to the
question of freedom, and opposed to the idea according to which
realist literature is expected to provide a mere description of
reality *as it is*. In *What is Literature?*, Sartre
describes the task of the novelist as that of disclosing the world as
if it arose from human freedom--rather than from a deterministic
chain of causes and consequences. The author's art consists in
obliging her reader "to *create* what [she]
*discloses*", and so to share with the writer the
responsibility and freedom involved in the act of literary creation
(Sartre 1948a [1988: 61]). In order for the world of the novel to
offer its maximum density, 



> 
> 
> the disclosure-creation by which the reader discovers it must also be
> an imaginary engagement in the action; in other words, the more
> disposed one is to change it, the more alive it will be. 
> 
> 
> 



The conception of the writer's engagement that resulted from
these analyses constitutes probably the most well-known aspect of
Sartre's relation to literature. The writer only has one topic:
freedom.



This analysis of the role of imaginative creations of art can also
help us to understand the role of philosophy within his own novels,
particularly in *Nausea*, a novel which Sartre began as he was
studying Husserl in Berlin. In this novel Sartre's
pre-phenomenological interest for the irreducibility of contingency
intersects with his newly-acquired competences in phenomenological
analyses, making *Nausea* a beautifully illustrated expression
of the metaphysical register Sartre gave to Husserl's conception
of intentionality. The feeling of nausea that Roquentin, the main
character of Sartre's novel, famously experienced in a public
garden while obsessively watching a chestnut tree, accounts for his
sensitivity to the absolute lack of necessity of whatever exists.
Sartre understands this radical absence of necessity as the expression
of the fundamental contingency of being. Roquentin's traumatic
moment of realisation that there is absolutely no reason for the
existence of all that exists illustrates the intuition that motivated
Sartre's philosophical thinking since the very beginning of his
intellectual career as a student at the Ecole Normale
Superieure, as Simone de Beauvoir recalls (1981 [1986]). It
constitutes the metaphysical background of his interpretation of
intentionality, which he would come to develop and systematise in the
early dense parts of *Being and Nothingness*. While the
experience of nausea when confronting the contingency of the chestnut
tree does not give us conceptual knowledge, it involves a form of
non-conceptual ontological awareness that is of a fundamentally
different order to, and cannot be derived from, our conceptual
understanding and knowledge of brute existence.


## 4. Being and Nothingness


### 4.1. Negation and freedom



*Being and Nothingness* (1943) remains the defining treatise of
the existentialist "movement", along with works from de
Beauvoir from this period (e.g., *The Ethics of Ambiguity*). We
cannot do justice to the entirety of the book here, but we can
indicate the broad outlines of the position. In brief, Sartre provides
a series of arguments for the necessary freedom of "human
reality" (his gloss on Heidegger's conception of Dasein),
based upon an ontological distinction between what he calls
being-for-itself (*pour soi*) and being-in-itself (*en
soi*), roughly between that which negates and transcends
(consciousness) and the "pure plenitude" of objects. That kind of
metaphysical position might seem to "beg the question" by
assuming what it purports to establish (i.e., radical human freedom).
However, Sartre argues that realism and idealism cannot sufficiently
account for a wide range of phenomena associated with negation. He
also draws on the direct evidence of phenomenological experience
(i.e., the experience of anguish). But the argument for his
metaphysical picture and human freedom is, on balance, an inference to
the best explanation. He contends that his complex metaphysical vision
best captures and explains central aspects of human reality.



As the title of the book suggests, nothingness plays a significant
role. While Sartre's concern with nothingness might be a
deal-breaker for some, following Rudolph Carnap's trenchant
criticisms of Heidegger's idea that the "nothing
noths/nothings" (depending on translation from the German),
Sartre's account of negation and nothingness (the latter of
which is the ostensible ground of the former) is nevertheless
philosophically interesting. Sartre does not say much about the
genesis of consciousness or the for-itself, other than that it is
contingent and arises from "the effort of an in-itself to found
itself" (Sartre 1943 [1956: 84]). He describes the appearance of
the for-itself as the absolute event, which occurs through
being's attempt "to remove contingency from its
being". Accordingly, the for-itself is radically and inescapably
distinct from the in-itself. In particular, it functions primarily
through negation, whether in relation to objects, values, meaning, or
social facts. According to Sartre this negation is not about any
reflective judgement or cognition, but an ontological relation to the
world. This ontological interpretation of negation minimises the
subjectivist interpretations of his philosophy. The most vivid example
he provides to illustrate this pre-reflective negation is the
apprehension of Pierre's absence from a cafe. Sartre
describes Pierre's absence as pervading the whole cafe.
The cafe is cast in the metaphorical "shade" of
Pierre not being there at the time he had been expected. This
experience depends on human expectations, of course. But Sartre argues
that if, by contrast, we imagine or reflect that someone else is not
present (say the Duke of Wellington, an elephant, etc.), these
abstract negative facts are not existentially given in the same manner
as our pre-reflective encounter with Pierre's absence. They are
not given as an "objective fact", as a "component of
the real".



Sartre provides numerous other examples of pre-reflective negation
throughout *Being and Nothingness*. He argues that the
apprehension of fragility and destruction are likewise premised on
negativity, and any effort to adequately describe these phenomena
requires negative concepts, but also that they presuppose more than
just negative thoughts and judgements. In regard to destruction,
Sartre suggests that there is not *less* after the storm, just
something else (Sartre 1943 [1956: 8]). Generally, we do not need to
reflectively judge that a building has been destroyed, but directly
see it in terms of that which it is *not*--the building,
say, in its former glory before being wrecked by the storm. Humans
introduce the possibility of destruction and fragility into the world,
since objectively there is just a change. Sartre's basic
question is: how could we accomplish this unless we are a being by
whom nothingness comes into the world, i.e., free? He poses similar
arguments in regard to a range of phenomena that present as basic to
our modes of inhabiting the world, from bad faith through to anguish.
In all of these cases Sartre argues that while we can expressly pose
negative judgements, or deliberately ask questions that admit of the
possibility of negative reply, or consciously individuate and
distinguish objects by reference to the objects which they are not,
there is a pre-comprehension of non-being that is the condition of
such negative judgements.



Although the for-itself and the in-itself are initially defined very
abstractly, the book ultimately comes to say a lot more about the
for-itself, even if not much more about the in-itself. The picture of
the for-itself and its freedom gradually becomes more
"concrete", reflecting the architectonic of the text,
which has more sustained treatments of the body, others, and action,
in the second half. Throughout, Sartre gives a series of paradoxical
glosses on the nature of the for-itself--i.e., a "being
which is what it is not and is not what it is" (Sartre 1943
[1956: 79]). Although this might appear to be a contradiction,
Sartre's claim is that it is the fundamental mode of existence
of the for-itself that is future-oriented and does not have a stable
identity in the manner of a chair, say, or a pen-knife. Rather,
"existence precedes essence", as he famously remarks in
both *Being and Nothingness* and *Existentialism is a
Humanism*. 



In later chapters he develops the basic ontological position in regard
to free action. His point is not, of course, to say we are free to do
or achieve anything (freedom as power), or even to claim that we are
free to "project" anything at all. The for-itself is
always in a factical situation. Nonetheless, he asserts that the
combination of the motives and ends we aspire to in relation to that
facticity depend on an act of negation in relation to the given. As he
puts it: "Action necessarily implies as its condition the
recognition of a "desideratum"; that is, of an objective
lack or again of a negatite" (Sartre 1943 [1956: 433]).
Even suffering in-itself is not a sufficient motive to determine
particular acts. Rather, it is the apprehension of the revolution as
possible (and as desired) which gives to the worker's suffering
its value as motive (Sartre 1943 [1956: 437]). A factual state, even
poverty, does not determine consciousness to apprehend it as a lack.
No factual state, whatever it may be, can cause consciousness to
respond to it in any one way. Rather, we make a choice (usually
pre-reflective) about the significance of that factual state for us,
and the ends and motives that we adopt in relation to it. We are
"condemned" to freedom of this ontological sort, with
resulting anguish and responsibility for our individual situation, as
well as for more collective situations of racism, oppression, and
colonialism. These are the themes for which Sartre became famous,
especially after World War 2 and *Existentialism is a
Humanism*.



In *Being and Nothingness* he provides various examples that
are designed to make this quite radical philosophy of freedom
plausible, including the hiker who gives in to their fatigue and
collapses to the ground. Sartre says that a necessary condition for
the hiker to give in to their fatigue--short of fainting--is
that their fatigue goes from being experienced as simply part of the
background to their activity, with their direct conscious attention
focusing on something else (e.g., the scenery, the challenge,
competing with a friend, philosophising, etc.), to being the direct
focus of their attention and thus becoming a motive for direct
recognition of one's exhaustion and the potential action of
collapsing to the ground. Although we are not necessarily reflectively
aware of having made such a decision, things could have been otherwise
and thus Sartre contends we have made a choice. Despite appearances,
however, Sartre insists that his view is not a voluntarist or
capricious account of freedom, but one that necessarily involves a
situation and a context. His account of situated freedom in the
chapter "Freedom and Action" affirms the inability to
extricate intentions, ends, motives, and reasons, from the embodied
context of the actor. As a synthetic whole, it is not merely freedom
of intention or motive (and hence even consciousness) that Sartre
affirms. Rather, our freedom is realised only in its projections and
actions, and is nothing without such action.


### 4.2 Bad faith and the critique of Freudian psychoanalysis



Sartre's account of bad faith (*mauvaise foi*) is of
major interest. It is said to be a phenomenon distinctive of the
for-itself, thus warranting ontological treatment. It also feeds into
questions to do with self-knowledge (see Moran 2001), as well as
serving as the basis for some of his criticisms of racism and
colonialism in his later work. His account of bad faith juxtaposes a
critique of Freud with its own "depth" interpretive
account, "existential psychoanalysis", which is itself
indebted to Freud, as Sartre admits. 



We will start with Sartre's critique of Freud, which is both
simple and complex, and features in the early parts of the chapter on
bad faith in *Being and Nothingness*. In short, Freud's
differing meta-psychological pictures (Conscious, Preconscious,
Unconscious, or Id, Ego, Superego) are charged with splitting the
subject in two (or more) in attempting to provide a mechanistic
explanation of bad faith: that is, how there can be a
"liar" and a "lied to" duality within a single
consciousness. But Sartre accuses Freud of reifying this structure,
and rather than adequately explaining the problem of bad faith, he
argues that Freud simply transfers the problem to another level where
it remains unsolved, thus consisting in a pseudo-explanation (which
today might be called a "homuncular fallacy"). Rather than
the problem being something that pertains to an embodied subject, and
how they might both be aware of something and yet also repress it at
the same time, Sartre argues that the early Freudian
meta-psychological model transfers the seat of this paradox to the
censor: that is, to a functional part of the brain/mind that both
knows and does not know. It must know enough in order to efficiently
repress, but it also must not know too much or nothing is hidden and
the problematic truth is manifest directly to consciousness.
Freud's "explanation" is hence accused of
recapitulating the problem of bad faith in an ostensible mechanism
that is itself "conscious" in some paradoxical sense.
Sartre even provocatively suggests that the practice of psychoanalysis
is itself in bad faith, since it treats a part of ourselves as
"Id"-like and thereby denies responsibility for it. That
is not the end of Sartre's story, however, because he ultimately
wants to revive a version of psychoanalysis that does not pivot around
the "unconscious" and these compartmentalised models of
the mind. We will come back to that, but it is first necessary to
introduce Sartre's own positive account of bad faith.



While bad faith is inevitable in Sartre's view, it is also
important to recognise that the "germ of its destruction"
lies within. This is because bad faith always remains at least partly
available to us in our own lived-experience, albeit not in a manner
that might be given propositional form in the same way as knowledge of
an external object. In short, when I existentially comprehend that my
life is dissatisfying, or even reflect on this basis that I have lived
an inauthentic life, while I am grasping something about myself (it is
given differently to the recognition that others have lived a lie and
more likely to induce anxiety), I am nonetheless not strictly
equivalent or identical with the "I" that is claimed to be
in bad faith (cf. Moran 2001). There is a distanciation involved in
coming to this recognition and the potential for self-transformation
of a more practical kind, even if this is under-thematised in
*Being and Nothingness*.



Sartre gives many examples of bad faith that remain of interest. His
most famous example of bad faith is the cafe waiter who plays
at being a cafe waiter, and who attempts to institutionalise
themselves as this object. While Sartre's implied criticisms of
their manner of inhabiting the world might seem to disparage social
roles and affirm an individualism, arguably this is not a fair reading
of the details of the text. For Sartre we do have a factical
situation, but the claim is that we cannot be wholly reduced to it. As
Sartre puts it: 



> 
> 
> There is no doubt I am in a sense a cafe waiter--otherwise
> could I not just as well call myself a diplomat or reporter? But if I
> am one, this cannot be in the mode of being-in-itself. I am a waiter
> in the mode of *being what I am not*. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 60])
> 
> 
> 
> 



In subsequent work, racism becomes emblematic of bad faith, when we
reduce the other to some ostensible identity (e.g., *Anti-semite
and the Jew*).



It is important to recognise that no project of
"sincerity", if that is understood as strictly being what
one is, is possible for Sartre given his view of the for-itself.
Likewise, in regard to any substantive self-knowledge that might be
achieved through direct self-consciousness, our options are limited.
On Sartre's view we cannot look inwards and discover the truth
about our identity or our own bad faith through simple introspection
(there is literally no-thing to observe). Moreover, when we have a
lived experience, and then reflect on ourselves from outside (e.g.,
third-personally), we are not strictly reducible to that Ego that is
so posited. We transcend it. Or, to be more precise, we both are that
Ego (just as we are what the Other perceives) and yet are also not
reducible to it. This is due to the structure of consciousness and the
arguments from *Transcendence of the Ego* examined in
 section 2.
 In *Being and Nothingness*, the temporal aspects of this
non-coincidence are also emphasised. We are not just our past and our
objective attributes in accord with some sort of principle of
identity, because we are also our "projects", and these
are intrinsically future oriented.



Nonetheless, Sartre argues that it would be false to conclude that all
modes of inhabiting the world are thereby equivalent in terms of
"faith" and "bad faith". Rather, there are
what he calls "patterns of bad faith" and he says these
are "objective". Any conduct can be seen from two
perspectives--transcendence and facticity, being-for-itself and
being-for-others. But it is the exclusive affirmation of one or the
others of these (or a motivated and selective oscillation between
them) which constitutes bad faith. There is no direct account of good
faith in *Being and Nothingness*, other than the enigmatic
footnote at the end of the book that promises an ethics. There are
more sustained treatments of authenticity in his *Notebooks for an
Ethics* and in *Anti-semite and Jew* (see also the entry on
 authenticity).


### 4.3 The Look, shame and intersubjectivity



Sartre's work on inter-subjectivity is often the subject of
premature dismissal. The hyperbolic dimension of his writings on the
Look of the Other and the pessimism of his chapter on "concrete
relations with others", which is essentially a restatement of
the "master-slave" stage of Hegel's struggle for
recognition without the possibility of its overcoming, are sometimes
treated as if they were nothing but the product of a certain sort of
mind--a kind of adolescent paranoia or hysteria about the Other
(see, e.g., Marcuse 1948). What this has meant, however, is that the
significance of Sartre's work on inter-subjectivity, both within
phenomenological circles and more broadly in regard to philosophy of
mind and social cognition, has been downplayed. Building on the
insights of Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger, Sartre proposes a set of
necessary and sufficient conditions for any theory of the other, which
are far from trivial. In *Being and Nothingness*, Sartre
suggests that various philosophical positions--realism and
idealism, and beyond--have been shipwrecked, often unawares, on
what he calls the "reef of solipsism". His own solution to
the problem of other minds consists, first and foremost, in his
descriptions of being subject to the look of another, and the way in
which in such an experience we become a "transcendence
transcended". On his famous description, we are asked to imagine
that we are peeping through a keyhole, pre-reflectively immersed and
absorbed in the scene on the other side of the door. Maybe we would be
nervous engaging in such activities given the socio-cultural
associations of being a "Peeping Tom", but after a period
of time we would be given over to the scene with self-reflection and
self-awareness limited to merely the minimal (tacit or
"non-thetic" in Sartre's language) understanding
that we are not what we are perceiving. Suddenly, though, we hear
footsteps, and we have an involuntary apprehension of ourselves as an
object in the eyes of another; a "pre-moral" experience of
shame; a shudder of recognition that we are the object that the other
sees, without room for any sort of inferential theorising or cognising
(at least that is manifest to our own consciousness). This ontological
shift, Sartre says, has another person as its condition,
notwithstanding whether or not one is in error on a particular
occasion of such an experience (i.e., the floor creaks but there is
no-one actually literally present). While many other phenomenological
accounts emphasise empathy or direct perception of mental states (for
example, Scheler and Merleau-Ponty), Sartre thereby adds something
significant and distinctive to these accounts that focus on our
experience of the other person as an object (albeit of a special kind)
rather than as a subject. In common with other phenomenologists like
Merleau-Ponty and Scheler, Sartre also maintains that it is a mistake
to view our relations with the other as one characterised by a radical
separation that we can only bridge with inferential reasoning. Any
argument by analogy, either to establish the existence of others in
general or to particular mental states like anger, is problematic,
begging the question and having insufficient warrant.



For Sartre, at least in his early work, our experience of being what
he calls a "we subject"--as a co-spectator in a
lecture or concert for example, which involves no objectification of
the other people we are with--is said to be merely a subjective
and psychological phenomenon that does not ground our understanding
and knowledge of others ontologically (Sartre 1943 [1956:
413-5]). Originally, human relations are typified by dyadic mode
of conflict best captured in the look of the other, and the sort of
scenario concerning the key-hole we just considered above. Given that
we also do not grasp a plural look, for Sartre, this means that social
life is fundamentally an attempt to control the impact of the look
upon us, either by anticipating it in advance and attempting to
invalidate that perspective (sadism) or by anticipating it and
attempting to embrace that solicited perspective when it comes
(masochism). In Sartre's words: 



> 
> 
> It is useless for human reality to seek to escape this dilemma: one
> must either transcend the Other or allow oneself to be transcended by
> him. The essence of the relations between consciousness is not the
> *Mitsein* (being-with); it is conflict. (Sartre 1943 [1956:
> 429])
> 
> 
> 


## 5. Existential Psychoanalysis and the Fundamental Project



Sartre's radical criticism of Freud's theory of the
unconscious is not his last word on psychoanalysis. In the last
chapters of *Being and Nothingness*, Sartre presents his own
conception of an existential psychoanalysis, drawing on some insights
from his attempt to account for Emperor Wilhelm II as a
"human-reality" in the 14th notebook from his
*War Diaries* (Sartre 1983b [1984]). This existential version
of psychoanalysis is claimed to be compatible with Sartre's
rejection of the unconscious, and is expected to achieve a
"psychoanalysis of consciousness" (Moati 2020: 219),
allowing us to understand one's existence in light of their
fundamental free choice of themselves.



The very idea of a psychoanalysis oriented towards the study of
consciousness rather than the unconscious seems paradoxical--a
paradox increased by Sartre's efforts to highlight the
fundamental differences that oppose his own version of psychoanalysis
to Freud's. Sartre contends that Freud's
"empirical" psychoanalysis 



> 
> 
> is based on the hypothesis of the existence of an unconscious psyche,
> which on principle escapes the intuition of the subject. 
> 
> 
> 



By contrast, Sartre's own existential psychoanalysis aims to
remain faithful to one of the earliest claims of Husserl's
phenomenology: that all psychic acts are "coextensive with
consciousness" (Sartre 1943 [1956: 570]). For Sartre, however,
the basic motivation for rejecting Freud's hypothesis is less an
inheritance of Brentano's descriptive psychology (as was the
case for Husserl) than a consequence of Sartre's fundamental
critique of determinism, applied to the naturalist presuppositions of
empirical psychoanalysis and the particular kind of determinism that
it involves. In agreement with Freud, Sartre holds that psychic life
remains inevitably "opaque" and at least somewhat
impenetrable to us. He also stresses that the philosophical
understanding of human reality requires a method for investigating the
*meaning* of psychic facts. But Sartre denies that the methods
and causal laws of the natural sciences are of any help in that
respect. The human *psyche* cannot be fully analysed and
explained as a mere *result* of external constraints acting
like physical forces or natural causes. The for-itself, being always
what it is not and not what it is, remains free whatever the external
and social constraints. Sartre is consequently bound to reject any
emphasis on the causal impact of the past upon the present, which he
argues is the basic methodological framework of empirical
psychoanalysis. That does not mean that past psychic or physical facts
have no impact on one's existence whatsoever. Rather, Sartre
contends that the impact of past events is determined in relation to
one's present choice, and understood as the consequence of the
power invested in this free choice. As he puts it: 



> 
> 
> Since the force of compulsion in my past is borrowed from my free,
> reflecting choice and from the very power which this choice has given
> itself, it is impossible to determine a priori the compelling power of
> a past. (Sartre 1943 [1956: 503])
> 
> 
> 



Past events bear no other meaning than the one given by a subject, in
agreement with the free project that orients his or her existence
towards the future. Conversely, determinist explanations that construe
one's present as a mere consequence of the past proceed from a
kind of self-delusion that operates by concealing one's free
project, and thus contributes to the obliteration of responsibility.
Sartre hence seeks to redefine the scope of psychoanalysis: rather
than a proper explanation of human behaviour that relies on the
identification of the laws of its causation, psychoanalysis consists
in understanding the meaning of our conducts in light of one's
project of existence and free choice. One might wonder, then, why we
need any such psychoanalysis, if the existential project that
constitutes its object is freely chosen by the subject. Sartre
addresses this objection in *Being and Nothingness*, claiming
that 



> 
> 
> if the fundamental project is fully experienced by the subject and
> hence wholly conscious, that certainly does not mean that it must by
> the same token be known by him; quite the contrary. (Sartre 1943
> [1956: 570])
> 
> 
> 



What Freud calls the unconscious must be redescribed as the
paradoxical entanglement of a "total absence of knowledge"
combined with a "true understanding" (*reelle
comprehension*) of oneself (1972, *Sit. IX*: 111). The
legitimacy of Sartre's existential psychoanalysis of
consciousness lies in its ability to unveil the original project
according to which one chooses (more or less obscurely) to develop the
fundamental orientations of their existence. According to Sartre,
analysing a human subject and understanding the meaning that orients
their existence as a whole requires that we grasp the specific kind of
unity that lies behind their various attitudes and conducts. This
unity can only appear once we discover the synthetic principle of
unification or "totalization" (*totalisation*) that
commands the whole of their behaviours. Sartre understands this
totalization as an an-going process that covers the entire course of
one's existence, a process which is constantly reassumed so as
to integrate the new developments of this existence. For this reason,
this never ending process of totalization cannot be fully
self-conscious or the object of reflective self-knowledge. The
synthetic principle that makes this totalization possible is
identified by Sartre in terms of fundamental choice: existential
psychoanalysis describes human subjects as synthetic totalities in
which every attitude, conduct, or behaviour finds its meaning in
relation to the unity of a primary choice, which all of the
subject's behaviour expresses in its own way.



All human behaviour can thus be described as a secondary
particularisation of a fundamental project which expresses the
subject's free choice, and conditions the intelligibility of
their actions. On the basis of his diagnosis of Baudelaire's
existential project, for instance, Sartre goes as far as to claim that
he is "prepared to wager that he preferred meats cooked in
sauces to grills, preserves to fresh vegetables" (Sartre 1947a
[1967: 113]). Sartre legitimates such a daring statement by showing
its logical connection to Baudelaire's irresistible hatred for
nature, from which his gastronomic preferences must derive, and which
Sartre identifies as the expression of the initial free choice of
himself that commands the whole of the French *poete
maudit*'s existence. In Sartre's words: 



> 
> 
> He chose to exist for himself as he was for others. He wanted his
> freedom to appear to himself like a "nature"; and he
> wanted this "nature" which others discovered in him to
> appear to them like the very emanation of his freedom. From that point
> everything becomes clear. [...] We should look in vain for a
> single circumstance for which he was not fully and consciously
> responsible. Every event was a reflection of that indecomposable
> totality which he was from the first to the last day of his life
> (Sartre 1947a [1967: 191-192]).
> 
> 
> 



Baudelaire's choice of himself both accounts for the
subject's freedom (insofar as it has been freely accepted as the
subject's own project of existence) and exerts a constraint on
particular behaviours and attitudes towards the world, so that he is
bound to act and behave in a way that must be compatible with that
choice. Although absolutely free, such an initial choice takes the
shape and the meaning of an inescapable and relentless
*destiny*--a destiny in which one's sense of freedom
and their inability to act in any other way than they actually did
come to merge perfectly: "the free choice which a man makes of
himself is completely identified with what is called his
destiny" (Sartre 1947a [1967: 192]).



In the years following the publication of *Being and
Nothingness*, Sartre refines this original conception of
existential psychoanalysis. He applies it methodically to the
biographical analysis of a series of major French writers (Baudelaire
first, then Mallarme, Jean Genet, Flaubert, and himself
in *Words*), warning against the dangers of all kinds of
determinist interpretations, from the constitution of psychological
types to materialist explanations inherited from Marxian historical
analyses. Sartre's analyses become more subtle over time, as he
substitutes fine-grained descriptions of the concrete constraints that
frame and shape the limits of human lives to the strongly metaphysical
theses on freedom that he was first tempted to apply indistinctly to
each of these writers. Accordingly, existential psychoanalysis plays a
central role in the development of Sartre's thought from the
early 40s up to his last published work on Flaubert. It allows him to
unify and articulate two fundamental threads of his philosophical
thinking: his ontological analysis of the absolute freedom of the
for-itself in *Being and Nothingness*; and his later attempt to
take into consideration the social, historical and political factors
that are inevitably involved in the determination of one's free
choice of their own existence. Already in his *War Diaries*
from 1940, the method of analysis of "human reality"
arises from Sartre's attempt to *understand* rather than
explain (according to Dilthey's famous distinction) Emperor
Wilhelm II's historical situation and its relation to the
aspects of his personal life that express his specific way of
being-in-the-world (Sartre 1983b [1984: 308-309]). The
application of his method to the specific cases of these French
writers allowed him to refine the ahistorical descriptions of his
earlier work, by bringing the analysis of the subject's freedom
back to the material/historical conditions (both internal and
external) of constitution of their particular modes of existing.



Sartre's inquiries into existential psychoanalysis also
anticipate and intersect with his philosophical investigations on
historical anthropology. The progressive-regressive method presented
in *Search for a Method* and *Critique of Dialectical
Reason* (Sartre 1960a [1976]) was first sketched and experimented
through Sartre's essays in existential psychoanalysis.
Sartre's detailed analyses of Flaubert's biography in
*The Family Idiot* can be read as synthesising the
hermeneutical methodology theorised in *Search for A Method*
and the conception of the freedom involved in one's initial
choice of themselves that arose from *Being and Nothingness*.
Moving discretely away from an all-too metaphysical doctrine of
absolute freedom, Sartre goes back to the most concrete details of
Flaubert's material conditions of existence in order to account
for the specific way in which Flaubert made himself able, through the
writing of his novels, to overcome his painful situation as a
"frustrated and jealous younger brother" and
"unloved child" thanks to a totalizing project that made
him "the author of *Madame Bovary*" (Sartre
1971-72 [1987, vol. 2: 7]). If Flaubert's novel and
masterpiece is consequently understood and described as the final
objectivation of Gustave's fundamental project, Sartre is now
careful to point out the economic, historic and social conditions
within which this project only finds its full intelligibility.
Sartre's psychoanalytic method is then expected to reveal,
beyond what society has made of Flaubert, what he himself could make
of what society has made of him. In order to fly away from the painful
reality of his unbearable familial situation, the young Gustave
chooses irreality over reality, and chooses it freely, though
achingly. From that moment on, his dedication to literature commits
him to a fictional world that he couldn't but choose to elect as
the realm of his genius.


## 6. Existentialist Marxism: Critique of Dialectical Reason



While *Search for a Method* (1957) had been published earlier,
it is not until 1960 that Sartre completed the first
volume--"Theory of Practical Ensembles"--of what
is his final systematic work of philosophy, *Critique of
Dialectical Reason*. The second volume, "The Intelligibility
of History", was published posthumously in French in 1985. It
would be 1991 before both volumes were to be available in English,
which goes some of the way towards explaining their subsequent
neglect. It is also a book that rivals *Being and Nothingness*
for difficulty, even if some of its goals and ambitions can be
expressed straightforwardly enough. Never a member of the French
Communist Party, Sartre nonetheless begins by laying his Marxist cards
on the table: 



> 
> 
> we were convinced at one and the same time that historical materialism
> furnished the only valid interpretation of history and that
> existentialism remained the only concrete approach to reality. (Sartre
> 1957 [1963: 21]) 
> 
> 
> 



*Critique* offers a systematic attempt to justify these two
perspectives and render them compatible. In broad terms, some of the
main steps needed to effect such a synthesis are clear, most notably
to deny or limit strong structuralist and determinist versions of
Marxism. Borrowing some themes from Merleau-Ponty's *Humanism
and Terror*, Sartre maintained that any genuinely dialectical
method refuses to reduce; it refuses scientific and economic
determinism that treats humans as things, contrary to reductive
versions of Marxism. He pithily puts his objection to such
explanations in terms of what we might today call the genetic fallacy.
Sartre says, 



> 
> 
> Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not
> every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery. The heuristic inadequacy
> of contemporary Marxism is contained in these two sentences. (Sartre
> 1957 [1963: 56]) 
> 
> 
> 



Moreover, for Sartre, class struggle is not the only factor that
determines and orients history and the field of possibilities. There
is human choice and commitment in class formation that is equally
fundamental. The way in which this plays out in *Critique* is
through an emphasis on praxis rather than consciousness, which we have
seen is also characteristic of his existential psychoanalytic work of
the prior decade.



Without being able to adequately summarise the vast *Critique*
here (see Flynn 1984), one of the book's core conceptual
innovations is the idea of the practico-inert. Sartre defines this as
"the activity of others insofar as it is sustained and diverted
by inorganic inertia" (Sartre 1960a [1976: 556]). The concept is
intended to capture the forms of social and historical sedimentation
that had only minimally featured in *Being and Nothingness*. It
is the reign of necessity, 



> 
> 
> the domain ... in which inorganic materiality envelops human
> multiplicity and transforms the producer into its product. (Sartre
> 1960a [1976: 339]) 
> 
> 
> 



For Sartre, the practico-inert is the negation of humanity. Any
reaffirmation of humanity, in which genuine freedom resides, must take
the form of the negation of this negation (negation is productive
here, as it also was in *Being and Nothingness*). For Sartre,
then, there are two fundamental kinds of social reality: a positive
one in which an active group constitutes the common field; and a
negative one in which individuals are effectively separated from each
other (even though they appear united) in a practico-inert field. In
the practico-inert field, relations are typified by what Sartre calls
seriality, like a number, or a worker in a factory who is allocated to
a place within a given system that is indifferent to the individual.
Sartre's prime example of this is of waiting for a bus, or
street-car, on the way to work. If the people involved do not know
each other reasonably well there is likely to be a kind of anonymity
to such experiences in which individuals are substitutable for each
other in relation to this imminent bus, and their relations are
organised around functional need. If the bus is late, or if there are
too many people on it, however, those who are waiting go from being
indifferent and anonymous (something akin to what Heidegger calls
*das Man* in *Being and Time*) to becoming competitors
and rivals. In a related spirit Sartre also discusses the serial unity
of the TV watching public, of the popular music charts, bourgeois
property, and petty racism and stereotyping as well. These collective
objects keep serial individuals apart from one another under the
pretext of unifying them. Sartre thus appears to accept a version of
the Marxian theses concerning commodity fetishism. This competitive or
antagonistic dimension of the practico-inert is amplified in
situations of material scarcity. This kind of seriality is argued to
be the basic type of sociality, thus transforming the focus on dyadic
consciousnesses of *Being and Nothingness*. In the
*Critique*, otherness becomes produced not simply through the
look that Sartre had previously described as the original meaning of
being-for-others, but through the sedimentation of social processes
and through practico-inert mediation. Society produces in us serial
behaviour, serial feelings, serial thoughts, and "passive
activity" (Sartre 1960a [1976: 266]), where events and history
are conceived as external occurrences that befall us, and we feel
compelled by the force of circumstance, or "monstrous
forces" as Sartre puts it. It is the practico-inert, modified by
material and economic scarcity, which turns us into conflictual
competitors and alienates us from each other and ourselves. Only an
end to both material scarcity and the alienating mediation of the
practico-inert will allow for the actualisation of socialism.



While Sartre is pessimistic about the prospects for any sort of
permanent revolution of society, he maintains that we get a fleeting
glimpse of this unalienated condition in the experience of the
"group in fusion". This occurs when the members of a group
relate to each other through praxis and in a particular way. The group
in fusion is not a collective *a la* the practico-inert,
but a social whole that spontaneously forms as a plurality of serial
individuals respond to some danger, pressing situation, or to the
likelihood of a collective reaction to their stance (Flynn 1984: 114).
We could consider what happens when an individual acts so as to make
manifest this serial otherness, like Rosa Parkes when she refused to
give up her seat and thus drew attention to the specific nature of the
colonialist seriality at the heart of many states in the USA. This
sometimes creates a rupture and others might follow. Sartre's
own prime example is of a crowd of workers who were fleeing during the
French Revolution in 1789. At some point the workers stopped fleeing,
turned around and reversed direction, suddenly energised alongside
each other by their practical awareness that they were doing something
together. For this kind of "fusion" to happen it must
fulfil the following four key conditions for genuine reciprocity that
Flynn summarises as follows:


1. That the other be a means to the exact degree that I am a means
myself, i.e., that he be the means towards a transcendent goal and not
my means;
2. That I recognize the other as praxis at the same time as I
integrate him into my totalizing project;
3. That I recognize his movement towards his own ends in the very
movement by which I project myself towards mine;
4. That I discover myself as an object and instrument of his own ends
by the same act that makes him an object and instrument of mine.
(Flynn 1984: 115, also see previous version of this entry [Flynn 2004
[2013]] and cf. Sartre 1960a [1976: 112-3]).



Sartre calls the resurrection of this freedom an
"apocalypse", indicating that it is an unforeseen and
(potentially) revolutionary event that happens when serial abuse and
exploitation can no longer be tolerated. The group in fusion has a
maximum of praxis and a minimum of inertia, but serial sociality has
the reverse.



Unfortunately, Sartre insists that this group in fusion is destined to
meet with what he calls an "ontological check" in the form
of the institution, which cannot be escaped as some versions of
anarchism and Marxism might hope. The group relapses into seriality
when groups are formalised into hierarchical institutional structures.
Serial otherness comes to implicate itself in interpersonal relations
in at least three ways in the institution: sovereignty; authority; and
bureaucracy (see Book 2, Chapter 6, "The Institution").
From the co-sovereignty of the group in fusion, someone inevitably
becomes sovereign in any new social order. Similarly, a
command-obedience relation comes about in institutions, to greater and
lesser extents, and there will be exhortations to company loyalty, to
do one's duty, etc. (Flynn 1984: 120). Bureaucratic rules and
regulation also inevitably follow, partly as a reaction to fear of
sovereignty, and this installs what Sartre calls vertical
otherness--top-down hierarchies, as opposed to the horizontal and
immanent organisation of the group in fusion (Sartre 1960a [1976:
655-663]). As such, the revolutionary force of the group in
fusion is necessarily subject to mediation by the practico-inert, as
well as the problems associated with institutionality just described.
Although is it still structured through a series of oppositions, the
*Critique* delivers a sophisticated social ontology that both
addresses some weaknesses in Sartre's earlier work and unifies
the social and political reflections of much of his later work.


## 7. Politics and Anti-Colonialism



Although it is not possible to address all of Sartre's rich and
varied contributions to ethics and politics here, we will introduce
some of the key ideas about race and anti-colonialism that were
important themes in his post *Being and Nothingness* work and
are currently significant issues in our times. Sartre was generally
stridently anti-colonialist, perhaps even advocating a
multiculturalism *avant la lettre*, as Michael Walzer has
argued in his Preface to *Anti-semite and Jew* (Walzer 1995:
xiv). His books and more journalistic writings typically call out what
he saw as the bad faith of many French and European citizens.



The issue of race was part of Sartre's French intellectual
scene, and Sartre himself played a major role in facilitating that in
the pages of *Les Temps Modernes*, *L'Express*,
and elsewhere. Debates about the intersection of philosophy and race,
and colonialism and multiculturalism, were all being had. These
concerned not only the French Algerian and African
"colonies" but also Vietnam via Tran Duc Thao, who had
challenged Sartre's efforts to bring phenomenological
existentialism together with Marxism. Initially at least,
Sartre's arguments here typically drew on and extended some of
the categories deployed in *Being and Nothingness*. There is an
obvious sense in which a critique of racism automatically ensues from
Sartrean existentialism. Racism is a form of bad faith, for Sartre,
since it typically (perhaps necessarily) involves believing in
essences or types, and indeed constructing essences and types. His
*Notebooks* suggest that all oppression rests on bad faith. In
racism, in particular, there is an "infernal circle of
irresponsible responsibility, of culpable ignorance and ignorance
which is knowledge" (Sartre 1943 [1956: 49]),
as well as what Sartre calls
passive complicity. Many of us (or Sartre's own French society)
may not obviously be bigots, but we sustain a system that is
objectively unjust through our choices and sometimes wilful ignorance.
In relation to colonialism, Sartre likewise contends that we have all
profited from colonialist exploitation and sustained its systems, even
if we are not ourselves a "settler".



This is also the key argument of *Anti-semite and the Jew*,
composed very quickly in 1944 and without much detailed knowledge of
Judaism but with more direct knowledge of the sort of passive
anti-semitism of many French citizens. The text was written following
the Dreyfus affair and before all of the horrors of the holocaust were
widely known. Sartre was aiming to understand (and critique) the
situation he observed around him, in which the imminent return of the
French Jews exiled by the Nazis was not unambiguously welcomed by all.
The book is perceptive about its prime targets, the explicit or
implicit anti-semite, who defines the real Frenchmen by excluding
others, notably the Jew. Now, of course, few of his contemporaries
would admit to being anti-semites, just as few would admit to being
racist. But there are patterns of bad faith that Sartre thinks are
clear: we participate in social systems that force the dilemma of
authenticity or inauthenticity upon the Jew, asking them to choose
between their concrete practical identities (religious and cultural)
and more universal ascriptions (liberty, etc.) in a way that cannot be
readily navigated within the terms of the debate. Sartre consistently
ascribes responsibility to collectives here, even if those collectives
are ultimately sustained by individual decisions and choices. For him,
it is not just the assassin say, nor just Eichmann and the Nazi
regime, who are held responsible. Rather, these more obviously
egregious activities were sustained by their society and the
individuals in it, through culpable ignorance and patterns of bad
faith.



Sartre also addressed the negritude movement in his Preface to
*Black Orpheus* (1948), an anthology of negritude poetry. He
called for an anti-racist racism and saw himself as resolutely on the
side of the negritude movement, but he also envisaged such
interventions as a step towards ultimately revealing the category of
race itself as an example of bad faith. Here the reception from Frantz
Fanon and others was mixed. In *Black Skin, White Masks*
(1952), Fanon argues this effectively undermined his own
lived-experience and its power (see entries on
 negritude
 and
 Fanon;
 cf. also Gordon 1995). Sartre continued to address colonialism and
racism in subsequent work, effecting a rapprochement of sorts with
Fanon that culminated in his "Introduction" to
Fanon's *The Wretched of the Earth* (1961), where also
Sartre appears to endorse a counter-violence. 



Although we have not given much attention to Sartre's literary
and artistic productions since
 section 3
 above, he continued to produce artistic work of political
significance throughout his career. Continuous with insights from his
*What is Literature?*, Sartre argues that in a society that
remains unjust and dominated by oppression, the prose-writer (if not
the poet) must combat this violence by jolting the reader and audience
from their complacency, rather than simply be concerned with art for
its own sake. His literary works hence are typically both
philosophical and political. Although the number of these works
diminished over time, there is still a powerful literary exploration
of the philosophical and political themes of the *Critique* in
the play, *The Condemned of Altona* (1960).



We cannot neatly sum up a public intellectual and man of letters, like
Sartre, to conclude. We do think, however, that it is arguable, with
the benefit of hindsight, that some of Sartre's interventions
are prescient rather than outmoded remnants of the nineteenth century
(*a la* Foucault). They certainly presage issues that
are in the foreground today, concerning class, race, and gender. That
doesn't mean that Sartre got it all correct, of course, whatever
that might mean in regard to the complex realities of socio-political
life. Indeed, if one is to take a stand on so many of the major
socio-political issues of one's time, as Sartre did, it is
inevitable that history will not look kindly on them all.
Sartre's life and writings hence present a complex and difficult
interpretive task, but they remain a powerful provocation for thought
and action today.