PHL217: Sartre: Index

Sartre’s system is unusual in that almost all of it is derived from a single claim, and the derivations are short. If you can state the first principle and reconstruct three or four steps from it, you can reach most of the rest without having memorized it.

The claim: a person is not made for anything. There is no blueprint, no purpose issued in advance, no nature you were given and have to live up to. You exist first, and what you are gets settled afterwards, by what you do. Sartre’s phrase is that existence precedes essence.

Two texts, written seven years apart, doing different jobs.

Being and Nothingness (1943) is the technical work. It supplies the machinery: what consciousness is, the two structures of a person, how self-deception is possible, and what happens when another person appears. It is dense and argues against opponents you may not know.

Existentialism is a Humanism (1946) is a public lecture and a defence. Sartre had been accused of quietism, pessimism, isolating the individual, and reducing ethics to caprice, and the lecture answers those charges in order. It is far easier to read, and the price of that is that it compresses arguments the earlier book works out slowly.

The order these are in

1. Existence precedes essence — the first principle, built from the paper-cutter argument. Why removing God removes human nature, what subjectivism means, and why choosing for yourself is choosing for everyone.
2. Anguish, forlornness, and despair — the three consequences, each naming a different absence. Contains the student’s dilemma, which is the case designed to defeat every ethical system in turn.
3. Facticity and transcendence — the two structures of a person, and consciousness as the nihilation of its own being. The vocabulary bad faith runs on.
4. Bad faith — why lying to yourself is not lying, why the unconscious is not an escape, and the two worked cases.
5. The Look — what changes when another person sees you. Shame as recognition rather than comparison, and being-for-others as a third mode of being.
6. Existentialism as a humanism — the four charges and the answers, including the argument that freedom must will the freedom of others.

Pages 1, 2, and 6 are the lecture. Pages 3, 4, and 5 are Being and Nothingness. They are interleaved rather than kept apart because the lecture’s ethics is unusable without the ontology underneath it, and the ontology is hard to motivate without knowing what it was for.

The one thread worth carrying through all six

Recognition. In Hegel, self-consciousness requires recognition by another self-consciousness, and the master’s arrangement fails because recognition from someone you count as nothing is worthless. Sartre inherits the problem and changes the answer. The Other’s look does not need your consent and requires no mutuality to take effect. It gives you a nature you did not have and cannot see, and Sartre’s word for the experience of it is shame, which he defines as recognition.

That is the line the course is drawing between the two thinkers, and it is the one a paper can be built on.

Index

• Existence Precedes Essence. Sartre's first principle, built from the paper-cutter argument: what essence and existence mean, why removing God removes human nature, why the doctrine is called subjectivism, and why choosing for yourself is choosing for everyone.
• Anguish, Forlornness, and Despair. The three technical terms Sartre derives from existence preceding essence: anguish as the felt weight of legislating for everyone, forlornness as the absence of any value to appeal to, despair as confining oneself to what depends on the will. Includes the student's dilemma and why no ethical system resolves it.
• Facticity and Transcendence. The two-structure account of a person that bad faith exploits: facticity as everything already true of you, transcendence as your escape from it, why consciousness is defined as the nihilation of its own being, and the No as the form negation takes in the world.
• Bad Faith. Why self-deception is not lying, the paradox of a single consciousness that must know the truth in order to conceal it, why the unconscious is not an escape, and the two patterns Sartre works through: the woman on the date and the waiter playing at being a waiter.
• The Look. How other people change what you are. Being-for-others as a third mode of being alongside the in-itself and the for-itself, shame as recognition rather than comparison, and why Sartre says the Other steals your world rather than merely observing it.
• Existentialism as a Humanism. The defence: the four charges Sartre is answering, why he says freedom must will the freedom of others, the two senses of humanism and which one he claims, and how judgment is possible without a priori values.