Sartre. The Arguments of the Philosophers

180 Pages·1999·1.49 MB·English

by  Peter Caws

SARTRE
The Arguments of the Philosophers
EDITOR: TED HONDERICH
The purpose of this series is to provide a contemporary assessment and history of the entire
course of philosophical thought. Each book constitutes a detailed, critical introduction to
the work of a philosopher of major influence and significance.
Plato J.C.B.Gosling
Augustine Christopher Kirwan
The Presocratic Philosophers Jonathan Barnes
Plotinus Lloyd P.Gerson
The Sceptics R.J.Hankinson
Socrates Gerasimos Xenophon Santas
Berkeley George Pitcher
Descartes Margaret Dauler Wilson
Hobbes Tom Sorell
Locke Michael Ayers
Spinoza R.J.Delahunty
Bentham Ross Harrison
Hume Barry Stroud
Butler Terence Penelhum
John Stuart Mill John Skorupski
Thomas Reid Keith Lehrer
Kant Ralph C.S.Walker
Hegel M.J.Inwood
Schopenhauer D.W.Hamlyn
Kierkegaard Alastair Hannay
Nietzsche Richard Schacht
Karl Marx Allen W.Wood
Gottlob Frege Hans D.Sluga
Meinong Reinhardt Grossmann
Husserl David Bell
G.E.Moore Thomas Baldwin
Wittgenstein Robert J.Fogelin
Russell Mark Sainsbury
William James Graham Bird
Peirce Christopher Hookway
Santayana Timothy L.S.Sprigge
Dewey J.E.Tiles
Bergson A.R.Lacey
J.L.Austin G.J.Warnock
Karl Popper Anthony O’Hear
Ayer John Foster
Sartre Peter Caws
SARTRE
The Arguments of the Philosophers
Peter Caws
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1979
by Routledge & Kegan Paul plc
First published, with additional notes, in paperback 1984
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Avenue, New York NY 10016
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© 1979 Peter Caws
Additional notes copyright © 1984 Peter Caws
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-84964-7 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-20390-2 (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-415-20392-9 (set)
Publisher’s note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original book may be apparent.
Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Notes and Abbreviations vii

Introduction 1
I A Conspectus of Sartre’s Writings 7
II Language and its Uses: Literature and Philosophy 16
III Image, Emotion, and Intentionality 26
IV Consciousness and Subjectivity 41
V Being and Negation 51
VI Bad Faith and the Existence of the For-Itself 61
VII The Existence of Others: Sartre’s Prise de Conscience 77
VIII Freedom and Existential Morality 92
IX Politics and Dialectics 107
X Series and Groups: The Dialectical World 126
XI History and the Universal Singular: Sartre and Flaubert 153

Bibliography 161
Index 165
Acknowledgments
The dedication of this book acknowledges my greatest human debt, but it acknowledges
an intellectual debt as well, especially to Mary Ann Caws, whose enthusiasm for the life
of the mind and whose exigent standards with respect to its products have sustained and
purged the work.
I am grateful to the Research Foundation of the City University of New York for a
Faculty Research Award during the tenure of which I began writing, and to several helpers—
Frances Cutler, Ruth Davis, and Frederica Goldsmith, but especially Dharie Vanbimol,
whose labours were Herculean—for turning the writing into a finished typescript. My
thanks also to Giuliana Carugati for locating many of the published English versions of
passages I had cited in my own translation, and to Hugh Sllverman for coming to the rescue
with some texts which were otherwise unavailable when they were needed.
My debt to students and colleagues—particularly to an insistent group of undergraduates
at the University of Kansas, now more than twenty years ago, with whom I first read Sartre
seriously—is too extensive to be detailed, but I wish to acknowledge with special thanks
the careful reading of the early chapters of the book by Jonathan Moreno.
Finally I must thank the following publishers for permission to cite extended passages
from works to which they hold the copyright: The Philosophical Library and Methuen
(Being and Nothingness), George Braziller (Saint Genet), Alfred A.Knopf and Methuen
(Search for a Method), and New Left Books (Critique of Dialectical Reason).
Peter Caws
Notes and Abbreviations
Because this book has been written over a period of time in which there was intense activity
in the translation of Sartre’s works, many of the citations which in the first draft had to be
given in my own versions have in the final text been able to be rephrased to bring them into
line with available English versions. In general I have used the available translations even
when I found them stylistically infelicitous, and have kept my own only in those cases in
which the translator has actually misunderstood the original. It would have been tedious
to explain in every case the reasons for dissatisfaction, however, and I have discussed the
shortcomings of the translations only when they make a serious difference to the sense of
the passage in question.
References are provided in the text, rather than in notes, by names of authors or, in the
case of works by Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, by abbreviations of titles. I have adopted
the following conventions: if the abbreviation is in Roman type, then the work is in English;
if in Italic type, then it is in French. If the page number is in Roman type, I have just cited
or referred to what is on the page in question; if in Italic type then the passage is quoted
in my own translation. (The class of references with Roman abbreviations and Italic page
numbers is therefore null.) A list of abbreviations used in the references is given below.
References to works cited in passing, for which the provision of an abbreviation would
have been pointless, are to bibliographical entries in the usual way, but in these cases
also my own translations are indicated by italics. In the list below, the abbreviation of the
English title is given along with that of the French one, and vice versa, whenever there is a
difference and there has been occasion to refer to both versions.
List of Abbreviations
Works in English:
ASJ Anti-Semite and Jew (RQJ)
B Baudelaire
BEM Between Existentialism and Marxism
BN Being and Nothingness (EN)
CA The Condemned of Altona
CP The Communists and Peace
CDR Critique of Dialectical Reason (CRD)
DGL The Devil and the Good Lord
E Existentialism
EA Essays in Aesthetics
EAM The Ethics of Ambiguity (de Beauvoir)
EMO The Emotions (ETE)
FC Force of Circumstance (de Beauvoir)
viii Notes and Abbreviations
IM Imagination
INT ‘lntentionality’
LPE Literary and Philosophical Essays
L/S Life/Situations
N Nausea
NYT New York Times interview
PI Playboy interview
PL Politics and Literature
POL The Prime of Life (de Beauvoir) (FA)
PSI The Psychology of Imagination (IE)
RW The Responsibility of the Writer’
SBH Sartre by Himself
SG Saint Genet
SIT Situations
SM Search for a Method
SS The Spectre of Stalin
TE The Transcendence of the Ego
WA The Wall
WIL What is Literature?
WO The Words (MO)
WS The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre (Contat and Rybalka) (ES)
Works in French:
CRD Critique de la raison dialectique (CDR)
EN L’Être et le Néant (BN)
ES Les Ecrits de Sartre (Contat and Rybalka) (WS)
ETE Esquisse d’une théorie des émotions (EMO)
FA La Force de l’âge (de Beauvoir) (POL)
IE L’Imaginaire (PSI)
IF L’Idiot de la famille (vols 1 and 2; vol. 3 appears as IF 3)
IN L’Imagination
MO Les Mots (WO)
RQJ Reflexions sur la question juive (ASJ)
S Situations (S I to S X; these correspond to various different titles in English, since they have
been translated piecemeal if at all)
TE La Transcendance de l’Ego
Note to second printing: Two significant posthumous works (both Paris, Gallimard, 1983)
have appeared. They are:
CDG Les Carnets de la drôle de guerre
CM Cahiers pour une morale
I
Introduction
This book is a reading of Jean-Paul Sartre’s philosophical writings. Its aim is to present and
criticize the arguments found in those writings, which constitute Sartre’s claim to attention
from other philosophers. A reading: while the arguments I present here are those that have
impressed themselves upon me in working my way, sometimes quickly and sometimes
slowly, Sometimes with delight and sometimes in despair, through Sartre’s monumental
corpus—about 10,000 pages of it, not counting the fiction and the theatre—I cannot claim
that they reflect Sartre’s own intentions adequately, or that many of them could not be
successfully refuted by other arguments drawn from the same corpus. But still a reading,
that is to say the result of a careful perusal of those pages, and of reflection on them over a
period of years, so that at the same time I do not think that an entirely alternative account
of Sartre’s philosophical views could reasonably be given.
If by ‘argument’ is understood a sequence of propositions, beginning from premisses
laid down with some plausible warrant and proceeding by way of intermediate steps, each
accompanied by a justifying reason, to a conclusion firmly established, the discovery of
arguments in Sartre’s work is not always easy. In the early academic writings (from The
Transcendence of the Ego to the first chapters of Being and Nothingness) he is, it is true,
relatively careful and conventional, working within the traditional context of professional
philosophy in France; but these works form only a small part of his extraordinary output
as a writer, and the arguments in them are not those on which his philosophical reputation
most obviously rests. That reputation is mixed: Sartre is admired for his range and insight
and relevance, castigated for his looseness and verbosity. On the one hand he has made
contributions of the first importance to existential ontology and the Marxist theory of
the collective; on the other a great deal of his writing proves on inspection to be merely
opinionated, and to make demands on the reader’s patience and on the world’s supply of
paper that can only be called extravagant.
Sartre’s philosophy presents itself, not only in its style but in the mode of development of
its content, as a series of finished assertions, with little apparent concern for the alternatives
and objections usually found in philosophical texts. Much of it is argumentative if not
argued, in that it consists of statements, often metaphorical and sometimes outrageous,
that cry out for clarification or questioning or contradiction—but these, especially in the
later work, are piled upon one another in such profusion that the task of arranging them so
as to make possible even the beginning of a counter-argument is a daunting one. Sartre’s
attitude to the world has been described by Simone de Beauvoir as resting on ‘unshakable
certainty’ (POL 35), and the combination of this with an almost total fluency of language
makes for texts that simply overwhelm, rather than convincing on the grounds of reason.
But this as it stands is no criticism: to say of an argument that it is dogmatic, insufficiently
reasoned, metaphorical, long-winded or arrogant is not to say that it is invalid. The problem