ebook img

Sartre's Concept of a Person: An Analytic Approach PDF

177 Pages·1976·5.61 MB·English
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Sartre's Concept of a Person: An Analytic Approach

Sartre's Concept of a Person: An Analytic Approach by Phyllis Sutton Morris University of Massachusetts Press Amherst 1976 Copyright ©1975 by The University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 75-8451 ISBN 0-87023-185-5 Printed in the United States of America Publication of this book was assisted by the American Council of Learned Societies under a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Morris, Phyllis Sutton, 1931- Sartre's concept of a person. A revision of the author *s thesis, University of Michigan, 1969. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Sartre, Jean Paul, 1905~ 2. Personality. I. Title. , B2430.S34M65 1975 126'.092 4 75-8451 ISBN 0-87023-185-5 for two Johns: late father early husband Contents Preface ix Introduction 1 1. Intentionality and the Reducibility Thesis 4 Intentionality: Two Theses The First Argument against Reducibility: Intentionality as Reference The Second Argument against Reducibility: Intentionality as Purpose The Third Argument against Reducibility: Intentionality as Chosen Purpose 2. The Question of Separate Existence 30 3. Persons and Memory 54 Remembering: Interpreting as Well as Certifying Accountability Reidentification 4. Character and the Ambiguity of " I " 85 Character as the Pattern of Past Actions The Ambiguity of " I " Applying Character Predicates Uncharacteristic Acts The Relative Coherence of Character 5. A New Criterion of Personal Identity: The Fundamental Project 103 The Fundamental Project as Relation Co- Personality Rationality and the Fundamental Project viii Freedom and the Fundamental Project Sartre and Aristotle Compared Some Objections 6. The Existence of Other Minds 128 7. Concluding Remarks 147 Selected Bibliography 154 Author Index 162 Subject Index 163 Preface While I hope that this book will be of interest to Sartre's many admirers, one of my main concerns has been to open Sartre's work to a new audience, which has been, to this point, relatively hostile to his ideas when it has taken them at all seriously. For the English-speaking analytic philosopher, the central problem in trying to understand Sartre is not that he is a French philosopher writing in French, for most of Sartre's important early works are available in translation. Rather, one of the severest difficulties is that, even in English, Sartre's ideas are obscured by his strange and difficult terminology. Most of the literature on Sartre merely paraphrases him without clarifying what he means. Another common difficulty has been that commentators have frequently tried to discuss too many of Sartre's ideas in too little space, with the result that Sartre's claims are not made clear. To avoid both of these problems, I thought it might make sense if this study were limited to a relatively small number of points in Sartre's position, and if the attempt were made to render these points and the supporting arguments as precisely and as thoroughly as possible. It should be clear from this procedure that the scope of this study is limited. It is not intended to be a definitive account of all of Sartre's ideas, but rather a clear and thorough account of that segment of Sartre's early writings that pertains to an analysis of his concept of a person. This subject was chosen in part because it has been little discussed by his English-speaking commentators, in part because his treatment of the concept of a person includes many questions discussed by contemporary English-speaking philosophers, and in part because it seems to be a sound, central, and extremely important part of his posi- tion, the clarification of which should illuminate many other elements of his work. The hope of making sense out of Sartre's ideas for the analytically oriented English-speaking philosopher has influ- enced several points of method. In most of the ensuing discus- x Preface sion I have started by asking certain questions that are discussed among analytic philosophers. Sartre's position with respect to these questions has been reconstructed from discussions scat- tered throughout his early writings. There is, of course, a danger of misinterpretation in taking points from one context and inserting them into a new context. However, this method can provide a fresh and illuminating approach to understanding these points. I have made every effort to avoid distorting Sartre's position, although, as I have noted on occasion, it has been necessary to try to fill in some gaps. Another decision that has been in part influenced by the hope of communicating with the English-speaking reader is the decision to deal only with Sartre's early works, most of which are available in English translation. Those readers familiar with Sartre's later work, in particular his Critique de la Raison Dialectique, may find it odd that I do not undertake to show the development of Sartre's position through time. However, since this book is not yet available in translation, except for the preface, the audience I am most concerned to address has not yet offered serious criticisms of it. Another important reason for this decision, however, is that I wanted to show the basic coherence of that early position, which is so often ignored, misunderstood, or abused as incoher- ent by his critics. I did not see a good way of showing this coherence in detail while, at the same time, taking into account the sharp changes in direction which Sartre's thinking under- went soon after the publication of Being and Nothingness. His early concern for an analysis of the structures of individual consciousness, which is closely connected with our topic, was later replaced by an emphasis on social and political questions. His thinking on freedom and on man's relation to the physical world shifted in his later writing. The interested reader may want to look at Hazel Barnes' new book, Sartre, which includes a lucid and sympathetic account of Sartre's development. There is another gap in my treatment which needs to be mentioned. There has been no attempt to trace the historical connections between Sartre's work and the work of Heidegger, Husserl, and Hegel. These connections have been discussed by some of Sartre's English-speaking commentators, and it seemed pointless to duplicate their efforts. For instance, Sartre's in- debtedness to the German thinkers with respect to his solution to the problem of other minds has been pointed out by Mary Warnock, Klaus Hartmann, Marjorie Grene, and Wilfred Desan, among others. Also, since the basic need is clarification, it Preface xi seemed to make more sense to compare Sartre's position to the vie'ws of English-speaking philosophers rather than to the ideas of German thinkers, who are not well known to most American and English philosophers. It has been customary to interpret Sartre as one who follows the rationalist tradition. This line of interpretation is continued in two recent works which I read too late to respond to in detail in this work: Marjorie Grene's Sartre and Hazel Barnes' Sartre. The professional philosopher may be puzzled at times to dis- cover that the claim that Sartre is a rationalist is sometimes presented in such a way as to suggest merely that he is not irrational. I have no quarrel with such a claim, except to point out that philosophers usually contrast rationalism to empiricism rather than to irrationalism. Grene takes the more traditional view of rationalism when she interprets Sartre as a neo- Cartesian. I do not think that Sartre is wholly free of rationalist ele- ments; his opposition to the atomistic empiricist account of perception is enough to rouse suspicions. But, after all, there may be very few pure rationalists or pure empiricists since Kant. In any case, what has made me most uncomfortable about the usual interpretation of Sartre as a rationalist simpliciter is that rationalism has traditionally espoused the doctrines of an imma- terial substantial ego and innate ideas. Sartre attacks both of these positions, and espouses alternatives which can be com- pared with traditional empiricist solutions, as I try to show. In his history of the phenomenological movement, Herbert Spiegelberg suggested that it might be fruitful to clarify the connections between that movement and the mainstream of empiricism. This study has taken its inspiration in part from that suggestion. In the ensuing discussion I would like to offer support for the following claims: (a) that Sartre's early analysis of the concept of a person is basically coherent. (Sometimes his terminology obscures this point; he argues that the concept of a person is ambiguous, but he offers a consistent treatment of that ambi- guity) (b) that Sartre's discussion is addressed to, and sheds light on, many of the questions discussed by contemporary analytic philosophers; and (c) that Sartre's analysis of the con- cept of a person raises some philosophically interesting new questions. An early version of my book was presented to the University of Michigan in 1969 in the form of a doctoral dissertation.

See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.