Sartre's Concept of a Person: An Analytic Approach

177 Pages·1976·5.61 MB·English

by  Phyllis Sutton Morris

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.