TOTALIZACIÓN DE COSTOS

The Pursuit of Being’ is an ever-digressing series of fits and starts that does not contain a single quotation, book title, reference, or any other part of the scholarly apparatus that philosophers usually employ and that Sartre employs elsewhere. This anarchic style not only confuses readers: it also seems to have confused Sartre at a crucial stage, obscuring for him the distinction between the claim that appearances are mind-dependent events or entities and the claim that reality consists in such events or entities. The first is common to indirect realism and phenomenalism, and is the central target of the passage, whereas the second is peculiar to phenomenalism. In this section, I aim to lay bare the structure of this passage in order to expose the arguments embedded in it. This project is not so much one of unweaving a rainbow as filtering a glaring beam of white light into its constituent spectrum of colours. Before this filtering, though, it is crucial to delineate sharply Sartre’s target.

Sartre is attempting to show both indirect realism and phenomenalism to be untenable, as a recommendation of his form of direct realism. McCulloch (1994, 84-8) presents Sartre’s aim as steering a course between Descartes and Berkeley. But this is misleading. Descartes is not the representative of indirect realism that McCulloch makes him out to be. Phenomenal consciousness does not, for Descartes, involve awareness of a subjective mental entity that purports to represent extra-mental reality: it involves instead awareness of a brain state that purports to represent extra-cranial reality (1985, 209). Although, as McCulloch points out, Descartes does believe that in principle a mind can exist without a world or a body, Descartes also believes that a mind that did exist in this way would be severely restricted in

its activities. Perception, imagination, and emotion all require ‘the close and intimate union of our mind with the body’ (1985, 209): a mind without a body is restricted to pure thought. And Sartre’s concern is not pure thought but phenomenal consciousness of the world, precisely the kinds of mental event that Descartes considered to require the ‘close and intimate union of our mind with the body’.

Sartre’s own examples of an indirect realist and a phenomenalist are Kant and Husserl respectively. Both of these thinkers subscribe to transcendental idealism, the belief that the application of concepts in experience shapes the world we experience, and our knowledge of the world is possible only because of this conceptual structure of experience. In classifying Kant as a ‘realist’ and Husserl as an ‘idealist’, Sartre is entirely ignoring this idealistic theory of knowledge common to the two thinkers. Sartre is concerned in this passage with being, not knowledge. He is not primarily concerned with the ways in which or the extent to which we know the world around us, or whether reality really has the structures it seems to have. He is, rather, concerned with whether the object of apprehension in experience of the world is a mind- dependent subjective private entity, as indirect realists and phenomenalists hold, or whether it is mind-independent objective being in-itself. The question of the ways in which or the extent to which our awareness of that object of apprehension is a distorting medium is not a question Sartre addresses in this passage. Later in Being and Nothingness, as we have seen (1.3), Sartre endorses the claim that consciousness is active in structuring the world of experience, claim ing that the way things appear is partly due to determinations applied by consciousness on the basis of past experience and in the light of current projects. By casting Descartes and Berkeley instead of Kant and Husserl as the indirect realist and phenomenalist that Sartre attacks, McCulloch blinds himself to Sartre’s adaptation of a claim common to Kant and Husserl but unknown to Descartes and Berkeley: that our way of being aware of the objects of apprehension helps to structure the world. McCulloch takes the form of direct realism that Sartre is recommending to hold that

consciousness reveals a pre-existent world without distortion, that the world is just mind-independent reality (1994, 111-7). Couching the attack in terms of Kant and Husserl rather than Descartes and Berkeley emphasises the distinction between the ontological realism and idealism that Sartre takes Kant and Husserl to differ over and the epistemological idealism on which they broadly agree.

The key difference between the two transcendental idealists, as Sartre reads them, concerns the ontological relation of experience to objective reality. Ultimately, he argues, neither Kant nor Husserl has a tenable position, because they share an untenable presumption. Kant famously draws a distinction between appearances (‘phenomena’) and things-in-themselves (‘noumena’), claiming that the world which we experience is the phenomenal realm, but that experience is in some way grounded in mind-independent noumenal reality, reality as it is in-itself. Scholars are divided between two main readings of this distinction, which (following Gardner 1999, 289-98) we can label the ‘two-object’ and the ‘two-conception’ readings. According to the ‘two-object’ reading, phenomena comprise a set of immediate objects of awareness, reality in-itself being an ontologically distinct realm lying beyond and somehow regulating the series of mind-dependent appearances. On this reading, ‘appearances are nothing but representations’ which are ‘merely in us’ (Kant 1929, A250 and A129). According to the ‘two-conception’ reading, on the other hand, Kant is drawing a distinction between two ways in which the same ontological reality can be considered. On this reading, the ‘object as

appearance is to be distinguished from itself as object in itself (1929, B69);

whilst ‘the senses represent to us something merely as it appears, this something must also in itself be a thing’ (1929, A249). Kant’s discussion of his distinction seems ambivalent between these two readings, and it is irrelevant to present purposes to attempt to resolve this ambivalence. What is clear is that Sartre subscribes to the ‘two-object’ reading of Kant: ‘Kant’s Erscheinung [appearance] ... point[s] over its shoulder to a true being which [is], for it, absolute’ (B&N: xxii; see xxiv). For Sartre, Kant’s claim is that we have direct

awareness only of mind-dependent appearances: reality as it exists in-itself lies beyond appearances. And it is this indirect realist claim, that mind- independent reality lies shielded behind mind-dependent objects, that Sartre objects to.^

Where Kant, in Sartre’s eyes, hides mind-independent reality behind a wall of subjective objects, Husserl’s brand of transcendental idealism demurs only to do away w ith m ind-independent reality altogether. ‘[L je s t any m isunderstanding a ris e ’, wrote Husserl in Cartesian Meditations, ‘phenomenology indeed excludes every naïve metaphysics that operates with absurd things in themselves, but does not exclude metaphysics as such. ... it by no means professes to stop short of the “supreme and ultimate” questions’ (1950, §64). Sartre reads Husserl to be attempting to answer the supreme and ultimate questions while retaining the traditional notion of mind-dependent appearance by denouncing as ‘absurd’ the ‘naïve’ notion of mind-independent reality that must lie inaccessible and unknowable beyond appearances (see also Husserl 1950, §41; 1982, §§ 40, 47, 52). This move can be made only if reality is construed to be ultimately constructed out of mind-dependent appearances. Husserl seems to endorse this construal of reality even as he attempts to distance himself from Berkeley. ‘If anyone reading our statements objects that they mean changing all the world into a subjective illusion and committing oneself to a “Berkeleian idealism’” , he wrote, ‘we can only answer that he has not seized upon the sense of those statements. They take nothing away from the fully valid being of the world ... The real actuality is not “reinterpreted” , to say nothing of its being denied; it is rather that a countersensical interpretation of the real actuality ... is removed’ (1982, § 55). Berkeleian idealism is not the claim that reality is an illusion, but that the conception of reality as mind-independent is incoherent. ‘That the things I see with mine eyes and touch with my hands do exist, really exist, I make not the least question’, wrote Berkeley. ‘The only thing whose existence we deny, is that which philosophers call matter or corporeal substance. And in doing of this, there is no damage done to the rest of mankind, who, I dare say, will

never miss it. ... If any man thinks this detracts from the existence or reality of things, he is very far from understanding what hath been premised in the plainest terms I could think o f (1975, §§ 35-6). If Husserl does construe reality to be constructed out of mind-dependent appearances, if his position is as close to Berkeley’s as these two quotations suggest, then Sartre is right to claim that ‘Husserl deserves ... to be called a phenomenalist’ (B&N: 73; see also xxvi).^

On these readings, regardless of their exegetical accuracy, Kant and Husserl both hold appearances to be mind-dependent entities. They also both hold that the application of determinations in experience shapes the way the world appears to us, but Sartre does not attack this point, as he agrees with it himself. Reserving ‘world’ for the world as we experience it, rather than being in-itself in itself, he writes later in Being and Nothingness: ‘it is through human reality that there is a world’ (B&N: 307). The point of agreement between Kant and Husserl that Sartre attacks is the claim that appearances are mind- dependent. Such appearances can be related to reality in only one of two ways. Either reality is mind-independent and lies beyond them, as Sartre reads Kant to hold. Or reality is constructed out of mind-dependent appearances, so that in the case of perceptual experience at least the object of apprehension is part of objective reality even though it is mind-dependent, as Sartre takes Husserl to hold. Sartre’s aim is to show that neither theory is tenable, and that we must therefore deny mind-dependent appearances altogether in favour of allowing mind-independent reality to be the direct object of apprehension. The rest of this section maps out the passage in which Sartre attempts to show this.

Sartre opens the passage praising ‘modern thought’ for ‘reducing the existent

(i’existant) to the series of appearances (apparitions) which manifest if, in an

attempt to ‘overcome a certain number of dualisms which have embarrassed philosophy’ (B&N: xxi). By divorcing the subjective world of appearance from reality as it is in itself, Sartre argues, indirect realists such as Kant have

generated dualisms that give rise to scepticism about the nature and structure of reality. The embarrassing dualisms are the dualisms of interior and exterior, being and appearance, and essence and appearance (B&N: xxi-xxii)."^ What is embarrassing about these dualisms is not simply that they challenge us to ‘explain how these realities are related to each other and why they are each considered “reality”’ (Catalano 1974, 22), but that they preclude a comprehensive and grounded account of the interior, true being, and essence of the world and its denizens. If reality itself does not appear, then it must remain ‘secret’, ‘hidden’, out of cognitive reach (B&N: xxi-xxii). If reality itself is manifest in experience, on the other hand, then there nothing is secret or hidden: the being and essence of an object or of reality in general are themselves present in experience, and so cognitively available.

The progress made by ‘modern thought’ is the abandonment of the root of these dualisms. As Sartre puts it later in the passage, ‘[t]he first procedure of a philosophy ought to be to expel things from consciousness and to reestablish its true connection with the world’ (B&N: xxvii). The ‘modern’ philosophers Sartre has in mind are Husserl and Heidegger. Perception, for Husserl, is direct awareness of reality itself, not of a mental representation of reality. We have ‘evidence’ {Evidenz) of reality, reality appears ‘in person’, even though knowledge of the existence and nature of reality requires phenomenological reflection on this evidence (see 1950, §§ 4-7). Heidegger claims that the central problems of philosophy arise from divorcing mind or self from reality at the outset, from ‘an ontologically inadequate way of starting with something of such a character that independently of it and “outside” of it a “world” is to be proved’ (Heidegger 1962, § 43a). Experience is not independent of reality, for Heidegger, but requires it; mind is not separable from world, but is being-in-the-world.

Heidegger soon drops out of § I of ‘The Pursuit of Being’, however, as Sartre raises the question of whether abandoning indirect realism is sufficient for avoiding the embarrassing dualisms, or only necessary. ‘Does this mean that

by reducing the existent to its manifestations we have succeeded in overcoming a//dualisms? It seems rather that we have converted them all into a new dualism: that of the finite and the infinite' (B&N: xxii-xxiii). Since a thing can be viewed in infinitely many ways and repeatedly across time, there remains the problem of the relation between a single finite appearance of an object and the infinite sequence of appearances of which it is a member. One option is to claim that appearances are mind-dependent, and that reality consists in infinite sequences of actual and possible appearances. Given that Husserl claims us to apprehend reality directly, and considers the notion of mind-independent existence ‘absurd’, Sartre ascribes this phenomenalist conception of the relation between appearance and reality to Husserl. But the embarrassing dualisms seem to reappear within this framework: the interior, being, and essence of an object now pertain to the infinite series of appearances, and so are not contained in any one appearance. ‘In thus replacing a variety of oppositions by a single dualism on which they are all based, have we gained or lost?’ (B&N: xxiv).

Sartre approaches this question from an oblique angle. § II of ‘The Pursuit of Being’ raises a question about the notion of mind-dependent appearances common to indirect realism and phenomenalism. There is, he claims, a ‘legitimate problem of the being of this appearing’ (B&N: xxiv). We do apprehend being, he claims, ‘since we can speak of it and since we have a certain comprehension of it’ (B&N: xxiv). This claim is based on Heidegger’s hermeneutic conception of enquiry, according to which any enquiry requires prior understanding or comprehension (Verstehen) of the subject-matter enquired into. Without such an understanding, we would have neither the motivation nor the ability to undertake the enquiry: we could not formulate or understand the question. Enquiry consists in ‘interpretation’ {Auslegung), which makes explicit what is already implicitly understood. Ontology, or enquiry into being, therefore requires a pre-ontological comprehension of being (Heidegger 1962, §§ 2, 4, 32, 33). Sartre follows Heidegger (1962, § 1)

in claiming that we do not understand the term ‘being’ by associating it with a description or definition, and so must understand it by apprehension.

Sartre’s discussion in § II focuses on the way in which we apprehend being. There are two options: either there are particular sorts of experience, such as nausea or boredom, which exclusively reveal being, or we apprehend being in experience in general. Either, that is, there is a special ‘phenomenon of being’, a kind of appearance that reveals being, or the being we apprehend is ‘the being of the phenomenon’, the being of every appearance. Sartre rejects the claim that there is a ‘phenomenon of being’ manifest in certain experiences such as boredom or nausea: his description of that claim is not to be taken, as Catalano (1974, 29) and Wider (1997, 42) take it, as an endorsement, but as the presentation of the way ‘[i]t seems ... at first’ (B&N: xxiv).^ Sartre dismisses the idea that our comprehension of being is rooted in a special type of appearance on the grounds that appearances themselves must be. Being, he argues, is not a quality of an object like colour or smell, and neither is it signified by appearances in the way a sign signifies its object. One apprehends objects exhibiting qualities in experience, and these objects and qualities have being, or are: their being itself cannot be apprehended except in apprehending them. ‘Being is simply the condition of all revelation. It is being-for-revealing (être-pour-dévoilei) and not revealed being { êt re

dévoilé)’ (B&N: xxv).

The problem that this poses, if it is right, is how the relation between appearance and being is to be construed if appearances are to be mind- dependent. Given that being is the condition of revelation, that appearance requires being, the being that appears cannot ‘exist only insofar as it reveals itself but is ‘transphenomenal’ (B&N: xxvi). This conclusion is, of course, the target conclusion of the passage as a whole: that we apprehend being which does not depend for its existence on our apprehension of it. But, even granting Sartre his premises in § II, his conclusion is not warranted because

he has not ruled out the possibility that although being is necessary for appearance, appearance is also necessary for being.

Sartre is aware that he has left this option open, and begins § III by pointing it out. ‘Why not say that the being of the appearing is its appearance? This is simply a way of choosing new words to clothe the old “Esse est percipl’ of Berkeley. And it is in fact what Husserl and his followers are doing’ (B&N: xxvi). It is at this point that Sartre’s dialectical style causes most confusion. Although attacking the shared claim of indirect realism and phenomenalism that appearances are mind-dependent, the consideration of being has led to the question of whether being is mind-dependent, and this includes the being of objects and of the world, and so is the claim peculiar to phenomenalism. From here on, Sartre couches most of the passage as an attack on phenomenalism, and by the time he comes to summarise the whole argument, he seems to have lost sight of indirect realism altogether. The focus on phenomenalism, moreover, leads to an exposition of a theory of the relation between consciousness and self-consciousness widely read as being an affirmation of that theory, but which I claim to be an exposition of a view that Sartre considers a part of phenomenalism. The purpose of the exposition is to provide the background for an argument against phenomenalism on grounds of incoherence. The focus on phenomenalism serves two rhetorical purposes as well as playing a role in the dialectic of Sartre’s argument. It is an