VENTAJAS Y DESVENTAJAS DEL MÉTODO

Sartre, as we have seen, holds a relational view of phenomenal consciousness as direct apprehension of an object or part of the world that is not dependent for its existence on that apprehension. This view, which I have also called ‘strong disjunctivism’, denies that experience is generated by stimulation of the neural system, claiming instead that the experience is identical with the causal relation between brain and object apprehended (see 3.2). This relational view of experience, as we shall see (4.2), requires the Heideggerian view of the subject as an environmentally embedded embodied being, a ‘being-in-the-world’ whose actions as well as experiences involve both the body and its immediate environment, a view to which Sartre emphatically subscribes. These claims can be attacked on ontological grounds, particularly on the grounds of ontological claims purportedly grounded in science, and hence must be defended from these attacks. In this chapter, I present both the classical grounds for attack (4.1) and the contemporary naturalist grounds for attack (4.2), before going on to reconstruct the principles underlying Sartre’s ontology of experience and of the subject from the discussions of ontology scattered throughout his early works (4.3). I argue that Sartre’s ontology is immune to the contemporary

naturalist attacks and, moreover, that there is good philosophical reason to prefer Sartre’s ontology to contemporary anglophone forms of naturalism

(4.4). Finally, I argue that Sartre’s ontology provides a new and innovative framework for a theory of colour that allows it to resist the classical attack on the view that experience is direct apprehension of part of mind-independent reality (4.5).

In the course of this, I argue that, despite Sartre’s use of the terms ‘being’ and ‘nothingness’, it is wrong to claim of his ontology that:

‘one could do no better than to call it a “dualist ontology”, an ontology which, in this sense, moves against the spirit of Heideggerian ontology and harks back to Descartes’ (McCann 1993, 112)

I argue that Sartre’s ontology should rather be taken as a form of monism, and that such a monism is compatible with his central existentialist claim that the nothingness of consciousness is the source of human freedom. Sartre’s self-professed Cartesianism, I claim, is not an assent to dualism but a retention of the Cartesian identification of freedom with the autonomy of consciousness within a monistic framework.

4.1 Science and Colour

The claim that a perceptual experience is not contained within the head or body of the perceiver is classically challenged on the grounds that the part of the world perceived does not possess all the properties it is experienced as having. Since, for example, reality is not really coloured, the thought runs, a visual experience that presents a coloured object must be generated within the body of the perceiver, which is precisely what Sartre’s position denies (see 3.2). Descartes, for example, argued that since ‘nothing whatever

belongs to the concept of body except the fact that it is something which has length, breadth and depth and is capable of various shapes and motions’, we must accept that ‘colours, tastes, smells, and so on, are ... merely certain sensations which exist in my thought, and are as different from bodies as pain is different from the shape and motion of the weapon which produces it’ (1984, 297). This distinction between primary qualities of shape and motion and secondary qualities of colour, taste, and smell was common to the Cartesian geometrical view of physics and the Newtonian corpuscularian, or atomist, view. The classical corpuscularian statement of the view is Locke’s:

‘The particular Bulk, Number, Figure, and Motion of the parts of Fire, or Snow, are really in them, whether anyone senses them or no: and therefore they may be called real Qualities, because they really exist in those Bodies. But ... let not the Eyes see Light, or Colours, nor the ears hear Sounds, let the Palate not Taste, nor the Nose Smell, and all Colours, Tastes, Odours, and Sounds, as they are such particular Ideas, vanish and cease, and are reduced to their causes, i.e. Bulk, Figure, and Motion of Parts’ (1975, ll.viii.17)

Although this is a general claim about phenomenal consciousness, I will restrict discussion of it to the case of colour in visual experience, for the sakes of simplicity and clarity, returning to the more general claim at the end (4.5). The Cartesian and Lockean point, then, is that phenomenal colours, colours as we experience them, form no part of the scientific accounts of reality, and so are no part of that reality. The basic scientific account of mind-independent reality operates only with the concepts of length, breadth, depth, shape, and motion, claim Descartes and Locke, and so phenomenal colours are no part of that reality. They are, rather, effects produced by neural stimulation. This point is not restricted to the Cartesian and Lockean views of basic science as dealing only with geometrical relations or the interaction of basic particles respectively. No form of basic science, whether it includes fields of force or