Episode #103 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Today’s episode is part four in a series on Sartre and Camus, and I hereby vow to get part five out by the end of the month. I hope you love the show today.

So, if you don’t follow the show on Facebook or you don’t follow me on Twitter, you may be a little out of the loop in terms of the requests I’ve been receiving and what the immediate future of this show’s going to be. So I want to fill you in. You know, at the end of one of the Heidegger episodes I said that the state of the world is always contingent upon the state of human thought that came before it. And what I meant when I said that was, whether we realize it or not, every single one of us exists as a single point on a massive continuum known as the history of human thought. Whether we realize it or not, so many of the strong convictions that we have, things we think are just parts of our personality, have been shaped and in many ways determined by the history of philosophical insights within this history of human thought.

You know, everybody has a particular way that they look at the world, a way they look at economics and government and relationships and God. And, if you’re an honest person, this way of looking at things is always changing; it’s always growing. But the fact remains that at any one point in time we all have a particular way that we look at the world that we’ve deemed to be a sort of best practices in that moment. And for years of my life, at least, whenever I thought about this particular way that I looked at the world, I walked around as if I had come up with it, like it was all me, like at some point I locked myself in a closet and just thought about stuff really, really hard for 20 years. And then I emerged with my way of looking at the world.

But what I realized is that so much of the way that we look at the world is actually this complex patchwork of philosophical insights that we’ve gleaned from all the books that we’ve read, the teachers that we’ve had, the people we’ve met, tons of different things. The point is, whether we realize it or not, we were all born into a particular philosophical facticity like we talked about last episode. And this facticity greatly influences the way that we look at the world.

Now, maybe you’ve listened to this show before. Maybe you’ve come across a thinker that embodies some aspect of the way you look at the world, you know, a single piece of that complex patchwork of ideas that you have. But just statistically speaking, if you’re a human being alive in the year 2017, a significant portion of the way that you look at the world is going to be based on the main philosophical conversations that occurred all throughout the 20th century.

That’s what I want to talk about for the next several episodes. Because when you understand the origins of these philosophical lines of thinking, what happens is you’re given a pretty substantial gift. It’s a gift that is twofold. At least that’s how I experienced it. First of all, I felt humbled because finally I was looking at my beliefs not as this, you know, elaborate art project I’m working on for 20 years and, if somebody criticizes my beliefs, they’re essentially criticizing me and my art project. And, second of all, I felt this weird sense of clarity because, when you turn on the TV and you see the way that people are behaving and you take a step back in Plato’s Cave, so to speak, and you see the shadows on the cave wall for what they are, when you see what’s going on as a ripple effect of a, you know, philosophical stone thrown into a pond last century, it all starts to make a lot more sense.

This is the gift that I’d like to give you over the course of this next series of episodes. And, when I thought about where to begin, the first thing I realized we’re going to need is a much deeper understanding of Sartre, much deeper than the, you know, the one episode I did on him where I just briefly touched on freedom and responsibility. Look, bottom line is, to fully understand Sartre’s concept of radical freedom and responsibility, we have to understand his phenomenology. To understand his phenomenology, we have to understand Husserl. And to understand Husserl, we have to understand a longstanding, kind of annoying tradition in the history of philosophy that people were starting to get very skeptical of right around the time of Sartre and Husserl.

This episode is a story from philosophy that I’d like to tell you. It’s a story to bring context to everything we’ve learned so far, context I could never give when I was just doing chronological episodes. But, nonetheless, it’s context we need to be able to understand the questions Sartre thought were worth answering during his time.

So, here we go. The story begins with Descartes, godfather of modern philosophy. Now, in many ways, the story of Descartes is as old as philosophy itself. He’s a mathematician turned philosopher, a mathematician fascinated by the level of certainty we can have when we say things like, “1+1=2.” And he wants to try to emulate this process of mathematical certainty and apply it to thinking, the goal being to arrive at certainty about things.

You know, in his book Rules for the Direction of the Mind he talks about taking clear and distinct propositions and linking them together in the same sort of way a mathematician might say something like, “Okay, well, 1+1=2. Alright. Now, 2+5=7. We know that, right? Okay. Now, 7x4=28. Alright. Now, let’s stop. Let’s bracket all these clear and distinct propositions we have that have allowed us to progress up until this point.” Now, imagine this same method applied to thinking. Except instead of chaining numbers together, you’re chaining together clear and distinct ideas, arriving at a level of certainty comparable to 7x4=28. That was the goal at least.

See, it’s important to understand where Descartes’s coming from with all this. Descartes takes a look back at the almost 2,000 years of philosophy that have been done before he was alive, and he’s embarrassed, quite frankly. Nobody agrees on anything. Nobody has any sort of solid foundation for what they’re writing. It’s all just a bunch of smart people spewing volume after volume of unverifiable speculation about things. Is this really what we want philosophy to be?

Descartes thinks that where all these philosophers went wrong was in their method. And, by the way, this exact same sentiment applies just more generally to us in our personal lives. But he says that it’s so easy to just fall into the trap where you’re super interested in something; you want to feel like you know about a topic so badly that you research it, and you think about it for a while; you talk to people about it. And then this strange, very human thirst for knowledge takes over. You want to feel like you know about it so badly that you end up getting impatient and just assuming that you know everything about it when there really was a lot more to consider if you dug deeper.

You know, to continue this math metaphor, it’s like if you wanted to be done with the test so badly that you just write a bunch of answers that seem like they’re about right, but you don’t actually go through and show your work of exactly how you got there. This is what philosophers have been doing. Well, enough of that. Enough speculation. Enough chaos in philosophy. We need certainty about things.

And Descartes thought that, if we’re ever going to arrive at certainty about things, we need to be taking a much more rigorous look at the methods that we’re using to arrive at it. He even uses that word. You know, he often talks about how philosophy should be looked at as a rigorous discipline. And what we’ve been doing so far, it’s been far from rigorous, let’s just say.

So, Descartes lays down the gauntlet. From this point forward, let’s all just agree on a couple things. Under penalty of being laughed at, cast out of the room, relegated to the children’s table at your next family reunion, a philosopher truly concerned with the quest for certainty shall henceforth never make any claim that is not, one, so clear that there is nothing obscure about it and, two, so distinct that there’s nothing confused about it. Clear and distinct, as clear and distinct as 1+1=2.

You know, you can imagine these sort of hypothetical chains of ideas linked together by earlier philosophers. You can imagine propositions within their thinking that may look to Descartes like 2+2=5. And then what happens is, all the rest of the ideas that are built on top of that proposition come crumbling down. This is the error. This is what’s happened all throughout history. This is the world Descartes’s living in. And here’s him throwing down this gauntlet, trying to make sure it never has to happen again. We need to arrive at certainty.

But here’s the thing about certainty. It’s no joke. It’s not enough just to say, “2+2, eh, basically 4.01, right? Close enough.” No. There’s no “close enough” when it comes to certainty. And, if we’re truly going to be rigorous, if we’re going to arrive at a philosophical system based on certainty, we need to build it completely from scratch. We can’t assume anything about it just as a given. Descartes says we need to doubt everything, even things that may seem a little bit silly when you’re initially doubting them, things, for example, like whether or not we actually exist. Can’t even take that for granted.

And, lucky for Descartes, he gets past that one pretty easily with his famous “I think, therefore I am.” See, if you’re Descartes -- and many philosophers before him, for that matter -- the criteria for knowing something clearly and distinctly lies in whether we have a direct awareness of it rather than some secondary level of awareness of it given to us by some other source. For example, to Descartes, when we ask the question whether or not we actually exist, simply based on the observation that we’re thinking about anything at all, to him, at the very least we must be some sort of thinking thing that exists. In other words, we have this sort of direct awareness of our existence present within our own minds.

But, as you can imagine, not everything is this straightforward, even things that may seem very straightforward. Because on the other hand, to Descartes, take something like the existence of the physical world, for instance. I mean, sure, it looks like there’s a physical world out there that we’re all interacting with. But can we be certain about the things that we’re looking at? After all, we know that our minds trick us all the time, right? I mean, it happens. You get stranded out in the desert long enough, dehydrated, hungry, lack of sleep; you start hallucinating. You start seeing a McDonald’s on the horizon. That McDonald’s isn’t actually there. You put a stick in some water; the stick looks bent. But the stick isn’t actually bent.

The conclusion here, Descartes says, is that, when it comes to the existence of the external world, we’re not directly aware of the things that exist in the world; we’re only directly aware of the way that they appear to us or the phenomena as they appear to us. Important word there in this story from history, phenomena. In other words, if we want to stay in keeping with this rigorous criteria that Descartes’s laid out trying to get to certainty about things, all we can really give with certainty is a description of the phenomena, not the actual external objects of the world. Though Descartes himself never talks about this process of describing phenomena. He just marks the distinction between phenomena and the objects of the world. That’s his contribution.

Now, this idea, this idea that we’re something that’s aware of our own existence that can’t be certain about anything else outside of our existence is a textbook example of a way of looking at things in philosophy called solipsism. Now, Descartes never would have thought of himself as a champion of solipsism. He has ways around it. He had an argument, for instance, where the existence of God was a certainty and that, therefore, God would never deceive us planting all these thoughts in our head about a world existing if there wasn’t actually one. Nobody else was buying it. But the important part is, Descartes got us back on track, right? He laid down the gauntlet of certainty.

Finally, for the first time ever, philosophy had been turned into a truly rigorous discipline. And, yeah, maybe Descartes didn’t get too far at arriving at these clear and distinct propositions he talks about, but at least now we’re back on the right track. Well, the story of philosophy goes on. Time goes on. Thinkers come and go presenting theory after theory. And they certainly make some progress when it comes to these things that we can say with absolute certainty. But the next big breakthrough occurs when a guy comes along that we’ve talked about many times on this show before, Mr. Immanuel Kant.

Again, for the full explanation, go back and listen to the Kant episodes. But, because most of you probably already know what I’m talking about, here’s the lightning-round edition just to frame things in this particular discussion. So, all of us listening to this look at the world around us, and we see a world that is solid, static, and unchanging. When, in reality, if we put that table in front of you under an electron microscope, you’d see that it was actually 99.9% empty space and constantly moving. What this tells us is that our senses weren’t necessarily evolved to be able to understand the fabric of reality itself, but really just to be able to create a map of reality that does a good enough job that we can survive and reproduce better than others in a particular set of climate conditions.

See, Descartes made a mistake in Kant’s eyes. Descartes made the assumption that the mind didn’t contribute anything to the phenomena it was looking at. He saw us as just kind of these passive observers just taking it all in. Kant, on the other hand, says that when you take a closer look at the mind, how it receives these phenomena, the mind actually contributes a lot to them. Kant says that for all intents and purposes there are two distinct worlds that exist. There’s the world of things in themselves: that’s the world out there beyond our basic map of reality that we’re reading with our senses. And then there’s the world of human experience, which is our map of the world or a world where our senses perceive these things in themselves and create phenomena that we organize through various mental faculties to be able to make sense of them, this whole process producing for us our human experience of the world.

In other words, we are active observers organizing and governing these raw phenomena, not just taking them in. And, to Kant, we can never know anything about this world of things in themselves, only the world of human experience. But the next chapter in this story is that now you have post-Kantians coming along saying, “Okay, well, if we can’t ever know anything about this world of things in themselves, how can we know for certain there’s more than one thing responsible for all these phenomena? How can we know that these things actually cause the phenomena? Isn’t causality just a category of the mind? Actually, how can we know for certain that this world of things in themselves exists at all?”

And the answer is, folks, at this point in philosophy, we can’t. This is why Kant’s referred to as a transcendental idealist. He’s one of the first members in a longstanding tradition in philosophy known as idealism, or the idea that all of reality -- or at least as we can possibly know it -- is nonmaterial and a construction of the mind. In other words, we can’t know for certain. We can’t just assume that there are these material objects existing in some hypothetical external world that are causing these phenomena we’re experiencing. All that we can be certain about is what’s going on in our minds. Again, certainty is what we’re going for. We have to adhere to this rigorous set of criteria laid out by Descartes.

Now, at this point, some of you are probably out there thinking, “Okay, what are we doing here really? What exactly are we doing with philosophy? Look, when Descartes questioned whether we actually exist or not, I mean, it was a fun thought experiment. When Kant did it, I respected the man’s tenacity. But at a certain point, like, what, we can’t know whether physical things actually exist? Like, how ridiculous is that? What, did Kant’s dad never take him aside and sit him down and say, ‘Son, look, you’re upstairs in that room all day doing your finger painting, wondering whether the world exists or not. Well, I got a news flash for you son: it does. Look, see? [knocking] Table. Ooh, ooh. Hey! Hey! Look over here! [rustling] It’s a newspaper! It’s real, hey! Ooh, it’s the classified section. Now you can get a real job. Ooh! It’s real! Hey, you like real stuff, don’t you?”

No. Now, of course this isn’t exactly how it went, but, I mean, it can start to make you think, “Look, I admire the whole quest for certainty thing. I understand what you guys are trying to do, and I appreciate it. But, at a certain point, I have a life to lead. I have kids to play football with. I have a job to go to. I can’t sit around all day wondering whether a material world actually exists or not. Look, I’m all for certainty. And I understand, you very well may be right. We may only have our thoughts. The universe itself may in fact be just one giant thought. But just the fact that it’s been this long and you can’t even confirm one of the most intuitively obvious things about existence, I’m worried about you. I’m worried you might be wasting your time. And, more importantly, I’m worried you might be wasting my time.”

Now, if anybody out there’s ever felt this way over the course of listening to this show, you’re not alone. Because as the story continues, right around the 19 century, thinkers started to emerge that were very skeptical of not just this longstanding tradition of looking for certainty about things, but more generally this long tradition of philosophers assuming that it’s possible to use reason to just reason our way to solutions about every problem we could ever face as a species. “We’re going to reason to certainty about things! We’re going to reason to the ideal form of government! We’re going to reason to a complete scientific world picture!”

There was this sense at the time that this kind of thinking was sort of outdated, kind of nostalgic, old philosophy. That for so long we’ve tried to reduce everything into these prepackaged, little rational categories, and we’ve done it so much that these categories have become more important to philosophers than the things that make them up, even human beings, for example. I mean, along with this old philosophy went an outdated way of rationally categorizing human beings we’ve talked about many times on this show, you know, this long tradition of seeing people as merely aspects of some larger whole, as merely children of God’s kingdom or merely members of a state.

Out went that way of thinking, and we started to see thinkers emerge like Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, people that took a look at what it is to be a human being much more in terms of what it is to be an individual, a relatively modern concept in human history. Now, of course this wasn’t the only way people were looking at the history of philosophy, but this is the way Sartre was looking at it. There was this feeling that maybe this trajectory of philosophy brought about in the 17th century had been off the rails for a long time and, quite frankly, was completely devoid of value. There’s this feeling that if we ever wanted to make any sort of progress in the future, we needed to do something radical, something fundamentally different than we ever had been doing.

Then along comes a powerful character into history to shake things up, the mad scientist philosopher Husserl. Early in his career on the same page as these 19th century thinkers that believe something radical needs to be done. And this is exactly what he’s trying to do with his early work. He’s not satisfied with idealism being some sort of final destination, and he wants to do something radical. He wants to tweak our methods of looking at these phenomena, study the very structure of consciousness, and arrive at a certainty that includes an external, physical world among other things.

In other words, this rigorous discipline of philosophy just got an extreme makeover. And, yeah, Husserl would agree. You definitely don’t want to spend every second of your life doubting whether the external world exists or not just because philosophers haven’t arrived at some definitive proof of it. I mean, it would be ridiculous. Just imagine if everybody adopted that strategy. What would that look like? Well, for one, nobody in the history of the world would have ever conducted a single scientific experiment. How can you do an experiment on a world you have no reason to believe actually exists?

Just imagine if we never conducted science just because philosophy had never arrived at a method that was going to guarantee we were never mistaken. No. Science doesn’t agonize over the idea of never being mistaken like Descartes did. Science isn’t in the business of certainty. It’s in the business of coming up with a, yes, largely incomplete, yes, tremendously flawed but profoundly useful set of insights that help us understand things a little bit better. Just because it’s not certainty doesn’t make it not useful. And, again, in a weird way, if scientists were out there trying to look for complete certainty, they wouldn’t be able to get anything done.

Husserl makes the distinction between these two very different ways of orienting yourself to the world. Both of which are useful in his eyes, by the way. On one hand we have the phenomenological attitude, sometimes called the philosophical attitude. This is the former one. This is Descartes’s gauntlet. This is the rigorous method of looking for certainty, the 100% honest way of looking at things, doubting everything including your own existence, and then proceeding with caution from there. There’s that way of orienting yourself to the world. And, on the other hand, we have what he calls the natural attitude or the sort of default way of orienting yourself to the world: the way of looking at things that all science is conducted through or, as Husserl says, the way of looking at things that starts with several big presuppositions but, nonetheless, allows us to continue on with our daily lives or scientific inquiry without being paralyzed by this quest for certainty all the time.

These are two different ways of approaching the world. Scientists don’t doubt the kind of things Husserl doubts when he’s looking for certainty. They don’t doubt things like whether there’s actually a correspondence between the thoughts I’m having and the object I’m perceiving. They don’t doubt things like whether the mind itself is something that’s even capable of arriving at objective facts. Yet they conduct scientific experiments assuming these things are in their favor. And it makes sense. Husserl would say that it’s just simply not useful when you’re doing scientific experiments to doubt whether the mind is something even capable of arriving at objectivity. Again, if you get too caught up on certainty, it sabotages your very ability to do science. Science is not certainty.

This is the point Husserl’s making: the phenomenological attitude and the natural attitude are mutually exclusive. It’s impossible to look at the world in both ways simultaneously. For example, a normal, everyday person immersed in the natural attitude might go down to the library, pick up some Husserl. They might read him. They might contemplate how they can know anything for certain. Maybe they even employ a few of his methods. They take a sort of recreational swim in the phenomenological attitude. But, when they’re done reading the book and they leave the library and they go on about their day, they’re not still doubting whether the world actually exists or not.

Now, on that same note, you can be the world’s most die-hard phenomenologist. Let’s say you work nine to five as a professional phenomenologist somewhere. The second that bell rings and you’re taking your union-standardized break, you’re not sitting around in the breakroom wondering whether the vending machine over there is just a mental construction or not. Practicing phenomenology is practicing a new way of seeing the world and the things that make seeing the world possible at all. And Husserl would say, yeah, it’s definitely possible for somebody to go way too far down this rabbit hole of the philosophical attitude, sitting around all day yelling at people. “Well, well, you don’t know! You don’t even know if you exist or not, so, so how can you say that I stole that candy bar?” And that certainly would be a waste of time, right?

But be careful because you can go too far in the other direction too. You can spend your entire life writing off these sort of pointless, armchair-philosopher questions and go on for the rest of your days never really thinking about the presuppositions of the natural attitude and honestly believing that what you’re looking at as you walk around in your everyday life is objective reality. There are people out there that talk about what we see as human beings as though it is objective reality.

Example everyone will know. There are certain big, famous celebrity proponents of science who are, by their own admission, proudly, willfully ignorant of philosophy. And these people will say that philosophy is essentially useless in today’s world because it’s been replaced by a better, more dynamic system called science that does everything philosophy used to do except better. Now, these people are a perfect example of what it looks like to go way too far down that rabbit hole of the natural attitude. I mean, does Bill Nye not realize that if it wasn’t for philosophy he’d just be Bill Nye, the guy?

Like, I mean, seriously, these people -- Bill Nye, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Stephen Hawking, all these people that are proud of the fact they’ve never read philosophy and yet they cavalierly throw around these terms like “objective reality” and “objective truth” and “facts” -- these people -- one of a few things has to be true about them. Either they’ve never considered things like the limitations of their senses, the limitations of human knowledge, all the assumptions present in the natural attitude which, given how little philosophy they’ve claimed to have read, is worrying. Or the more charitable reading -- the reading I’ve forced myself to believe as I sit in the corner neurotically rocking -- is that maybe they have considered all these boundaries between themselves and objectivity, but they use terms like “objective truth” because they see themselves as engaged in this war against religion, and they feel like they need to be a direct substitute to it.

In other words, maybe it’s all a strategy. This is what I think it is. Like, maybe they’re not lost in the natural attitude. Maybe they see that human beings are these things that really seem to enjoy having all the answers and harnessing objective truth, and then religion tells them they can find those sort of answers in the book of Genesis. So, in order to compete with that, let’s sort of gloss over all the limitations of science and that human beings ultimately have to conduct science, and let’s proceed as though our method is the real method of arriving at objective truth.

What I’m saying is, when you go too far down this natural-attitude rabbit hole and you start looking at this stuff as though it is objective truth, it starts to look eerily familiar. You know, like in the 1400s, you had a priest that wore a big robe, and he conducted a ritual at an altar. And he spoke to God and told you what the objective truth of the universe was. In today’s world, you have a scientist wearing a big robe -- a lab coat -- conducting a ritual -- an experiment -- at an altar -- a laboratory -- speaking to the universe and telling you what the objective truth about it is. You never go full natural attitude is what I’m saying.

But back to the story. Now, as you can imagine, when word gets out that Husserl’s come up with this new method of phenomenology that may give us certainty about an external physical world, and much more by the way, it starts to attract a lot of aspiring philosophers that see it as one piece of this radical change we’re going to have to make in philosophy if we want to move forward. One of these thinkers that became a student of Husserl was named Martin Heidegger. Another one was named Jean-Paul Sartre.

Now, in an unexpected turn of events, a turn that many of Husserl’s students couldn’t even fully understand, right around the middle of Husserl’s life he does sort of an about-face with his phenomenology. He takes it in the same direction so many other thinkers before him took it. He loses faith in his early work, and he becomes an idealist. Now, some students followed along with Husserl, adopting his new work. But other students were like, “Mm? No, no.” They thought, “Sure, Husserl, this early work is far from perfect. But, look, it can be fixed. A few clarifications over there, a little development over here. This is going to be solid. Maybe that’s what I’ll work on.” Two of the thinkers that were part of this group were Heidegger and Sartre.

Now, Heidegger, as we talked about, disagreed with some pretty critical aspects of Husserl, not the least of which was the entire idea of consciousness at all. Again, why do we need to think of ourselves like Descartes did back in the 17th century, like we’re subjects acting upon objects or, a more modern spin, consciousness acting upon things in the world? No, to Heidegger, we have no reasonable basis for making that sort of assumption. Being and the world are a unified thing that are fundamentally inseparable from each other.

Well, Sartre reads Heidegger, and he’s convinced. Heidegger’s right. We have no basis for assuming that we are subjects acting upon objects. He’s right. Being and the world are a unified thing. But Sartre leaves room for consciousness. To Sartre, it’s consciousness and the world that are fundamentally inseparable. See, Sartre takes a look at this long history in philosophy we’ve been talking about this whole episode, and he realizes something. The problem everyone seems to have is being able to explain how things work up in this strange box inside of their head that they seem to be trapped in.

They have this factory up in their heads called consciousness or whatever word they use for it, and they have this receiving dock that takes in these semi-trucks full of phenomena. And these phenomena are sent down conveyor belts, and the disenfranchised blue-collar workers organize them and categorize them and turn them into this crude map of the world that they ship out the other side of the factory to us so we can perceive the world. But think about what we talked about last time. Consciousness is not some empty container, some empty factory in our heads waiting to be filled up with perceptions.

No, the more these phenomenologists look at consciousness, the more they see it as more of an activity than some mysterious thing up in our heads. Remember, consciousness is always actional -- doing something -- and referential -- pointing towards something. There’s no such thing as some empty consciousness out there.

See, Sartre’s different from Husserl. Like, when Husserl’s doing his phenomenology, he’s super focused on the task of figuring out what everything is. And the way he does this is through various methods like the eidetic reduction we talked about in Heidegger Part One. What Husserl’s interested in doing in his work is describing things in the world in terms of these universal essences that he arrives at through the eidetic reduction. But, remember, Sartre doesn’t come from that school of thought. In fact, he’d see that whole process as just a misguided extension of this outdated, old philosophy where we thought we could think about everything in terms of these neat categories and universals.

No, Sartre’s more focused on the individual. And he thinks he can’t ever know everything about an individual simply by looking at them in terms of what universal essences intersect by them. For example, it’s so tempting to think that if we could figure out what the essence of something is, we would know what it is. If we had a piece of wax, we did the eidetic reduction, and arrived at its universal essences, that we’ve essentially figured out what it is to be that thing. But Sartre says, no, that’s incomplete. That never tells us the full story.

There’s a famous argument that he has in Being and Nothingness where he quotes a passage from a biography of the French author Gustave Flaubert. And he’s pointing out how ridiculous it is that the biographer that’s writing it is trying to explain the psychology of Flaubert, the psychology of a human being, by using this sort of process of appealing to a bunch of universals. He says, “A critic, for example, wishing to explain the ‘psychology’ of Flaubert, will write that he ‘appeared in his early youth to know as his normal state, a continual exaltation resulting from the twofold feeling of his grandiose ambition and his invincible power…The effervescence of his young blood was then turned into literary passion as happens about the eighteenth year in precocious souls who find the energy of style or the intensities of fiction some way of escaping the need of violent action or of intense feeling, which torments them.’”

So, you can see what the biographer’s trying to do here, right? He’s trying to give his own psychoanalysis of Gustave Flaubert and the things that happened in his youth that ended up causing him to get into writing. Sartre goes on, “In this passage there is an effort to reduce the complex personality of an adolescent to a few basic desires, as the chemist reduces compound bodies to merely a combination of simple bodies. The primitive givens will be grandiose ambition, the need of violent action and of intense feeling; these elements, when they enter into combination, produce a permanent exaltation.”

Just listen to that. Look at that comparison he draws there. We’re trying to break this person down in the same methodical way a chemist reduces compound bodies to merely a combination of simple bodies. He says, “At each state in the description just quoted, we meet with a hiatus. Why did ambition and the feeling of his power produce in Flaubert exaltation rather than tranquil waiting or gloomy impatience? Why did this exaltation express itself specifically in the need to act violently and feel intensely? Or rather why does this need make a sudden appearance by spontaneous generation at the end of the paragraph? And why does this need instead of seeking to appease itself in acts of violence, by amorous adventures, or in debauch, choose precisely to satisfy itself symbolically? And why does Flaubert turn to writing rather than to painting or music for the symbolic satisfaction; he could just as well not resort to the artistic field at all. ‘I could have been a great actor,’ wrote Flaubert somewhere. Why did he not try to be one? In a word, we have understood nothing; we have seen a succession of accidental happenings, of desires springing forth fully armed, one from the other, with no possibility for us to grasp their genesis.”

This brings us to the end of the story, to the place Sartre’s writing his philosophy from. What if this old style of philosophy was severely misguided? What if understanding the universal essences of things isn’t enough to fully understand them? What if we don’t have some consciousness factory up in our heads with these mysterious phenomena that leave us unable to be certain about anything but ideas? What if consciousness and the world are a unified thing, fundamentally inseparable? And, when you start to think about it this way, what if consciousness is like shining a flashlight into a dark room, revealing only a small portion of what would otherwise be concealed? Except it’s more than that.

Imagine there was no flashlight causing the light rays. Metaphorically speaking, what if what we are are the light rays revealing a portion of an otherwise dark room, pure awareness of things in the world? What if the idea that we needed a flashlight to produce the light rays or that there was a barrier between us and the world, what if that was an assumption we’d been making all along? And, as we prepare for next episode where we talk about more of the details of Sartre’s phenomenology and, more importantly, how it affects the way that we should look at ourselves, our lives, and the things that we all care about, Sartre would want us to consider, what if we are consciousness and what if consciousness is radical freedom and responsibility?

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you next time.