The discussion so far leads us to see that we have a basic responsibility for the world insofar as we make it exist; the world we are faced with is made by our projects, by our ends that create a world in line with their conditions of completion and satisfaction. The inherent lack in human reality means that “[m]y ultimate and initial project … is, as we shall see, always the outline of a solution to the problem of being. But this solution is not first conceived and realised; we are this solution.”181 Any given concrete approach to the problem of lack demands a world in which to enact it, and so we are responsible for the world that we live through. The awareness of this responsibility, anguish, is apparently extremely painful to the point where we can find ourselves entirely devoted to avoiding it.182 We are told that “anguish is reflective apprehension of the self”;183 insofar as the self is an ultimately impossible project, anguish is the collision of our reflective awareness of ourselves as having achievable, well-formed goals with the awareness that they ultimately point towards something impossible. It is a special kind of horror at the way that our actions are all dependent on the impossible, on an original choice that sits outside of the space of reasons yet is still definitively ours. Moreover, the flexibility inherent in our choice of the world poses a double-edged threat to our goals as we usually see them; either that our most cherished and meaning-giving values might collapse and see us becoming what we most hate, or that a change we see as positive and constantly strive for might remain eternally thwarted by processes for which we are responsible. I might remain locked into smoking despite despising it and myself for carrying on, for instance. We will see that a reconciliation with our freedom is the foundation of ethics for the early Sartre; the unethical begins with the set of responsibility dodging tactics he puts under the umbrella of “bad faith”.
To fully describe the structure of this self-deception, we need to have the answer to three sub-questions about self-awareness qua awareness of the Ego or I:
A) What is the nature of the self?
181 BN, p.485.
182 More on this later, in the chapter on “bad faith”.
183 Ibid., p.45.
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B) What is it for us to be aware of or know something as being true?
and
C) Are there any special considerations relating to our awareness and/or knowledge of truths about ourselves?
Hopefully this is uncontroversial; if the overall question is one about knowledge and self-deception, then we need to know what the self is and how we come to have knowledge (about it).
This chapter will look at the picture of the Ego and character coming out of Transcendence of the Ego, asking if our character can casually determine our action(s) or not and if our consciousness is coextensive with our character.184
In the less conventional second half, the chapter looks at what knowledge is in Truth and Existence, setting out his unusual picture of knowledge as a kind of intuition or ‘direct seeing’. After addressing some apparent flaws to do with subjectivism, we will see that the nature of error in this account is directly applicable to and pre-empts the account of self-deception in Being and Nothingness. Along the way, it will note the interesting connection between the intuition/presence based account of truth and knowledge and his account of the present, given in the chapter above.
Although Being and Nothingness contains material on knowledge (some of which will be drawn on), Truth and Existence will be the main focus of this account. This is because, in Being and Nothingness, knowledge is covered as a facet of presence and temporality, as a stepping stone to later points in the text and its overall arc. Moreover, in Being and Nothingness, no completed ethical position is present and the goal of the text is not to elucidate an ethics – not even as a stated secondary goal. In Truth and Existence, by contrast, we have a complete text devoted to knowledge and truth which also explores its ethical dimension. Although it was never published in Sartre’s lifetime, the text is complete and compatible with the ontology of Being and Nothingness. The opening pages of Truth and Existence read almost as a summary of that prior text, with little or no drift in the broad strokes of Sartre’s position. I hope that the reader can, by readily reconciling the ideas from Truth and Existence with those that came before, see that this is the case and accept that text as a
184For an alternative account of the arguments in Transcendence of the Ego, one that focuses far more on the divergence from Husserl it represents, see Priest, Stephen. The Subject in Question: Sartre's Critique of Husserl in The Transcendence of the Ego. Routledge: London, 2000.
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continuation and expansion on Sartre’s earlier ideas on the project, presence, and knowledge.
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