Conclusions

Intentionality, for Sartre, then, is not representational, as it is for current anglophone philosophers, but relational: it involves a relation of intuition or

knowledge (connaissance) of a part of mind-independent reality, to which attention is paid in perceptual experience, but which is surpassed towards a different object in imaginative experience. The object attended to, or posited, the object made available for demonstrative reference, is the intentional object. Intuiting an object involves awareness of manifest qualities of that object, which motivate the application of determinations, themselves built up through awareness of qualities of objects, which means that the object is experienced as falling under certain categories. It is this rich experience, involving both qualities and determinations, that structures the world of coloured and shaped entities with instrumental and other values out of mere being in-itself. The intentional structure of perceptual experience, then, is the reason why ‘a world appears instead of isolated examples of In-itself. And in this world it is possible to effect a designation and to say this object, that object’ (B&N: 139). In imaginative experience, on the other hand, the manifest qualities of the object of intuition motivate determinations that are not applied to the object of intuition but which specify a different intentional object. The colours and shapes that make up the photograph of Peter, for example, can motivate determinations that specify Peter as an object of attention, rather than simply tracking the features of the photograph. Sartre’s arguments for the claim that consciousness is a relation to an object, a relation of intuition or apprehension, are the subject of chapter 2. In chapter 3, we will see how Sartre’s distinction between the way in which determinations are motivated in perception and in imagination allows him to evade the objection that an experience cannot be a relation to an intuited object on the grounds that the same experience could occur as an hallucination in the absence of any suitable object. The ontology underpinning Sartre’s relational conception of intentionality is the subject of chapter 4. The conception of intentionality as a relation to an object whose manifest qualities motivate determinations to be applied to the object or which specify another object, detailed in this chapter, is the central concern of this thesis, and one which, I claim, grounds the whole of Sartre’s early philosophy.

Sartre’s claim that phenomenal consciousness of the world involves a relation to mind-independent stuff through which qualities are manifested to consciousness as well as determinations that classify the object seen on the basis of its manifest qualities was presented with a challenge in this chapter: to specify a role for qualities to play that could not be played by representations. If qualities are an inessential part of the theory, then so is the relational conception of intentionality: if all aspects of my experience of the world can be accounted for in terms of representations of the world, then Sartre’s claim that phenomenal consciousness consists in relations to mind- independent entities rather than representations of possible scenarios is unfounded. Sartre’s position met this challenge, I claimed (1.5), in his claim that determinations, the representations employed in consciousness to classify the object of awareness, are formed on the basis of awareness of qualities. Representations, obviously, could not play the role of grounding representations. We have also seen that determinations, for Sartre as for Spinoza (1995, letter 50; see B&N: 185), have their meaning specified by what Sartre calls ‘polyvalent negation’. The meaning of a determination, that is, is fixed by a set of things that it does not apply to, and this understanding of determinations means that Sartre’s claim that determinations are formed on the basis of experience is immune to objections based on Wittgenstein’s private language argument (1.5).

Sartre’s theory of the role of determinations in experience may make useful contributions to recent debate over the epistemic role of perception. Eilan, for example, argues that ‘for perceptions to serve as a basis for knowledge it must be possible for the subject to use her perceptions to answer questions about the environment and to incorporate the deliverances of her perceptions into further rational deliberation and action’ (1998, 189). If the answers to perceptual questions are to play the rational roles that Eilan mentions, then they must be conceptually structured. But the operation of conceptual capacities must be constrained in perception in a way that it is not constrained in pure thought if perception is to answer questions about the environment,

and this constraint requires the conceptual deliverances of perception to be based in some way on a nonconceptual component present in perceptual experience but not present in pure thought (1998, 199). This proposal faces the Wittgensteinian challenges discussed in 1.5. McDowell’s point that rational relations can hold only between conceptually structured relata precludes understanding the conceptual deliverances of perception as justified by, or inferred from, the nonconceptual component of experience. But Sartre’s emphasis on the classification of experience instead of inference from it sidesteps this objection. Similarly, if the concepts employed in the deliverances of perception are themselves to be understood as drawn from perception, then Kripke’s objection that a rule must have infinite content where experience is finite can be sidestepped only by the Sartrean manoeuvre of construing the determinations employed in experience not as fully defined concepts but as refinable sets of negative necessary conditions for class membership, and so denying that their application involves following a rule.

Sartre also holds that purely qualitative awareness is required to explain how events in a person’s environment may affect the way that person is aware of other things without that person being able to report that those events had this affect. As we have seen, Sartre’s claim that a linguistically inarticulable awareness must be one free of representations conflates the notion of

representation with that of conceptual representation. Only conceptual

representations must by definition be inferentially and rationally linked to one another, so it remains possible for a representation of an object to be unreportable if it is not conceptual, which is to say that it does not stand in inferential relations to beliefs such as the belief that the object is represented (1.4). And Sartre also holds that purely qualitative awareness of objects is required to explain how one can deliberately turn attention to those objects, but as we have seen this role could equally be played by vague representational awareness that becomes more explicit as attention is

focused, and simple experiments suggest that we do indeed have vague representational awareness of objects that we are not attending to (1.4).

The relation between qualities and determinations in perceptual experience has implications for the issues of whether Sartre is to be understood as a structural realist or idealist, and whether he is understood as a semantic realist or idealist. The structural question, we saw in 1.2, is not clearly settled by the positionality of perceptual experience. It is unclear from this aspect of Sartre’s theory alone, that is, whether Sartre takes being in-itself to be already structured as a set of mutually independent chunks, as McCulloch claims, or whether he takes being in-itself to be an unstructured mass whose apparent structure is a function of the ways in which we are aware of it, as Danto and Baldwin claim. But one thing is clear: since the world is formed from being in- itself by the intentionality of consciousness, the world is certainly made up of various distinguishable objects, such as chairs and tables, and these objects display the qualities that they seem to display. Qualities, though, bring in a new motivation for ascribing structure to being in-itself as well as to the world: if different regions of being in-itself manifest different qualities to consciousness, it seems that this must be due to structural differences between these objects. A full account of Sartre’s understanding of qualities, though, requires an assessment of Sartre’s theory in the light of the traditional philosophical claim that such qualities as colours cannot be construed as parts of mind-independent reality and so experience must be understood as representation of that reality rather than relation to it. This issue is discussed in chapter 4 (4.1 and 4.5). Sartre’s understanding of determinations as built up from experience of manifest qualities similarly has ramifications for positioning Sartre in relation to various realisms and idealisms. The structure of the world, constructed from the interplay of consciousness and being in-itself, is two-fold: determinations help to structure it, on the basis of its manifest qualities. So it seems that Sartre must subscribe to one form of semantic realism: the world must really have the structure that the determinations employed in experience and thought ascribe to it, since that very ascription helps to structure the

world in the first place, and since the determinations are formed and motivated by the manifest qualities of the world. But this, of course, is not to say that determinations must or can capture the structure (if there is one) of

being in-itself. Sartre’s claim that determinations have their meaning fixed by

‘polyvalent negation’ may have ramifications for the issue of whether determinations can track the structure (if there is one) of being in-itself, for if negativity is essential to the meaning of a determination and negativity can enter into the world only by the activity of consciousness, then determinations cannot correspond to structures of mind-independent being. But this issue cannot be settled without first settling the question of whether being in-itself has any structure at all for Sartre, and this question cannot be answered without the consideration of Sartrean ontology that is central to chapter 4.

Chapter 2