The above picture, while useful for showing the broad outlines of Sartre's theory, does not consider the relation between the motif and the mobile past the need to synthesise them together in the Sartrean account of action. In this section we will look at the exact relationship between the motif and the mobile, and the light that relationship sheds on instrumentality in Sartre's picture of action.
Although we can investigate this synthesis from either side, it makes sense to begin by considering the motif, the objective set of circumstances (or presumed circumstances) that justify the action, because on the face of it that is the better candidate for explaining a non capricious, properly justified action – it is immune to the kinds of random changes that Sartre ascribes to Ferdinand Lot’s account of the mobile, at least in the actions of Constantine. Sartre elaborates on the motif in one very informationally dense section which implicitly brings in everything we have gone over above:
(1) the cause [motif] is objective; it is the state of contemporary things as it is revealed to a consciousness ... (2) Nevertheless this state of affairs can be revealed only to a for-itself since in general the for-itself is the being by which "there is" a world. (3) Better yet, it can be revealed only to a for-itself which chooses itself in this or that particular way – that is, to a for-itself which has made its own individuality. The for-itself must of necessity have projected itself in this or that way in order to discover the instrumental implications of instrumental-things.102
Let’s break this down:
1) The motif is objective in the sense it is not up for debate whether it is present or not in the world;
it just is the case that there are ships in harbour or onions on the chopping board – things are this way, and it is up to us to reinterpret them or debate what they ask of us in their existence, but there is nothing we can do about their presently being where they are; the brute existents103 just are arranged in a particular way at the present moment. The state of affairs that we call the motif has an independent existence from us and is revealed to us, not generated in some kind of idealism.
2) The world, and any motif manifested in it, is nonetheless dependent on a human subject because
102 Ibid., p. 469.
103 Items or things considered as in-itself.
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it must be revealed to exist, and revelation through nihilation is precisely the domain or purview of the for-itself.
3) To exist is literally to stand out,104 and for something to stand out as differentiated from the undifferentiated mass of the in-itself there must be the nihilating action of a for-itself, the
generation of meaning via absence or lack related to our projects that we saw above. Even though Sartre is committed to the independence of the in-itself from consciousness or human projects, the world which that in-itself amounts to for us is entirely generated by and dependent on
consciousness and conscious projects. This is a natural conclusion to draw from the earlier remarks Sartre makes about the nature of negation and nihilation, such as that “man is the only being by whom a destruction can be accomplished … [natural disasters] merely modify the masses of things”.105 Our world as a whole is generated in this fashion, not just what we might think as being the currently relevant parts of it to our projects, the specific tools that right now are useful to us in achieving our ends. If we are to take seriously the idea that all perception is a perceptive act, then to be an act it must be rationally justified in line with some project, which is to say that the entire world is generated in line with our projects, even if it is made to have the value of not-worth-paying-attention-to or mere background with respect to our current project. We can see this most clearly in the case of “the gunner who has been assigned an objective”,106 i.e. ordered to shoot a particular target. Aiming at a particular spot is as much a case of not shooting at the other possible targets as at is a case of shooting at the designated target – in order to point out the bullseye, we have to exclude the outer rings, so the gunner “carefully points his gun in a certain direction excluding all others”. Hence even what we would want to usually refer to as inessential or peripheral parts of the world are enmeshed in our projects precisely as being left out of them; they are included in the world in order to be excluded from our projects. Instrumental complexes make no sense in the absence of projects, and the whole of the world is the instrumental complex at play in the for-itself's projects, not just the parts of the world that seem to be directly relevant.
The first question that comes to mind here is how to integrate this with the notion of the
translucency of consciousness – how are we aware of our constructing the world in this fashion, if it is indeed an action and a project in itself to create the world that supports our other projects?
However, there is textual evidence that Sartre, at least, sees this characterisation to be backward and that in fact the mobile is our awareness of the motif. On a superficial level, if we take the
104 I.e. the original Latin phrase “ex sistere” which became our word “exist” literally means to stand out.
105 Ibid., p.32
106 Ibid., p.32
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valuational demands made by our projects to be demands objects in the world seem to make on us in light of the project, it is at least plausible that the lines between this and the mobile (on our earlier baseline construal) would be blurred from time to time. After all, the mobile does not necessarily have to be thematised as a reason for acting – it can be some kind of gut feeling or emotional charge in the world, and we can see this quite clearly in the example of the soldier fleeing the battlefield under heavy enemy fire. As bullets land all around him, he is seized by a sudden terror and flees, never having conceptualised the need to run away as such - only subsequently being able to conceptualise the whole event later. It is through the emotion of terror that he apprehends the battlefield as dangerous because, for instance, it threatens his various projects that depend on him coming home from the war alive such as raising his children or pursuing some civilian career. His fear is almost wholly the pre-reflective apprehension of these goals that depend on his survival, which causes the world to manifest value properties to him, and is exactly in the same affective class of experience as the mobile was for Lot studying Constantinople. We might tentatively suggest that the mobile is nothing more than this level of apprehension of the current end the subject is working towards, that the affective urge to act that we formerly called the mobile is made up, at least in some cases, just of the value structure that is an awareness of our projects. If this is the case, then what we called the mobile, in the unreflective case, is just (the apprehension of) the value structure of the for-itself. We will return to the reflectively conscious or volitional version of the mobile later, the variant where I say to myself explicitly that I will perform a certain action.
Returning to the example of the soldier, the world does not disappear in the episode of wholly emotional engagement with the battlefield. The soldier is still situated in an objective world, parts of which are only a configuration of matter – the breaching explosions that are growing closer, the yells of the enemy in the next street, the walls that might give cover or give way at any minute to a hostile worming squad – and all of these are apprehended as a part of the experience. Indeed, this configuration of matter has to have been nihilated107 to produce the world that is so threatening;
even if the world has melted down to just being “too much” in an episode of horrified dissociation, it is still there. In order to be overloaded by the experience, the world has to be present to the soldier as blanked-out-because-overwhelming. To this extent, the motif is always one awareness of the mobile, and vice versa. It is this insight that Sartre tracks in this pair of statements:
It is obvious that the apprehension of the motive [mobile] refers at once to the cause [motif], its correlate, since the motive [mobile], even when made-past and fixed in-itself, at least maintains as
107 i.e. we have to have hung demands on it.
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its meaning the fact that it has been a consciousness of a cause [motif], i.e., the discovery of an objective structure of the world.108
[P]ositional consciousness of the cause [motif] is on principle a non-thetic consciousness of itself as a project toward an end. In this sense it is a motive [mobile] ... Thus cause [motif] and motive [mobile]
are correlative, exactly as the non-thetic self-consciousness is the ontological correlate of the thetic consciousness of the object.109
In light of this correlation, Sartre shows us that in fact the mobile and the motif are aspects of one and the same structure. Given that both of these components of action are in awareness of our (the same) ends, then the mobile, motif, and end are not really distinct. We should think of them instead as different parts or moments of the same thing, our current project, which we apprehend
differently at different times and under different contexts. Our positional consciousness of a motif, because of Sartre's commitment to the pre-reflective cogito, must contain a non-thetic
self-awareness of itself, and this non-thetic self-self-awareness is manifested as what we wanted to call the mobilebefore, as certain feelings about the situation we find ourselves in. Hence the mobile, the motif, and the end all must be co-originary, and so they must all be generated at the very start of the project – in fact, for a project to start is exactly for the mobile, motif, and end to all come into being (or ‘upsurge’) at once. By extension, the entire system of instrumentality that we experience, the world itself, is in some relevant sense just an awareness of our projects – the choice of ourselves as having a given project is not at all separate from choosing the world itself. In fact, this is nothing more than the development of comments Sartre has made earlier in Being and Nothingness - “what I expect from the carburettor, what the watchmaker expects from the works of the watch … is a disclosure of being”110 - the whole of the instrumental complex is entirely dependent on our projects, the objectively present state of affairs in the world is nonetheless dependent on being interrogated with some aim in mind so that there can be a world in the first place. What we have to remember in this continuity between these early comments and the discussion of the project structure over five hundred pages later is that the simultaneous upsurge of our ends and the world was in mind from the very beginning, present right at the first discussions of negation. Sartre's account is holistic in the sense that the parts of the structure motif/mobile/end are interdependent as aspects of a synthetic totality that is action. They are not independent terms that are unified by being involved in action. The aspects of action they capture are also taken in by the alternative
108 Ibid., p.472.
109 Ibid., p.471.
110 Ibid., p. 31.
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accounts Sartre considered - the motif and the mobile are all introduced as important terms for other writers/thinkers – the different varieties of historian, the proponents of free will or determinism, but never Sartre himself. The account of the unitary upsurge is already implicitly present in the classic example of Pierre in the café, at least implicitly – the cafe would not have risen up as presenting us with Pierre as an absence if meeting him there were not our operative goal and justifying consideration for being in the café.111 We have already seen that Sartre's overall picture is founded on an original project that gives meaning to a totality of meaningful projects that
nonetheless do not make up the original project, but are rather indistinguishable from it, completely parasitical on it in spite of the possibility of reconstructing the original project on the basis of the sub projects that it produces. At the level of this original project, the project in question has to be purely intrinsic, in other words, the question “… but why have that project?” has to make no sense because our analysis is at a level beyond this kind of questioning.
One clarification is still needed here as to what is meant by “intrinsic” goals, because we experience ourselves as doing something for its own sake very regularly. For instance, I used to enjoy having a cider on the way home. If someone asked me why I had chosen cider out of the whole bar, I would reply “because I felt like it” and really mean that; the value of having that drink seemed to come from itself and have nothing leading up to it or justifying it - it was experienced as being intrinsic. So, one objection to the above picture of intrinsic ends is that it does not do justice to these kinds of experiences; even if it seems to hold logically, it is breaking Sartre’s commitment to respecting the power and validity of first person experiences as they are lived through. Since we experience
ourselves as having intrinsic ends that are not the original project, then there must be other intrinsic ends in play which in principle could serve as guaranteeing the instrumental actions leading up to them. This account could give us a motivational structure made up of multiple interwoven but nonetheless unrelated projects, some of them quite banal like walking my dog every day and having cider after a walk and some of them more serious like being a good citizen. One immediate problem with this kind of account is trying to see how the competing demands of these projects would be balanced if they are not related by an overarching goal. We might end up with some kind of drive theory by following this route, perhaps talking about a polyp-armed self as with Nietzsche in
Daybreak 119, but Sartre rejects this kind of story: “[e]very desire if presented as an irreducible is an absurd contingency and involves in absurdity human reality ... I can not in fact consider this fondness for rowing as the fundamental project of Pierre; it contains something secondary and derived”.112
111 "In fact Pierre is absent from the whole café ... I myself expected to see Pierre, and my expectation has caused the absence of Pierre to happen as a real event concerning this café" Ibid., p.34.
112 Ibid., pp.582/3, emphasis mine.
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This seems to me to be a clear endorsement of the above picture, where any project or desire has to either feature as an instrumental component of achieving another end, or refer directly to the original project. All the same, given that experiences of enjoying something for its own sake are universal, whether that’s a cider or an apricot cocktail, we can’t throw out the idea that we experience projects as being intrinsic. However, we can deny that this is the foundational form of the intrinsic. What I wish to draw here is a distinction between a ‘hard’ sense of the intrinsic beyond which we can find no support(ing project) and a ‘soft’ sense of the intrinsic which can be analysed in terms of some support(ing project). We can draw this idea out in terms of completeness and finality of the projects in question – a hard intrinsic project, once complete, would in principle admit of no further projects to take place which are connected to itself. A soft intrinsic project, by contrast, enables or at least permits other projects to take place after it has completed but does not present itself as such. On this system of categorisation, a hard intrinsic project is and can only be the original project argued for above.
What could this project be? It is helpful here to recapitulate some of our earlier conclusions. Firstly, we should remember there is always a relevant sense in which the in-itself is the foundation of the for-itself, insofar as they are both parts/moments of a synthetic totality. Human reality stands in a similar relation to the Mona Lisa and its components in Catalano’s example, which is both the Mona Lisa and a collection of paint deposits on a canvas – there is no difference at all between the painting and the paint, nothing whatsoever separates the two, but there is nonetheless the paint and the painting which are different in spite of being part of an inseparable synthetic totality. Likewise, the itself just is the in-itself, and is separated by absolutely nothing from the in-itself, but the itself and the in-itself are nonetheless separate. Human reality, considered abstractly as the for-itself, is, and remains, divided from itself (as the in-itself) by absolutely nothing. Secondly, the only project that adequately explains human reality must be a total project, or else we are subject to an infinite regress, an infinite number of underlying drives that generate our drives, an infinite series of desires that explain our desires. This gets us nowhere. Human reality is not just characterised by the for-itself, because that for-itself is founded on the in-itself that is the necessary condition of its being. As the for-itself is coincidence with itself locked in a synthetic totality with non-coincidence with itself, it would fail if it made an effort to simply return to being the pure or basic in-itself that it is separated from by nothingness. This means that insofar as the for-itself desires any return to the in-itself, “the for-itself, being the negation of the in-itself, could not desire the pure and simple
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return to the in-itself.113” As a result it must attempt self-coincidence in a different mode, which can only be to self-coincide as being the for-itself, as being self-coincidence with being non-coincident. It is an abject paradox for non-coincidence to coincide with itself, because if it succeeds in coinciding
return to the in-itself.113” As a result it must attempt self-coincidence in a different mode, which can only be to self-coincide as being the for-itself, as being self-coincidence with being non-coincident. It is an abject paradox for non-coincidence to coincide with itself, because if it succeeds in coinciding