With this picture of the Ego in mind, the next question is: how are we to account for the inaccuracy or accuracy of our self-knowledge?235 Self-knowledge in the sense of knowledge of character is knowledge of an object, because the Ego of states, qualities, actions etc is a transcendent object.
This means it is safe to begin by assuming that there are no special considerations about knowledge of the Ego, and instead look at knowledge more generally.
Sartre has an unusual account of knowledge which he describes as follows:
There is only intuitive knowledge. Deduction and discursive argument, incorrectly called examples of knowing, are only instruments which lead to intuition. When intuition is reached, methods used to attain it are effaced before it; in cases where it is not attained, reason and argument remain as indicating signs which point to an intuition beyond reach.236
As Detmer puts it, it seems that “intuition” means “the direct apprehension, or if you prefer, the immediate seeing or grasping of some point or principle.”237238 Given our everyday conceptions about knowledge, the idea of a knowledge solely based on intuition might seem unlikely or even fantastical, but a good reason to allow this importance to intuitive knowledge comes to us through Lewis Carroll. In order to prove an argument through deductive logic, he claims, we must accept the truth of a certain set of premises and propositions that show they lead to a conclusion. If knowledge is something gained by this sort of reasoning, it flows from a series of propositions that necessarily entail a conclusion. In Carroll’s original paper, “What the Tortoise said to Achilles”,239 we have Achilles advancing the following argument (overleaf):
235 i.e., the (reflective) judgments we make about ourselves.
236 BN, p.195.
237 Detmer, Freedom as a Value, p.187.
238 In order for this to meet our ordinary expectations about knowledge, there has to be come kind of immediate givenness to the ‘accuracy’ of knowledge that would lead to these disputes being potentially settled.
239Carroll, Lewis, “What the Tortoise said to Achilles”, in Mind, vol. 2 no.14, 1895, pp.278-80.
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Therefore, Z.
The tortoise, not believing Achilles, is prepared to grant A and B, but not to accept that they entail Z.
Achilles asks that the tortoise grants a further premise, C: “if A and B are true, Z follows”. Yet the tortoise can refuse Z even on the basis of A, B, and C, because he can demand a further premise, D, which says that A, B, C is a good argument for Z. This can go on forever: if we posit A, B, C, D the tortoise can make trouble by demanding a premise E, that “A, B, C, D proves Z “is a valid argument. If
“A, B, therefore Z” is sound and valid but not convincing, no amount of extra premises will be sufficient, or necessary and sufficient, to make it persuasive. The conclusion we are meant to draw from this is that “deductive logic without intuition proves nothing. Logic is of no use if it does not help me to see that something is so”.240 This seems to give us reason to accept that intuition is necessary for the acquisition of knowledge. Sartre radicalises this: intuition is sufficient, not merely necessary, for the acquisition of knowledge: “[t]here is only intuitive knowledge”.241 If all knowledge is ultimately grounded on some kind of immediate seeing, then there is no place at the site of knowledge gain for a deductive argument. Logical reasoning can allow us to see something, to have an insight, but it is not sufficient for knowledge. Later on, in Truth and Existence, Sartre explicitly rejects the idea that logical discourse creates knowledge; the “contemplative” outlook that insists that it does is “a kind of thought making truth the product of reasoning and of discourse that refuse [sic] intuition’s fundamental revealing value”.242 We can still need a specific procedure to get to knowledge, such as deductive reasoning, but the way this gives us knowledge lies in intuition, not some special non-intuitive feature of the argument itself.243
Before getting into more detail about this “seeing”, there is one objection it is useful to get out of the way. We might want to suggest that two people could “see” the same thing and fail to get the same knowledge. If all knowledge is a matter of seeing but what you learn is un(der)determined by what you see, then we don’t have a good explanation of how a particular contact with the world
240 Detmer, Freedom as a Value, p. 189.
241 BN, p.195.
242 Sartre, J-P., Truth and Existence. Translated by Adrian van den Hoven. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. p.58. Hereafter referenced as T&E.
243 If the reader still sees the idea of intuitive knowledge as strange, it might be helpful to see how Husserl proposed something similar in Cartesian Meditation III. See Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Cairns, D., Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1960.
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gives you knowledge. Imagine you are playing poker with two other people, Alice and Bob. Alice has just placed a very large bet, and your response could turn the whole game. You and Bob have the same, unobstructed view of her playing with her watch; Bob is aware, but you are not, that she plays with her watch when she lies. On one reading of the situation, you both see exactly the same thing, therefore if knowledge is a matter of seeing you should have the same knowledge. If we know everything we see, and Bob knows Alice is bluffing, you should too.
This objection falls down because of the passive model of perception it presupposes – by Sartre’s lights, perception is active. This passivity is what suggests the claim that you and Bob are both
“seeing the same thing”, since it suggests that in “seeing”, something independent of you filters in, unmodified, via the senses. The active sense of “seeing the same thing” here is something like experiencing the same sensations, which is quite different from sharing an active perception of the world. We say we are “seeing the same thing” because there is, give or take a few degrees of visual angle, the same pattern of light reaching us, and hence the same image created on our retinas, transmitted to the sight centres of the brain, etc. Sartre explicitly rejects the notion of sensations this hangs on, saying “it is pure fiction”.244 When we equate sensation with perception and describe it as some kind of sense-data based on light wavelengths travelling into the eye, we leave out both the immediate givenness of the world and the affective dimension of perception. The world manifests values to us as well as a brute picture or image, and so whilst the players may all see the same visual picture (in terms of primary and secondary qualities), only Bob experiences the world as demanding that he bets. When we look at a full account of what is actively perceived, we are not perceiving the same thing as Bob because we are not directly perceiving that Alice is lying. By taking in the affective dimension of perception, we can see that the players were not “seeing” the same thing at all, so the objection does not hold.
So far we have a starting point: knowledge is a matter of contact with the world through perception.
Knowledge either is or is intimately related to the presence of the world to us – there is something about seeing that specific tree writhe in the Mediterranean heat that gives us knowledge. In light of the world being created or illuminated by consciousness, this contact or presence must be part of a project – the project of making a world that can meet our desires out of the in-itself. If knowledge is only present during direct contact with the world, then there is a tension here with our necessary separation from the objects of our perception. This can both be seen and accounted for in the following statements:
244 BN, p.338.
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The for-itself is outside itself in the in-itself since it causes itself to be defined by what it is not; the first bond between the in-itself and the for-itself is therefore a bond of being.
Consciousness, having projects that depend on making a world to enact them (like the hiker making a steep, harsh mountainous path in order to be fatigued), is defined by those projects that relate to a missing end such as a fatigue the hiker does not have. The world is generated as one that presents values in line with those ends; the in-itself and consciousness are linked by their needing each other to exist.245
But this bond is neither a lack or absence … [t]he knower is not; he is not apprehensible. He is nothing other than that which brings it about that there is a being-there on the part of the known, a presence – for by itself the known is neither present nor absent, it simply is.
Here is the problem: how can we fit in the characterisation of projects as oriented at lack with the claim that lack and absence do not characterise the bond between the object and consciousness?
One way to solve it is to suggest that at the point of access to the object, it is neither given as in the present, nor in the future or past. It could be given as being a pure movement through the temporal extases of past and future, a contact that involves the past, present, and future all at once and is not located or stuck in one of those moments. Sartre gives a statement supporting this: “But this
presence of the known is presence to nothing, since the knower is the pure reflection of a non-being246”, i.e. since the knowing consciousness is oriented towards the non-being of the future, it is
“not” in the sense of not yet, it borrows its being from the future. This is supported by a later remark: “if we can not posit any intermediary,247 we must at the same time reject both continuity and discontinuity as a type of presence of the knower to the known”.248 This matches up to our picture of temporality because the past is definitely continuous with consciousness and the future is always potentially discontinuous with consciousness, yet both extases cannot be removed from the overall flow. Sartre’s conclusion later in the same paragraph is more definitive on this point: “[t]he presence of the for-itself to the in-itself can be expressed neither in terms of continuity nor in terms of discontinuity: it is pure denied identity”. I take “pure denied identity” here to mean the primary
245 Of course, there is the in-itself regardless of consciousness, but it does not have the meaningful status of the world, it cannot stand out in the sense of ex sistere on its own.
246 Ibid., p.200.
247 Between the knowing consciousness and its object.
248 Ibid., p.201.
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instance of non-identity between consciousness and its object. This non-identity helps make sense of the idea that the present is mysterious or vanishing; presence, the time where an object is present to us, is bizarre. Knowledge is (closely related to) the constitution of the world in the present moment, it is the site of the creation of what there (now) is in order for projects to engage. Our knowledge of the world is an immediate insight into the world given to us in and through our creating that world.
This opens up another problem: since we ordinarily talk about knowledge as being something we get to keep, talking about instantaneous contact with the world doesn’t seem to capture it. Rather than being (semi) permanent, knowledge is challenged constantly because consciousness is always temporalizing – time is always flowing, and the contact with the object we have in knowledge is always slipping away from us: “I can grasp what is present to me only by temporalizing myself in behaviours that aim at the future”249250 which makes us “a being which is not yet what it is”.251 Because of this, the project of verification or checking of knowledge and truth is perpetual; this lines up with earlier remarks in BN about the constant need for renewal of projects, like the early example of the gambler’s constantly (un)renewed project to give up gambling.252 Moreover, each object as it is present to us suggests a([n] element of the) future, such as the cup of hot tea which suggests both that it will be warm in a few seconds but cold in a few minutes. “[Being] depends, in its manifest being, on a verification which is to come and that is considered as having occurred or, rather, there is a whole important dimension of its present being which is not given in intuition and yet which is present in its very character as absence”.253 Objects in the present refer forwards into the future because they manifest a lack of some future state of affairs, like the mushrooms that demand to be kept in the pan because they aren’t cooked. These claims exerted on the future can serve as motivation for a future project: the mushrooms might also contextually demand that salt and pepper are added when they have been fried. As I engage with the world, I constantly test my anticipations and establish new ones, so all free projects will lead to the creation of (new)
knowledge. In turn, all knowledge involves the process of objectifying the world by the negation and nihilation involved in the passage of time,254 it is constantly being made determinate. The passage of knowledge into the past turns it from a live, actual contact with the world into a fixed, determinate
249 This bears striking parallels with Hegel’s arguments about Sense-Certainty and the “now”: Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A.V. Miller. Oxford University Press: New York, 1977. pp.63-5.
250 T&E, p.19.
251 Ibid., p.18.
252 BN, p.56-7.
253 T&E, p.24.
254 i.e., the flow of the future and present into the past makes them negated, objectified, definite.
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object that is part of my past – the specific contact I had with the world is now a part of my history.
Since our knowledge is perpetually becoming fixed, it changes from an irreducible part of our own conscious flow to a publicly available object. Instead of being a set of demands that are sustained by their flow into other projects, the knowledge (and through it, its object) has become fixed and an in-itself. In fact, this process is another way of looking at the flow of the present into the past. Sartre’s belief that “essence is what has been” is crucial to explaining this – the past is, as we saw in the previous chapter, determinate, negated, and fixed. So what does this constant negation actually do to knowledge?
Since this negated knowledge is fixed and determinate, it will be communicable in a way my
immediate lived experiences are not. I have revealed the world to myself through and to knowledge when I have the initial knowledge-constituting insight; the process of temporalisation, of creating a unity of consciousness across time, ensures that our knowledge immediately passes over into a negated, intersubjectively available form. This form is what Sartre calls truth: “truth cannot be for just a single absolute-subject. If I communicate a revealed manifestation, I communicate it with my revealing behaviour, with the outline and selection that I performed on it, with contours”.255 A truth’s “contours” are the selections of project and/or attitude that led up to it being made, which make it a revelation of a concrete, specific world. When that truth is shared, “the in-itself appears to the newcomer as for-itself”, i.e. the world appears as something coming to me through the
intermediary of another consciousness. “[A]t the same time the for-itself becomes in-itself” in the sense that my subjective revelation of the world takes on the form of an object seeking to compel the other to see the world in a certain way, which appears as ownerless and objective.256 Thanks to temporalisation, at any point where we grasp knowledge apart from the initial moment of insight, it will therefore be through a truth – the same fixed, determinate, or propositional object that we communicate to others. When I try to (re)capture my previous insight into the way the world is, it comes from the in-itself, the factical, rather than being lived through as a present and ongoing revelation. Knowledge as it is presented in BN is never truly present to us but has always already
255 T&E, pp.5-6.
256 These remarks borrow a lot of their force from the BN chapter on intersubjectivity which has not been addressed yet, but the description should seem reasonable. If a friend tells me a certain part of town is beautiful, that judgment reflects on him and his character at the same time as it reveals or gives me insight into an “ownerless” idea that the town is worth seeing. An objective force that compels consciousness in a certain direction seemingly to contradict Sartre’s account of freedom, but the influence of other
consciousnesses will turn out to be a special case.
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slipped into the past,257 so in Sartre’s specialised terminology what we call knowledge is really truth apart from when it is lived through. Since truth is a ready-formed and ready shaped vision of the world, it can trigger in us a new or renewed appreciation of the knowledge we previously had – it can cause us to see the world in the same way we did previously. It suggests to us certain
anticipations about the way the world is, like that our salt cellar is filled with salt, and can be tested by having those anticipations tested. As long as the anticipations are fulfilled, we regain the
knowledge we had, and the truth remains stable and unchallenged. This is only a sketch, and we will return shortly to a fuller account of how Sartre sees error and how it relates to truth.
We might worry that this leaves us with a story about knowledge and truth which doesn’t leave room for accuracy or inaccuracy. We could be suggesting a total subjectivism where there are no wrong or right answers, just potential spaces of reason that might or might not be inhabited, different ways of seeing the world we might or might not think of as appropriate. The argument runs something like this: if I have free rein in setting my goals, I have free rein in the anticipations that they give me, so I have almost limitless freedom with regard to what is true for me. In short, it says we are at risk of losing everything we normally want to capture when we talk about truth and knowledge. Detmer summarises this danger well: “You have your claim, based upon your intuition, and I have my counter claim, based upon my quite different intuition. All we can do, so the objection
We might worry that this leaves us with a story about knowledge and truth which doesn’t leave room for accuracy or inaccuracy. We could be suggesting a total subjectivism where there are no wrong or right answers, just potential spaces of reason that might or might not be inhabited, different ways of seeing the world we might or might not think of as appropriate. The argument runs something like this: if I have free rein in setting my goals, I have free rein in the anticipations that they give me, so I have almost limitless freedom with regard to what is true for me. In short, it says we are at risk of losing everything we normally want to capture when we talk about truth and knowledge. Detmer summarises this danger well: “You have your claim, based upon your intuition, and I have my counter claim, based upon my quite different intuition. All we can do, so the objection