Sartre and the Other

Abstract

With some misgivings, I propose to share with you a fragmentary speculation about Sartre and what he has called the problem of the Other, in particular as expounded in Being and Nothingness in the two chapters on the Other and the Body. My misgivings have two sources. For one thing, it's obscure even to myself in what sense what I am going to say-and to report Sartre as saying-counts as philosophy. Is it "philosophical psychology' or "philosophy of mind"? Since I find both these terms bewildering, I can't tell. It is certainly not phenomenology in any pure Husserlian sense. Insofar as it interprets a Sartrean text, perhaps it's "hermeneutics", but as my own speculation at the hand of Being and Nothingness it could only count as hermeneutics in the quaint seventeenth century sense in which one read-and interpreted-the book of nature, in this case the book of human nature. My second reason for self-doubt: Being and Nothingness presents a view of man and the world which is, I believe, almost entirely mistaken. Why worry about it? Because this is a fascinating, indeed, I believe a great work in the tradition of western thought. How can one find philosophical greatness in a text whose premises, and the conclusions they entail, are false? One might put this question also about other philosophical classics; I shall certainly not try to answer it now. Instead let me leave both my meta-questions aside and plunge into my discourse-in the middle, as Plato in the Phaedrus has warned us not to do. In the chapter on the Other Sartre is trying, as he puts it, to "overcome the reef of solipsism". The Other must be approached, however, he tells us, not by any abstract argument (all these have failed), but by a second cogito. And this move, from the original cogito to the cogito by which I apprehend the Other, he likens to Descartes's move in the Third Meditation from himself to God. This is where I want to start.