(DOC) The Free Will Problem

THE FREE WILL PROBLEM Do not, I beg you, look for anything behind phenomena. They are themselves their own lesson. -Goethe 1 A Phenomenological Analysis of Free Will, in Defence of Act-Libertarianism by David Proud, M.Phil., M.Sc., P.G.C.E.(I.C.T.), B.A., B.A. (Open) 2 CONTENTS Chapter One: The Problem…………………………………………………………………………4 1.1. The Agent as Free Agent………………………………………………………………………4 1.2. The Agent as Embodied Subject…………………………………………………………… 6 Chapter Two: The Method…………………………………………………………………...……12 Chapter Three: The Argument…………………………………………………………………….21 3.1. Action and Intentionality……………………………………………………………………..21 3.2. Consciousness and Intentionality…………………………………………………………..…26 3.3. Perceptual Consciousness and Imaginative Consciousness………………………………..…31 3.4. Consciousness and Self-Consciousness………………………………………………………37 3.5. An Encounter with Being…………….…………………………………………………..42 3.6. An Encounter with Not-Being……………..……………...…………………….……………49 3.7. Consciousness and Resistance………..………………………………………………………60 3.8. The Original Project…………………………………………………………………………..67 3.8.1. The Attainment of Being….………..……………………………………………………..67 3.8.2. The Ambiguity of Freedom.………..……………………………………………………..74 3.8.3. On Voluntary Action……...………..……………………………………………………..82 3.8.4. The Futile Passion………………….……………………………………………………..87 3.9. The Unveiling of Being……..………………….….………………………………………….95 3.10. The Viscosity of Being……………………………..………...………………………..…. 104 Chapter Four: The Paradox of Freedom………………………………………………………….113 NOTES…………………………………………………………………………………………...119 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………..……139 3 Chapter One: The Problem 1.1. The Agent as Free Agent1 As we address the free will problem, there may be objections to the way the problem has been formulated, such is the case with any philosophical problem. But the problem would seem to arise as the result of a conflict between two intuitions that we have about ourselves, about what we are. One of these intuitions is that there are some events2 that occur in the world with which I have a close connection, a connection of a special kind. Such events I take to be my actions, and the existence of these events, together with my conscious awareness of them, lead me to suppose that I have a special kind of standing in the world that non-conscious entities do not have. I suppose that I own my actions, they are mine in a different sense of mineness than that whereby my house is mine, and in a very different sense of mineness than that whereby a part of my body is mine. 3 The sense of ownership involved is analogous to an artist owning his created work, for an artist is the author of the content of his created work. An action of mine can also be said to have a content, which is my project, or my plan-of-action, and an action is mine in the sense that I consider myself to be the author of its content. And given that I am the author of its content, and also that in some sense the occurrence of the act is instigated by me, then I, and I alone, am responsible for the occurrence of my act. This is a responsibility that at the very least is mine, in that I am responsible for the realization of the act’s content, and in that I am in control of what I do, under normal circumstances, though I may deny responsibility in another sense. I may claim that I acted freely to bring about an event or state-of- affairs, but I would not have acted thus had not the situation dictated that there was only one possible course of action open to me. It follows from this responsibility, in the first sense of being the author of the act’s content, that I was able, in the very same circumstances in which I actually acted, to have not thus acted, though I may deny this with regard to responsibility in the second sense without thereby denying that I acted freely. This is so in some very fundamental sense of the word able. I was able to act thus due to a capacity that I have to realise my plan-of-action in some more fundamental sense than merely having the opportunity to realise that plan without any external factors that may impede my realization of that plan. In other words, I am a free agent. This is so for responsibility in the first sense, whereby I accept responsibility for my actions; I acknowledge that I need have not thus acted. And it is so for responsibility in the second sense, whereby I may claim that I had to do what I did, given my moral commitments, or whatever factors are serving to impede my actions, and for which I am responsible in the first sense, for in making such a claim I thereby acknowledge that at some more fundamental level I could have not thus acted. In addition, during the course of any investigation concerning myself, and what I am, it may turn out that this supposed freedom extends to events, states, or dispositions, the very kinds of things 4 which I do not normally consider to be my actions. For example, such freedom may extend to my beliefs and desires. Or rather, I may regard my freedom as extending only to my actions, but my beliefs and desires are also my actions. Such reflections upon myself and what I am question the extension of the concept of freedom, and the concept of action. But the primary feeling that I have concerning my standing as a free agent is seemingly fundamental to my understanding of myself. At the very least, as an agent I am a free agent. The intuition that I have of myself as a free agent can therefore be stated as follows: I was able, in the very same circumstances in which I actually acted, to have not thus acted. 5 1.2. The Agent as Embodied Subject But there is a second intuition that I have which is just as fundamental to my understanding of myself as the first, and yet is seemingly contradictory to it. This second intuition concerns the fact that I have, or perhaps am, a body, and that at least many of my actions are, or in some sense involve, movements of this body. Not all my actions are movements of my body, and not all of my bodily movements are my actions. But it remains the case that at least many of my actions are, or in some sense involve, my bodily movements. The free will problem arises as we seek to clarify this second intuition, while at the same time acknowledging the first intuition. We are subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and, like all empirical laws, they admit of no exception. We can never render them false. An empirical hypothesis is, of course, always inconclusive, but it is just about as certain as any empirical hypothesis can be that my bodily movements are caused. The proximal causes of these movements concern my muscles and my brain, but such causes are themselves effects of more and more distant causes located beyond my body, in the external physical environment. And yet, if we accept this empirical belief, and conjoin it with the two intuitions mentioned above, then a question arises as to whether the resultant set of beliefs that we have concerning ourselves can be consistent. For causality, as Anscombe has said: …consists in the derivativeness of an effect from its causes. ...Effects derive from, arise out of, come of, their causes.4 If this is so, then it is hard to see how any act can possibly be mine, in the sense outlined above, or how it can possibly be my creation, the occurrence of which is my sole responsibility, if it comes from, arises out of, other events, causes which extend beyond my body, into the distant past, prior to my birth. That is, the relevant act comes from events the occurrences of which were beyond my control. How could I possibly have instigated an occurrence which originated in prior events? How, that is, could I possibly have authored that which came from elsewhere? My act may be seen to be just one event among others, just one link between other events in nature’s causal chains. Viewed thus, the special standing I like to confer upon myself may be unjustified. And a corollary of this would be that I would have to give up my belief that I am entirely responsible for the occurrence of my act. If I do not give up this belief, then I must give up the view that my act is caused. And yet, if I accept this latter alternative, a question arises as to how I can consistently retain my plausible belief that my act is a movement of my body, having already accepted the fact that my bodily movements are caused. One solution may be that, although I am not solely responsible for my act’s occurrence, I may at least be partially responsible for it, and this partial responsibility is sufficient in itself for it to at least make sense to raise moral questions concerning my conduct. But we are denied this solution, for the responsibility that concerns us here is an all-or-nothing affair. This is because my claim to 6 be at least partially responsible for my act’s occurrence arises entirely from my alleged authorship of my act; and what is here in question is whether this apparent authoring of my act can really be an authoring if my act is caused. The free will problem arises from the fact that the responsibility for my act seems to be an all-or-nothing affair. It is of no help at all to try to resolve the above difficulties by making a distinction between two senses of responsibility. That is, between causal responsibility, and authorial responsibility. If we take a particular set, c, of my act’s causes, it may be said that though c was causally responsible for my act’s occurrence, I am still responsible, in the sense of authorial responsibility, for its occurrence. And I am authorially responsible for my act’s occurrence by the simple fact that I alone intended to perform my action, this being so whether or not that intention or that act was caused. But this suggestion begs the very question at issue. The question is this. Can authorial responsibility be consistently conjoined with causal responsibility in this way? Or, in other words, is my alleged intention, that is, my projection of what purports to be my project, or my plan-of-action, a genuine intention, a projection of what is in fact my project, in fact my plan? Can I have planned that which came from elsewhere? Or is the intentional object of my alleged intention to act a project, or plan, in appearance only? It would once have been said, some forty- odd years ago,5 that the expression genuine intention takes its very meaning from its application to what may be termed alleged intentions. That is, these so-called alleged intentions provide us with paradigm cases of what we mean by the term intention. In applying the term intention we mean that type of thing, and no discovery about the presence, or absence, of causes of acts would alter our view about the paradigm cases. But the question is, if acts are caused, are we justified in thus applying the concept of intention? We may grant that the concept of intention has an application in the sense that we apply it to the paradigm cases. But it does not follow from this that it has an application in the sense that there is something in the world that answers to its specifications. We can, and do, apply concepts which cannot possibly have an application in this latter sense. One such concept, for example, is that of destiny. If the grasping of a concept implies the ability to use a word, then, because we can use the word destiny, we have grasped the concept of destiny. But what do we mean by destiny? What are the necessary conditions to be fulfilled for us to say of someone that he has fulfilled his destiny? Schopenhauer thought that “the conviction of the strict necessity of all that happens is at any rate felt, as in the view of fatum…that was so firmly held by the ancients.”6 He wrote: If we do not accept the strict necessity of all that happens by virtue of a causal chain that connects all events without distinction, but represent that chain as being interrupted in innumerable places by an absolute freedom, then all foreseeing of the future in dreams, in clairvoyant somnambulism, and in second sight becomes even objectively, and thus absolutely, impossible, and consequently inconceivable. For then there is absolutely no objectively real future that could possibly be foreseen. 7 By contrast, we are now in doubt only about the subjective conditions for foreseeing the future and hence about the subjective possibility. And at the present time even this doubt can no longer be entertained by those who are well informed, after innumerable testimonies of the greatest veracity have established those anticipations of the future.7 That is, everything must happen through strict necessity, or clairvoyance would be impossible. And as the evidence for clairvoyance is convincing, for Schopenhauer, then everything must happen through strict necessity. But the question arises as to what would count as evidence for a successful act of clairvoyance. And further, as Kant has said: Many empirical concepts are employed without question from anyone. Since experience is always available for the proof of their objective reality, we believe ourselves, even without a deduction, to be justified in appropriating to them a meaning, an ascribed significance. But there are also usurpatory concepts, such as fortune, fate, which [are] allowed to circulate by almost universal indulgence, [without anything] sufficient to justify their employment, being obtainable either from experience or from reason.8 Given that a project has an authored content, no reference to paradigm cases will halt the emergence of the free will problem. What we require are paradigm cases, not in the sense of events to which we apply the concept of intention, but in the sense of events which actually exemplify the concept of intention. We can apply the concept of destiny or fate to paradigm cases, in the story of Oedipus, for example. But the story of Oedipus does not actually exemplify the concept of destiny, for though we employ the concept of destiny with seeming justification, we supposedly understand what it means to say of Oedipus that he fulfilled his destiny, the justification of such employment of the concept is, in fact, lacking both in reason and experience. Ordinary-language philosophers may not wish to draw a distinction between events to which we apply the concept and events which actually exemplify the concept. But if the term intention derives its meaning from paradigmatic cases of intention, then if we apply the term to something that does not exemplify the concept we have thereby misunderstood the concept, in the context of ordinary-language theory. And in applying the concept of destiny to significant events that unfold in the life of Oedipus we show thereby that we seemingly do understand the concept. But the application of the concept of destiny is without justification, from the perspective of both reason or experience. And it is whether there are paradigm cases in the sense of events which actually exemplify the concept of intention which the free will problem addresses. Certainly, this at least apparent conceptual conflict at the heart of the free will problem, between my having authored my act, and its having come from elsewhere, is exacerbated further if one makes a somewhat contentious assumption concerning necessity. That is, if one assumes that causes qua causes necessitate their effects. But it is a mistake to suppose that the free will problem requires such an assumption. To say that a cause, c, in its circumstances, empirically 8 necessitates its effect, e, is to say that, had c, in its circumstances, not caused an event of the type which e in fact instantiated, then an empirical law would have been rendered false. But it is tautological to say that an empirical law cannot, in the sense which expresses empirical impossibility, be rendered false. But if, as many believe, the assumption about necessity is true, then the prospect of reconciling freedom with causation begins to look impossible. For if my act was empirically necessitated, then it at least appears that I could, in the sense used to express freedom, have not thus acted only if I could, in the sense which expresses empirical possibility, have rendered an empirical law false. But, by definition of empirical law, that I necessarily cannot, in the sense which expresses empirical impossibility, do. And then it appears that, to protect my freedom from the assumption concerning necessity, I must either grace myself with the ability to render empirical laws false, or dilute the concept of freedom. The former alternative makes me a god, the latter incurs the charge of being an abdication of genuine responsibility. However, in order to encounter the free will problem, we are not required to conjoin the assumption about necessity to the claim that my acts derive from, arise out of, come from, other events. The free will problem arises because of this derivativeness, the derivation of acts from their alleged causes, and it does not arise through any dubious assumption concerning necessity. An objection may be made that the derivativeness conception of causation which I have used to set up the free will problem, notwithstanding its prima facie neutrality concerning empirical necessity, is in fact stronger than I am entitled to. It might be suggested, that is, that all that one is entitled to say about the sense of cause is, for example, that c causes e just in case e follows c in accordance with a brute matter-of-fact regularity, e-type events regularly following c-type events. As Hume put it, "we may define a cause to be an object followed by another, and where all the objects, similar to the first, are followed by objects similar to the second.”9 A resolution to the free will problem is thereby sought through a dilution of the concept of causation. That is, e typically follows c, or a particular action follows a particular desire. It is merely a case of one thing following another, and it is supposed that because of this fact there is no problem of free will. But when I intend to perform an action, I do not intend, just as a matter of brute fact, that an event will occur. I consider that an act of mine has more relevance to its effect. However, in addition to the brute regularity conception of causation, Hume also offered a counterfactual conception of causation. That is, c causes e just in case, “if the first object had not been, the second never had existed.”10 If c had not occurred e would not have occurred. If I had not been invited to dinner at 12 o’clock I would not have gone to dinner at 12 o’clock. And given that actions thereby satisfy the subjunctive conditional, and that causation, it is supposed, may be defined in terms of the subjunctive conditional, it is further supposed that actions are caused. But though actions do satisfy counterfactuals, for instance, we persuade each other, and the concept of persuasion implicates the counterfactual, the counterfactual does not capture the sense of cause 9 whereby one event derives from another. In typing this word I had at some point to type w. If I had not typed w I would not have typed word. Yet my typing of w did not cause my typing of word. The dilution of the concept of causation is an attempt to retain the structure of the act while allowing it to have causal antecedents, to dilute the relation borne to the act by its causal antecedents, so that the freedom of the act is no longer threatened, so to speak, from behind. But one cannot with consistency adopt one view of causation for what threatens the act from behind, some alleged cause, and another for what lies ahead of the act, its intended effect. And it is unlikely that these alternative views of causation can meet the requirements imposed by the nature of success. Freedom of the will is considered important because of the power associated with the attribution of success, our success, to our act of will. But how are we to understand success? In intending, as only I can intend, to succeed, I am thereby intending that something will come of my act, so that I succeed only if my act’s intended effect derives from, arises out of, originates in, my act. These alternative views of causation, by failing to present my act’s intended effect as coming from my act, fail to present my success as an achievement, at best they present it as an acquisition. Through a rejection of the concept of derivativeness, we are thereby rejecting the concept of action. And there are well-known general difficulties besetting these alternative views of causation. The diluting-program would seem to create more problems than it purports to solve. Intentions aim essentially at success, which requires there to be something ahead of the action, an obstacle, or resistance. Nietzsche thereby connects the concept of free will with that of resistance: …he who wills believes with a tolerable degree of certainty that will and action are somehow one – he attributes the success, the carrying out of the willing, to the will itself, and thereby enjoys an increase of that sensation of power which all success brings with it. “Freedom of the will” – is the expression for that complex condition of pleasure of the person who wills, who commands and at the same time identifies himself with the executor of the command – who as such also enjoys the triumph over resistances involved but who thinks it was his will itself who overcame these resistances.11 This, it may be supposed, is what it means for an action to be mine. It was I that encountered and overcame the resistance. Freedom, said Nietzsche, is to be measured “by the resistance which has to be overcome, by the effort it costs to stay aloft.”12 And Kant, in his critique of Plato’s theory of knowledge, speaks of how “the light dove”: …cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas, in the empty space of the understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance – meeting no 10 resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand, to which he could apply his powers, and so set his understanding in motion. 13 The dove may feel how free it would be were there no resistance whatever, but if there were no resistance it would plummet to the ground. In order for there to be an action there has to be some resistance overcome, an achievement, so that when I act it is appropriate to say I did that. The above considerations, of course, raise many others. And, doubtless, any purported solution to the free will problem will stand or fall with the articulations it offers for the free will problem’s constituent concepts. Yet the above suffices to provide a context wherein the free will problem can be seen to arise quite naturally when I attempt to understand myself from both the objective and subjective standpoints. From the objective standpoint, that is, as being in the world in which causal relations obtain, what might be termed the natural world, at least to the extent that my body relates causally to other material objects. And from the subjective standpoint, that is, as yet being, at least to the extent that I am conscious of the natural world, in some sense external to, at a distance from, the natural world, an ofness which leads me to conceive of myself as being sufficiently distanced from the natural world to be able to make plans concerning my relationship with it. The free will problem questions the intelligibility of adopting both standpoints. Then, given the above context, we can formulate the free will problem in two parts. The conceptual part can be formulated thus: Is the proposition that I perform free actions consistent with the proposition that those actions are caused? And the ontological part can be formulated thus: Do I perform free actions? Neither compatibilism nor incompatibilism address the ontological question. Being purely conceptual theses, they are defined by the answer they give to the conceptual question. The answer that compatibilism gives to the conceptual question is that the propositions are consistent. The answer given by incompatibilism is that they are not. And having already drawn attention to the problems besetting any compatibilist thesis, the following work presents an incompatibilist and ontological thesis, Act-Libertarianism, the thesis that, conceptually, actions cannot be caused, and that there are actions, and that, being uncaused, they are thereby free. 11 Chapter Two: The Method The free will problem, as we have formulated it from our initial intuitions, arises from the attempt to understand ourselves from both the objective and subjective viewpoints, or, to put it another way, human reality is ambiguous. Such an understanding of the free will problem derives from Sartre, who, as Jeanson has pointed out, “everywhere insists that the existential phenomenon is human reality in its ambiguity, simultaneously and indissolubly both value and fact, transcendence and nature.”1 Having identified an essential ambiguity of the human manner of being, which is to say, human being is that existent that is incommensurable with other existents, a method grounded in a recognition of this ambiguity is required, for without such a method a philosopher’s endeavours toward a resolution of the free will problem, as we have formulated the latter, are without meaning and fruitless. However, though human reality is ambiguous, as Jeanson has said: A method should not be ambiguous in the same way its object may be. It can at most be allowed to be oriented toward ambiguity, but only at the cost of having already posited ambiguity as such, that is, of having isolated by abstraction the two aspects which it must then reunite. Thus, while never losing sight of the existential phenomenon itself, one may nevertheless be constrained to approach it either through an essentialism of facts that seem to deprive those facts of their value or, correlatively, through an essentialism of values that seems to reduce values to the realm of facts. 2 Having posited its ambiguity, to now approach the existential phenomenon through an essentialism of facts would be to adopt the scientific method, whereby consciousness is seen as a natural object, amenable to analysis and study by the methods of the natural sciences. But it would seem to follow from the other aspect of this ambiguity, that of value, that human reality, consciousness, is characterised by an attitudinizing activity. And yet, the scientific method attends solely to what are regarded as psychic facts, to the neglect of psychic acts, that is, the concern is with what is rather than with the way in which what is is accomplished. And such an analysis becomes, as Jeanson has said, a “mental physics.”3 However, lest we be accused of misunderstanding, or at the very least of over-simplifying, the scientific method, we may consider the following account, provided for us by two physicists, Sokal and Bricmont, of the method in question: For us, the scientific method is not radically different from the rational attitude in everyday life or in other domains of human knowledge. Historians, detectives and plumbers – indeed, all human beings – use the same basic methods of induction, deduction and assessment of evidence as do physicists or biochemists. Modern science tries to carry out these operations in a more systematic way, by using controls and statistical tests, insisting on replication, and so forth. Moreover, scientific 12 measurements are often much more precise than everyday observations; they allow us to discover hitherto unknown phenomena; and they often conflict with “common sense.” But the conflict is at the level of conclusions, not the basic approach.4 It is clear enough from this account that the employment of the scientific method would be inappropriate to the task of resolving the free will problem. Firstly, that which Sokal and Bricmont refer to as “the rational attitude in everyday life or in other domains of human knowledge” is, given its underlying presuppositions, a naïve attitude. Husserl refers to it as the natural attitude, an indirect reference to Hume’s naturalism, signifying the way in which we conduct ourselves with a customary supply of inductive assumptions. I see a computer in front of me, I see it as a particular object, I see it in terms of its functions, and I see it as an object that will be there when I turn my back on it. And so on. I, this concrete person of flesh and blood, am looking at this computer from the natural standpoint, and I am satisfied with all the existential claims I have made concerning the computer that I see before me. And in order to clarify the natural attitude, Husserl employed a phenomenological method, the phenomenological epoché, whereby the objects of consciousness are placed within parentheses, and thereby put out of use. I can reduce my natural standpoint toward the computer by degrees. For example, I can abandon the claim that this computer will still be there when I turn my back on it. And then I can go further. I can bracket the existence of the world.5 Secondly, Sokal and Bricmont refer to the method of assessing evidence that we all employ in a manner similar to physicists and biochemists. But what is to count as evidence in the free will debate? It would seem that an appropriate method for the study of consciousness should begin with intuition, for a genuine philosophy has, as Husserl said, to be grounded in, and developed through, absolute insights, for only then can it be absolutely justified. 6 And it must then proceed in accordance with evidence that it alone produces, that is, it must be self-responsible, accepting nothing as knowledge that it has not validated for itself, 7 including the claims of science. And this is the method of phenomenology. For the method to be grounded in absolute insights the requirement is that it begin with intuition, whereby the object of the investigation is confronted directly. “Intuition,” as Sartre has said, “puts us in the presence of the thing.”8 And what is the thing? The thing is that which appears to consciousness as it appears to consciousness. Phenomenology is thus grounded in intuition, a referral to the things themselves in their self- givenness deprived of all extraneous pre-conceived notions concerning them. Husserl explicates such intuition in terms of seeing; a self-given object stands before our eyes. 9 Typically when we understand something we say “I see,” but with regard to individual objects original intuition is perception, for in the perceiving of a thing, the thing stands before our eyes. Through intuition a return may be undergone to a pre-theoretical consciousness which thereby becomes transparent. And as for the evidence that such a method produces, of particular importance is apodictic evidence, a direct apprehension, a perception in the Husserlian sense, of a modal state of affairs. 10 13 If I judge that x, and I have corresponding evidence, I have the state of affairs itself. If I make an apodictic judgment, for instance, necessarily one cannot see a sound, then the corresponding evidence itself must be apodictic. So in experiencing evidence, I am having a direct apprehension of a modal state of affairs. The possession of evidence is thereby an experience. It is to be in direct possession of the state of affairs itself. And if I am making a judgment, if x then y, and I have appropriate evidence, then, because it is a conditional, I do not need to assume that x holds or y holds. For, in having a direct apprehension of a state of affairs, it is as though every judgment is a conditional. I do not need to posit that x holds existentially. Though it emerges from such a method that not everything has been bracketed, for though the objects of consciousness are bracketed, consciousness itself, the ego, is not. The third point to note concerning the Sokal and Bricmont account of the scientific method is the reference to observation, which, from the natural standpoint, can only be naïve observation. Human reality is ambiguous, and, as R. D. Laing has pointed out: Man’s being … can be seen from different points of view and one or other aspect can be made the focus of study. In particular, man can be seen as a person or a thing. Now, even the same thing, seen from different points of view, gives rise to two entirely different theories, and the theories result in two entirely different sets of action. The initial way we see a thing determines all our subsequent dealings with it.11 I may see you as “a complex physical-chemical system,” that is, as “no longer a person but an organism,” and then, “I can see you as another person like myself; without you changing or doing anything differently.”:12 Expressed in the language of existential phenomenology, the other, as seen as a person or as seen as an organism, is the object of different intentional acts. There is no dualism in the sense of the co- existence of two different essences or substances there in the object, psyche and soma; there are two different experiential Gestalts: person and organism.13 Given that the object of this enquiry is an ambiguous phenomenon, then it is the language of phenomenology that is required to deal with it. Whether the concern of traditional psychology is with objects, alterations, changes, potentials, or aptitudes of the mind, the tendency is to naturalise the mind, discounting its distinctly psychic efficacy in affecting both itself and the world. And even in the event of a psychology characterised by an absence of active movement being replaced by a teleological psychology, whereby psychic events are operative to the extent of being directed in accordance with a purpose, thereby temporalising the psychic in terms of its having a future envisaged by itself, nonetheless the force ascribed to consciousness is still that of a natural potency that merely reveals itself in consciousness in various ways. 14 And the role of consciousness in relation to such a potency remains that of a “passive witness and register.” 15 14 But an analysis of consciousness that takes it to be passive will ineluctably lead to the theory of the epiphenomenon, whereby “there is a power in consciousness, but it is not a power of consciousness.”16 That is, the power in consciousness passes through and affects consciousness, but it is never a power that is exercised by consciousness. Consciousness is thereby reduced, being subordinate with regard to what occurs within itself, to the role of epiphenomenon, a subordinate phenomena that is in itself an effect, but is never, in accordance with a proper sequence, a cause of anything, be it a recognition, or an apprehension, or a perception, that is brought forth, in some mysterious manner, but in itself brings forth nothing. Though the notion of intentional acts that Laing refers to will be in need of clarification, consciousness is characterised by attitutudinising activity. And, as Jeanson has said, “my attitude, whatever it may be on any occasion, always means something.”17 Which suggests further that consciousness is constituting activity, and a disclosure of the extent to which it is so will thereby preclude naïve observation from the natural standpoint, in favour of pure observation from the phenomenological standpoint. Hence for Husserl phenomenological enquiry is to be drawn “directly from concrete intuition,”18 given that what is of interest to him is constitution, and “every genuine intuition has its place in the constitutional nexus.” 19 Of foremost importance is thereby an originally giving intuition, from which derives the legitimation of every cognition, and from which everything that is given derives its veraciousness. Original or self-giving intuition is that whereby a concrete individual object is self-given, is giving of itself in person, and is not an abstract universal. Husserl’s phenomenology, however, led to the so-called transcendental insight, that is, that consciousness constitutes all of its objects, as explicated in Meditation One of the Cartesian Meditations: The Objective world, the world that exists for me, that always has and always will exist for me, the only world that ever can exist for me – this world, with all its Objects…derives its whole sense and its existential status, which it has for me, from me myself…20 And again in Meditation Four: Whatever exists for me, exists for me thanks to my knowing consciousness; it is for me the experienced of my experiencing, the thought of my thinking, the theorized of my theorizing, the intellectually seen of my insight.21 There is only one central argument in our defence of Act-Libertarianism. Drawing from the transcendental insight we will develop a theory of freedom that acknowledges the constituting role of consciousness, but the conclusion will be that consciousness encounters obstacles and resistance in the world that have not been created by it, but which are chosen by it. That is, we choose our own obstacles. As Jeanson puts it: 15 When the world seems “difficult” to me, it is not because it obliged me to judge it so; rather, its having this character is itself a function of the activity that I am endeavouring to carry on in it. 22 And such activity, we will argue, is itself conditioned by a fundamental attitude that we have freely chosen. There is, however, more than one phenomenological method. The aim of phenomenology is to extract from the thing the essential features of our experience of the thing, together with the essence of what we experience. But there are two prevailing movements in phenomenology, which thereby direct the latter in seemingly contrary directions. Husserl’s pure phenomenology is a methodical analysis of consciousness, whereby the latter is detached from all explanatory principles appertaining to phenomena bar those that can be utilised in an analysis of pure consciousness itself, the aim being, after this initial procedure, to clarify the engagement of consciousness with the world. An existential phenomenology, however, is a direct study of consciousness situated in the world, whereby the objects of the enquiry, the existential phenomena, are studied, without any preceding clarification, and by virtue of their own existential qualities, together with the essential structures of consciousness manifested in such phenomena. 23 Husserl’s essentialist phenomenology exemplifies the first movement, as it aims to provide a description of the essential structures of pure consciousness. Heidegger’s existentialist phenomenology exemplifies the second movement, as it aims to provide a description of concrete existence, without any intermediary, that is, without the conscious dimension considered as a disengaged separate realm of being from the being with which it is engaged. Which is to say, there is no subject/object duality. These two tendencies have been considered to be in opposition, but the phenomenological method we will adopt, following Sartre, differs from both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s conceptions. Given that the way in which we have formulated the free will problem in terms of human reality from the subjective and objective viewpoints, we are interested in an ontology of the mental which should always be concerned with the human being in situation. The basic principles of Husserl and Heidegger can therefore be appraised with regard to each other. The essential structures of consciousness as described by Husserl can in turn be described in a way that corresponds with the Heideggerian conception of human reality as that which has an existential understanding of itself merely as existing. That is, to be is to be a problem to oneself. To put it another way, for human reality, to exist is, according to Heidegger, to assume its own being in an existential mode of understanding. And, according to Husserl, to exist is, for consciousness, to appear to itself. Since the appearance here is considered to be an absolute, unconditioned by anything beyond itself, then it is the appearance which has to be described and is the object of the enquiry. From such a perspective Heidegger took every human attitude, such as the emotional attitude, to be that through which we can recapture human reality in its entirety, for 16 through emotion, for instance, human being takes possession of itself as it emotionally directs itself towards the world. But for Husserl, a phenomenological description of an attitude, like that of emotion, will disclose the essential structures of consciousness, for an emotion just is a consciousness.24 To the degree with which the Sartrean method of inquiry and its object can be separated, the former is given by Husserl, and the latter by Heidegger. The object of the enquiry is human reality, human being in situation. And the method will identify human being as consciousness, a locus of intentions, with a power of initiative, an instigator of projects. But this is so only insofar as human being is all these things within its actual situation. For Husserl the object of the method is the method itself, a specious ontology of the essence of pure consciousness. And for Heidegger there is a natural ontology of unreflective existence, an immediate reaching for the object without any distancing from it. Our chosen method is therefore an essentialist/existential phenomenological method. An authentic phenomenology cannot be solely existential, rather, an essentialist attitude, or eidetic method, is necessary to disclose an understanding of the self that has some philosophical merit, as opposed to our understanding of the elementary I, revealed through self scrutiny and which is the object of psychological enquiry. The free will problem is thereby a problem of ontology rather than metaphysics, for given that an ontology will always be an anthropomorphic ontology, essentialist/existential phenomenology allows us to distinguish between ontology and metaphysics. Ontology situates the human condition, whereas metaphysics tries to explain it, through inference from other hypotheses. But essentialist/existential phenomenology is an investigation into concrete particularity. And its concepts are to be distinguished from abstract actualities postulated for the purpose of explaining this concreteness. If we designate the locus of intentions and purposes as the for-itself, and anything that is non-conscious as the in-itself, then we can explain this distinction between metaphysics and ontology: Metaphysics may well inquire and form hypotheses regarding the origin of the for-itself, but it can never inquire regarding the origin of the in-itself. There are two options. First, one may question the in-itself in its being. But then the question “how does it come to be that being is?” has no meaning, since that question is conditioned by this very being. Consequently, this being has already been taken as absolutely contingent, “without reason, without cause and without necessity.” The second alternative is to question the in-itself insofar as it appears. The question becomes “why is there a world?” and the answer is supplied by ontology: there is a world through the presence of the for- itself.25 Metaphysics seeks to explain, but ontology merely describes what is. Phenomenology, therefore, is not phenomenalism, for the latter presents a metaphysics of the phenomenon, whereas the former presents a description of the phenomenon while disclosing the implications for ontology. Or rather, phenomenology is ontology. 17 Phenomenological analysis is therefore capable of resolving the ontological problem of free will. But such an ontological enquiry should not have an essentialist ontology as its object, nor must it be absorbed at the outset in an existentialist analysis. For if either result were to obtain, the object of the enquiry is thereby lost, as well as the relationship of essences to existence, or of conscious intentions to that which motivates them. The particular object of ontology should be a freedom that discloses itself through a self-verifying act as an agent’s intentions bestow a sense upon that agent’s motivations, or, conversely, it should be a freedom that no longer exists through a self- surrendering act as an agent’s motivations tend towards being merely the causes of intentions. Ontology should not therefore be a pure phenomenology, such as we have with Husserl, for even though through the disclosures of an essentialist phenomenology human reality can obtain an understanding of its own attitudes, this is achieved at the price of abstracting from that understanding the fact of its situation, its facticity, that which it has not chosen for itself. But if we assume that human reality is present to the world, or the world is present to it, then an understanding of any psychic phenomenon requires that human reality be elevated from its situation of being-in-the-world, to use the terminology of Heidegger, toward the emergence in consciousness of human being, the world, and their relation to each other. That is to say, toward a consciousness that is transcendental and constitutive. To understand this further we need to distinguish the natural attitude from accessory reflection. The natural attitude, as we have said, is an uncritical acceptance of the existence of the world. That which the subject perceives, the world towards which consciousness is directed, is taken to have an existence independent of the subject that is experiencing the perception. But such naïvety may be corrected by a purifying reflection. Accessory, or impure reflection, as Sartre said, “may indeed recognize the consciousness qua consciousness, but only as it is motivated by the object.” 26 Or, as Jeanson puts it, at the level of impure reflection, “this object is thereafter seen as possessing the aspect which has in fact been conferred on it by the magical attitude of consciousness.” 27 Purifying reflection, on the other hand, “grasps the [object] insofar as it constitutes the aspect conferred upon the object.”28 To use Sartre’s example, we may grasp the emotion of anger at the level of accessory reflection, I am angry because he is detestable, but we may also grasp it at the level of pure reflection, I find him detestable because I am angry.29 The phenomenological attitude is characterised by pure reflection, for through establishing the constitutive role of consciousness we can then, for instance, show that no motive could determine consciousness, given that such a motive is constituted by, and given the meaning it has, by consciousness. But Husserl sought to arrive at this consciousness by means of the phenomenological reduction, or the placing of the world between parentheses. This is pure phenomenology, which we reject as a method, but there is no requirement for the phenomenological attitude also to be rejected. The argument that follows is a defence of Sartre’s Act-Libertarianism and draws primarily on the arguments to be found in Being and Nothingness and The Imaginary, good arguments for the 18 existence of free will, though in need of some additional details, and involving deep issues. The following is thereby an attempt to provide the missing premises, and to present and defend Sartre’s action theory in a systematic manner. Where I go beyond anything to be found in Sartre I have indicated as much. The argument will proceed as follows: 3.1., the starting point, our initial premise, is that an action is on principle intentional, it is something that we mean to do, and the intention in the action thereby has a forward directedness to an object of the intention, an object in need of completion, whereby the action succeeds or fails. Such a structure of an act corresponds to the structure of consciousness, whereby, 3.2., consciousness is intentional in that it has a directedness to an intentional object, a directedness that implicates the fact that consciousness is without content, it contains, 3.3., neither percepts nor images, though perceiving and imagining are quite distinct in the manner by which consciousness attains the perceptual or imaginary object. The directedness of consciousness also implicates the fact that consciousness can be an object for itself, that is, 3.4., to be aware is to be self-aware, but such self-awareness must be pre- reflective, thereby allowing us to distinguish between reflective and unreflective acts. And, 3.5., the directedness of consciousness commits us to, not only a consciousness that is present to itself, but also to the existence of an independent world also present to consciousness. That is, consciousness encounters Being, and is thereby necessarily situated. This is a repudiation of idealism, but does not leave us in a position of realism, for the distinction we have drawn between perceiving and imagining, in relation to the constitutional activity of consciousness, allows us to conclude that, 3.6., consciousness also encounters not-Being, an encounter that implicates the not in our formulation of free will as the capacity to have not thus acted. As consciousness encounters Being it cannot, 3.7., constitute material objects as such, and thereby encounters resistance in the world, in which it is responsible for its choice of obstacle, but far from being suspended within a vacuum, 3.8., such an exercise of choice can acquire meaning only within an original project of an intentional, oriented freedom. However, 3.8.1., the original project conditions the situation through which consciousness knows itself in its attempt to attain Being to determine itself. Such self-determination may be considered self-contradictory, but it is not if we remember, 3.8.2., that freedom and choice are ambiguous terms. The self-imposed structure of the original choice does, however, 3.8.3., restrict voluntary or wilful action, and, given that transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness, and that consciousness is supported by a Being which is not itself, 3.8.4., consciousness is engaged in an impossible project of achieving identity with itself. This is the thesis of the futile passion. The ambiguity of human reality in its essence has now been defined, and has led to a duality, consciousness-Being, a lived ambiguity. The manner in which this lived ambiguity is experienced can now be described, 3.9., to show that consciousness is embodied, a body-subject, and as such a realising consciousness, as opposed to an imaging consciousness, has the ontological characteristic of Nausea, an awareness of its own existence as a brute fact. And, 3.10., to show 19 that we assume our motivations to be causal, as we evade responsibility for them within the complexity of the causal and teleological layering within which our actions occur, which we can explicate by analogy with our experience of the viscous. But the motivations of the body-subject are in fact non-causal, because of the manner in which it engages with its situation, for consciousness is active, but it can assume passivity in its encounter with motives that itself has constituted. But given its pre-reflective self-awareness, the body-subject is thereby engaged in a project of seeking excuses, an evasion of the fundamental meaning of any of its attemptings, for, due to the futile passion, the latter are ultimately grounded in failure. However, the theory of free will thus presented does lead us to a paradox, which will be dealt with in Chapter Four. 20 Chapter Three: The Argument 3.1. Action and Intentionality Act-Libertarianism is an ontological position whereby the proposition that my act is caused is inconsistent with the proposition that my act is free, and there are free actions. In the sense of cause by which one event comes from, derives from, another event, necessarily actions cannot be caused. The view that my action is caused in this sense is necessarily false. 1 As Sartre has pointed out: It is strange that philosophers have been able to argue endlessly about determinism and free-will, to cite examples in favour of one or the other thesis without ever attempting first to make explicit the structures contained in the very idea of action. The concept of an act contains, in fact, numerous subordinate notions which we shall have to organise and arrange in a hierarchy: to act is to modify the shape of the world; it is to arrange means in view of an end…2 It is strange that philosophers can talk about freedom without inquiring into the very idea of an action. “The fundamental condition of the act is freedom,” 3 or, the concept of action implicates the concept of freedom. If there are actions, then they are necessarily free. And given that this is a logical necessity, it is not a matter of empirical discovery whether or not universal causation is true, and hence, given that the causation is universal, whether or not causation is applicable to those events we deem to be our actions. This is so also with regard to the question as to whether or not actions are free. That is, the proposition actions are free expresses an analytic truth, hence the issue is really are there actions? However, we must not be misled by the use of the word cause in the translation of Being and Nothingness, whereby Barnes distinguishes cause and motive. In the translation it is written that “there is no act without a cause,” but that “in order to be a cause, the cause must be experienced as such.”4 It would be more apt to use the word reason rather than motive or cause, but then the use of the word reason would remove an important detail. Sartre himself makes a distinction between motif and mobile. I go to the bank in order to put money into my bank account in order to not go into the red. The cause (motif) is the state of the bank account, the motive (mobile) is the effect whereby consciousness confers on this cause its value as a cause, and is thereby going to act in order to change it. But both cause and motive in the senses thus employed may be termed reason, the reason for going to the bank was in order to stop going into red. But we must not take cause in this context to refer to causation, whereby c causes e just in case e derives from c. Our initial premise, then, is that an action is on principle intentional,5 whereby intentional is employed in the ordinary sense of the word. That is, whenever we have acted we thereby intentionally did something, or we meant to do what we did do. However, Sartre commits a logical error in his explication of intentional action:6 21 The careless smoker who has through negligence caused the explosion of a powder magazine has not acted. On the other hand the worker who is charged with dynamiting a quarry and who obeys the given orders has acted when he has produced the expected explosion; he knew what he was doing or, if you prefer, he intentionally realised a conscious project. 7 Sartre makes a contrast between a negligent smoker causing an explosion, and a smoker deliberately causing an explosion, whereby in the former case the smoker exploding the powder magazine does not describe an action because the smoker did not intend to cause the powder magazine to explode. But the concept of intentionality is such that it introduces an intensional context. For instance, the proposition x believes that... introduces an intensional, or opaque, context. To employ an example from Frege, if I believe that Hesperus is a star, and Hesperus is identical with Phosphorus, we cannot conclude from this that I believe that Phosphorus is a star. 8 With an opaque or intensional context the way something is described matters. And all terms that are expressing modes of consciousness are such that they introduce opaque contexts. There is a problem of reference here, a problem recognised by the Ancients. For instance, I may know who my father is, but I don’t know who the masked man is; we cannot conclude from this that the masked man is not my father. 9 So, even though an action is on principle intentional, it is so relative to a description. For example, if I intentionally raise my arm to stop a bus, and the bus then stops, then my raising my arm is thereby appropriately correlated with the bus stopping. We can denote the action with the description my stopping the bus, that is, we can describe the act in terms of its effects. In which case we could also describe it as my disturbing such and such air molecules, but that description is not a description under which the act is intentional. Raising my arm in order to stop the bus is the description under which the act is intentional. In Sartre’s example, the smoker threw the cigarette to the ground intentionally, though it had an unintentional consequence. What Sartre should have said was that exploding the powder magazine is not the description under which the worker can be said to have acted. Some other description is. Similarly, the statement Oedipus marries Jocasta describes an action, which is thereby intentional. On the other hand, the statement Oedipus marries his mother does not describe an action. Oedipus does not intend to marry his mother. Oedipus intentionally married Jocasta and unintentionally married his mother, but all that is meant by the latter statement is that Oedipus performed an intentional act, but he did not intend that it should fall under that particular description, marrying his mother. To say that an action is intentional is to say that an action realises a plan, or project, and the plan itself may be the intentional object of the intention. If I intend to raise my arm, the project is that I raise my arm. Correlatively, given that there is a logical relation between an intention and the intentional object, the very structure of the project contains freedom in it. Or the very concept of a plan can be unravelled so as to reveal freedom. To have a plan of action just is to intend, though to intend is not the same as to have a plan of action, for there are many instances of intention that 22 lack such explicit preparedness as a plan entails. And yet an intentional action requires an intentional object, whether or not the intentional object is an explicit plan. A useful metaphor may be employed to make this point clear. The intentional object of an intention has a pull, this is what having a plan involves. We must not, however, read into that pull that we are somehow a victim of our projects. An intention can be contrasted with a wish. The intentional object of a wish has no pull. That is, to say that the project has a pull implies that by its very nature as a project it is calling out to be satisfied; there remains something to be done. To have the plan x without actualising x is possible. It follows from the very nature of a plan. If the planned were given with the plan there would be no need for a plan. An analogy can thus be drawn between a Fregean function 10 and an intention. Frege spoke of concepts in terms of functions, a concept is a function mapping objects onto truth-values. An object is not a concept, an object is what a proper name stands for, whereas a concept is incomplete. In the proposition Sartre is the author of Being and Nothingness, …is the author of Being and Nothingness is a function, and Sartre is its argument. The function is unsaturated, that is, it is in need of completion. We can complete our example of a function with the argument Sartre, thereby mapping the object to the truth-value true. Or we could complete the function with, say, the argument Frege, thereby mapping the object to the truth-value false. Similarly, an intention is incomplete, or unsaturated, or unfulfilled. A fulfilled intention just ceases to exist. As soon as I actualise the project to raise my arm I cease to have the project. The intention cannot exist fulfilled. That is, the project has a pull, or, to put it another way, it requires that there be something lacking to sustain the intention. It is thus possible to distinguish between future intentions, for instance, I intend to have a cup of coffee at 11 o’clock, and here and now, or present, intentions, I intend to have a cup of coffee now. A here and now intention must have a pull, and freedom is the choice that confers the pull. But that does not mean that I cannot break away from the pull, if I so choose. But as for a wish, I can wish it were raining, and there is nothing left to be done. I have done it. The wish actualises its own object. If I wish that it were raining, I have thereby wished. It is complete within itself. If I intend to get a cup of coffee, on the other hand, there is something remaining that has to be done, getting a cup of coffee. This can be expressed by saying that a wish is performatory, it performs what has to be done. It may be objected that there is no real contrast between a wish and an intention, given that I may wish for a state of affairs to come about in cases where it is unclear if I can really intend that such a state of affairs will come about. Kierkegaard imagines his knight of infinite resignation in just such a situation: A young lad falls in love with a princess, the content of his whole life lies in this love, and yet the relationship is one that cannot possibly be brought to fruition, be translated from ideality into reality. The slaves of misery, the frogs in life’s swamp, naturally exclaim: “Such love is foolishness; the rich brewer’s widow is just as good and sound a match.” Let them croak away undisturbed in the swamp. 23 This is not the manner of the knight of infinite resignation, he does not renounce the love, not for all the glory in the world. He is no trifler.11 And yet it is not a wish that goes away with his wishing it, for “the knight… [has] the strength to concentrate the whole of his life’s content and the meaning of reality in a single wish.” 12 Such an objection would understand our use of the term wish to be the same as wish as it features in fairy tales, whereby we may be granted three wishes, and, once fulfilled, such wishes would be actions successfully fulfilled by the mere act of wishing, but the wish of the knight of infinite resignation is not of that kind. “The magic wishes of fairy tales,” as Sartre has said, “renders the desire immediately operative.”13 Such fairy tale wishes are indeed performatory, in that there is nothing more to be done than to make the wish. And if our first wish were to have an infinite number of wishes we would thereby become God, removing the distinction between having and wishing to have, for wishing to have is sufficient in itself to have that which is wished for. Such wishes do indeed belong to fairy tales, but the question is whether or not there can be a wish that is both performatory and incomplete, that is, given that there is the wish, something still remains to be done to fulfil the wish. And the answer is that there cannot be such a wish. The knight of infinite resignation can wish the princess would requite his love without thereby exerting himself to make it happen, for he knows, unlike the knight of faith, that he has no possibility of success in making it happen. Such a wish may become the whole meaning of his life, but it is both performatory and without the need for any further action on the part of the knight. It is complete in itself, for the reason for the incompleteness of an intention is precisely because the intention, necessarily, is aimed at success, a success that lies in the future. 14 Success is not given logically with the intention. One cannot aim at what one cannot miss. Aiming implicates the logical possibility of missing, or of failure. An intention thus brings into play the concepts of success and failure. That is all that is meant by saying that it is incomplete. 15 From this notion of intentionality in action we can secure at least two conclusions. First, given that an action realises a project, the latter being the intentional object of an intention, then it follows that we can proceed with the argument for Act-Libertarianism, that is, with the argument for actions being uncaused and thereby free, while acknowledging that bodily movements are caused, and we can proceed thus without being inconsistent. For, as Hornsby reminds us: “Move” belongs to a class of English verbs that occur both transitively (i.e. with grammatical objects) and intransitively (without objects), the two sorts of occurrence being related in sense in a certain systematic way…If John movedT his body, then his body movedI.16 That is, movement is an ambiguous term, depending on whether we give it a transitive or an intransitive reading. Employing this syntactical criterion, it follows that the term moving in my moving my arm is to be given a transitive reading, that is, it takes a grammatical object, but the 24 term moving in the moving of my arm is to be given an intransitive reading. With this distinction it is appropriate to say that actions are identical with bodily movements, and bodily movements are caused, because moving, whereby an action is described, is transitive, but the cause of the movement, whereby a bodily movement is described, is intransitive. It does not follow from the fact that bodily movements are caused that actions are caused. My moving my arm describes the action, not the moving of my arm. My moving my arm (transitive reading) causes the moving of my arm (intransitive reading). This syntactical criterion, in effect, is a denial of our original set-up of the problem, as it arises from a failure to recognise the ambiguity of the term movement. Actions are bodily movements, movement understood transitively, and bodily movements are caused, movement understood intransitively. Our second conclusion is that the directedness and incompleteness of intentionality in action, given that it is an expression of a particular mode of directedness, which is to say, a particular mode of consciousness, that is, the action is the realisation of an intentional object of the intention, derives from the fact that consciousness is intentional, in the sense that it is characterised by a directedness toward an intentional object. The usage of the term intentional as applied to consciousness is, however, given a technical sense, but through an analysis of the intentionality of consciousness, and of the intentional object, we may discover a closer meaning to the ordinary sense of the term, whereby an action is intentional, than is often supposed. 25 intentional object 3.2. Consciousness and Intentionality Consciousness has intentionality, in the sense that consciousness is about something, that is, consciousness is necessarily directed onto an object. We are afraid of something, we believe that something is the case, we are ashamed that we have done such and such, and so on. As Jeanson has said: “All consciousness is consciousness of something;” all consciousness is intentionality. The world is the correlate of consciousness. Consciousness [is] …always reaching toward [the world] and aiming at it. “To aim” derives from the Latin aestimare meaning both “to appraise” and “to imbue with value.”17 Given this aiming of consciousness toward the world, we can represent the intentionality of consciousness via a particular model, an arrow of consciousness, shown in Fig. 1, where X is the intentional object. Intentionality is a distinguishing feature of mental phenomena, they are about something. One cannot imagine, wish, or dream without imagining or wishing or dreaming something. If I imagine my mother, I have an intention of her, an intention towards an object, my mother. My mother is the intentional object of the intention. An intention can be an imagining, a wishing, or a dreaming, and so on. For example, in a particular mode of directedness, such as a dream, I am dreaming about my mother, that is, I am intending my mother. If I am thinking about my mother, wishing my mother was here, dreaming about my mother, in all cases I am intending my mother, in the sense that my mother is the object of all those modes of consciousness, though the intentional object has a different aspect in all cases, depending on the particular mode of consciousness. This is the intentionality thesis, the thesis that consciousness is directed on to an object. An object, in this context, is a technical term, the object of directedness, and this is not necessarily a material object.18 There are at least two important consequences of the thesis of intentionality. First, a rejection of of X 26 Fig 1. the container theory of mind that models the mind as a container of a particular type, a container that contains ideas as its contents. This is the representationalist view of the mind, 19 whereby if I am now thinking about my mother, I thereby conjure up the image of my mother, and this image represents, or is a picture of, my mother, my mother who is out there in the world. The intentionality thesis rejects this model by implication. If the intentionality thesis is an accurate model of the mind, then there is nothing in the mind. 20 If consciousness is of an object, then the object is always external to it. Consciousness is always at a distance from its object. The ofness separating consciousness from its object puts consciousness at a distance from its object. An intentional object is an object for consciousness as it appears to consciousness. According to representationalism, I have never perceived my mother, but only a representation of her. The representationalist may claim that the representation is not an image, but a proposition stored in the mind of which the subject might not even be aware. But even were this the case, I could never perceive my mother, but only a representation of my mother, at whatever level of abstraction that representation may occur. Thus the Husserlian battle cry: back to the things themselves, whereby the thing is that which appears to consciousness as it appears to consciousness. However, the medieval philosophers referred to the intentional inexistence of the object, and intentional in this context is a technical term used by the scholastics and which was reintroduced by Brentano.21 What it means is that the intentional object does not guarantee existence. For example, from the proposition I am imagining my mother, we cannot infer that my mother exists. On an intuitive level, there are plenty of examples that establish this. In imagination, and especially in dreams, for instance, the intentional object can be self-contradictory. In perceiving a print by Escher the intentional object of our perceptual consciousness is a logical impossibility. And R. D. Laing has provided examples of dreams whereby, though they are open to symbolic interpretation, the intentional objects are self-contradictory. An example he gives is that of a dream in which human beings become petrified, in the literal meaning of that word: …a girl of twenty-five years dreamt that she had cooked dinner for her family of five. She had just served it and now called her parents and her brothers and sister to dinner. Nobody replied…. She rushed upstairs to look for her family. In the first bedroom, she could still see her two sisters sitting on two beds. In spite of her impatient calls they remained in an unnaturally rigid position and did not even answer her. She went up to her sisters and wanted to shake them. Suddenly she noticed that they were stone statues.22 We can thereby speak of the intentional inexistence of the object, for in this instance the dreamer is not dreaming of statues of her sisters, but is rather dreaming of statues that are her sisters, and this is self-contradictory. 27 Suppose I am now entertaining a particular thought that just might be false, thinking of an entity, say, and there is no such entity. Assume that before you came to visit me, I told you I had murdered my mother and buried her body in the garden. You believe me and set about trying to find the corpse by digging up my garden, even though I had only made the claim with a jocular intent. You are thereby trying to find my dead mother’s body, this is an intent. It is true that you are trying to find the buried corpse, but there is no buried corpse. It is an empty description. I may think of the so and so, even though the description refers to nothing out there, in the real world. I can think about the first Russian cosmonaut to walk on the moon. That there is no such person does not preclude the possibility that I can have a directedness to such an object, by means of descriptions. And yet, according to the container theory of the mind, if I am thinking about my mother, then the mind contains ideas that are representationally related to my mother. But if I am thinking about my mother, the intentional object is not an idea of my mother, or an image of my mother, but my mother herself. What is true of my mother is simply not true of the image of my mother. My mother can pick up a telephone, whereas the idea of my mother cannot. Nor can I ring up an idea of my mother. So consciousness is of its object, it is directly related to the object itself. But there may be nothing to which the description of the object refers. In presenting a model of consciousness we can employ the important Fregean distinctions between sense, reference, and referent.23 We can illustrate such distinctions using Frege’s own example.24 The evening star is the morning star. If this is an identity statement, then we may suppose that if it is true then it is necessarily true. But then how can it be interesting? The interest arises because of the distinction between sense and referent. The two descriptions, the morning star and the evening star, have a different sense; we can understand one of the descriptions without understanding the other; the concepts that one of the descriptions expresses are not the concepts that the other description expresses. Yet they both refer to same object. Reference to an object occurs via sense. The sense of an expression mediates its reference. The evening star refers to an object only because the concepts that such a description evoke delimit a unique object; that is what it is to refer to something. There is thus a three-fold distinction that can enable us to explain what it is for reference to occur. We have a sense, for example, the morning star, and this sense is a set of concepts. We have a predicate, …is a star, and another predicate, …appears in the morning to the Babylonians, and another predicate, …is the harbinger of Aurora, and so on. If the senses that are employed are adequate they will determine a reference. These senses have a reference. But we can determine a reference while lacking a referent. To apply this to our model of consciousness, we can conclude that to say that consciousness is intentional is to say that consciousness necessarily has a reference. Consciousness is directed towards an intentional object. And there can be a reference without a referent. So consciousness can be directed to an object without any such object being in the world. If I am scared of what I 28 believe to be a burglar in the kitchen, but which is in fact my cat, then the object of my fear, its sense, has a reference but not a referent. But if I think of my mother, the sense of the object has a reference and a referent. The latter is in the world and the former is not. So what I fear, the referent, does not exist, but the object of my fear, the reference, does exist. It may be objected that the problem concerning non-existent objects remains, for intentionality is directed at objects, not ideas, given that the former can pick up telephones and the latter cannot, and yet the burglar in the kitchen, qua reference, constitutes no danger to me. In other words, we cannot interact with references but we can interact with referents. And allowing that we can fear references would seem to pose a threat to the point that intentionality is directed upon causally active objects. But the object of an intention is an intentional object, and the intentional object has a distinct aspect depending on the mode of consciousness that has the intent. The object, in this context, may be a material object, but not necessarily so. This allows consciousness in a mode of belief, belief in God, for instance, to direct itself toward the object of that belief, perhaps by praying, regardless of whether or not the object has a referent. Consciousness necessarily has a reference. And for a reference to occur we have a sense, say, a noise in the kitchen. But in this example we have failed to grasp the essential meaning of the object, for sense is not the same as meaning. Senses are modes of presentation of references, but sense is not merely a semantic notion. The noise in the kitchen has a mode of presentation that is thereby the object of my fear due to the fact that I have grasped its sense, but misunderstood its meaning. I’m thinking of my mother, and my mother is a singular term. With singular terms we touch the world as closely as we ever can do.25 I am thinking about something that can be described with a singular term. But this is not the case with the representationalist model of the mind. For the representationalist, I am never thinking about my mother. I can only think about an idea of my mother. But with the Fregean model, reference to an object goes through sense, or, to adopt Husserl’s terminology, through the noema. But the noema is a very problematic concept. Husserl says several inconsistent things about it. On one view, the notion of sense, as used by Frege, has been extended to all intentional acts of consciousness. So, if I am thinking about my mother, or wishing she was here, or whatever, then in each case there is a parallel noema; consciousness goes through that sense to direct itself onto a particular object. The directedness ends there, as opposed to that which occurs in the representationalist model of consciousness. There is thus an external directedness toward the object. It may be objected that if the object does not exist, then the intentionality is only apparent; we have the sense, that is, the way we would get the referent, but there is nothing outside. Hence, the intentionality must consist in some non-referring description, which takes us back to representationalism. But the noema is also the object as intended. For example, if I am thinking of the evening star, then I am thinking of the morning star, but not intentionally. In all cases the noema is different, though we may prefer to say that the reference point is different. In every 29 case, what is intended falls under a different description. The noema is thus the Fregean sense and the object as intended, and yet these two views of the noema are not consistent. It may also be objected that, because Husserl’s bipartite distinction, the act of consciousness, or noesis, and its intended object, or noema, does not map neatly onto Frege’s tripartite one, sense, reference, and referent, this does not imply that Husserl’s concept of the noema is problematic or inconsistent. We could say, the noema is the referent presented by the sense. But the referent is the problem here. There can be reference without a referent, but not consciousness without a reference. The reference of an expression is the thing it stands for, and there may not exist any such thing. The sense is the mode of presentation of the reference. This is also the noema, and the noesis directs itself to an object via the noema. So if we say that the noema is the referent presented by the sense, we are, in effect, saying the noema is the referent presented by the noema, which is tautological. But the noema is also the object as intended, which may or may not have a referent. Hence the noema cannot be both the sense and the object as intended. But the noema has something to do with sense, that is, with the mode of presentation of the object, or the description under which the object falls. The adjective noematic thus refers to some kind of mediation. This is a problem that will have to be dealt with later. According to Husserl, if I am now imagining my mother, were we to provide a noematic description of my consciousness, we would inject into the description just those concepts that occur in my noema. We would not, for example, need to mention that I am imagining my mother. All that we require are just those concepts that I am using to refer to my mother. The terminology that can be applied to capture these distinctions is that of perceptual consciousness and imaginative consciousness. The noesis, on the other hand, is a particular concrete act. If I am imagining my mother, or if I am perceiving my mother, the noesis is different in each of these cases, but the noema might be the same. And yet, though this may be the case with incomplete descriptions of the noema, it may not be the case with respect to the content of the noema, considered in its entirety. But having made the distinction between perceptual consciousness and imaginative consciousness, a problem emerges concerning the thesis of a contentless consciousness, for it would seem to be the case that, even with an acceptance of the view that a perceptual consciousness apprehends the perceived object directly, and not a representation of the object, an imagining consciousness would seem to direct itself toward an imaginary object, an imaginary object contained in the mind. An argument is required, therefore, to show that imagining is itself a particular mode of directedness, a directedness toward an object at a distance from consciousness. 30 3.3. Perceptual Consciousness and Imaginative Consciousness. The objection is this; if my mother is not now an object of perception but an object of imagining, then the image of my mother exists in my mind. But given that consciousness is intentional it cannot be a place wherein psychic states reside, or where psychic events occur. An imagining consciousness cannot be comprised of images, for an image is neither a stable thing nor a mobile thing. Rather, an image can only be a relation that is activated by an imagining consciousness as it aims at an object. If I imagine my mother I aim at an object, I want to make my mother appear to me, but my mother is not there, thus I am unable to make a direct perception of her come into existence. Therefore, as Sartre has said, “I make use of a certain matter that acts as an analogon, as an equivalent of perception.”26 For instance, I imagine my mother, this is an intention. That is, my mother is not there, and I know my mother is not there, but the intention is directed towards my mother through some matter that is analogous to my mother, be it a photograph of my mother, a drawing of my mother, or a consciousness of my mother-as-imaged, as Sartre puts it.27 But for such matter to be analogous to my mother, the object apprehended in the form of an image of my mother has to lose its own meaning and acquire another. But the analogon is not a thing in my mind, nor is the imagining activity the analogon itself, it is the constituting of the analogon, which is to say, the imagining activity is the meaning an imagining consciousness bestows on the analogon as it constitutes it as such. In an imagining attitude consciousness aims toward an object by means of the analogon that is given to consciousness, or that it gives to itself. It may be objected that I can be scared of a burglar in the kitchen, but if there is no burglar, it is only a cat, then the burglar is an intentional object. The burglar does not exist in the world, the objection goes, but he does exist in my mind. But by the intentionality thesis, consciousness aims toward an object, a transcendent object. The intentional object of a perceptual consciousness is transcendent in one sense by virtue of its appearance in profile, there is always more to the object than meets the eye, and it is transcendent in another sense by virtue of its temporal trans- phenomenality. That is, the intentional object, to the extent that it is given as temporally exceeding its present experience, is unified with its past and future appearances. And the intentional object of an imagining consciousness is transcendent, due to the “necessity for the matter of the mental image to be already constituted as an object for consciousness.” 28 That which the image represents is external, as is its mental analogon, being, as it is, a spatio-temporal object constituted by consciousness to mean something other than its original meaning. Similarly, if consciousness intends a burglar in the kitchen when there is no burglar but only a cat, consciousness thereby intends a transcendent object, but as there is no burglar then the object is not in consciousness, rather consciousness is thereby “a pure sign consciousness” that “aims 31 emptily at the thing.”29 Consciousness posits the burglar, it has adopted an attitude that aims at an object through another object, the noise constituted by consciousness as signifying the existence of the burglar. Consciousness in this case is only imagining a burglar, through an analogon that, in this case, is not given to it, but that it gives to itself. Reflective consciousness reveals this to us, as it is able to attain the essence of the image to the extent that the imagined appearance of the object implicates a mental given, that is, an unspecified or unidentified but perceptible material that functions as an analogon. But as such material can function as an analogon only inside the limits of the intentional constituting activity effected by an imagining consciousness, reflection on the image can thereby apprehend in their entirety the properties of the thing aimed at as the properties of the thing aimed at. Imagining consciousness thereby aims at a transcendent object, and reflective consciousness can revert toward such consciousness in order to apprehend both the essence of the act of aiming and the mental correlate necessarily implicated by the imagining act. The image is not an object in consciousness. The image is a relation to some external object and is not a psychic transference of the object into consciousness. If consciousness were a container of a particular kind, with its own particular kinds of content, states, or events, or processes, or if it were a passive screen on which such content is projected, then consciousness could not also be such as to reflect in any way whatever upon that which occurs within it. That is to say, consciousness cannot be a place wherein mental states reside, whether percepts or images, or wherein events take place, whether perceiving or imagining, for introspection would thereby be impossible. But the conception of images as objects in consciousness persists, whereby the exploration of the mind is viewed as being akin to the exploration of an inner landscape within consciousness, without attending to the necessity for consciousness to adopt an attitude. But a decisive objection can be made against the view of the image as an internal perception, for such a view requires perception to be conceived as an external projection toward an image, analogous to that of a slide projected onto a screen. And a denial of the intentionality of consciousness is a denial of the object intended by consciousness, as a consequence of the object being considered as an interior thing. But to consider the object as an interior thing leaves unexplained how such psychic objects are apprehended and controlled by the mind that contains them. If consciousness is not consciousness of a transcendent object, but rather the object is immanent in consciousness, then consciousness is thereby attached to the associative incidental qualities of the appearance of the object, which is to say, consciousness is a succession of mere appearances of the object. But were this to be the case, then we are presented with a problem. If we wish to decide between those representations that are perceptions and those that are images, within the landscape of impressions, we may find ourselves reverting to phenomenalism, as a consequence of the absence of any criteria for distinguishing between a world that is external and a world that is imaginary, other than the external characteristics of the impressions, which is to say, their 32 comparable vividness or distinctness. “All the colours of poetry,” said Hume, “however splendid, can never paint natural objects in such a manner as to make the description be taken for a real landscape. The most lively thought is still inferior to the dullest sensation.” 30 An object is thereby only an exteriorized image and an image is only an interiorized object, but object and image have identical objective characteristics, and identical determinate qualities. But this is to prescribe for the image conditions that can apply only to perception, an error that we find in Berkeley. Locke wrote, concerning abstraction, that “ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all of the same kind; and their names, general names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to such abstract ideas.”31 To which Berkeley responded: Whether others have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas, they best can tell: for myself, I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining, or representing to myself, the ideas of those particular things I have perceived, and of variously compounding and dividing them. I can imagine a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse. I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But then whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and colour. Likewise the idea of man that I frame to myself must be either of a white, or a black, or a tawny, a straight, or a crooked, a tall, or a low, or a middle-sized man. I cannot by any effort of thought conceive the abstract idea above described. 32 Berkeley supposed that he could not, by any effort of thought, conceive an abstract idea. But an image is not a perception. The object as imaged is solely the consciousness one has of it, and to have vague consciousness of an image is to have consciousness of a vague image. My cat vaguely perceived is in itself a determinate cat. But a cat that is the object of a vague image is an indeterminate cat. It may be the case that images can appear to consciousness suddenly and without a decision on the part of consciousness to make such images appear. But consciousness is susceptible to reverie, forgetfulness, inattentiveness, making possible the material for an image to arise as the result of a failure in a prior attitude of the intending consciousness, but such material becomes an image only when once again it is apprehended in a new attitude of consciousness that maintains itself as an imagining attitude. In an attitude of inattentiveness, whereby consciousness forgets itself, the products of psychic activity are no longer maintained in existence via the relational equilibrium between the opposing divisions that constitute their psychic being, rather, the products are available for new constitutional activity, and will cease to exist if not immediately taken up in a new constitutional act whereby they become re-engaged in a new psychic motion. Such motion by the mind may maintain such products for a while through giving them a meaning, in the absence of which meaning they would not be conscious. The products of mental activity can be subjected to interruption only to the extent that they are mental. The reappearance of a mental product permeated with an imagining function is only 33 possible because a conscious intention bestows upon it the role of analogon, for a while, of some object that consciousness directs itself toward, through this product. Which is to say that consciousness cannot encounter anything without itself partaking in the encounter, even in the case of an unanticipated encounter, for in accepting the encounter it inescapably enters into a form of understanding of itself within the situation that has altered. By the intentionality thesis, consciousness has to orient itself in order to grasp its object, and when that which it grasps is an image, this requires an imaging act on the part of consciousness. From this notion of the necessity of consciousness to determine its bearings, so to speak, it follows that the manner in which an imagining act accomplishes this differs from that of an act of perception. For having rejected the container theory of the mind, we can no longer conceive of an image as some kind of errant impression that in some manner finds itself in a contingent, arbitrary and anomic associative relationship. Nor can we conceive of an image as determined totally in a deterministic world already complete in itself, for we can conceive such a world, but such a world could never be the object of imagination. Were there such a world, it necessarily would constitute itself continually step by step solely on the foundation of perception, the latter being the condition for the existence of the world. The activities of the perceiving capacity and that of the imaging capacity are thereby quite distinct. Employing image as a transitive verb, I may image my cat, and the image I thereby intend is no less outer and transcendent to my consciousness than my perception of my cat. Both the image of my cat and the perception of my cat are in different ways spatial. Imaging my cat and perceiving my cat have the same object, and I aim at this object in both cases, but in perceiving my cat the object that I intend overflows my perception of my cat, it is impossible that it could present to consciousness all that it has. Howsoever I devote myself to learning about the object of perception, I recognise clearly enough that the process of informing myself about such an object can be without end, for a perceptual object qua object is that which I must inform myself about, which is to say, of necessity I come up against an object abundant in determinative qualities. And such an encounter is undergone with the understanding that the object can only be apprehended sequentially, through particular aspects, and to the exclusion of an infinite number of mutually exclusive points of view. In considering the image of my cat, however, the object as imaged gives itself to me in a single occurrence and in a settled manner through a constitutive act whereby I direct myself toward the object. In this single occurrence the image of my cat has granted me everything it possesses. At the moment of its first manifestation I know all I can know concerning the image and can inform myself of nothing more concerning it. Through giving myself the image I thereby confine to within its first manifestation my relation to the object. The image is exiguous in its determinative qualities, given that it can have only those that I bestow upon it in its formation. And given that the image is a type of object that is not constituted by its mutually dependent interconnected divisions, nor is it constituted through its coherence with the other objects of the world, then I do 34 not observe the image. I may consider the image, or quasi-observe33 the image, to use Sartre’s phrase, that is, I can only consider the image, and in such a manner whereby the information I have of the image is not augmented in the least. My experience of a perception, whereby in effect I am delivered over to the object, is quite different, as I am induced to participate in the impetus of a complete scrutiny of the object, while apprehending an opacity in the object that originates in the plenteousness of the object’s worldly presence. But in the case of the object of an image, such an object manifests itself to me in a manner corresponding to my own intentional activity in making the image appear, and though remoulding the image into a new form is always a possibility, no effort is required on my part, given that such a remoulding occurs within a balanced and unchanging set of interrelated divisions. But upon the manifestation of a perceived object, such an object is always capable of surprising us, forever open to a series of manifestations that is without end. And yet the manifestation of the imagined object, given that it is restricted to the very determinative qualities it had at its source, is in effect confined within itself, and is without any attainability of development. An image is neither a mental object present in consciousness, nor a representation of an external object. The image presents us with an object that is absent, in a way totally different from the way an object would appear to us were it really present. It follows from the intentionality thesis that in imaging we aim at a spatial object, but the image appears to us in an original configuration, which is to say, an imaging configuration. And determinative qualities do not disclose themselves in such a configuration, nor are such qualities coadunative in the manner to be found in a worldly object. Rather, the determinative qualities of the image, having the same relationship to each other, thereby implicate and reciprocally permeate each other in a total impression that is confined within itself. From these points concerning imaging and perceiving it follows that some constitutional activity is required on the part of consciousness in constituting the meaning through which consciousness attains its object. That is, intentional activity is conditioned by an attitude, it is a requirement of consciousness that it adopt an attitude, be it an imaging attitude, a perceiving attitude, an emotional attitude, or whatever, and further, as we have previously noted, 34 an attitude, of whatever kind and on whatever occasion, always means something. That is, just as an action means something in that the action is intended, so too conscious activity means something, because of its intentionality. A wish is an intention, albeit a fulfilled intention, for to say I wish that... is to say I am intending that.... This expresses something different from I am intending to act, but it still expresses an intention. Similarly, to say that I image that… is to say I am intending that…. Again, this case is different from saying I am intending to act, but it does express an intention. 35 According to Sartre, being angry with someone is a grasping of the intentional object as hateful.35 Similarly, Husserl states, in his discussion concerning the idea of a genuine science, that what is required is: …an initial clarification of “judicative” doing and the “judgment” itself, along with the discrimination of immediate and mediate judgments…36 That is, to judge is to be involved in judicative doing. To judge is to mean that something is the case, or to intend that something is the case. That is, to say that I judge that... is to say I am intending that…. However, given that consciousness is intentional, that is, necessarily directed towards an object, it would seem that consciousness can also be an object for itself. It would seem, that is, that for a particular mode of directedness, that of knowing, there is the requirement that consciousness can direct itself toward itself, that it can be its own object, and given the constitutional activity of consciousness that we have just disclosed, the question now arises concerning the manner in which consciousness, through awareness of itself and what it is, is thereby responsible for what it is, given that it would seem that an imaging consciousness could imagine itself as other than what it is. 36 3.4. Consciousness and Self-Consciousness According to Sartre, it would seem to be “a necessary and sufficient condition for a knowing consciousness to be knowledge of its object … that it be consciousness of itself as being that knowledge.”37 For if I were conscious of a table without being conscious of being conscious of the table this would be “a consciousness ignorant of itself, an unconscious – which is absurd.” 38 But such consciousness of consciousness cannot be a reflective consciousness, or a knowledge of knowing, for were it so then we would have a knowing subject and an object of knowledge, which gives us a regress: …if we accept the knower-known dyad, then a third term will be necessary in order for knower to become known in turn, and we will be faced with this dilemma: Either we stop at any one term of the series – the known, the knower known, the knower known by the knower, etc. In this case the totality of the phenomenon falls into the unknown; that is, we always bump up against a non-self-conscious reflection and a final term. Or else we affirm the necessity of an infinite regress … which is absurd. 39 This is a reductio ad absurdum directed against Alain’s view of knowledge, that to know is to know one knows.40 Sartre illuminates this position through the example of counting his cigarettes: If I count the cigarettes which are in that case, I have the impression of disclosing an objective property of this collection of cigarettes: they are a dozen. This property appears to my consciousness as a property existing in the world. It is very possible that I have no positional consciousness of counting them. Then I do not know myself as counting … Yet at the moment when these cigarettes are revealed to me as a dozen, I have a non-thetic consciousness of my adding activity. If anyone questioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask, “What are you doing there?” I should reply at once, “I am counting.”41 In counting his cigarettes, whereby he is attempting, through description, to establish the number of cigarettes, he does not know that he is counting. It is not reflective awareness. He is counting, but there must be some minimal awareness that he is counting. If he is asked what he is doing, he can reply that he is counting. How could he answer thus if there were not some minimal self- awareness of the counting?42 In the cognitive sense, consciousness is engaged in some kind of feeling of itself, and given that an intention can be such only through an unbridgeable distance that separates the intention from the intentional object, consciousness is at a distance from itself. Consciousness of consciousness is not knowledge of knowledge, or an idea of an idea. For that would entail a reflective consciousness of consciousness. A reflecting consciousness aiming toward a reflected 37 consciousness, the object of the reflecting consciousness thereby having a transcendence, or a meaning that overflows its givenness, just as the consciousness reflected upon itself aims toward transcendent objects. That is, the object of the reflecting consciousness is itself a consciousness. The situation is thereby “like a hall of mirrors” that “entails an infinite regression since the knowing reflection would in turn have to be known by a new knowing reflection that would take it as object.”43 Consciousness we have of the object of consciousness Sartre calls positional or thetic consciousness. But consciousness of consciousness is not in the first instance positional (thetic). Positional consciousness of consciousness is reflection. But the minimal self-awareness we have prior to reflection is non-positional (non-thetic). Sartre marks this fact by putting the of in brackets, consciousness (of) consciousness. We thereby avoid the infinite regress through postulating a pre-reflective consciousness, a minimal self-awareness that consciousness has of itself. In pre-reflective awareness consciousness does not treat itself as an object; it is not an ofness such as we find with reflective awareness, that is, it is a non-thetic awareness of itself in that it is aware of itself without apprehending itself thematically. The intentionality of consciousness, its ofness, may be represented by an arrow to signify its directedness. A thetic consciousness of X refers to the fact that consciousness is of its object. It is a positional or thetic awareness of X. But we cannot represent non-thetic or pre-reflective consciousness in this way, because it does not resemble the model shown in Fig. 2. The regress is avoided if thetic awareness is pre-reflectively aware of itself, the latter represented by putting the of in brackets. That is, consciousness of is consciousness (of) itself. The regress is avoided because consciousness of and consciousness (of) are not distinct consciousnesses. And this is a problem with our model of consciousness as represented diagrammatically. For the sake of accuracy the arrow representing consciousness (of), , would have to be placed in the arrow representing consciousness of, . (of) X Fig. 2 38 The example of counting one’s cigarettes is an empirical point, of course, and thereby inconclusive. Piaget, an empirical psychologist, has demonstrated that if one asks a child, who has just executed a calculation, how he did it, he does not know. The implication of this is that the child was not reflectively aware. But as these are empirical considerations they cannot be decisive. Nor do they yield Sartre’s desired conclusion, that consciousness is not reflectively aware of itself. The only conclusion is that if consciousness is reflectively aware of itself, this awareness is not knowledge. That is, it is consistent with a rival hypothesis. If a child is calculating, he is reflectively aware of what he is doing, though confused. But this is not knowledge. That is, he lacks the capacity to understand that reflection of consciousness engaged in the calculating activity.44 Great artists can be so lost in the act of creation, that even if they begin a critical reflection on what they are doing in a philosophical manner it can destroy their ability to be creative. That they do not have the knowledge does not mean that they are not reflectively aware of what they are doing. For example, an art critic, who can bring art criticism under concepts, in terms of the aesthetic relations of elements in a picture, may present his criticism to the artist, who may then agree that the critic has correctly verbalised that which the artist was trying to achieve, but unable to put into words. So they may have been reflecting on what they were doing, but lacked the conceptual skills to achieve a knowledge of it. We therefore need an argument to reject this rival hypothesis, that reflection is occurring but it is not knowledge reflection. If Alain is correct and that to know is to know that one knows, then the act of knowing has a subject/object structure, that is, to know is to be conscious of knowing. And then we are either forced to posit another reflection, that is, to know is to be conscious of knowing, which entails knowing that one knows that one is conscious of knowing, and thus we have an infinite regress. Or we must stop at one reflection, and the one we stop at will not be self- awareness. Either way we will terminate at the rock bottom knowledge claim. Otherwise, there is a conscious act whereby knowledge is grasped, for example, I know the table is there. Either we have infinite terms or we stop at one of the terms, either way we will stop at knowledge, knowing the table is there. That is, we know the table is there. We are aware that we know the table is there. We are aware that we are aware that we know the table is there. And so on. But it is better to stop at all of the terms, we do not need any of them. There is a way in which, say, with proposition P, we can move up a level and say “P is true,” then jump up another level and say “‘P’ is true” is true.” This is possible at a logical level, for there is a relationship between propositions, assertions, and truth that allows this. But with a relationship of this kind, awareness and its object, it is not possible, for though the propositional levels may be infinite, in the case of levels of self-awareness there cannot be an infinite number of levels of awareness of an object, awareness of awareness of an object, and so on. We can therefore, with Sartre, introduce the (of) in brackets, consciousness (of), to denote a pre-reflective self-awareness to prevent the regress to infinite levels of self-awareness. 39 There is, however, an implicit assumption in our account of self-awareness. An awareness of awareness and the latter awareness itself are taken to have a logical distinctness. And yet we are in need of Kant’s requirement of unity, the “I think to accompany all my representations.”45 The knowledge I have that the table is there must be my knowledge, and not impersonal knowledge. As I reflect on the table being there such reflecting is exactly what I do. I know that the table is there. But then it would seem I cannot be aware of the awareness I have of being aware of the table being there, while at the same time that awareness of the table being there has an accompanying I. I can thereby postulate an awareness of the self at the second level of awareness, the awareness I have of being aware, for I is a reflexive term, indicating as it does both an object and a subject that are identical, unlike you, whereby the subject and object taken in its usage are distinct referents. But for the possibility for the Kantian I think, we may as well postulate an awareness of the self at the first level. Pre-reflective self-awareness is presupposed by reflective awareness. Otherwise reflective awareness would merely indicate that you are conscious, or there is consciousness. But if being aware and being aware of being aware are distinct consciousnesses, then how is it possible for me to say that I have knowledge? We need a principle of unity for the possibility of saying that I have knowledge. At best, reflective consciousness, if required for self-awareness, has to have an accompanying I. To stop the regress we must allow that being aware of being aware is non-cognitive. The condition of the phenomenon of saying I, whichever reflective relation we are concerned with, is that that reflective relation has to have a non-cognitive relation with itself. This, of course, leaves undecided the question as to why we must postulate the Kantian I. Why must there be some minimal self-awareness, so that we may say I at any point? Why can there not be awareness without self-awareness? The answer to this question is that, in intending, consciousness has themes. We can illustrate this with the example of Sartre counting his cigarettes. The individual bits of counting need a theme to integrate them, otherwise Sartre could go “one cigarette” and then go to the door. The cigarettes are unified by the theme of counting. They are not discrete fragments, rather, they are linked particles of counting. Consciousness has a project, and this theme requires self-awareness. If it is myself that is counting the cigarettes, it is not counting as such that unifies these acts, it is my counting. I do not count one cigarette, remark that there is a table there, decide that I must go to work, and so on. An intention requires a unifying theme. And there can be such only if there is a minimum self-awareness in consciousness. This is a necessary condition for unity, that is, that there be a unifying theme and reflective awareness. And in order for there to be a unifying theme, self-awareness is required, but it cannot be reflective awareness. 46 The being of consciousness is thereby to appear. Consciousness appears to itself pre- reflectively, that is, not as an object. This is the notion of translucency applied to consciousness, the being of consciousness is its appearing. But in the case of intentional acts, if an unreflective act appears to us at all it does so in relation to a reflection, and therefore it must be placed 40 somewhere between that reflective consciousness and pure unconsciousness. But given the translucency of consciousness there is no pure unconsciousness. Now, if an emotion, for instance, is an intention, if anger is something that is intended, this must be an intention at the unreflective level. A show of anger is an unreflective act, for angry behaviour, pulling one’s hair out, or stamping one’s feet, behaviour that seemingly serves no practical purpose, can only attain meaning within a conscious intention whereby the enraged person has seen clearly his obligation to act, but he just does not feel up to meeting this obligation. Having no time for deliberation, as the difficulty of the obligation appears unexpectedly, through degraded behaviour the enraged person can evade the obligation, at the same time dealing with the anxiety he feels toward the sensed yet hidden possibilities of the situation. There is thereby a distinction between awareness and knowledge. Awareness does not imply knowledge. Awareness is pre-reflectively aware of itself, and thereby translucent. This is “the mystery in broad daylight,”47 as Sartre refers to it, but it is not a cognitive daylight. And once the person obtains a practical viewpoint in which at issue is his own attitude of ready accessibility to his own motives and actions, and once he then, from such a viewpoint, questions himself as to whether or not he is compelled to endure in a reflective mode the emotion he intends at an unreflective level, then indeed does that which we have referred to as human ambiguity become most clearly expressed. This brings us to the heart of the free will problem, for it is not enough to say of Sartre’s theory of freedom, as Thody does, that it: …stems from the fact that we are always conscious of what we are, and consequently always able to change. There is nothing we can do to abolish our awareness of ourselves and of our freedom. 48 For it is true that self-consciousness alone has the means to thoughtfully engage, with difficulty to progress, to put right and to orientate, but the question remains as to whether self-consciousness is also powerless before the inventiveness of the consciousness of the world, and whether there are sound reasons to ascribe to a perceivable act an unreflective emotion, such as anger, with its attendant degraded behaviour, if it is the case that an orientating self-consciousness persists in its powerlessness when faced with the degradation engendered by this inventiveness. Such questions can be addressed by following through the essential character of intentionality that has been implicated in our analysis thus far, that consciousness, being intentional, is thereby constitutive. Husserl, through a supposed bracketing of all assumptions concerning the natural world, the phenomenological reduction, was led toward a particular metaphysical position, transcendental idealism,49 whereby consciousness is found to be presided over by an ego, an I or subject involved no less than objects in the very possibility of any act of consciousness whatsoever. And given that all evidence for what exists or does not exist has been bracketed, this ego is not the existing person. It is a transcendental ego, and phenomenology is no longer an investigation of the things themselves, but rather all objects of consciousness are dependent for 41 their characteristics upon the activity of this ego. The question thus arises, does the phenomenological attitude lead to a position of idealism, and if so should the phenomenological attitude be rejected? And would such a rejection thereby lead us toward a position of realism? 3.5. An Encounter with Being For Husserl, the entire world gets its sense from an apodictically evident cogito, that is, in the sense in which I am held to be a transcendental subject, the ground of the world, I am held not to be in the world but external to the world, the intentional object is thereby solely a sense or meaning, with its opacity removed, together with its alien quality, and its presence-to, and the object is then directly accessible to consciousness. And then consciousness is this sense or meaning, and nothing more. And yet, no sense or meaning can ever arise from such a pure consciousness, considered in itself, unconditioned by anything other than itself, an absolute. If consciousness is consciousness of, we are thereby committed to the existence of the external world. If we reflect on intentionality, directedness, ofness, however we wish to term it, we will see that it relates us to the existence of the world. It is a parasitic directedness; it is parasitic on their being things, not just senses, or possibilities. The ofness of consciousness leads to this existential claim.50 That is to say, the intentionality thesis commits us to the existence of a world, as Sartre has said: All consciousness is consciousness of something. This definition of consciousness can be taken in two very distinct senses: either we understand by this that consciousness is constitutive of the being of its object, or it means that consciousness in its inmost nature is a relation to a transcendent being. But the first interpretation of the formula destroys itself: to be conscious of something is to be confronted with a concrete and full presence which is not consciousness… the objective will never come out of the subjective nor the transcendent from immanence, nor being from non-being… 51 Because of intentionality, consciousness is a being that implies a being other than itself. Consciousness is consciousness of something. This means that transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness; that is, that consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself.52 Our phenomenological method should thereby bring to light such intentionality toward the world, by causing to emerge the diverse intentionalities connecting consciousness to the world. And given that it is an essentialist/existential phenomenology, it can thereby grasp both the facticity of the world and its existential validity, as it discloses essences by means of facticity and existence as they appear in a mode of ideality. But the method must not stray beyond what is properly intentional within intentionality, for what is to appear is the relation of consciousness to an actual 42 world, and a method that directs itself to the discovery of such ideal structures of facticity and existence must not in the process purge from itself that which it is supposed to make evident, namely, this relation of consciousness to actuality. Such a purgation of this relation would in effect obliterate consciousness’s own notion of itself. The study of the intentional object in transcendental phenomenology, for instance, becomes a study of the principles governing the activity of the transcendental ego by which the object is constituted out of what are in effect contents of consciousness, the hylé and the really immanent transcendent objects. In other words, the discovery of a transcendental ego constituting acts of consciousness leads to the discovery that consciousness has contents, and the character of every object has to be referred to the activity of consciousness. But from the intentionality of consciousness it follows that there is no ego in or behind consciousness, there is only an ego for consciousness. And rather than puzzle ourselves over the problem of how the contents of consciousness are constituted into intended objects, the conclusion to be drawn is rather that consciousness has no contents. Consciousness is activity, pure spontaneity, transcending itself towards objects. There are thereby no mental entities, no stuff of consciousness representing the outside world. There are only objects for consciousness, be they ideas, material objects, or whatever, and there are no objects in consciousness. If consciousness has no transcendental ego and no contents, and therefore the being of objects, being in-itself, is not constituted by a transcendental ego through the medium of mental contents, then the being of objects is either not disclosed to every act of consciousness, or it is, but if it is not, then we can never apprehend anything having a type of being different from the being of consciousness. But this is in opposition to the tenet of the intentionality of consciousness, whereby consciousness, the for-itself, and the in-itself are different types of being, though the former cannot exist without the latter. Were we to perform the transcendental reduction, we would be putting into abeyance all affirmations of existence beyond consciousness itself, thereby reflecting upon intentions of consciousness which no longer posit any objects in an existing world. And this is impossible. The intentionality thesis is a rejection of all notions of contents of consciousness. As Sartre puts it: 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. 53 If we reject the transcendental ego or contents in consciousness, phenomenology is then concerned with human existence relating with the world, consciousness as consciousness of things, consciousness of itself, consciousness of other selves. Consciousness, that is, exists in a situation, it is engaged, it is necessarily present to the existing world. Consciousness is a transcendence when it is an object for itself, it goes beyond what is merely given and can never grasp the in- itself. Consciousness can therefore be defined as follows: 43 The for-itself is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being is essentially a certain way of not being a being which it posits simultaneously as other than itself. 54 Consciousness encounters no difficulty in aiming toward the world, but this ready facility brings with it a gratification leading to a worldly inveiglement whereby consciousness loses its knowledge of the world as that which obtains being only through such a relation which it itself has activated. In the exercise of this facility, consciousness in effect excludes itself in preference for a world that it has objectified, whereby its own evaluations are seen as recognitions, its own presence is taken to be a mere screen on which the world is reflected, and objects are apprehended as in themselves possessing determinative qualities, which is to say, possessing diverse meanings that only consciousness can give to them. This is in opposition to the intellectualists’ view, whereby there is in effect no self, as truth is already fully constituted by a transcendental consciousness, for it is the basic tenet of transcendental idealism that there are some things that we can know to be true because the knowing mind makes them true. And it is in opposition to the empiricists’ view, in which again there is in effect no self in the notion of the mind as a tabula rasa, whereby consciousness is seen as a passive receptor of the world. And such an elimination of the self is to be found in analyses of modes of consciousness offered by classical psychology, be such modes of consciousness perceptual, imaginative, or emotional. This arises from a failure to make the distinction between perception and imagination, and which leads to a recognition solely of behaviour that is objective, that is to say, to the neglect of consciousness (of) consciousness, which is in itself absolutely subjective, in a way that consciousness of the world is not. Classical psychology recognises only objective behaviour that is caused by determining conditions or factors, and maintains a belief in imaginary objects that have a determinative thinghood, and that are given as such to consciousness. But if its directedness toward the world is a ready facility of consciousness, so too is its evaluative function, exercised through a reattainment of its control of itself, even if merely at the level of velleity, which is acheivable through a resumption of this essential character, which is to say, a change of direction is undergone whereby possession of its own motion at the point of its origin is recovered. Consciousness, as Sartre has said, slopes toward the world, and this is that which is the point of origin of its motion, but this point of origin must be understood in terms of its own capacity, independently of the very sloping that makes it the point of origin. Which is to say, the sloping manifests itself as such only to the extent that consciousness attempts to rise above it, but then the manner in which consciousness slopes toward the world is thereby presented as depleted of efficacious signification, of any value or capability of being used or put into effect. This is so because it ceases to be a sloping toward its own situation, or its own existence. It is rather an absolute, or unconditioned slope, as Sartre points out: 44 If the cogito necessarily leads outside the self, if consciousness is a slippery slope on which one cannot take one’s stand without immediately finding oneself tipped outside onto being-in-itself, this is because consciousness does not have by itself any sufficiency of being as an absolute subjectivity; from the start it refers to the thing.55 The fundamental and indispensable attitudes of consciousness can be described with respect to the way in which this “slippery slope” constitutes consciousness. And the purpose of such an analytical disengagement is to clarify the prior engagement implicated by our very existence, and which allows such disengagement to proceed. What is required, that is, is an ontology of consciousness in situation. An alternative would be the pure phenomenology of Husserl, but after the phenomenological reduction there is no longer any possibility of apprehending any difference between images and perceptions, other than those constituent in their intentionality. And then the question arises as to how there can still be images and perceptions, and how there can still be a real world and an imaginary world. After the reduction, dwelling in consciousness is an occurrent that may be designated a mental given, a content, which is an object for consciousness only through the noema, that is, through a sense or meaning. Just as prior to the reduction a distinction could be made between world and consciousness, after the reduction a distinction can be made between the noema and the noesis, the latter considered as a mental reality. The noesis is the mental content to the extent that it is activated by an intentional act. However, suppose that I am now perceiving my mother. My-mother-perceived is thereby the meaning that is my noema and that comes to occupy my noesis. But the meaning perceived that my mother appropriates for me cannot come from the noema, for the latter dwells in consciousness in precisely the same way as does my-mother-imagined. The difference must therefore derive from the different intentions characteristic of perception and imagination. On the level of noema, my-mother-perceived equals my-mother-imagined. In placing the world between brackets I thereby replace my mother by the meaning my mother. The meaning is henceforth incapable of surpassing itself in the direction of some real complement of meaning, which could give my mother either as perceived or as imagined. For Husserl, the act of the noesis is real, but the noema, the object as intended, is given ideal status, it is wholly me-dependent. But the being of the phenomenon cannot be reduced to the phenomenon of being. We cannot reduce being to the knowledge that we have of it. For instance, even were we to accept cognitive idealism, the view that the world, being, is reducible to knowledge, we can still raise the question of the being of knowledge. And in having apodictic evidence, there is a direct apprehension, a perception in the Husserlian sense, of a modal state of affairs. Apodictic evidence, that is, establishes the being of knowledge. However, we can still raise the question of the being of apodictic evidence. Or let us take some other criterion, x, the being of which we wish to establish, the being of x is not reducible to the knowledge we have of x. For this to be so, the being of consciousness must be 45 an absolute being. The cogito, the being of consciousness, is not merely an appearance, it is. That is, consciousness must have transphenomenal being. There is x, for instance, there is a table. Logically, there are a set of conditional propositions concerning my perceptions of the table. This reduces the being of x, the table, to its appearances. We have not removed transphenomenal being, because we cannot have an appearance without something to which it appears. For the phenomenalist, x, the table, is a concatenation of appearances. For us, even if we accept that, it refers us to transphenomenal being, which is consciousness. The being of consciousness is an absolute being. Consciousness is an appearance to itself, but that being of consciousness is not merely an appearance. Appearances, as such, need to be grounded, to go beyond appearances. Something not reducible to appearances is needed to ground appearances. If we reduce appearances to the phenomenon of being, we will be transferred to the transphenomenal being of consciousness. Given appearances, it forces us to postulate something more than appearance. It is impossible that everything be reduced to appearances, for appearances presuppose something of which they are appearances, that is, appearance is relative. That to which the appearance appears must itself be more than appearance. It cannot be relative to, for example, knowledge. Or if it is, we can refer to the being of knowledge. There has to be a stopping place, that is, consciousness, the absolute, in the sense that all appearances are relative to it. Therefore, we are committed to more than phenomena; we have consciousness and appearances, and the phenomenon of being must be integrated with transphenomenal being. That is, I am not its origin. The directedness of consciousness is not simply through the noema, it is a directedness onto that, a consciousness of..., to necessarily transcend the noema and touch particularity. That is, so we can say that one. Without brute existence there would be no modal distinctions between fiction and reality. And, as Jeanson noted, “presence to the world is the means by which the freedom of consciousness acquires a meaning,” 56 and “the experience of having an attitude is what must be understood.”57 Ontology is thereby a reflection on self, a disclosure of the manner in which self apprehends itself, and as it apprehends itself as a situated being that implies a being other than itself, a transcendence transcending, such an ontology leads to a revolutionary psychology that: …has uncovered the hypocrisy of conceiving consciousness in a tendentious way which deprives it of all responsibility for what transpires within it. This conception implies either a naturalism or a transcendentalism: it makes consciousness a mere witness, either of a universal mechanism or of the activity of some objective Spirit. But consciousness is precisely what is not the object. It is instead transcendent to every possible object. And even if it experiences the temptation embodied by the object, it can never entirely forget itself since “it is consciousness of being a consciousness that forgets.” Its flaw is its inability to consummate the betrayal of itself: it always apprehends itself as the source of its self-denials. Free in its initiatives, it is nevertheless unable to ignore its own corporeal existence.58 46 The contingency of the existence of consciousness in the world is the basis of the freedom of consciousness. But the facticity of consciousness is the basis of its transcendence. Husserl employed the term motivation for that which has not been fully given, as indicated by what has been, for instance, with my present perception of a side of a tree the other side is given, not merely as a logical possibility, but as motivated, that is, as having a certain undetermined but determinable configuration. And yet a pure phenomenology attempts to analyse intentionality beyond the reach of those very motivations through which the world’s irreducible existence guarantees that motions of consciousness will have the character of present, active attitudes. But consciousness (of) consciousness is absolute subjectivity. It is immanent to itself and it amounts to the identity of appearing and existing; consciousness exists to the extent that it appears to itself. But this consciousness (of) consciousness must: …be qualified in some way, and it can be qualified only as revealing intuition or it is nothing. Now a revealing intuition implies something revealed. Absolute subjectivity can be established only in the face of something revealed; immanence can be defined only within the apprehension of a transcendent. …consciousness implies in its being a non-conscious and transphenomenal being. … To say that consciousness is consciousness of something is to say that it must produce itself as a revealed-revelation of a being which is not it and which gives itself as already existing when consciousness reveals it.59 Though we began with the phenomenon, we are led to the conclusion that the phenomenon does not support itself as such. The world is not merely phenomenal, not merely world-for-us; it is, it is in-itself, it exists independently of consciousness and is not reducible to it. And consciousness itself is not just phenomenal; it is absolute subjectivity, it is for-itself, irreducible to the world’s mode of being. Having passed beyond the phenomenon toward each of the two types of being of which the phenomenon gives evidence, we have thereby avoided the phenomenalism of philosophical idealism, whereby the very being of the object is a constituted product of consciousness, in which all being is referred back to the being of consciousness. And we have avoided the epiphenomenalism of philosophical realism, whereby the object is construed as acting on a passive consciousness, in which all being is referred back to the being of the object. Having established these two types of being, the next stage is to employ the essentialist/existential phenomenological method to disclose essences through the appearance in ideal form of facticity and existence. That is, we can make an abstract distinction between consciousness and objects, but in real terms we do not have consciousness independent of objects. It is rather consciousness-Being,60 a synthetic totality. But consciousness is distinct from its object, otherwise it could not be consciousness of its object. For this to be possible, consciousness must negate its object, that is, to say I am not that object. I must distinguish myself from other 47 things, through negations, not this, not that, and consciousness thereby nihilates, or negates. As Jeanson puts it, “consciousness rejects being.”61 Our ontology is thereby a duality of terms, a duality of essences. The essence of lived ambiguity is to be a duality, and each term of the duality discloses its own lack, for the in-itself as an object is a being sufficient in itself in its contingency, but insufficient in its justification as presence. But the for-itself is a being sufficient in itself as theoretical consciousness, but insufficient in an account of its own existence. There are thereby two kinds of insufficiency corresponding to these two instances of insufficiency. The for-itself cannot exist without the in-itself, any more than a colour can exist without a shape, or a tone, and consciousness considered by itself is therefore only an abstraction. And the in-itself has no need for the for-itself in order to be, but without the for-itself the in-itself cannot appear. The in-itself is an abstract phenomenon without the for-itself, but the being of the in-itself is not abstract. There is, therefore, this duality, consciousness-Being. But if the two terms of the duality implicated each other in a mutual correspondence, this would amount to the absolute dualism of Hegel, whereby Being and not-Being can each become the other. We would then be compelled to interpret such an absolute dualism in such a way as to overcome it. Such an interpretation would either lead toward realism, whereby the for-itself is eliminated and we are left with an unconceivable Being. Or it would lead toward an idealism, in which Being is eliminated and we are left with an active for-itself, but quite how such a for-itself can be active can only be a mystery. From an ontological point of view, if there were an equivalence of terms in the duality then consciousness-Being would be pure not-Being. Consciousness-Being, which we have represented diagrammatically by an arrow, is not, in fact, to be conceived of in such a simple way, for consciousness-Being is an active force and influence adjusted to a particular situation. But the arrow of consciousness is also representative of consciousness-Being, in that the arrow points in one direction. By the intentionality thesis, consciousness exists and Being appears through the movement of consciousness toward Being, but the reverse movement, whereby Being exists and consciousness appears, is impossible. When we refer to the essences of consciousness we are referring to meanings that can be understood only as lived meanings. And freedom, the essential structure of consciousness, is existence in its particularity imposing itself on consciousness; or, as Sartre put it, “in freedom, existence precedes essence.”62 Human reality therefore has an understanding of its own attitudes that can be disclosed through an essentialist, or eidetic, phenomenology. A phenomenon is absolute/relative, in that a phenomenon has horizons, but the being of the phenomenon does possess an absolute objectivity transcending the manner in which it presents itself. The being of consciousness is to appear. Consciousness appears to itself pre-reflectively, that is, not as an object. This is the notion of translucency, the being of consciousness is its appearing Having established the ineludability of Being to consciousness, its perpetual confirmation as something overflowing in relation to all possible points of view that consciousness may take on it, 48 the next step is to determine how consciousness, which by its very nature reveals Being, can reveal not-Being, a gap, or rupture at the heart of consciousness. 3.6. An Encounter with Not-Being An image, as we have seen, is not a perception. But just as it is a necessary truth that there is, in perception, a percept, and a ground, in imagination there is an image, and a ground. The positing of the absence or the nonexistence of the object presentified as imaged forces the world back in such a manner that it remains there as a horizon against which the irreal63 form of the image stands out in relief. If I arrange to meet Pierre at the café64 and Pierre is not there, Pierre’s absence goes throughout the café, it defines the café almost. It is a particular concrete not-Being of Pierre in the café. A Pierre that was present would be the percept, whereas an absent Pierre is the image. We thereby pick out the percept or the image, depending on whether we are perceiving or imaging, and we make it stand out against a backdrop. 65 This and that, as in this Pierre or that Pierre, are indexical terms that indicate a distinction between him, or it, that which is indicated, and something else, a backdrop. The café is the backdrop against which I see or image Pierre. So the café is transformed; it is infected already with Pierre. I thereby describe the backdrop in terms of Pierre. A record is playing, the one Pierre hates. It is thus appropriate to redescribe the café in terms of Pierre. Pierre is infecting the café. And Pierre not being there is a concrete not-Being because the backdrop is appropriately described in terms of Pierre; a café is thus describable in terms of Pierre. That in itself, together with Pierre not being there, indicates a concrete not-Being, for the Duke of Wellington is not there either, but that fact does not enter into the description of the backdrop. Similarly, Napolean Bonaparte is not in the café is just an abstract negative judgment, whereas Pierre’s absence in the café is an objective constituent in the cafe. Such not-Being that is a possible object of experience Sartre designates as Nothingness, but this evokes an ancient problem. As the visitor from Elea says, in Plato’s The Sophist, quoting Parmenides: Never shall this force itself on us, that that which is not may be; While you search, keep your thought far away from this path.66 Parmenides is claiming that since what is cannot not-be, being excludes all denial, all negation. That is, we cannot speak of what is not, for “what should the name, that which is not, be applied to?”67 For “that which is not can’t be applied to any of those which are,” and “if you can’t apply it to that which is, it wouldn’t be right either to apply it to something,” for “someone who does not say something says nothing at all,” and it is therefore not the case that “a person like that speaks but says nothing,” rather, “anyone who tries to utter that which is not is [not] even speaking.”68 However, though it is impossible to speak about nothing, we can only ever speak about something, and it is impossible to experience nothing, we can only ever experience something, it is possible to 49 speak about, and to experience, not-Being. We can argue for this through the Husserlian notion of empty intending. A material object percept, an object of which we are aware, is transcendent to the experiential continuity in which it features, for the being of the phenomenon is transphenomenal. The computer that I have in front of me at present has a reverse side that does not appear to me, but it can become an object of direct experience, whereby the original appearance of the front side is then lost. The intentional object thereby incorporates a connate transcendence to the immanent elements that comprise the experience of that which is intending the object. Physical objects and their attendant characteristics are delineated by means of the really inherent distinctive aspects of the sensations that feature as part of any experiential percept. This is not a consequence of our naturalistic beliefs, for what we believe about the actuality of worldly objects is not at issue here. We know that a material object, like a computer, has a front and a back, an inside and an outside. And yet, such objects would appear that way to us even if they were not that way at all, but mere illusions or ideas in the mind. It is a categorical fact about that type of object and the experience of such an object that they are unreflectively accepted as such an object. And since we are at present engaging in phenomenological description, we can be certain of this fact even after the phenomenological reduction. Were I to convince myself that what appears to me at present is only an illusory computer, the computer will persist in its appearance as a three-dimensional material object with concealed aspects. Such a description of the object serves to explicate the manner in which a material body as an object of experience thereby has a material body sense. Perception of a material object involves a reference to aspects of it that are not given in sensation, that is, a meaning intention that is empty may achieve fulfilment through perceptual contact with the object that is emptily meant. Empty intending is a part of any perceptual experience of a bodily presence of an object. An individual percept is a combination of fulfilled and unfulfilled intentions, as, for instance, the computer is an object that appears as a material object with concealed aspects. But for it to appear so requires a subjective accomplishment of perception involving a reference to these hidden aspects, and this is lacking in a mere sensation experience whereby there do not appear to be any hidden aspects. Such perceptual references to hidden aspects of an object are anticipatory in nature, in that were I to open my fully functioning computer I anticipate seeing within it some kind of circuitry. If such anticipation is satisfied, then the computer percept can be said to have fulfilled what was formerly an empty reference to that which has been fulfilled through the anticipatory satisfaction. That there are such perceptual references is clear from the fact that there is the permanent possibility of surprise in our experience of any object. I may open the computer to discover it empty of all content. But for any object that has a material body sense, necessarily we will have at least the expectation that the object has concealed aspects. We may conclude that in the presence of such empty or unfulfilled components in experience, there is intentionality: 50 Intentional analysis is guided by the fundamental cognition that, as a consciousness, every cogito is indeed (in the broadest sense) a meaning of its meant, but that, at any moment, this something meant is more – something meant with something more - than what is meant at that moment “explicitly.” In … each phase of perception [is] a mere side of “the” object, as what [is] perceptually meant. This intending-beyond-itself, which is implicit in any consciousness, must be considered an essential moment of it.69 Even from the point of view of pure subjective experience, after the reduction, we discover a duality of object and of subjective processes in which an object is given. On the side of the object is the computer as just one thing, and on the side of the subjective processes is an effusive multeity of computer experiences. Intentional acts are thereby to be understood in terms of empty intending, in contradistinction to fulfilling acts. But even the latter, though they involve sensations fully presented, are intentional, for they also bear an intending beyond what is given. The conclusion to draw is that absence is an essential constituent of intentionality. The example of the computer is a case of direct apprehension, but the latter need not involve bodily presence. We can directly apprehend a modal state of affairs, but the range of what is intuitional, or of acts that give us something, is greater than the original cases of direct apprehension. Acts of concretely imagining something are cases of intuition, as are cases of concretely recollecting something. The contrast for the general class of what is intuitive, or giving, is with acts that are empty. For example, if I hear a noise in the kitchen which I take to be a burglar but am told is only my cat, I understand the meaning of what I am told without the need for an accompanying cat image, whether it be the image of my cat or of any cat at all. However, in entering the kitchen the topic of the discourse, my cat, is now perceived, and recognised, in a synthesis of identification, as that which was formerly only understood. The achievement of such a synthetic act requires no imaging of cats to connect that which is understood with that which is perceived. In Husserlian terms we can say that the perceptual experience in question agrees with the content of the empty meaning intention, by virtue of which the latter is fulfilled by the bodily presence given by the former. As Husserl says: A merely supposing judging becomes adjusted to the affairs, the affair-complexes, themselves by conscious conversion into the corresponding evidence. This conversion is inherently characterized as the fulfilling of what was merely meant, a synthesis in which what was meant coincides and agrees with what is itself given; it is an evident possessing of the correctness of what previously was meant at a distance from affairs.70 The perceptual experience, in effect, covers for the content of the empty meaning intention. However, such empty intending is in need of re-interpretation in the light of a consciousness that is both pre-reflective and empty of content. As Sartre has said: 51 It seems that Husserl has not always escaped the materialist illusion. To be empty an intention must be conscious of itself as empty and precisely as empty of the exact matter at which it aims. An empty intention constitutes itself as empty to the exact extent that it posits its matter as non-existing or absent. In short an empty intention is a consciousness of negation which transcends itself toward an object which it posits as absent or non-existent. 71 That is, negation is an essential part of the structure of consciousness. An empty intention is thereby an experience of not-Being, and the latter is a theme that we can now pursue. Were we now to embark on a discussion of Nothingness, on the other hand, we would not be saying anything at all. Empty intending is grounded in the questioning attitude, as, for instance, I look inside my computer to see what is there. Questioning is “a human attitude filled with meaning. What does this attitude reveal to us?”72 Questioning addresses itself to a being. Whether we inquire about its way of being or its being itself, we are asking about that in virtue of which this being participates in the general transcendence of being. Questioning presupposes, and does not create, man’s relation to being-in-itself. As Jeanson says, “Transcendent being – which is an absolute positivity beyond affirmation and negation – thus presents itself through interrogation as a perpetual response to human efforts…By the fact of interrogation alone there is a revelation of being, which thereby presents itself as the equally transcendent foundation of non-being.”73 But we do not wish to allow not-Being an ontological status beyond what is required for the negative condition, as an essential part of the structure of consciousness, for the world to be such that within such a world the notion of my being able to not do what I did in fact do is at least meaningful. The significance of not-Being is not so much to do with the fact that the world is a totality of implements, and given that tools can fail then not-Being is part of the structure of the world. Rather, its real significance is in the fact that consciousness, through negating itself, is thereby breaking the law of identity. Not-Being is the first condition of questioning behaviour. For there to be questioning there must be the possibility of negation: “In order for negation to exist in the world and in order that we may consequently raise questions concerning Being, it is necessary that in some way Nothingness be given.”74 Not-Being cannot be conceived as “outside of Being, nor as a complementary, abstract notion.”75 Not-Being cannot come after Being. It needs Being to maintain its own nihilation of Being. But although not-Being implies the existence of Being, Being does not imply the existence of not-Being. Not-Being is not outside of Being, the endless backdrop within which Being is suspended. We know this through the existence of actualities that are elements in our lived experiences, like “distance…absence, otherness, repulsion, regret, distraction, etc.” Such actualities are “experienced, combatted, dreaded, etc., by the human being.” They are negativities:76 “..their inner structures are inhabited by negation, as by a necessary condition of their existence…they are dispersed in being, are supported by being, and are conditions of 52 reality.”77 Within the very midst of the world there is a “swarm of ultra-mundane beings which possess as much reality and efficacy as other beings, but which enclose within themselves non- being.”78 Not-Being can be given, then, “coiled in the heart of being - like a worm.”79 Not-Being is the unifying theme of negations. We can give an extended description of the equation between not-Being and freedom. The ontological position is this. The world is a synthetic totality, involving the for-itself and the in-itself, and is brought under a conceptual grid; that is, tools and instruments. A totality of instruments is a product of a relationship of the for- itself and the in-itself. The world is the world of persons, chairs, tables, hammers, and so on, whereas the in-itself does not contain such objects. The in-itself is an undifferentiated mass, it is what it is, and it is identical with itself. The world is not the in-itself, the world is tables and chairs and books. The world is instruments and tools, so it is not surprising that not-Being is invoked in descriptions of the structure of the world. But not-Being is not reducible to negative judgments. Not-Being is the condition of the possibility of negative judgments. Ontology can be nothing but an anthropomorphic, or human, ontology. We are responsible for there being a world. And there are little pools of not-Being, but concrete not-Being is going to be project, or human expectation, relative. We are concerned with the ontological status of this category, the objective pools of not-Being. For it is irreducible, we cannot get by without it. It is not reducible to negative judgments, it is required before negative judgments. The very upsurge of consciousness requires not-Being. We can see this in terms of the questioning attitude. In talking about a question, we are giving the term a broad sense. We can question the table. We can rap it to see if it is made of metal, and the noise we get is the answer. Negation, applied to judgments, is correlated with a question. There is a reductive argument involved in this. If we have a failing watch, we may suppose we can account for the negative part of the watch, that which causes it to fail, solely in positive terms. For example, the notion of a completed watch provides us with positive comparisons; a particular watch, for example, has a piece missing. An ontological category may be reducible to some other ontological category, without loss of what we know from experience to exist in our conceptual scheme of things. Phenomenalism attempts to reduce material objects to sets of experiences. There is a table in front of me, and this table is reducible to a set of counterfactuals about my perceptions. If I were to do so and so I would see such and such. This is ontological reductionism, which does not require a denial of the existence of real tables. But the question of interest to us is, can we do without not-Being? We cannot, because not-Being is doing more work than simply being applied to judgments. There is an objective pool of not-Being, not-Being in consciousness is a precondition for there being a world. So there is this priority. The Sartrean term for this act of making something be nothing, or to make nothing, or rather, if we remember Parmenides, to make something not-Be, is to nihilate.80 As a logical precondition for there being a world, there is something negative involved. As for the world of instruments, tools, categories, distances, separate objects/events, this is all something that we are responsible 53 for, in the sense that it is consciousness that is carving up the undifferentiated mass that is the in- itself. Consciousness places its conceptual grid on the in-itself. As for the in-itself, qua in-itself, we have nothing to say about it, though Sartre does say something about it in Nausea, where it may be revealed through such feelings as that of boredom, but with the world we have already implicated ourselves. In other words, not-Being implicates Being and cannot be conceived apart from Being, but Being, on the other hand, is without negativity, which is to say, it is a total positivity that does not implicate not-Being. And not-Being cannot be conceived through itself as a starting point. Not- Being is non-Being, it cannot haul from out of itself the required power to bring about its own self-nihilation. When we are talking about not-Being having a power to do this or to do that, we are talking about consciousness. Whence, then, does this power come, if not from not-Being? The important point to note, as Jeanson said, is that: “Nothingness is not, for otherwise it would be confused with being. Strictly speaking, there cannot be Nothingness, only ‘being-that-is- nihilated.’ Or, if you will, there can be a being that, as Nothingness, is carried along, sustained, assured, by being. And… the kind of being that plays this role is not Being-in-Itself.” 81 With the rejection of transcendental idealism, it is still permissible to give an objective description of an earthquake. It is an event, with a negative description, and it is we who provide the negative description. Otherwise with every earthquake there would only be an alteration in bits of matter, not an earthquake qua destruction as it is related to human projects, plans, and so on. So, we cannot describe the world without negativity, and this negativity cannot be reduced to purely positive concepts, because it is linked with the fact that the concept of not-Being is not reducible to negative judgments. The logical concept of a question can be applied to propositions. The door is closed. Is it the case that the door is closed? Our usage of the concept of a question is wider than that. The being of human reality is this: to be is to be in question, or to be is to be a problem to oneself. This concept is then applied so that it makes sense to say: consciousness is in question. It is not asking questions about itself, it is something prior to that. So we do not get an account of not-Being in terms of the negation operator (¬), but something prior to it. Not-Being is the ground for the possibility of the negation operator. Human reality is its own problem. To ask explicit questions it needs a prior question of itself. The notion of a question is not cashable in terms of what logicians mean by a question. Not-Being is logically prior to the negation operator. It may be objected that we are thereby committing a fallacy of division. That is, we are saying things about the parts that are true of the whole. For instance, we may say of a watch that it is a real though failing watch, and it is failing because of a real though failing part of the watch. But though the latter is part of the watch, in itself it is not a real though failing part of the watch. It is the watch itself that is failing. Otherwise failure would be applied to part of the watch and not to the watch itself, yet the analogy between failure and not-Being does not hold, for the concept of 54 not-Being is wider than, and more fundamental than, the negation operator. Strictly speaking we cannot apply the negation operator to a watch.82 And not-Being is a universal. Consciousness is essentially bound up with not-Being; through nihilations, or negations. But not-Being has not the ontological status of the in-itself, as Ayer supposed when he accused those who discuss Nothing as an ontological category of committing a familiar fallacy: …the postulation of real non-existent entities results from the superstition…that, to every word or phrase that can be the grammatical subject of a sentence, there must somewhere be a real entity corresponding. For as there is no place in the empirical world for many of these ‘entities’, a special non-empirical world is invoked to house them. To this error must be attributed, not only the utterances of a Heidegger, who bases his metaphysics on the assumption that ‘Nothing’ is a name to denote something peculiarly mysterious, but also the prevalence of such problems as those concerning the reality of propositions and universals whose senselessness, though less obvious, is no less complete.83 This fallacy occurs in Alice Through the Looking Glass, when the Messenger arrives to greet the King, and tells him that nobody walks faster than he, and the King replies that he cannot do that or he’d have been here first. 84 Who is this Nobody who can walk faster than the Messenger? Nobody is here being taken as a proper name, just as, according to Ayer, those who discuss Nothing are taking Nothing as a proper name. But if we were making that mistake we would allow not-Being the status of the in-itself. Rather, not-Being has a borrowed, a parasitic, being. Not-Being has an ontological status because we need the concept to coherently describe the relationship between consciousness and the in-itself. If we have two categories of being, the for- itself and the in-itself, and we are going to describe their relation, d, then that description, d, must contain the concept of not-Being. We cannot reduce not-Being out of d. A question may be raised concerning the notion of an ontological status, that is, whether or not not-Being, for instance, could have a certain degree of existence. But it must be remembered that we are dealing here with a phenomenological ontology, an ontology, that is, that situates the human condition. Phenomenological ontology makes explicit, through description, that which is implicit in the human condition, which is to say, that which it implies for itself, as it conceptualises itself and identifies its essence through definitions. We are not questioning the in- itself in its being, as one may ask, why is there something rather than nothing? The question of why Being is is conditioned by this Being. Rather, we are questioning Being as it appears, and asking why is there a world? The answer is provided by phenomenological ontology. The world is there through the presence of the for-itself. The phenomenon is thereby relative, relative to the for-itself, but it is also absolute, as it reveals itself as it is. But given its relativity to the for-itself, the phenomenon of Being has a transphenomenal character, for the phenomenality of Being is absolute, that is, forever beyond the 55 series of disclosures it presents to the for-itself. But not-Being necessarily features in the descriptions that situate the human condition, the relation between consciousness and the in-itself, and is not itself being described. Hence, from the point of view of phenomenological ontology, it does not have the ontological status of Being. The term not-Being is thereby not wholly cashable in terms of negation, a concept applicable to everything, and also applicable to itself. Consciousness brings not-Being into the world, as far as it has existential status. There must thereby be some sort of self-distinguishing occurring. What is involved here is an ofness, a distance, a negativity. Not-Being just is this relationship that consciousness has to itself, the pre-reflective relationship. This gap or distance that consciousness has with itself is in some sense of the term negative, a nihilating power of consciousness. Freedom is the capacity to introduce negativity into the world. It is at least intuitively clear that freedom does involve negativity, as we cannot describe it without recourse to negativity. We cannot describe the phenomenon of choice without negativity, for choice is an ontological event with negativity incorporated within it: I could have not done that. The metaphors employed here are appropriate because not-Being is a wider concept than the negation operator. Not-Being exists upon the surface of Being, not within it. With the surface of Being consciousness is already implicated. We can compare this with the concept of directedness, such as that of an arrow, shot from a bow, aimed at a target. Aiming is a negative concept. That is, one is fixing the direction in which the arrow is going to go, thereby precluding the arrow going in other directions. Sartre speaks of an internal negation. As Heidegger put it, Nothing noths itself: …the nothing [nihilation] … is neither an annihilation of Beings nor does it spring from a negation. Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihilates.85 The for-itself is activity, and the not-Being is an activity constitutive of the for-itself’s world. And not-Being also nihilates itself, the negation is turned upon itself. We can speak of not-Being nihilating itself because we are not giving any powers to not-Being, conceiving it as a force, rather, it is consciousness that is being described, but it is not-Being that is doing the negating. Whatever not-Being means its meaning is wider than the negation operator, and it is applicable to itself. The for-itself is the continuous project of not being itself in order that it may be present to itself, and for this reason the for-itself nihilates itself, which is to say, not-Being nihilates itself. And the ontological ground of not-Being, in other words, the law of being of the for-itself, is to be itself in the form of presence to itself. The nihilating capacity of consciousness is the cause of its own conduct and way of being, but the presence of consciousness cannot be explained by itself or by what is other than itself, because the presence of the for-itself to the world is that whereby the for-itself exists, but the for-itself is not itself the foundation of its presence to the world. An 56 awareness of ourselves is thereby not only an awareness of ourselves as existing as a brute fact, but is also an awareness of our factual existence as being without justification. Not-Being has a paradoxical being. Being-in-itself cannot causally produce not-Being. Not- Being is not, it is made-to-be by consciousness, it alone brings consciousness into the world, but it has an objective reality, it infects reality, contrary to idealism. There comes-to-be not-Being, even allowing the fact that not-Being doesn’t have being. To say not-Being has some kind of reality does not mean that it is there. It comes only through consciousness. The world is a world of tools, the world is this room, windows, tables, cars. It is infiltrated with anthropomorphism; it is a human world, essentially functional, for us, but we make it to be for us, by our projects. Nevertheless, instrumental complexes, for example, tools, have an objectivity. Archaeologists may find an object, and they can see it is a tool, though they do not know what it is for. Its toolness is not relevant to anyone’s project, but it is a tool. Tools, and such like, have an objectivity in that sense. The world is a synthetic totality of instrumental complexes, and anything found within that complex is going to be so infected. It has to be such because of our intending, aiming beyond, rendering the in-itself transformed by our intending beyond it. Because consciousness distinguishes being in-itself from Being itself, it is not me, I am not it, this double nihilation, an external negation, where consciousness rejects Being, is an internal negation, the pre-reflective cogito. This internal negation, this minimal self-awareness, consciousness distinguishing itself from what it is conscious of, a structural feature of consciousness, is what is responsible for not-Being, or negation. To be conscious of an object, consciousness must have distinguished itself from that object, which involves a negation, not... not... not... But that cannot be the end of the story, for if it were we would have to say that this not-Being is there, with a stable identity, thereby turning it into Being, the in-itself. Therefore not- Being must be nihilated, or negated, that is, there is not merely not-Being, there is not-Being of not-Being. That is, not-Being does not have the same status as Being. By virtue of itself not-Being negates itself, in some sense of the term negate, thereby breaking its identity. For consciousness, identity is a negated identity. Because of the pre-reflective cogito, consciousness is a translucency, that is, it is as it appears to be, though this is distinct from knowledge. This does not mean that I cannot misdescribe it. But because of the internal negation, how it appears to itself is negated. Therefore, consciousness is how it appears to be. And how does it appear to be? It appears to be such that it negates itself. Consciousness is separated from itself, that is its appearance. This is a rejection, a denial, of the identity of consciousness. Because of the negations, the appearance of consciousness is such that its identity is to be rejected, therefore its identity is to be rejected. Structurally, consciousness is translucent because of the pre-reflective cogito. By the thesis of intentionality, nothing can be in consciousness, not even an idea, neither a table, nor an idea of a table. Consciousness is not-Being. And the conclusion is, because consciousness is not-Being, without the ontological status of being-in-itself, it must not be subsumable under the law of identity. And because of the pre-reflective cogito, the 57 translucency of consciousness, consciousness is as it appears to be. If it appears to itself as being x, we therefore conclude that it is x. So x is the important factor, it determines our ontological conclusions. And x involves the internal negation, consciousness appears such that its identity is negated, therefore its identity is negated. But it is consciousness itself that effects these negations. Therefore consciousness makes itself, it is its own origin. This self-nihilation is that which makes consciousness. It may be objected that we are falling into circularity in giving such an account of consciousness, that is, to negate itself consciousness must exist already. But the upsurges are structural claims, they all occur at a stroke. Consciousness escapes itself, or the not-Being in consciousness is the elsewhere of consciousness; this is another way of expressing this lack of coincidence. Because there is a negation consciousness directs on itself, the negating identity cannot be strictly identical with the negated identity because then it would negate itself and the negation would collapse. So all these considerations concerning negation suggest that not-Being does not have the same ontological status as the in-itself, which is defined by the law of identity. Such are the premises involved at the outset in the break of identity. It may, however, also be objected that the phrases arises out of..., comes from..., all employ causal language. But if I go to the bar because someone persuaded me to, this is not a causal because. In some sense, consciousness arises out of being-in-itself, but on no account is this causal, for being-in-itself, with no traces of negativity in itself whatsoever, is complete, and nothing possibly could come from being-in-itself. My action is full of negativity, as when I use a tool, for instance, and this could not come from being-in-itself. Negativity could not possibly come from the in-itself, although in some sense it does arise out of the in-itself. We may conclude, then, that the objects of our encounter with not-Being, the negativities, are what motivate actions, through the apprehension of an objective not-Being, or négatité,86 and that they cannot be determined by Being, but only ever appear in the world in virtue of a relation to an end, the latter in a condition of not-Being. Hence I must effect a double nihilation in order to act. To return to our previous example, in the case of going to the bank in order to put money into my bank account to prevent my account going into the red, the state of my bank account is a fact (motif/cause), given its value as a motif by consciousness, in a prior nihilatory attitude (mobile/motive), as it projects itself toward not-Being, that is, a non-existent end, my-account remaining-in-the-black-as-imaged. However, given that our subject is free will, and if, through making choices with regard to how to direct itself the for-itself defines and determines its own nature of itself, and consciousness is not-Being, then for the will, whereby such choices are exercised, to be placed within the context of constituted thought, and as itself the spontaneous constitution of thought, leads us to a paradox. The will, as reflective effort, would be unintelligible to itself if there were not a background of pre-reflective life for it to take account of, a pre-reflective life oriented around a fundamental choice by which consciousness, at this level of free spontaneity, defines itself. For the will’s 58 activity cannot occur within a vacuum, or engage with Nothing, rather, the will can acquire meaning only within the original project of an intentional, oriented freedom. That is, a being that is its own negation of Being is also its own possibility, and as such it is nothing besides the original project of its own not-Being. That there is such an original project can now be argued for, its essential structure disclosed. But first, and in reference to the paradox just alluded to, given that we have just stated that the unreflective life is oriented around an original project whereby consciousness defines itself at a level of free spontaneity, an argument is needed to establish that such activity indeed occurs freely. Our argument will establish that the will’s activity occurs in a context whereby constituted thought encounters obstacles in themselves not constituted by consciousness, though consciousness does constitute them as obstacles, the resistance thereby overcome being a necessary condition for success, and thereby establishing consciousness as activity, whereby all such activity involves attempting, in some manner. 59 3.7. Consciousness and Resistance Having embarked on a particular line of enquiry, the phenomenological reduction, Husserl’s subsequent statements have to be understood from the reduced standpoint. For instance, when he is discussing synthesis, with a particular example from perception, he states that: ...to every perception there always belongs a horizon of the past, as a potentiality of awakenable recollections; and to every recollection there belongs, as a horizon, the continuous intervening intentionality of possible recollections (to be actualised on my initiative, actively), up to the actual Now of perception. Everywhere in this connexion an “I can and do, but I can also do otherwise than I am doing” plays its part - without detriment to the fact that this “freedom”, like every other, is always open to possible hindrances.87 (my italics) The fact that freedom is always open to possible hindrances we may take to its logical conclusion. The bracketing is concerned with attempting to doubt rather than achieving an attitude of doubt, for the former adopts as a methodological principle the need to put all attitudes in abeyance, including certainty and disbelief, the latter also being an attitude that has been put in abeyance. But the question remains, concerning the phenemenological reduction, whether or not it is possible, given that the concept of resistance has been invoked. The question arises as to whether there can be an attempt without resistance, that is, a full-blown causal resistance. But the notion of hindrance is important. The world has been bracketed, by the phenomenologist. But existential commitments have been bracketed, so from whence comes the hindrance? Husserl would not accept how the problem of freedom has been formulated at the beginning of this work. That is, how can my acts be authored (by me) and yet caused? The concept of causation is applicable to events, or facts concerning events, and, for some philosophers, continuants. That is, the concept of causation pertains to the world that has been bracketed, to physics, the sciences, and so on, and with it the concepts applicable to it. Husserl would not involve himself with the problem of free will as we have defined it, because of its dependency on causation. But given that, as we have shown, Being is not reducible to phenomena, that is, from the nature of a perceptual object we can deduce that we are aware of a facet of the object, a facet of an infinite series, for even were it to be true that there is only a finite number of ways an object can appear, this does not constitute a finitude, because I am constantly changing, and there is an infinite number of perspectives I can take on the object, then we can designate a synthetic totality of which it forms a part, and this designation, this signification, refers one to infinity. It is not a 60 finite series, it is an infinite component, which is related to the objectivity of a thing. That is, it is related necessarily to the thing’s opacity and resistance. The three concepts, objectivity, opacity, and resistance are thereby different concepts for talking about the same thing. Consciousness cannot be deemed the creator of objectivity, opacity, resistance and infinity in these terms. I cannot constitute material objects. I do constitute them as such and such, for example, a table, but the bruteness of the thing does not come from me. Husserl had taken the notion of objectivity and passivity, and then located this notion of passivity into consciousness. Husserl is thereby inconsistent with regard to translucency, and is inconsistently transcendental. He tries to account for objectivity, or public objects, by introducing thing-like qualities into consciousness, that is to say, roughness, resistance, and opacity. These are concepts implicated by material objects. If something is opaque, I cannot grasp the object all at once; I have to move around it. But hindrance is a causal concept. Hindrance, or resistance, is something that is all pervasive. Material objects resist. Tables resist. A jammed door resists. A material object implies causation. There is something about causation that we cannot touch, for it is essential to every conceptual scheme. If any phenomenological reduction is committed to this concept, then, by a reductio ad absurdum, the reduction must fail. The reduction entails this dilution; the refraining, or bracketing, is intimately linked with causation. Therefore, the concept of hindrance, or resistance, must be essential to freedom, and the concept is a causal concept, but the phenomenological reduction allows no room for true causality. Imagination, like perception, is a distinctive mode of intentional consciousness whose intentional content we have shown should not be considered in terms of inner objects. The intentional object of the imagining consciousness is the imaginary, the latter going beyond the actual world and therefore is not the effect of actual causes. Yet such freedom is a phenomenon of all intentional conciousnesses, not just imaginary ones. For instance, Husserl stressed the importance of synthesis, the holistic relation between moments of consciousness, and without which the concept of intentionality is not illuminating in the slightest: ...the radical difference between objectivities that are real (in a broad sense) and categorial objectivities also presents itself. The latter point back to an origin from “operations”, from a step-by- step generative-constructive activity of the ego; the former, to an origin as effects of a merely passive (in any case, not an actively generative) synthesis.88 I see Pierre, who is standing there before me. I leave the room and I imagine Pierre. There is a synthetic act that forms a unity through the sharing of an intentional object; they are synthesised internally; there are internal links relating them. The fundamental form of synthesis is the act of identification. Identification is interchangeable with identity-positing. The act of imagining Pierre is constituted by my positing. Any identity between my now intentional object of my recollection is identical with my (prior) intentional object of my perceptual consciousness. 61 Thereby I synthesise my imaginative consciousness with my perceptual consciousness. That is, I posit the identity. And this is so when I encounter an object for the first time, because of the concept of the horizon. Within this project we shall encounter what makes an object real or a fiction. Or what makes it imaginative or perceptual. By categorial objectivity Husserl means the type material object, a logical abstraction. And when he writes of the activity of the ego, activity is an appropriate word. The distinction between fiction and reality is cashed in terms of a classical distinction between activity and passivity. The world thrusts itself forward and I am passive. But it is strange that Husserl uses this distinction, also used by Descartes. 89 According to Descartes, in perception I am passive, so it must be the case that what I clearly and distinctly perceive is true, or God is a deceiver. That it is there is not a matter of my will.90 But Husserl cannot distinguish between activity and passivity, because he is not entitled to the concept of resistance. Yet Husserl does make a distinction between activity and passivity, he talks about a passive synthesis. Whether he is entitled to make such distinctions depends on our understanding of the reduction. And there is something prima facie strange about the notion of a passive synthesis anyway. Husserl has to give a distinction between reality and fiction from his transcendental standpoint. If he cannot capture this distinction in some form, then something has gone wrong; it is a reductio ad absurdum. I come to realise that I constitute senses, but, to recognise that, I must be separate from the constituting process. The intending of an object is exactly what constitution is. The relationship between I and the world must be such that part of the very meaning of 2 + 2 = 4 is I infected, according to Husserl. This is because I produce senses. In an analytical philosophy of mind one would say that belief is a propositional attitude, and the identity of the person who has that attitude is independent of the content of the proposition. Husserl is an objectivist in logic, and similar subjects, but they are also part of the eidos, the eidetic or essential structure of the ego. Everything is located in the ego, but somethings are eidetically located. That is, they are essentially located. When we use the term eidetic we are referring to essences, and eidetic methodology involves a reduction or alteration of viewpoint in order to isolate the essential features of the phenomena under investigation. For instance, an essential structure of the ego is the consciousness of internal time. But it is not necessary that I am now perceiving this table to explain the objectivity of logic which just points to an essential structure of the ego. And if the world is I-infected in the way that Husserl argues, this would suggest that we are responsible for all resistance, and that we create our own obstacles. We must look at this suggestion in more detail. If there is no subject-independent resistant world, or if there is no resistance which is not subject-dependent, logically distinct from consciousness, we are deprived of the legitimate distinction between illusion and reality. For instance, Macbeth experiences a dagger, and he cannot decide if the experience is of an illusory dagger or a real dagger. As he says, “I have thee 62 not and yet I see thee still!” 91 Macbeth concludes, “Mine eyes are made the fools o’the other senses,/Or else worth all the rest.” 92 Either the dagger does not exist, a dagger of the mind, or else Macbeth is having a vision of a truth more eminent than that provided by ordinary sense- experience. But if Macbeth’s dagger is a dagger of the mind, the resistance of the dagger to all of Macbeth’s attempts to grasp it are Macbeth-infected. But if the dagger is an actual dagger, so too the resistance of the actual dagger is Macbeth-infected. And yet Husserl appeals to the distinction between illusion and reality. The horizon, and active and passive synthesis,93 for example, mark a progression in methodology towards eidetic phenomenology. In the phenomenology we have thus far presented, we may examine this dagger, and describe this dagger as it appears. In the case of eidetic phenomenology, we then search for the essence of the perception. One imaginatively varies the perception; for example, we imagine it being silver, and so on, with the object of seeing what we can remove from the perception and still be left with that perception, and what we cannot remove from the perception if we wish to remain with the perception. The perceptual object gives itself as overflowing. The horizon thereby implicitly contains a counterfactual. If I were to look at the back of the object of perception, the dagger, say, I would see such and such. This implicates the fact that the dagger will remain, will endure, in the time I take to go round to the back of it. Its horizon includes this permanence, for however a long time period. So this is an essential characteristic of a perceptual object. Because of this horizon we effect the distinction between illusion and reality. This seems uncontroversial, but the puzzle begins when we realise that the perceptual object has this horizon. In other words, it comes from, derives from, the constituting activity of the ego. And then we may wonder as to why I am now perceiving this object rather than imagining it. Husserl is forced to the view that, in some sense, inherent in the structure of the ego, there is a life-plan, so that at this particular time Macbeth is imagining this dagger and not perceiving it. A realist would point to external resistance. Objects are resistant, objects foist themselves on consciousness. Husserl needs to give a similar account, to explain why Macbeth is now imagining the dagger, and not perceiving it. This is a legitimate question, because for Husserl, the horizon of the perceptual act is different from the horizon of the imaginative act. Perceptual objects overflow. He accounts for this by synthetic acts of consciousness alone. But he cannot distinguish between imagination and perception. 94 And the question arises as to whether resistance, in toto, can be I-produced. And this contains a hidden contradiction. I can create obstacles for myself. Indeed, every obstacle is in a sense self-given, given that it only counts as an obstacle in the context of a free project. But obstacles are to be understood against a background of resistances that I have not produced. There is always the possibility of a hindrance towards my success. And I cannot intend to fail, for intentions must be aimed at success. Therefore, resistance, a possible hindrance to my success, cannot be I-produced. Intentions are future directed because success is not given with the intention. There are obstacles to be overcome in order to succeed. 63 If I achieve success, at the rock bottom level that was what I was aiming for. But if I have produced the obstacle this would mean that, at the rock bottom level, I was intending to fail. Sartre, on the other hand, employs the term coefficient of adversity95 to refer to the amount of resistance presented by external objects to the projects of the for-itself. But Husserl believed he had uncovered an ego as the source of all acts. Yet if the object of consciousness is I-infected then, if the object of consciousness is consciousness itself, this too is I-infected. And if self- consciousness is intellection, consciousness’s understanding of itself is I-infected, and we are in an interpretative circle. For then intentionality does not determine the subject, the subject determines the subject. We need a better account of consciousness as self-consciousness, of pre- reflective presence to itself. And introducing opacity into consciousness destroys the pre-reflective cogito, or the translucency of consciousness. Opacity in consciousness is a lack of translucency in consciousness. Opacity brings with it a passive element. If something is opaque, and if I were to confront this opacity, that confrontation would contain passivity. A table is opaque, I am passive in front of it, though I classify it as a table. It is opaque only if there is an element of passivity in that confrontation. I am passive before an object if I am not the creator of that object. That is, though Husserl thought otherwise, I am not the source of the passivity. The opacity of the object is linked to the concept of passivity. The passive is defined in terms of the object I am in front of, the passivity of the object does not have its source in me: What is passivity? I am passive when I undergo a modification of which I am not the origin; that is, neither the source nor the creator.96 We are thereby provided with a definition of passivity. There is a transitivity of source, as there is of causation. If x is the source of y, and y is source of z, then x is source of z. If the object is the source of passivity, and passivity is the source of a passive mode of consciousness, then the object is the source of this passive mode of consciousness. We now have a negative concept of passivity; what is passive is not active. If we place all of this in context, and remember that we are all the time concerned with free will, we can yield a concept of resistance that goes hand in hand with that. The conclusion is that I cannot be the source of resistance, or, I cannot be the source of objectivity. If one slides opacity into consciousness then one slides passivity into consciousness. This entails that there will be various modifications of me that I will receive passively. This is inconsistent with the claim that I am responsible for those modifications. ...we have this choice of alternatives: either, indeed, I am not passive in my being, in which case I become the foundation of my affections even if at first I have not been the origin of them - or I am affected with passivity in my very existence, my being is a received being, and hence all falls into Nothingness.97 64 In the case of affections, I must assume them as mine. Modifications of consciousness cannot be passively given to it from the outside. Resistance to consciousness must be on the other side of consciousness, not within consciousness. It is an intention that brings the concept of success into play. We may say, loosely, that we fell down and succeeded in breaking the vase, but there is no action here, it is a parasitic use of the term. A precondition of the concept of success is that, only if first of all there is an intention can we speak of success. Only in respect of a particular intention am I successful. There is no sense in speaking about absolute success or failure; it is a success or failure only with respect to a plan. What we have succeeded in doing is always relative to a project. If someone were to say of himself that he is a failure, we may say that he is so with respect to certain projects. But he could try others. Therefore, resistance must be located on the other side of the project. Resistance is not encountered within the noetic act. Otherwise the projection of the project encounters resistance. That is, prior to the project we can already talk about success. We have overcome resistance. This is a regress argument. Therefore, resistance cannot be located within consciousness, for were it to be so the project as noetic act would encounter resistance, another noetic act would attempt to overcome that resistance, and backwards to infinity. And given that failure is brought into play, it presupposes an intention. For failure to be brought into play we must have a project. Thus it follows that no project is fully realisable. We have succeeded in formulating a project, but success presupposes a project, so we cannot successfully formulate a here and now project. But we can formulate plans for what we want to do next year. And we can distinguish the coefficient of adversity from resistance. 98 Resistance and adversity implicate both the world and projects, which is to say, resistance is a relation between that which resists, that is, the world, and that which is resisted, the project, and the coefficient of adversity is a measure of by how much it resists. In the case of a mountain, for a painter who wishes to paint the mountain the coefficient of adversity amounts to very little, and yet for a climber who wishes to climb the mountain it is very high. The coefficient of adversity is relative to our projects. Therefore, we choose our own obstacles. For the notion of an obstacle implicates the relation just outlined. Given the differing perspectives on a mountain, M, there are differing changes in the value of R, the coefficient of adversity. If I am to go right to the top of M, R is higher than if I am to go to the base of M. For this to be so, there must be something in M that is objective that R can vary in respect to. In an appropriate sense, I am not giving the resistance to the thing. R is not project relative. R is relative to M. Suppose M is made of glass, R rises, and my project has not altered, or correlatively it has, because it is made of glass. Also, I can encounter surprises. My project is in respect to a particular mountain, M, but seen from a distance I cannot see that it is made of glass. 65 The issue is illuminated if we ask, what is the difference between wishing to climb M and intending to climb M? As to how difficult our project is, if it depends on us, whence arises the source of the difficulty? We have to locate some of it in M. If all the source of the difficulty is located in consciousness, there is nothing to prevent arbitrary degrees of difficulty. That is, climbing Mt. Everest is easy, but climbing a table is difficult. We encounter roughness and opacity in consciousness if resistance is there. We cannot have a world of empty shadows and place resistance within it. And though there cannot be a limit on our freedom, and the resistance of the thing is given to us in the thing itself, the coefficient of adversity arises through our projects: …the coefficient of adversity in things can not be an argument against our freedom, for it is by us – i.e., by the preliminary positing of an end - that this coefficient of adversity arises. A particular crag, which manifests a profound resistance if I wish to displace it, will be on the contrary a valuable aid if I want to climb upon it in order to look over the countryside. In itself – if one can even imagine what the crag can be in itself – it is neutral; that is, it waits to be illuminated by an end in order to manifest itself as adverse or helpful.99 Husserl was unfaithful to his principle in saying that consciousness had a content. Everything is outside of consciousness. And resistance, a fortiori, is outside of consciousness. If we were to bracket the natural attitude, then we bracket the concept of causation. But we cannot do this, for resistance is part of the structure of consciousness. But then the question arises as to whether we are responsible for the resistance we encounter, for we can create obstacles for ourselves. For example, we are rushing to catch a bus and suddenly we realise that we have left our briefcase at home, and we go back to get it and thus fail to reach our appointment on time. But that is the reason why we left it there in the first place. For Freud, there is no such thing as an unmotivated mistake. But this requires objects there that are not to do with me. And then the question arises concerning the manner whereby we choose obstacles for ourselves. The for-itself both finds itself existing in a certain situation, and creates a situation through its choice of obstacle. Consciousness is a not-Being, incomplete, which is to say, always conscious of something else, of a certain fact, of a certain emotion, of a certain object, of a certain desire, of a certain value. The for-itself thereby makes choices with regard to how to direct itself, and the will’s activity, whereby such choices are exercised, would seem to acquire meaning only within the original project of an intentional, oriented freedom. 66 3.8. The Original Project 3.8.1. The Attainment of Being According to the intentionality thesis, consciousness has a directedness towards an object. But there is no transcendental I in this relationship. Therefore, the only thing worthy of the designation of subject is consciousness itself. Consequently, I am my freedom. Freedom is not a property of mine, in the manner of bodily properties such as height and weight; it is me. This is an identity relation, as Orestes declares, in Sartre’s play The Flies:100 ZEUS: ...am I not your King? Who, then, made you? ORESTES: You. But you blundered; you should not have made me free. ZEUS: I gave you freedom so that you might serve me. ORESTES: Perhaps. But now it has turned against its giver. And neither you nor I can undo what has been done. ZEUS: Ah, at last! So this is your excuse? ORESTES: I am not excusing myself. ZEUS: No? Let me tell you it sounds much like an excuse, this freedom whose slave you claim to be. ORESTES: Neither slave nor master, I am my freedom. No sooner had you created me than I ceased to be yours.101 I am my freedom. Freedom has only one limit, that is, itself. In other words, I cannot choose to be free. This is at least intuitively clear. It is certain that if freedom is a matter of necessity, then being free is not an option. If I can choose to be free, this would show that there is an option, to be free or not to be free. Freedom is its own limit and its only limit. I cannot choose not to be free. Freedom thus relates to the notion of facticity, that which concerns me that I have not chosen. So it follows that freedom is its own facticity. Such freedom is thereby absolute. The for-itself is constitutive, that is, it is the source of all meanings apperceptively given to that which it encounters. And this includes those meanings that appear to be brought to consciousness from the outside, or from its past, through such determining factors as that of motives, or of drives, or through such feelings as that of ardour, devotion, eagerness, fury, shame, depression, superciliousness, or whatever. Freedom is the for-itself, the for-itself constitutes that which apparently impels it, therefore, the constitutor being freedom itself, that which apparently impels the constitutor cannot, in fact, so impel it. Which is to say that freedom is absolute. 67 An act, being intentional, is forward looking, it is directed towards the future. And given that an intention necessarily aims at a success that lies in the future, it is incomplete. The very structure of a project introduces a gap between a present intention, together with its pull, and that which will actualise the project, the completed action. The intention is the action, and the intention is the choice, it is consciousness itself. So it follows from the fact that there is this gap separating the intention from the completed act, by virtue of the structure of the project, there is a gap between the intention and the action. And as the intention is the action, there is a gap between the intention and itself. This gap between the intention and the action is to be understood as a metaphor. Not only is the intention, in the everyday sense of that term, some kind of distance, it is also distanced from itself.102 From the fact that we aim at success, we are in some sense creating a rupture within the intention, that is, the intention is incomplete. Within this internal rupturing freedom is located. The distance of consciousness is distanced from itself. In having a project, consciousness is, as it were, projecting itself. It is conceiving of itself as something it is not yet; it is making itself an object, and contradicting itself with something it intends to become. This is suggestive of Heidegger’s Dasein, “a Being of distances:”103 Dasein is an entity which does not just occur among entities. Rather it is ontologically distinguished by the fact that, in its very Being, that Being is an issue for it. But in that case, this is a constitutive state of Dasein’s Being, and this implies that Dasein, in its Being, has a relationship towards that Being – a relationship which itself is one of Being.104 And, according to Heidegger, “Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence – in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself.” 105 There is therefore a distance between consciousness and its object, the for-itself as it is now is at a distance from itself as a future possibility. If I have a plan, concerning myself, then I am placing myself at a distance from myself.106 And through placing the self at a distance from itself we are not burdening ourselves with unwanted ontological baggage. I, in the future, in some sense, exist. This is a metaphor. From the very fact that I have a project, there is an I in the future that is pulling the I now. Given the ambiguity of human reality the problem is how to reconcile the subjectivity that is a function of the object of the enquiry, an ambiguous nature and its resulting behaviour that is dependent on its subjective aspect, with an objectivity that we would expect in any serious enquiry. Meaning is lived meaning, and phenomenology must therefore have at least an existentialist component, but if we follow Heidegger in disclosing an existentialist structure of the world in terms of a structure that incorporates situations bearing meanings that reflect human reality’s own understanding of its own being-toward-the-world, the resulting analysis would have as its object a human reality for which the act of self-understanding is the essential part, rather than human reality as a synthetic totality of fact and value. And if we follow Husserl then 68 meanings as constituted meanings are the important factor, whereby an essential structure of consciousness is disclosed and conceptualised as both transcendental and constitutive. The solution is therefore to follow Sartre in disclosing the structure of a consciousness and its relation to its objects, whereby the constituted meanings of the intentional object of an action of a for-itself, the motives, or whatever, cannot be the causes of that action. But then, an act is intentional, and within the structure of the act there is a minimal self-awareness. If we consider such things as self-deception, or neuroses, the kinds of things of interest to psychologists, we can see that they have an ontological significance, for they are intentional. For instance, R.D. Laing has described the behaviour of the schizophrenic in terms of the intentions of the schizophrenic: A good deal of schizophrenia is simply nonsense, red-herring speech, prolonged filibustering to throw dangerous people off the scent, to create boredom and futility in others. The schizophrenic is often making a fool of himself and the doctor. He is playing at being mad to avoid at all costs the possibility of being held responsible for a single coherent idea, or intention.107 If consciousness is directing itself toward the future, that is, imagining itself in the future, and is thereby in a particular way of being in time, this can only be understood in terms of the totality of choices it makes and the totality of ways in which it directs itself over time. A project has a teleological structure: I intend to x in order that y in order that z.......N. I have a project to illuminate the room. I walk over to the light switch, switch it on, etc... This is not a series of projects, it is just one project. I stand up, in order to go to the light switch, in order to switch it on. There is thus a telic link, it is linked by this important relation …in order that…. The project is a holistic structure which is teleologically layered. The final term (N) is the original project. In our example, the original project is that the lights go on. The original project is not the first term. It is the final term. Now, consciousness-Being, as we have said, is an active force and influence adjusted to a particular situation, and we can thereby know ourselves only through this situation to which consciousness-Being adjusts itself: …in what we shall call the world of the immediate, which delivers itself to our unreflective consciousness, we do not first appear to ourselves, to be thrown subsequently into enterprises. Our Being is immediately “in situation;” that is, it arises in enterprises and knows itself first in so far as it is reflected in those enterprises. We discover ourselves then in a world peopled with demands, in the heart of projects “in the course of realization.” I write. I am going to smoke. I have an appointment with Pierre…108 We are immediately in a situation, and this situation through which we know ourselves, it would seem, must be conditioned by an original project: 69 All these trivial passive expectations of the real, all these commonplace, everyday values, derive their meaning from an original projection of myself which stands as my choice of myself in the world. But to be exact, this projection of myself toward an original possibility, which causes the existence of values, appeals, expectations, and in general a world, appears to me only beyond the world as the meaning and the abstract, logical signification of my enterprises. 109 Given the teleological structure of a project, it follows that we make ourselves and define our way of life by projecting ourselves toward the future, and by constantly going beyond the given situation in which we find ourselves. The first term of the original project may be found in our childhood, but if all our subsequent actions derive their meaning from this original project it is because of the final term of the project. And the teleological structure of the original project, as it is for our long-term projects, is not a series of loosely connected events, but a series with a principle of progression. So, “by going further and further back we have reached the original relation which the for-itself chooses with its facticity and with the world. But this original relation is nothing other than the for-itself’s being-in-the-world inasmuch as this being-in-the-world is a choice – that is, we have reached the original type of nihilation by which the for-itself has to be its own Nothingness.” 110 And “the fundamental project which I am is a project concerning not my relations with this or that particular object in the world, but my total being-in-the-world; since the world itself is revealed only in the light of an end, this project posits for its end a certain type of relation to Being which the for-itself wills to adopt.”111 The individual person is thereby disclosed in the initial project through which he is constituted, a disclosure of the entirety of the person’s urge to achieve being, an original relation to oneself, and to others, in a harmony of internal relations and of a fundamental project. It is through the original choice, in fact, that an individual for-itself becomes a person, thus allowing for the possibility of an existential psychoanalysis: Existential psychoanalysis seeks to determine the original choice. This original choice operating in the face of the world and being a choice of position in the world is total like the complex; it is prior to logic like the complex. It is this which decides the attitude of the person when confronted with logic and principles; therefore there can be no possibility of questioning it in conformance to logic. It brings together in a prelogical synthesis the totality of the existent, and as such it is the centre of reference for an infinity of polyvalent meanings.112 Freudians prefer to explain, say, neuroses by an appeal to external causes, that is, childhood events qua causes. And such notions as drives, or forces, are introduced to explain the inner compulsion for neurotic behaviour, but the explanation for why such drives or forces have the hold they do over the subject is to be found in external causes. But existential psychoanalysis will explain 70 neuroses, and such like, from within. 113 The relation …in order that... contains terms that are hidden from the neurotic, but the explanation for the disorder is there in the project. To uncover the meaning of an act, that is, to uncover these final terms, is to discover the exact nature of the act, what exactly it is pointing at. An alternative approach, as R.D. Laing recognised, would lead to an “inveterate tendency to depersonalize or reify persons.” 114 In The Divided Self Laing was “concerned specifically with people who experience themselves as automata, as robots, as bits of machinery, or even as animals:”115 Such persons are rightly regarded as crazy. Yet why do we not regard a theory that seeks to transmute persons into automata or animals as equally crazy? The experience of oneself and others as persons is primary and self-validating. It exists prior to the scientific or philosophical difficulties about how such experience is possible or how it is to be explained. 116 In literature we can find descriptions of the way in which a certain manner of being, the original relation to oneself and to others, is attained. Proust, for instance, describes Swann’s choice of a manner of being, when he is no longer young: …Swann was reaching an age at which one’s philosophy – encouraged by the current philosophy of the day…where it was agreed that intelligence was in direct ratio to scepticism and nothing was real and incontestible except the individual taste of each person – is no longer that of youth, but a positive, almost medical philosophy, the philosophy of men who, instead of exteriorizing the objects of their aspirations, try to derive from the years that have already elapsed a stable residue of habits and passions which they can regard as characteristic and permanent and which they will deliberately make it their primary concern that the kind of life they adopt may satisfy. 117 And Sartre gives an account of Mathieu Delarue, in the The Age of Reason, attaining the age of reason: …[he had] finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him with their services: disillusioned epicureanism, smiling tolerance, resignation, common sense, stoicism, - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life…he repeated to himself “It’s true, it’s absolutely true: I have attained the age of reason.” 118 The age of reason is, however, supposedly attained by the child at around about 7 or 8 years of age, for at that age French children are deemed to be able to distinguish between right and wrong, and thereby able to take their first communion. 119 Mathieu, however, has throughout the novel exhibited uncertainty with regard to knowing whether or not he is doing the right thing, so we may suppose that the title The Age of Reason has ironic connotations.120 71 With teleological relations, the terms, x, y, z…., and finally N, are infecting each other. An example Sartre gives to illustrate this point is that of a hiker walking in the mountains, who may or may not give in to his fatigue: The way in which I suffer my fatigue is in no way dependent on the chance difficulty of the slope which I am climbing or on the more or less restless night which I have spent; these factors can contribute to constituting my fatigue itself but not to the way in which I suffer it. 121 The hiker who throws down his bags and declares that he cannot go on could have chosen differently, but at what price? There are many other layers in his holistic project that would have undergone an alteration had he chosen differently. These teleological elements infect each other that way. We could do otherwise, but at what price? We can thereby apply the coefficient of adversity to all our enterprises: To give in to fatigue…is to transcend the path by causing it to constitute in itself the meaning of “a path too difficult to traverse”. It is impossible seriously to consider the feeling of inferiority without determining it in terms of the future and of my possibilities. Even assertions such as “I am ugly,” “I am stupid,” etc. are by nature anticipations. We are not dealing here with the pure establishment of my ugliness but with the apprehension of the coefficient of adversity which is presented by women or by society to my enterprises. And this can be discovered only through and in the choice of these enterprises.122 And though there cannot be a limit on our freedom, and the resistance of the thing is given to us in the thing itself, the coefficient of adversity arises through our projects: …the coefficient of adversity in things can not be an argument against our freedom, for it is by us – i.e., by the preliminary positing of an end - that this coefficient of adversity arises. A particular crag, which manifests a profound resistance if I wish to displace it, will be on the contrary a valuable aid if I want to climb upon it in order to look over the countryside. In itself – if one can even imagine what the crag can be in itself – it is neutral; that is, it waits to be illuminated by an end in order to manifest itself as adverse or helpful.123 We have already referred to the fact that due to intentionality and self-awareness, consciousness must necessarily orient itself, and given that resistance is located on the other side of the project, consciousness thereby chooses its way of being, which in turn refers back to an original project. This “fundamental act of freedom,”124 as Sartre has said, is the choice of the original project that gives unity to our subsequent life: Freedom implies the existence of an environment to be changed: obstacles to be cleared, tools to be used. Of course it is freedom which reveals them as obstacles, but by its free choice it can only 72 interpret the meaning of their being. It is necessary that they be simply there, wholly brute, in order that there may be freedom…freedom by recognizing itself as the freedom to change, recognizes and implicitly foresees in its original project the independent existence of the given on which it is exercised. The internal negation recognizes the in-itself as independent, and it is this independence which constitutes in the in-itself its character as a thing.125 An act, as Sartre said, is uncaused and yet comprehensible, for “every project is comprehensible as a project of itself toward a possible:”126 It is comprehensible first in so far as it offers a rational content which is immediately apprehensible – I place my knapsack on the ground in order to rest for a moment. This means that we immediately apprehend the possible which it projects and the end at which it aims. 127 We can understand an action if we know the individual terms in the …in order to… teleological relationship, that is, I x in order to y in order to z, and all the terms ultimately refer to the original project: In the second place it is comprehensible in that the possible under consideration refers to other possibles, these to still others, and so on to the ultimate possibility which I am. 128 The final term of the project is “the ultimate possibility which I am.” Acts cannot be understood as discrete, isolated events: The comprehension is effected in two opposed senses: by a regressive psychoanalysis one ascends back from the considered act to my ultimate possible; and by a synthetic progression one redescends from this ultimate possible to the considered act and grasps its integration in the total form. 129 For instance, a person may have chosen an original project to be inferior: …the man who realises himself as humiliated … constitutes himself as a means of attaining certain ends: the humiliation chosen can be, for example, identified like masochism with an instrument designed to free us from existence-for-itself; it be a project of getting rid of our anguishing freedom to the advantage of others; our project can be to cause our Being-for-itself to be entirely absorbed by our Being-for-others. At all events the “inferiority complex” can arise only if it is founded on a free apprehension of our Being-for-others. This Being-for-others as a situation will act in the capacity of a cause, but all the same it must be discovered by a motive which is nothing but our free project. 130 We apprehend our being-for-others as a situation that gives us a reason to regard ourselves as inferior, but it is not the cause of our inferiority. However, though the original project is prior to logic, and cannot thereby be disproven by logic, it is often objected that the notion of an original 73 choice, implying as it does a kind of self-determination, or a self-cause, is self-contradictory, but this is not the case. 3.8.2. The Ambiguity of Freedom Consciousness is attitudinizing activity, but such activity may occur at the level of either impure or pure reflection. And at the level of impure reflection, the natural attitude, we can only give freedom a negative character, whereby choice is seen, as Jeanson said: …as an elimination effected by the subject – one by which he progressively appears to himself through making one or another kind of world appear. To say he is absolutely responsible for such a choice simply means no one else would have chosen the same, not even if he were in exactly the same objective circumstances. And this entails that these objective conditions show themselves as such only through the subject’s intervention.131 We can thus talk meaningfully of an original choice, for which the subject is responsible, and which makes subsequent actions of the subject comprehensible, without being self-contradictory, if we attribute to consciousness an original power of discrimination: 132 A power of discrimination exists; insofar as it contains a power of refusal, it is the most fundamental structure of consciousness. But this power exhausts itself in its actual operations upon the world, and it can become “genuine” choice only after a purifying reflection which takes it on as its own. In fact it is already a free choice, and it is mine; but paradoxically I must still make it into my free choice of myself. I am already myself before I apprehend myself – but I am such in the mode of having-to-be myself, and this is why, even though I am already constantly choosing what is to constitute myself, I must still also choose myself.133 That is, “the silent assertion of our being toward the world” 134 involves choice. Sartre illustrates this point with the example of Raskolnikov, who, having murdered an old woman, decides to turn himself in, an “extraordinary and marvellous instant when the prior project collapses into the past in the light of a new project which rises on its ruins and which as yet exists only in outline, in which humiliation, anguish, joy, hope are delicately blended, in which we let go in order to grasp and grasp in order to let go – these have often appeared to furnish the clearest and most moving image of our freedom.”135 But such a conversion is only one way in which freedom manifests itself. As Jeanson said, the fact that “the silent assertion of our being toward the world” involves choice: 74 …is confirmed by the observation that, in conversion, it permits the emergence of an authentic choice. It is also confirmed by a feeling all of us have experienced to some degree: whatever our birth, whatever our past, we choose them in proportion as we explicitly relate them to ourselves, as we assume them, as we consent to live the life initiated in them. What is self-contradictory is therefore only the idea of an authentic first choice.136 This follows from the fact that choice is ambiguous. Our first choice is not authentic, but it is a choice, instigated by the original power of discrimination of consciousness. And freedom is ambiguous too. There is factual freedom, freedom as a structure of our being and, as Merleau-Ponty acknowledges, “a state of nature.” 137 Indeed, the existence of such factual freedom precludes the possibility that any discussion of the free will problem will convince anyone, whether a determinist, or a natural scientist, a behaviourist, or whomsoever, that our behaviour is unfree, in the sense that we genuinely make choices. As Searle expresses this point, “…evolution has given us a form of experience of voluntary action where the experience of freedom, that is to say, the experience of the sense of alternative possibilities, is built into the very structure of conscious, voluntary, intentional human behaviour.”138 But there is in addition, as Jeanson says, “freedom-as-valued,” freedom that “enjoins one to assess the value of the various uses to which it may be put. It is on this basis that the differences between persons arises in the first place.”139 And in the case of freedom in the first sense, a prisoner who resigns himself to his situation is as free as his gaoler, and as free as a prisoner who escapes. In the case of freedom in the second sense, the prisoner who performs an authentic act, the prisoner who seeks to bring about his own escape, is not instigating an original intention that stands out incomprehensibly against his more or less determined life. Whereas the prisoner’s initial resignation arose through his viewpoint on the objective conditions, his apprehension of his situation, this viewpoint is consciously altered through an authentic act that is itself a reflective assumption of his life. That is to say, there are no unfree acts, but some have a freeing effect when they are performed. Such a proposition can only be understood if we remember the ambiguity of freedom. A free act, in the second sense of freedom, involves a working together of freedom-as-fact and freedom-as- valued, it is this that makes the act authentic. Freedom-as-valued has to be acquired, it is never given, but freedom-as-fact is never absent. However, if our theory of freedom leads to the claim that the prisoner is as free as his gaoler, we may be accused of presenting a theory of an abstract freedom, or of merely an idea of freedom, as Hegel accused the Stoics. That is, in its attempt to achieve a state of imperturbability, the Stoic consciousness aims to deal with the external world by inner withdrawal, whereby the pure ego of Stoicism, whatever content it may have, is turned inward, with a consequently abstract indifference to the being of nature, the latter left to take its own course howsoever it may. But drawn away from life and things such freedom is not a living, contentful freedom, but the mere idea of freedom. Without external content given to this consciousness, its only criterion of 75 virtuous action is an empty, abstract one, that of the reasonable, a superficially elevated notion Hegel described as “tedious.”140 “This thinking consciousness,” according to Hegel, “as determined in the form of abstract freedom is only the incomplete negation of otherness. Withdrawn from existence only into itself, it has not there achieved its consummation as absolute negation of that existence.” 141 That is, Stoic consciousness can negate particular content, but it fails to negate this negation, to appropriate such content to itself. It is clear, therefore, that our theory of freedom is not of such a contentless freedom, for we have shown that imagination is a category of negation endowing a being that can imagine its own not-Being with the ability to individualise a being that is not Being-in-itself. Therein lies our freedom, for Being-in-itself is a being whose “property is the nihilation effected by Nothingness” and it is that “by which Nothingness comes to things.”142 Just as all consciousness is consciousness of something, so all freedom is freedom within some situation, that is, a negation of a state of affairs, an escape from an objective existence, and a transcendence of this existence in the direction of its meaning. Consciousness is not a prisoner in the actual, it is a relation to the actual. This is its situation and its freedom. The prisoner in chains is thereby as free as his gaoler. The number of actions open to the prisoner are, of course, limited, but for him to act unfreely would require an unintended intention. There is no unfree act involved in the prisoner breaking his chains through a mere effort of will, because there is no intended action. Freedom in its metaphysical, fundamental sense is not success dependent. Necessarily, in order for there to be freedom, there must be the logical possibility of failure. My freedom does not entail that I can do whatever I want to do, whenever I want to do it. There are limits to what I can do, but freedom itself is not limited. As we have argued, without obstacles, or resistance, that might possibly hinder my success, freedom is success dependent and thereby destroyed, as actions are absorbed into a series of events, an act merely being one event among others, pushed and pulled by the nexus of events. But I succeed by virtue of my acts causing other events. I intentionally throw the switch, and the light comes on now. This causal chain involves particular events occurring according to certain rules, or particular laws, that are not up to me. Rather, they are to do with the behaviour of electrical filaments, and so on. That is, they are not within my control. My success, to that extent, is not within my control. Compatibilists would presumably agree with this. As Davidson said, “we never do more than move our bodies: the rest is up to nature.” 143 If freedom is dependent on success then freedom is something that is not within our control. Rather, freedom is dependent on the workings of nature. But if an action is free, then the action is within the agent’s control, 144 and this is as true for the prisoner in chains as for his gaoler. Our theory of freedom is also to be distinguished from the hypothetical liberty of Hume, whereby he is attempting to mislead his readers: 76 ...what is meant by liberty, when applied to voluntary actions? We cannot surely mean that actions have so little connection with motives, inclinations, and circumstances, that one does not follow with a certain degree of uniformity from the other, and that one affords no inference by which we can conclude the existence of the other...By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will; that is, if we choose to remain at rest, we may; if we choose to move, we also may. Now this hypothetical liberty is universally allowed to every one who is not a prisoner and in chains.145 Hume, a determinist, does not need this hypothetical liberty in his system, a liberty that he somewhat inconsistently denies to the prisoner in chains. It is a conditional freedom, and therefore consistent with everything. Freedom cannot be understood distinct from the reapprehension of the natural freedom that is essential to human consciousness. But Merleau-Ponty objects that Sartre’s freedom is so effectual in itself that it cannot account for what we know about the way human beings behave, that is, there are improbable occurrences in human behaviour, of the kind that Hume appealed to in his defence of determinism, that is, he argued that the same type of motive is always followed by the same type of action. For instance, a person having maintained an inferiority feeling for twenty years, having formulated a daily schedule on the basis of a view of self to the extent that it is a source of security, for such a person it is highly improbable that he will ever change: …since freedom does not tolerate any motive in its path, my habitual being in the world is at each moment equally precarious, and the complexes which I have allowed to develop over the years always remain equally soothing, and the free act can with no difficulty blow them sky-high. 146 But there is a distinction to be made between contemplating motives and being motivated by them, for though through the free project of the for-itself it is able to effect a transformation, this does not mean that the transformation can be effected all at once, in the instant, and permeating all its connections with the world. Consciousness is active, but it can assume passivity in its encounter with constituted motives, acceding to their reiterative and routine interaction, thereby deciding the outcome. But consciousness is an ambiguous activity, for it consists in meaning-giving projects that achieve results in the world, but as they do so they continually acquire sustenance in their existing orientation, thereby becoming habituated, encumbered by that which Jeanson calls “active inertia.”147 In the latter case, however, it is not freedom-as-fact, freedom as a structure of consciousness, that becomes endued with improbability. Rather, what becomes more and more improbable is the reacquisition of authenticity, freedom-as-valued, whereby such freedom is enabled to effect a transformation. But, at this level an unexpected transformation is a continual possibility, thereby opening up the sundry ways toward a purifying reflection that could affirm or nullify the new option taken by the for-itself. 77 It may also be objected, however, that Sartre’s freedom implies self-determination, an incoherent notion, as Nietszche said: The causa sui is the best self-contradiction hitherto imagined, a kind of logical rape and unnaturalness: but mankind’s extravagant pride has managed to get itself deeply and frightfully entangled with precisely this piece of nonsense. For the desire for “freedom of will” in that metaphysical superlative sense which is unfortunately still dominant in the minds of the half- educated, the desire to bear the whole and sole responsibility for one’s actions and to absolve God, world, ancestors, chance, society from responsibility for them, is nothing less than the desire to be precisely that causa sui and, with more than Munchhausen temerity, to pull oneself into existence out of the swamp of nothingness by one’s own hair.148 Galen Strawson has argued that there is a sense of free that is impossible, the sense of free that he claims is important to us. This, we may suppose, corresponds to our notion of freedom-as-valued. When people are free agents, he argues, “they can properly be held to be truly responsible for their actions in such a way as to be truly deserving of (moral) praise and blame for them.” 149 But true freedom, according to Strawson, implies true self-determination, because “if one is to be truly responsible for one’s actions, then, clearly, one must be truly self-determining or truly self- determined in one’s actions. True responsibility presupposes true self-determination.” 150 And “one is truly self-determining, in one’s actions, only if one is truly self-determined, and one is truly self- determined if and only if one has somehow or other determined how one is in such a way that one is truly responsible for how one is.”151 According to Strawson, 152 what he calls true self-determination is impossible because it requires the completion of an infinite regress of choices of principles of choice, that is, to be responsible for the way one is, mentally speaking, at the time one acts, one must have consciously chosen to be the way one is, mentally speaking, which is impossible unless one already exists with some principles of choice, the beliefs and values or whatever that determine how one chooses. And so on, back to the first choice one ever made. But in the first place, the use of the term true in this kind of context, as in true self-determination, is generally suspicious, asserting as it does that the meaning given for the term qualified as true is the precise or correct one, thereby disregarding any alternative meanings as being imprecise or incorrect. In the second place, if choice requires principles of choice, the first choice, in the absence of such principles, could never obtain, nor any subsequent choice that requires previous choices of the principles of choice. But this is to ignore the ambiguity of choice, for the attribution of the original discriminatory power to consciousness avoids such contradictions. The original project does not depend on principles of choice existing before the original choice is made. The first choice is free, without foundation, and determining its own motives, but as it is unavoidable it is also compulsory, thereby implicating the concurrent emergence of time and the world. The world emerges, as a choice can never originate in nothing, nor relate to nothing. And time emerges, as a 78 choice is necessarily intentional, that is, the for-itself through choice projects itself into the future, thereby bringing to light a temporal present understood in terms of this project. Choice therefore is generated and evolves within both the world and the lasting moment, and, having attained being, given that a being tends to persevere in being, impure reflection attempts to retain the choice within both the world and the lasting moment. This is so because an original project is an intention and not a state, and an intention is conscious (of) itself. At every moment I am actuating this or that endeavour, and may thereby at any time appraise and renounce my original choice. But even at the level of impure reflection I am prevented from restricting my attention towards actions whereby I can lose myself in the world, because the original project is subject to the instant moment, and upon the advent of the latter the lasting moment is put out of joint, for the instant moment is a rupture bringing to an end the original project, abetting the instigation of a new choice of oneself, that is, the kind of conversion of which we have referred to above. However, in a moment of conversion we do not thereby become free, for the preceding choice was free. Impure reflection, appearing on the foundation of pure reflection, exceeds the latter as it engenders additional affirmations. It is the for-itself’s striving toward an apprehension of its being, an endeavour to determine the being it is, thereby founding itself. But it is an impossible project, for it is at the level of impure reflection that so-called psychic facts are posited, because the will, intent on avoiding the original choice, constitutes spurious psychic objects as drives in order to deliberate upon such drives, the desire for fame, the satisfaction of aesthetic sensibilities, the need to be constantly drunk, or whatever, such drives conditioning the manner in which the for-itself determines itself. But the value of such drives is conferred upon them prior to any deliberation by the choice the for-itself makes of itself, rendering any such appraisal of them impossible, given that they are dependent objects given determinate qualities and maintained in existence before consciousness in the perpetually binding unity which the free project grants them. But reflection can be purified in a return to an original presence to self, whereby the for-itself is released from such oppressiveness it has given itself, that is, it ceases in its attempts at bestowing upon itself drives, motives, inducements, sustainers, rationalisations, vindications, justifications or excuses, and is thereby in addition released from the need for approval. On the contrary, all drives, needs, obsessions, preoccupations, imperatives, compulsions, pressures and urgencies are referred back to the choice of itself whereby the for-itself constitutes its fundamental project. Which is to say, the for-itself is not the being toward which it endeavours, it is rather the project of being, which, as an intention, is conscious (of) itself. Merleau-Ponty, however, insists that the original choice is a “ready-made freedom:” 153 …the real choice is that of whole character and our manner of being in the world. But either this total choice is never uttered, since it is the silent upsurge of our being in the world, in which case it is not clear in what sense it could be said to be ours, since this freedom glides over itself and is the equivalent of fate – or else our choice of ourselves is truly a choice, a conversion involving our 79 whole existence. In this case, however, there is presupposed a previous acquisition which the choice sets out to modify and it founds a new tradition.154 And again the argument is presented that the notion of an original choice is self-contradictory: …we have indeed always the power to interrupt, but it implies in any case a power to begin, for there would be no severance unless freedom has taken up its abode somewhere and were preparing to move it. Unless there are cycles of behaviour, open situations requiring certain completion and capable of constituting a background to either a confirmatory or transformatory decision, we never experience freedom. Choice of an intelligible sort is excluded, not only because there is no time anterior to time, but because choice presupposes a prior commitment and because the idea of an initial choice involves a contradiction.155 Merleau-Ponty is accusing Sartre of being on a search that looks for “the conditions of possibility without concerning itself with the conditions of reality,” 156 of supporting “a freedom which has no need to be exercised because it is already acquired.” 157 But it is freedom-as-valued that has to be acquired, freedom-as-fact merely is. We can say that it is constitutive of freedom-as-fact that it intends and pre-reflectively seeks its own transformation into freedom-as-valued. But the point to note is that all freedom is engaged, and the “ready-made freedom” of which Merleau-Ponty speaks is only “ready-made” from the perspective of freedom-as-fact, a freedom that has not performed the transition whereby it comes to value itself. Freedom-as-fact is the facticity of freedom, the sort of freedom that Mathieu is referring to when he declares “I am condemned to be free,” 158 a freedom that Merleau-Ponty claims would be like a destiny. But it is not a destiny. Freedom is engaged, for if freedom were merely an ensnarement we could never succeed in breaking out of the ensnarement. Merleau-Ponty spoke of a freedom “that has nothing to accomplish because it is already acquired.” But it has not been acquired, “it simply is, but it is such that it must be accomplished and conquered. It is engaged in itself and it must be engaged by itself. It is choice, but it must choose itself.”159 The original choice is that whereby any particular action brought under consideration acquires meaning, and yet, according to Baldwin, “Sartre faces insoluble problems in explaining how such an act can be a choice at all, since all the subject’s reasons for choice are referred back to their fundamental choice.”160 But the problems are not insoluble. The project is not given to us, and the environment “can act on the subject only to the extent that he comprehends it; that is, transforms it into a situation.”161 The choice we make of ourselves, “that by which all foundations and all reasons come into being,”162 is not itself founded. It is a contingent foundation, and like any foundation is itself without foundation, an unsupported support of the complex interrelated way of being in the world. The “absolute event or for-itself is contingent in its very being” 163 even if it is “its own foundation qua for-itself.”164 We are confronted with a decision whether to accept a way of life, only once it is accepted can justification be based upon the way of life. But the acceptance 80 of a way of life, an assertion of our being in the world, is an authentic choice, an exercise of freedom-as-valued, which is its own justification. Yet the original project is itself without justification. However, the original choice of one’s fundamental project may thereby be said to be absurd, since, although choices are normally made for reasons, this choice lies beyond reason because all reasons for choice are supposed to be grounded in one’s fundamental project. It may therefore be objected that we are mistaken in supposing that reasons for choice are themselves grounded in a choice. In addition, our theory of free will is beginning to appear somewhat paradoxical, if “the will acquires meaning only within the original project of an intentional, oriented freedom.” 165 Is voluntary action not thereby restricted by the self-imposed structure of this fundamental choice? 81 3.8.3. On Voluntary Action A “man being condemned to be free,” according to Sartre, “carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being.” 166 And, for Sartre, responsibility is “consciousness (of) being the incontestable author of an event or of an object:”167 What happens to me happens through me, and I can neither affect myself with it nor revolt against it nor resign myself to it. Moreover, everything that happens to me is mine…the situation is mine because it is the image of my free choice of myself, and everything which it presents to me is mine in that it represents me and symbolizes me.168 In the light of this we can understand Sartre’s claim that “I choose being born,” 169 because I “[assume] this birth in full responsibility and [make] it mine.”170 My birth is mine as a fact of nature, but I can also assume it as mine. Sartre can then also claim that “there are no accidents in a life:”171 If I am mobilized in a war, this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it. I deserve it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by desertion; these ultimate possibles are those which must always be present for us when there is a question of envisaging a situation. For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it. This can be due to inertia, to cowardice in the face of public opinion, or because I prefer certain other values to the value of the refusal to join in the war (the good opinion of my relatives, the honour of my family, etc.). Anyway you look at it, it is a matter of choice. The choice will be repeated later on again and again without a break until the end of the war.172 Everything about the life of a person, excepting what is factually the case about that person, where he was born, and so on, expresses, as Sartre says, a “thematic organization and an inherent meaning in this totality.”173 “To act,” Jeanson said, “for human reality, is to enter into the most fundamental possible relationship with the world: one surpasses the world’s merely static configuration and modifies its materiality.”174 Action’s principal condition is freedom, but this is ambiguous. Consciousness is freedom, it can effect a concurrent withdrawal both from the world in its totality as an object of consciousness, and from its own past, endowing both the former and the latter with an aspect of 82 not-Being. Consciousness is thereby not itself but presence to itself. In effect this imposes a constraint on consciousness, for at the centre of ambiguous human reality there is not-Being, and consciousness has to make itself. Its mode of existence is not simply to be. But consciousness cannot be compelled by any motive, or impulse, or passion, for consciousness itself is the source of the meanings such determining factors appear to transmit to consciousness from the outside or from its past. Freedom is thereby absolute. Consciousness projects itself toward an end it freely chooses. And freedom, consciousness itself, encounters either resistance or sustenance, obstacles or support, that derive their entire value, or otherwise, from the initial choice that consciousness, freedom itself, has made. But freedom thereby dwells outside the sphere of a voluntary deliberating, for the latter is always the outcome of a particular intention, that is, a prior decision of consciousness to place itself, to fulfil the intention to act, on a reflective level. As Sartre puts it, “voluntary deliberation is always a deception:”175 When I deliberate, the chips are down. And if I am brought to the point of deliberating, this is simply because it is part of my original project to realise motives by means of deliberation rather than by some other form of discovery (by passion, for example, or simply by action, which reveals to me the organised ensemble of causes and of ends as my language informs me of my thought). There is therefore a choice of deliberation as a procedure which will make known to me what I project and consequently what I am. And the choice of deliberation is organised with the ensemble motives- causes and end by free spontaneity. When the will intervenes, the decision is taken, and it has no other value than that of making the announcement.176 As Jeanson said, we should treat with suspicion any theory that “erects will into an all-powerful faculty of soul, an unconditioned power of decision,” 177 for “freedom is beyond the realm of deliberation,”178 and “the will acquires meaning only within the original project of an intentional, oriented freedom.”179 We can therefore comprehend such phenomena as the inferiority feeling. 180 As Sartre said “whatever our being may be, it is a choice; and it depends on us to choose ourselves as “great” or “noble” or “base” and “humiliated.” If we have chosen humiliation as the very stuff of our being, we shall realise ourselves as humiliated, embittered, inferior, etc.”181 The actions of one who has an inferiority feeling, actions that express their own feelings of being inferior, can only be understood in the light of an original choice to be inferior; for instance, “I can persist in manifesting myself in certain kinds of employment because I am inferior in it, whereas in some other field I could without difficulty show myself equal to the average.” 182 I am the aggregation of my projects within which is included every one of my particular possibilities. This aggregation is to be understood as an inherent completion of consciousness, that is, the ultimate possibility that is consciousness, consciousness’s fundamental choice of itself, is represented by that aggregation as it accomplishes a synthetic unity. One of the grounds for such an interpretation, aside from the structural facts of consciousness that we have been discussing, is the feeling of anguish, whereby the perpetual possibility of a radical conversion is 83 apprehended by consciousness. However, for consciousness to be continually lingering within the self-imposed structure of this fundamental choice has the consequence that specific projects, though they are not logically entailed by that choice, will become expressed through that fundamental choice in a flexible structure that is continuous, not discrete. If for a moment consciousness chooses to discard the level of unreflectivity, consciousness can attain the level of reflectivity in the attempt through utter strength of will to impress upon itself projects that challenge its original project. But the peculiar consequence of this is that the will is only modifying secondary projects, while leaving untouched the original choice it has made of itself. As Sartre would say, it is undertaken in bad faith and incapable of any true resolution. We have thus attained the most crucial conclusion of Sartre’s ontology, but unfortunately it begins to appear paradoxical. “Those who strive to live morally,” as Jeanson said, “may be distressed by the limits to voluntary or wilful action…, for such action seems to be essential to moral striving.” 183 But for the will to be conceived as effort at the level of reflectivity would impose an unintelligibility by the will onto itself, in the absence of a background of pre-reflectivity that is unknown but lived, and is adjusted in accordance with the fundamental choice by which consciousness spontaneously defines itself. The will can only attain significance within the original project of an intentional freedom that is in accord with that project. For were it otherwise, if absolute freedom is reflective voluntariness, then it both has motives that explain its decisions, and it is an absolute motivating force, whereby actions decide themselves through a self-moving force that is outside the range of motives and reflection. It is to be understood within the context of constituted thought and the spontaneous constitution of thought. And this is self-contradictory. But though the will can challenge the original project, it cannot modify the original project through secondary projects that solely depend on the original project. The original project cannot be enfeebled through a breakdown in any of the constituent parts that arise through the original project in action. One may be tempted to suppose that it rather consists in a choice to fail, whereby the will intervenes only to underpin the choice that instigates it. To have an inferiority feeling is to choose oneself as inferior. The choice of inferiority implies constantly bringing about a gap between the end which the will pursues and the end which the will obtains. But such a choice can only affirm itself through the utilisation of a will extending beyond its true extent in bad faith, thereby avoiding a recognition of its own goals, that is, the feelings of being improper, ridiculous, or whatever. For the fundamental choice of consciousness here has to make the inferiority on which it has already decided readily perceived by the inferior consciousness, leading to a contriving towards the production of supposed voluntary means of counteracting the undesirable feeling of inferiority, but the intention of which is rather to lead to failure. If we choose to be inferior we must convince ourselves first of all that we are inferior, we must perpetually make ourselves inferior by deliberate attempts at some form of superiority. At this level, the will is capable only of a transient proclivity. This is the level of accessory reflection: 84 Such reflection bears only on the secondary structures of action, as in deliberation over the means to attain a certain end. While engaging in it, one refuses to ask oneself about the existence or supreme end or of a fundamental choice. Accessory reflection permeates day-to-day living, living which thinks of itself only to justify itself, which finds itself in the wrong only with regard to the use of this or that procedure, which finds one’s basic failure not in a choice – which, being fundamental, it prefers to ignore, but in the unavoidable disappointment of “destiny.”184 But such destiny can only be willed as such by the subject, for though the fundamental project is lived but not known, consciousness has an explicit aspiration towards a fully acquired essential constituting that is also self-consciousness. Consciousness seeks to have done with an existence whereby it is continually being exhausted by relentless pressure or resistance, a way of being that is continually self-defeating, lacking consistency, unity, or refuge. A few subjects may content themselves through not being, that is, through suicide, but many more are content just to be this or that, in a resignation of themselves through the abandonment of this or that aspiration, rather than departing from the inveterate self-falsification through which they attempt a flight from an oppressive freedom. “They are like sleepwalkers,” said Jeanson, “choosing never to awake from their basic project of constant sleep.”185 But one authorises one’s choice of self within oneself and through one’s engagement with the world, and there is no liberation from one’s fundamental project through turning one’s back on it, immersing oneself in secondary behaviours that in fact course from one’s fundamental project. As Jeanson said, “to stop oneself from stammering will no more cure an inferiority complex than sponging the floor will stem a flood.”186 And, as Jeanson also noted: …Alain’s well-known remark – “To appear is itself one way to be, and it may be the only way” – … characterises the level of accessory reflection. This proposes Being as an ideal without enquiring about the significance of that ideal. It also implies that one must use means that are purely external to the end one wishes to achieve.187 Whatever plots and practices we may endeavour to pursue towards cultivating the will’s activity, which are themselves lacking in discernment of the will’s dependence upon a fundamental choice, they only serve to entangle the will into colluding with this lack of discernment. The freedom of consciousness has its basis in the contingency of its existence in the world, whereas its transcendence has its basis in its facticity. And for anything to be meaningful at all, it must develop on a basis of absurdity, the latter understood in terms of a lack of any transcendent significance in the activity of consciousness. But the existence of the absurd itself implicates the existence of meaning. Consciousness, in fact, could not appear other than against a purview of 85 absurdity, against which everything that it finds impenetrable, from the point of view of practicality, is thereby rebuffed. However, we have endeavoured to demonstrate, on the basis that consciousness is consciousness of something, that transcendence is the constitutive structure of consciousness, that consciousness is supported by a being which is not itself, that consciousness is not identical with itself, that consciousness is presence to itself and in itself is not-Being. What does this mean in regard to the manner in which the original project aims at success? Is such a project not impossible and thereby ultimately futile? 86 3.8.4. The Futile Passion Given that the for-itself is distanced from itself it is also present to itself. And by virtue of negating things, the in-itself, the for-itself has a gap within itself. Consciousness has this gap within itself which it is negating or denying, that is, denying it is separate from itself. Consciousness is thereby haunted by its unachievable totality. Therefore, consciousness negates not-Being, which is to say, it has a project of removing the gap, but that is not possible: Thus human reality arises as such in the presence of its own totality or self as a lack of totality. And this totality can not be given by nature, since it combines in itself the incompatible characteristics of the in-itself and the for-itself.188 The internal negation is the structure of bad faith, a failed attempt at self-deception. However, if not-Being nihilates itself then, strictly speaking, it does not nihilate itself, but it is nihilated. Consciousness is separated from itself, structurally trying to remove the gap, but if it succeeded in this it would be dead. To be consciousness it needs to retain this separation. The alternative is for consciousness (of) to be an intentional consciousness of, and the arrow of consciousness that we have used to represent consciousness-Being would then become a circle, Fig. 3. But this would make consciousness complete, and this we may designate as God. This is what we are aiming at, to be God. When Sartre claims that we are aiming to be God he is using the word in a technical sense to designate the for-itself-in-itself complex. That is, certain conditions must be met for God to be God. For instance, God is transcendence and not immanence: Let no one reproach us with capriciously inventing a being of this kind; when by a further movement of thought the being and absolute absence of this totality are hypostasized as transcendence beyond the world, it takes on the name of God. Is not God a being who is what he is – in that he is all positivity and the foundation of the world – and at the same time a being who is not what he is and who is what he is not – in that he is self-consciousness and the necessary foundation of himself? 189 Concerning myself, on the other hand, as Sartre says, I am what I am not and I am not what I am. The futile passion is the desire to be God: 87 The being of human reality is suffering because it rises in being as perpetually haunted by a totality which it is without being able to be it, precisely because it could not attain the in-itself without losing itself as for-itself. Human reality therefore is by nature an unhappy consciousness with no possibility of surpassing its unhappy state.190 I am what I am not, for there is no ego, so I thereby choose myself, in the absence of this given I. Consciousness can never be what it chooses to be; if it can be anything it can only be the act of choosing. It must choose what it becomes, but it can never be what it chooses, because consciousness lacks identity. I am not what I am, in the sense that I am something, that is, my past, my essence, for my past life is part of the category of the in-itself. So it is appropriate to talk of the law of identity in reference to the past. My essence is my past, and consciousness is perpetually choosing its essence: Fig. 3. The surpassed in-itself lives on and haunts the for-itself as its original contingency. The for-itself can never reach the in-itself nor apprehend itself as being this or that, but neither can it prevent itself from being what it is – at a distance from itself. The contingency of the for-itself, this weight surpassed and preserved in the very surpassing – this is Facticity. But it is also the past. “Facticity” and “Past” are two words to indicate one and the same thing.191 It sounds paradoxical to say I lack identity with myself. It is self-contradictory, the very expression of this thesis is paradoxical. We cannot even say it without falling into paradox. However, we must not rest a theory of phenomenological ontology on linguistic shoulders, for ordinary language can mislead. There is, however, a difference in saying I want to be God but I cannot be God, and in saying I want to be a philosopher but I cannot be a philosopher. If we can be anything at all we can only be our past: 88 …it is the being of fact, which cannot determine the content of my motivations but which paralyses them with its contingency because they can neither suppress it nor change it; it is what they necessarily carry with them in order to modify it, what they preserve in order to flee it, what they have to be in their very effort not to be it; it is that in terms of which they make themselves what they are.192 The metaphor of distance applies to the past. Our past is what we are but we cannot be our past: It is this being which is responsible for the fact that each instant I am not a diplomat or a sailor, that I am a professor, although I can only play this being as a role and although I can never be united with it. If I can not re-enter into the past, it is not because some magical power puts it beyond my reach but simply because it is in-itself and because I am for-myself. The past is what I am without being able to live it.193 The foundation of all desire is a desire to be, and though a radical conversion of our being-in-the- world is always possible, it would amount to choosing a new self, to choosing a new fundamental project, because the choice would manifest itself not only at that moment, but in many other ways. The self is not a series of fragmented behaviours, but a totality. The original project manifests itself in every act, big or small, but it is not to be equated with some event or decision in the past. Rather it is recreated at each moment through the choices we make and the actions we perform. And because the possibility of radical conversion always exists, we are responsible for what we are. But it is an essential structure of consciousness that I become God. I x in order that y in order that z...in order that I be God. That is, I attempt to achieve a perfect coincidence with myself while remaining consciousness.194 A perfect self-coincidence satisfies the law of identity, that is, for all x, x = x. My original project is that I satisfy the law of identity while I remain consciousness, and this project is self-contradictory, that is, it is logically impossible. Human reality is a futile passion, because consciousness has this original project which is doomed to failure.195 If the final term of the project is that I be God, then I am attempting the impossible. But attempting the logically impossible can be done, provided various restrictions are met, that is, the first term must be possible. I can raise my arm with the intention of stopping the passage of time. I can sit down and attempt to prove Goldbach’s conjecture. 196 If the first term is logically impossible it destroys intentionality. I cannot intend now, at this moment, to raise and not to raise my arm. The project never materialises. I may consider the idea, but it is incapable of transforming itself into a project. The individual terms of the project, x, y, z, are not arbitrarily related. They refer to each other within the holistic project. They tell a story. They link together within an holistic structure of the project. The parts are not discrete atoms that can be isolated from each other. And this raises an important question. What are the properties of the relation, …in order that…? Because I am 89 intending to succeed, perhaps it is plausible to suppose that, if these terms infect each other, then prima facie a guiding idea we have is of a forwardwise infectedness. For example, I stand up to turn the lights on. If the final term is: ...in order that the lights go on, this infects the first term: I stood up…in order that… These terms are related holistically. But it is very difficult to sort out the exact nature of the infectedness. How do the teleological layers layer over each other? If N, a logical impossibility, is the final term, although the first term is not a logical impossibility, it infects backwards, rendering x, the first term, impossible, so that the first term becomes logically impossible. There is a possible objection. In the case of my trying to stop the course of time, we do not have this worry concerning backwards infection. But this is different because it is not a necessary fact about me that I have that project. For Sartre, the very structure of consciousness leads to N, that I become God, hence the final term infects backwards. The case is similar if we are building a house, and its structure is necessarily such that if a particular heavy roof is placed upon it, it would collapse and be destroyed, and part of the structure of the house is that it is to have this particular roof put upon it. Given that it is a structural claim about consciousness, that sets up a concern that these terms are going to be infected. What is the intelligibility of the terms in the relation .. in order that...? The form of consciousness dictates that N be there. If backward infection is true then we cease to have a project. But we obviously do have projects. Consciousness necessarily has a project, and human reality is a futile passion. But we can understand the fundamental project through the use of an analogy with a mathematical sequence. If R signifies the rules governing the progression of a series of numbers, the principle of ordering the series, the series will go on forever. But the mathematicians do not intend to realise infinity. On the other hand, by Sartre’s conception of the original project, if I take option A or option B, both will be in order to become God. And as we have seen, an action is always an attempt without success ever being guaranteed, but if the ultimate intention is to be God then failure is logically given with that intention. It may be objected that having rejected an idea, the existence of an ego, we have now ended up with the doctrine of the futile passion, then it is rather the doctrine of the futile passion that has to be rejected. So there is an I. But consciousness has this gap within itself which it is negating or denying, that is, denying it is separate from itself. By virtue of negating things, the in-itself, it has this gap within itself. This is the futile passion, whereby it is essential to consciousness that it has a project of coincidence, thus removing the gap, thereby no longer being consciousness. The internal negation must be there, and consciousness must have this project of coincidence, because, as we do not have a transcendental I, we need a principle of unification, for the Kantian requirement that I think accompany all my representations. Therefore the only place to look for the principle of unification is in the noesis or the noema. That is, the conceptual content through which one intends an object, the concrete act of intending, consciousness itself. “Consciousness …unifies itself by a play of “transversal” intentionalities,” as Sartre says. 197 I raise my arm. The 90 object of consciousness, the noema, brings with it unity, but at a cost, a unity which entails self- identity. For example, my raising my arm is the noema. Given there is no transcendental I, consciousness is committing itself to realising its project at the present moment. Desire, which by virtue of being desire, is a desire to be fulfilled, and because there is no I it is it, this desire, which seeks fulfilment, but then it would cease to be desire. This connects with the notion of failure, for the being of consciousness, as the foundation of itself as not-Being, is failure. Haunted by a totality that it can never realise, consciousness is consciousness because of this deficiency. And this unrealisable totality is the value that is a product of the valorising activity of consciousness. And yet, though human reality incorporates both value and consciousness, the value is both present to consciousness and out of reach of consciousness. The value is, so to speak, perpetually experienced as that which gives meaning to the deficiency that constitutes the being of consciousness. And the deficiency of consciousness that denies to consciousness the capacity to be itself is also that which consciousness is not but must be in order achieve completion. Hence, we can speak of desire as that which seeks perpetual satisfaction, which in turn necessitates desire never ceasing to exist as desire. This follows from consciousness as that which is haunted by an unachievable totality, and from the being of consciousness as failure, for desire is deficient in satisfaction, a deficiency that sustains the desire as desire, but the satisfaction of desire is not desired in order to replace the desire, but rather so that the desire can achieve completion in a perfect totality whereby the desire would be satisfied without entailing a dying away of the pleasure accompanying the satisfaction of the desire. For example, in the case of the physiological condition of thirst and the accompanying desire to drink, given that consciousness is pre-reflectively aware of itself, and there is no transcendental ego, if I have a desire to drink, I am that desire to drink. By that very fact I desire this desire to drink to be satisfied. That is, the desire aims at its own satisfaction and the alleviation of thirst. The desire desires its satisfaction, which is impossible, that is, it is wanting to be satisfied while still a desire. There is no I to carry identity through time. I desire my desire to be satisfied. The desire desires its satisfaction while being desire. Desire does not have identity through time, like an I would. The attempt aims at its success while still being an attempt. Satisfaction entails the dying away of the existence of desire. The project of this desire is that it remains a desire while being satisfied. A rejection of the ego thus leads to the futile passion. The for-itself aims at being for-itself-in-itself. If I have an ego, I aim at my desire. But we have rejected the ego. Consciousness, at the pre-reflective level, apprehends itself as a deficiency, an unachieved totality. This is the grounding of desire, but in the absence of an ego, consciousness is this deficiency, as Sartre said: It is this lack and it is also the lacking, for it has to be what it is. To drink or to be drinking means never to have finished drinking, to have still to be drinking beyond the drinking which I am. And when “I have finished drinking,” I have drunk: the ensemble slips into the past. While actually 91 drinking, I am then this drinking which I have to be and which I am not; every designation of myself if it is to be heavy and full, if it is to have the density of the self-identical – every such designation escapes me into the past.198 By denying the transcendental ego we need a principle of unification, the outcome of which is to involve consciousness in the futile passion. The I has strict self-identity, by helping oneself to it we can avoid the futile passion, but there is no self-identical I. We thereby never succeed at any project. I cannot even succeed in raising my arm. For me to raise my arm is presupposing me. Me and my are reflexive terms that implicate self-identity. But given the nature of consciousness such a strict identity is unattainable. We can account for the unity without a transcendental I and the cost is the futile passion. We may wish to argue that the cost is too great, philosophically speaking. That is, having a project in that sense, to that degree. Because of the futile passion even a project of suicide cannot succeed, as consciousness attempts to belie its own nature through its own annulment, but the internal negation in the structure of consciousness precludes sincerity, or consciousness being what it is, that is, identical with itself. But by this internal negation, consciousness is denying its own nature, or structure. Not-Being must not just be non-Being, it is made-to-be. The gap in not- Being is to be the object of negation. Consciousness is not simply distanced from itself, it distances itself from the fact that it is distanced from itself. It is necessarily such that its project belies its own nature. And yet its project is futile, for it can never achieve a perfect coincidence with itself, for were it to achieve this it would be dead. We could understand this impossible project of the for-itself making itself an in-itself-for-itself in this way: the final term of the project, N, is not a member of the series, but is rather a limit to the series. For example, if everything is ordered according to similarity, identity is a limiting case, it is not a part of the series. Similarly, the unachievable totality that is the intentional object of the impossible project is a limiting case to the project. There is nothing in Sartre to support this interpretation, but it is one that we can make to support our contention that the for-itself is engaged in a fundamental and impossible project. For Sartre, however, I do try to make myself an in-itself-for-itself, that is, the end part of the project is in the project. This I in the future towards which the noetic act is directed concerns an I which is not me, it is not identical with me, it is not identical with itself. But this directedness cannot be threatened because the very notion of possibility is only applicable where we have descriptions, that is, in the realm of essences. Freedom has no essence, because it is through freedom that there come to be essences. The constitutor cannot itself be constituted. So the notions of possibility or necessity cannot apply to it. Husserl believed that we can bracket necessities, but necessities cannot apply to the constitutor of necessities. There are therefore three ways of coping with the futile passion. First, through the break of the identity of consciousness. Second, through the limiting case. And third, through the fact that freedom lacks an essence.199 And bad faith is described as a flight from freedom “which consists 92 in conceiving of my self as an essence or nature. Freedom then becomes nothing but the means by which my actions are conformed to my nature, by which my existence is seen to flow from me as from an essence for which I do not have to be responsible because I did not choose to be this essence even though, in fact, it serves to define me as that very being which I am.” 200 But bad faith is only possible through a nihilating withdrawal, a separation of the ego from Being, considered as the essence of consciousness. Rather, our essence is constituted through consciousness, or freedom, which itself is without essence. Essence is a product of consciousness. What does the producing cannot produce itself. We have thus clarified the essential structures of consciousness in its relation to itself and to the world with the intent of rediscovering the substantive from the conceptual, eschewing a description having the character of a single thing, thereby resolving into a duality with two incompatible terms. But given that the substantive is permeated throughout by freedom-as-fact, in the absence of the latter the terms good and evil are void of meaning. For without natural freedom any moral conversion of the subject would be undergone passively, that is, the act of conversion of the subject would be completely dependent on divine grace. Merleau-Ponty gives a description whereby “the life of consciousness - cognitive life, the life of desire or perceptual life - is subtended by an “intentional arc” which projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation…” 201 But what is required is rather, as Sartre recognised, a description of the situation that moralises the situation. What this amounts to is that human ambiguity, which is lived ambiguity, does not result from a relation between contrary elements in opposition, between Being and not-Being, between good and evil, between freedom itself and that which is antipathetic to freedom. Rather, human ambiguity is at the core of freedom, betwixt the incitation of freedom, its impetus, so to speak, and the assuming anew of that impetus, in a purifying reflection by the for-itself on its own ends. We have therefore presented an essentialist phenomenology, the object of which has been to define and determine the primitive duality of Being and not-Being, for it is within such a duality that Being is both intended and rejected, and which is of fundamental importance for an understanding of the most profound significance of human action and deportment. Having clarified its structures, the next stage in the argument is to give an account of such ambiguity as it is lived and experienced. The ambiguity of human reality has to have first been defined in its essence before describing its disclosures, for had this not been done the ambiguity would perhaps be understood as a subjection to the motivations of the world coinciding within the for-itself with a freedom to surpass such motivations. But the motivations would thereby be causes and the freedom would be insufficient to produce the desired outcome. An understanding of a situation implicates a capacity to make the situation appear as something else, which is to say, a capacity to resituate oneself at the original derivation of what is the case. And yet this capacity and an engagement that one merely undergoes are mutually exclusive, for living is not merely experiencing and passing through one’s situation, it is accepting and affirming it. 93 Drawing on our previous conclusions, we can now give a description of ambiguity as it is lived and experienced. We begin by returning to our initial intuitions, whereby our experience of ourselves is of embodied consciousness, a body-subject, as is our experience of others. And from our distinction between realising consciousness and imaging consciousness, we will see that the former, particularly in the mode of realising itself as an existing fact, and of realising others as existing facts, is characterised by Nausea, 202 an insipid taste of the real, and the evidence of which phenomena we can provide through phenomenological description. 94 3.9. The Unveiling of Being. The transcendental I is an I distinct from consciousness, though it may be objected that a viable alternative would be that the I just is identical with consciousness. The I with its consciousness emerges from the transcendental reduction, but might it not be that I am this now consciousness, that is, there is no distinction between the subject and consciousness, between the cogito, consciousness, and the cogitatum, the object of consciousness? But we have avoided the presupposition that our only options are for the I to refer to a transcendental ego or to consciousness. The process of bracketing reveals constitution. I come to realise that I constitute senses, but, to recognise that, I must be separate from the constituting process. The intending of an object is exactly what constitution is. But have we shown that making intentionality constitutive is an intelligible or worthwhile goal? And what does the locution the intending of the object really mean? Is the object an intentional object? An objection may be made, for those attending to this problem from the natural standpoint, that a mental state would not, usually, be an intending. So what does it mean? Intentionality, or directedness, is clearly a relation, but what are the relata? One is the object, but what is the other? We cannot say it is consciousness itself without circularity. Thus we have a relation, R R, and on each side of the relation is a relatum, R. If I say, I am consciousness, I am appealing to the relation itself to give an account of the relation. Consciousness is not an object, or a thing. Because it is intentional nothing can be in consciousness, but something can be in a thing. So to say I am consciousness is circular. Consciousness does not intend its object, it is the intending of the object, it is I who intend. There is thus a danger of circularity, that is, making the relation, consciousness, one of the things that relates, one of the relata. For instance, a relation of a two place predicate, that is, Fxy, is a relation that is itself not one of the relata. To account for the relational status of consciousness we are committed to an I. I am my consciousness. If I ask any ontological question, it is because I do it. For Husserl, consciousness is a relation between the ego and its object. 203 We reach the intentional object through sense. Given that I produce the noema the meaning of the world is going to be infected with the I. In some sense of the word production I produce sense. This is a metaphor, it is not like producing chairs and tables. But not just any expression of the world, at the noema, contains a reference to I. The sense of I need not infect the sense of all terms at the noema. For example, there is no sense of the term world at the noema without the I-implication, because I produce the senses. But there are counter-examples. If Pierre produced a film, this does not mean that the plot, or content, of the film is infected by Pierre. In some sense, the author enters into the identity of the work. But the sense of the I does not enter into the sense of the work. That is, the sense of I is not a logical commitment to the meaning of terms. In the film 95 analogy, there is an internal relationship. Pierre produced a particular film, so Pierre has made his mark on that film, but not in the sense that Pierre enters into the plot of that film. However, to return to our initial intuitions in this enquiry, whereby the agent is an embodied subject, consciousness, it would seem, is rather a relation between a body-subject, not a transcendental ego, and an object of consciousness. But given that an intentional act intends more than is merely presented to consciousness, this is also true when what is presented to consciousness is a living human body. Such a body is an object, but a conscious object. And a conscious body is a body that relates to its consciousness, in some manner. The experience of another is of a body, insofar as the other is an object. And viewed from the perspective of the scientific attitude, the body is an existent thing, to be understood from without, so to speak, and functioning in accordance with well-defined laws, that is, subject to the laws of causation. And consciousness is that which can be directly intuited, by the phenomenologist who is that consciousness. But from the scientific perspective, an attempt is made to blend my consciousness not with my body but with the body of others. And yet, I cannot posit my own body as an external object, completely visible to one view. I am my body in the sense that I am this very implement by which I can interact with the world, but the body is also an object in the world and subject to interaction by other bodies. That is, my body is an object in the world for another, or for myself when I consider myself from the perspective of another. And yet the body cannot be both one thing among others and that by which things are revealed to me. A bodiless mind or soul is thereby inconceivable. William Blake said that “Man has no Body distinct from his Soul; for that called Body is a portion of soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.” 204 But there are more than five senses. Proprioception, for instance, is the pre-reflective perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli within the body itself. And kinaesthesia is the feeling of movements of the limbs and body. And cenesthesia is the general feeling of inhabiting one's body that arises from multiple stimuli from various bodily organs. For a knowing mind, objective knowing, that is, adequately judging that something is the case, is an essentially human objectivity given that knowledge is not cogitation, or consideration, or whatever, but an experience, and this implicates the fact that objective knowledge is impossible without something primarily disclosing itself to the knowing mind. Such disclosure is the theme of an experience, and is bodily-consciousness. Modern science, on the other hand, elects to define objectivity in terms of a putative objective method that aims to objectivise its subject matter. But for this to make sense, experience has to be understood as a set of unambiguous relationships integrated in such a way that the observer is somehow incorporated, and disregarded, within it. The physiological and the psychical cannot be two distinct realities capable of acting upon each other. Consciousness is wholly body and wholly conscious. Consciousness is not that which is connected to a body, for the body is entirely psychical. And given that consciousness lacks substantiality, it is a pure appearance existing only to the extent that it appears to itself. But 96 because consciousness is pure appearance, that is, because of intentionality, the entire world is outside of consciousness, appearing and existing are thus identical. That is, consciousness is an absolute. Nothing substantial, nothing in relation to material being, it is thus that consciousness is a fullness of existence as consciousness. But if there is a facticity of consciousness it is the fact that consciousness is the body. If the body was an in-itself within a for-itself, everything would coagulate because of the body. The body is a for-itself. And given that the body necessarily exists as a contingent being engaged with other contingent beings, the body as for-itself is not its own foundation. The body is the contingent aspect of my situation. It is my foundational frame of reference behind which further retreat is impossible. It is an implement among implements; yet it is only on the foundation of the body that the world can order itself as a complex of implementality in the first place. The body situates this complex by its own situation. That is, a body is originally given as a body in a situation, for another body as flesh cannot intervene in a situation defined beforehand, anterior to its presence in that situation. In fact, the body as flesh is the condition of there being a situation, it exists only in and through a transcendence. In this way the body of another signifies or confers meaning. We apprehend another’s psyche on her body. We perceive another’s gestures, not like fragments of worldly objects, but on the basis of the other in her entirety, as existing in her particular situation. Every sign of contempt that another gives to us is not an expression of the contempt, it is rather the contempt itself. In itself a wave of the hand signifies nothing, but we never perceive a wave of the hand. We may perceive a woman in a specific situation waving her hand, and because of the specific situation in this instance this particular movement of the body is perceived as a dismissive gesture. In another situation it may well be perceived as a gesture of farewell. So the body of another always indicates something beyond itself, which is true of space, whereby the body of another indicates a situation, and of time, whereby the body of another indicates an objective freedom. The other person is given to me completely and without intermediary, thereby the other person’s body is always more than a body, though still a body, through the continual transcendence of the facticity of the other’s body. I exist my body and at a more basic level, if my body is used or known by another, I exist for myself as known by another in my bodily facticity. There is this relation in which the other is disclosed to me as the subject for which I am an object, thereby my body continually eludes me, in that the being of my body is, at a fundamental level, a continuous somatic exteriority of that with which I am most closely acquainted, a visceral interiority. We have clarified the essential structures of consciousness in its relation to itself and to the world, but if consciousness negates itself, it also negates the body. And given that consciousness does not identify itself with its body, we cannot say that consciousness is its body. Rather, there is an experiential relationship between consciousness and body, a relation we may call existential in that the provenience of the body and of consciousness can be understood and explained by 97 empirical science, in fact in the case of the body, in principle in the case of consciousness, but the body-subject itself is without explanation. It may be that activity of the nervous system generates consciousness, and this has led to the claim that we are nothing but a pack of neurons, 205 but this does not explain why one pack of neurons is the body-subject that it is, and another pack of neurons is another. The body-subject itself is therefore without explanation, in fact and in principle, though the body and consciousness are not. But it is a pre-reflective consciousness that assimilates the body as one of its structures. A pre-reflective embodied consciousness is consciousness (of) the body as that which has to be transcended and nihilated in order to make itself consciousness, or, to put it another way, this type of consciousness is consciousness (of) that which consciousness is without having to be it, and which consciousness goes beyond in order to be what it has to be. Since it follows that the body is that implement that I cannot employ by means of another implement, and my body is that which provides a frame of reference, but upon which a frame of reference is unattainable, for me, then we can say, following Sartre, that a metastable, 206 attitudinizing, unreflective consciousness “exists its body.”207 Consciousness is, therefore, a relation between the body-subject and the object of consciousness. Consciousness can only ever be embodied consciousness. And the body that is conscious exists in a very real sense for another embodied consciousness. That is how I apprehend another’s body, and that is how another apprehends my body. And given that my body is my facticity and the body of the other is her facticity, and the body of myself is the contingent aspect of my being, and the body of another is the contingent aspect of her being, this contingent aspect is felt by the other as a reflexive saporific malaise that we may designate as Nausea. And this I perceive as her flesh, but her flesh, even were she a cadaver, can never be a simple object for me. But as the body-subject images, it opposes itself to the world by denying the world’s being there and by positing a not-Being toward which this denial is directed, for the intentional object of an imaging body-subject cannot appear to such a body-subject without indicating its absence. However, the body-subject can oppose an imaginary object to the world in this way only to the extent that it is securely situated within the world, for it is not the case that the imaginary can be anything at all, as the body-subject can give a particular image to itself solely in accordance with an actual and particular motivation within a situation, a motivation that prevents the object in question from any access to the real world. Solely to the extent that Pierre cannot be there, present to me, am I able to imagine Pierre as not there. As Sartre said, “an image is not purely and simply the world denied, but is always the world denied from a certain point of view, precisely that which allows the positing of the absence or the nonexistence of the object presentified ‘as imaged’.” 208 And from the body-subject as present to itself we derive the conclusion that the body-subject has a nihilating capacity, as consciousness pre-reflectively nihilates the body, for in a particular sense consciousness is its body, the sense in which if it were solely its body it would not be consciousness. The special facility of consciousness is to make of nothing its fleshly complex, to 98 disregard it, in silence to transcend it. The for-itself exists its body, which is to say it exists that contingency that is its body, that is, the for-itself is the contingency which the for-itself is as a facticity and which it must transcend. And this is evident in such phenomena as sickness, aversion, disgust, or Nausea, a lived grasping by consciousness of its own contingency, of its own existence as a brute fact. Not only does consciousness never desist in having a body, but a body exists for another, the body of the other being her facticity and the contingency of her being, a contingency that is felt as a psycho/physical discomfort that we have designated as a Nausea. But the Nausea only indicates and does not establish what we have identified as the nihilating capacity of consciousness, as consciousness nihilates the body, for consciousness also nihilates itself. Such Nausea is not to be understood as a metaphor, but as an experience of ambiguity as it is lived. We have referred to cenesthetic sensation, and, according to Sartre: Cenesthetic affectivity is a pure, non-positional apprehension of a contingency without colour, a pure apprehension of the self as a factual existence. This perpetual apprehension on the part of my for- itself of an insipid taste which I cannot place, which accompanies me even in my efforts to get away from it, and which is my taste – this is what we have described elsewhere under the name of Nausea.209 And Sartre speaks elsewhere of “the nauseous disgust that characterizes the realising consciousness,”210 that is, as opposed to the imaging consciousness. In giving our account of ambiguity as it is lived and experienced, which includes our experience of Nausea, we can bring together some previous conclusions. For instance, “the body is necessary…as the obstacle to be surpassed in order to be in the world; that is, the obstacle which I am to myself,” that is, the body is itself an obstacle, and therefore resists. And “in this sense it is not different from the absolute order of the world, this order which I cause to arrive in being by surpassing it toward a being-to-come, toward being-beyond-being.” 211 That is to say: A dull and inescapable nausea perpetually reveals my body to my consciousness. Sometimes we look for the pleasant or for physical pain to free ourselves from this nausea; but as soon as the pain and the pleasure are existed by consciousness, they in turn manifest its facticity and its contingency; and it is on the ground of this nausea that they are revealed. We must not take the term nausea as a metaphor derived from our physiological disgust. On the contrary, we must realise that it is on the foundation of this nausea that all concrete and empirical nausea (nausea caused by spoiled meat, fresh blood, excrement, etc.) are produced and make us vomit.212 In addition, “…the facticity of the Other – that is, the contingency of his being - …This facticity is precisely what the Other exists – in and through his for-itself; it is what the other perpetually lives in nausea as a contingency which he is, as a pure apprehension of self as a factual existence.” 213 99 And then objections are raised, by Thody and others, that Sartre is here making the claim, fallaciously in their view, that everybody really feels as sick as Roquentin, the protagonist of Nausea, though they may be unaware of it. 214 And yet, the objections go, for the devout Muslim or Christian the world is not absurd, it is rather necessary, willed into existence by an all-powerful creator in order to serve a definite purpose, and thereby replete with meaning. 215 And scientists and philosophers, on the other hand, for whom the world is contingent, accept their contingency with equanimity.216 And Nausea is a supposed expression of that which Ayer describes as “a pointless lament,”217 ruing as it does the contingency of matters of fact, despite the fact that by definition they just cannot be logically necessary. “Nobody would disagree with Sartre’s view that the world exists for no purpose,” claims Thody, “what seems odd is that he should create a hero who is so upset by this that he wants to write a book which will make people ashamed of their existence.” 218 Which is to say, whatever point Sartre was trying to make in Nausea it would have been better served if Roquentin had been presented as an unusual character, with his own peculiar reaction to the non-existence of God and to the absurd. Nausea could then be regarded as a metaphor that expresses one possible reaction to the absurd, rather than being something that we ought to feel. And then, the argument continues, there would be no need to use the same images in a work of philosophical analysis that Sartre employs in his novel.219 But such objections are in effect denying an ontological characteristic disclosed through phenomenological ontology. Nausea is that insipid taste of oneself as a factual existent. In moving beyond his own existence towards the imaginary, Roquentin thereby forgets his existence as such, or rather, he relieves himself of his own existence through the life he gives to the Marquis de Rollebon, on whom he is writing a biography, while at the same time he confers upon it a meaning, a value, a sort of justification. But the role Roquentin thereby adopts can no longer be maintained once Rollebon becomes no more than an image for Roquentin, that is, Rollebon’s face appears as an image, a fiction.220 Existence thereby re-incorporates the role-playing and desists in being surpassed by any meaning. This existence that permeates him is his own existence but in the same mode as that of things. Consciousness thereby loses its capacity to go beyond, and lets itself get caught among things, it is mired in existence. And then there is the revelatory moment whereby existence no longer lacks merely the particular meaning which gave it its rationalisation for Roquentin, but it is now deprived even of its most general meaning, according to which the world is a complex of implements. Nausea is thereby the awareness of existing not as consciousness but as a thing. Roquentin’s consciousness almost ceases to exist as such, preserving only enough of itself to feel ensnared and immersed in the being of things. There is, then, consciousness, but no person is dwelling within. And if Roquentin retains a modest detachment from things, it is from having lost all power to negate them, in his enthrallment at attending to their absurd and uncustomary self affirmation, the latter being a characteristic of contingency. 100 Being is thereby this superfluity, this contingency of things, while not-Being is that by which there may be Being for consciousness, that is, it designates the power consciousness has to nihilate. Nausea reveals Being, that in which consciousness constantly risks letting itself be caught. The devout Muslims and Christians, the scientists, the logical positivists, are those who allow themselves to be thus caught, who cease to exist qua consciousness and who then constantly pretend to justify this thing-like existence in a spirit of seriousness. And given that their opposition to Being endures, they thus veil their own power of negation and freedom. Nausea is thereby the unveiling of Being.221 Roquentin’s own existence appears as a superfluous impediment to him as it streams back over him,222 because just like the existence of things it is contingent, unjustified, and absurd. We do not cause the absurd to be, it is, and this absolute of Being can be opposed by an unconditioned power of negation. Such power we designate with the term imagination, and it is through imagination that Roquentin makes his advancement toward his liberation from the Nauseous. The imaginary, though motivated by one situation or another, brings into existence substances of irreality, which thus provided are thereby subject to an attitude whereby they may become objects of necessity to whatever extent we so please. For instance, mathematical objects may procure a restraint on absurdity and contingency. Though we may not think of a rectangle as a physical thing, our experience of such is repeatable and consistent, that is, if two people try to find the area of a rectangle and give different answers, then we know that either one of them has made a mistake or they both have. However, diverse rectangular objects derive their meaning from the rectangle, that is, the justification for their existence arises from their being permeated, to a lesser degree, by the necessity the rectangle exemplifies. But this is so only because the rectangle is without existence, an abstraction. 223 At every instant the implied meaning of the real is represented by the imaginary. When Sartre speaks in The Imaginary of the Nauseous disgust that characterizes consciousness of reality, he is referring to a textural fact concerning consciousness, an insipidity that consciousness returns to when it departs from the exactitude of the imaginary world, when it ceases, for instance, listening to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, to use Sartre’s example. 224 But of course there is no denying that there are those who are oblivious to the allurements of music, or of the arts generally, and are thereby inured to the Nauseous. That is, the insipid taste of their realising consciousness is for the most part an inured aspect of its texture. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Caesar says of Cassius: “He reads much,/He is a great observer, and he looks/Quite through the deeds of men. He loves no plays… he hears no music.” 225 Cassius is an exemplar of the spirit of seriousness, inured to the Nauseous. Gustav Mahler, on the other hand, said that: “When I hear music…I can hear quite definite answers to my questions and feel entirely clear and sure. Or rather, I feel quite clearly that there are no questions at all.”226 But as we have seen, the questioning attitude presupposes the for-itself’s relation to being-in-itself, rather than creating it. How are we to interpret Mahler’s claim other 101 than that through music his imaging consciousness achieves identity with itself, which is to say, it achieves a sense of being real that is unsustainable in ordinary existence, that is, it achieves a suspension of the absurd? And when the music is over, there is a return to the insipid, the Nauseous. And yet the imaginary itself can become as absurd as the real if, by acquiring through the analogon the same functions and characteristics of the real, it circumscribes itself within a project of imitating the motivations of the real. At the very least it cannot thereby attain the mode of an artistic work, as the latter is a calling into question of contingency. That is, our various negations of the real are formed with exactitude through a work of art, as it puts the world and the necessity which issues exclusively from our own freedom into conflict. Value once created in the imagination endows certain aspects of the real with value while divorcing us from its other aspect of brute existence. There is thereby an unconditional contrariety between the exactitude of art and the absurdity of things. It does not follow, however, that Roquentin is thereby doomed to suffer the barrenness of such a contrariness, having perpetually to be in readiness for the experience of music to spare himself ad interim from Nausea. If an action is incapable in and of itself of overcoming the advent of the problematic in the world, and if an artistic work merely negates the existence of the world to the extent of making it evident, there remains the possibility, through a type of artistic act, of living artistically, that is capable of transmuting the outward appearance of things. We thereby understand our initial intuition, that is, I am the owner of my actions, in a sense analogous to an artist owning his created work, for an artist has authored the content of his created work. The imaginary, that is, should not be apprehended as a representation of Being, but rather as a motive for action, that is, as we illustrated with the example of Sartre counting his cigarettes, an action has a theme and the theme can be the imaginary, rather than the latter being considered as a potentiality for avoidance. Nietzsche once said that “the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon,”227 but in the case of ourselves, human being, the point is not to attempt the attainment of a being in the manner whereby an artistic work has being. The point is rather to endeavour to actualise an artistic life, thereby realising its being. Rather than the imaginary extending its influence through and through action, whereby the latter is eventually disowned altogether, the imaginary should constitute the object of an action in the world. The attitude of absurdification can thereby be displaced, as in the mode of a justification bestowed upon it the meaning of life is thereby realised. Such is the manner whereby ambiguity is lived and experienced, as the body-subject negates the absurd and attains justification, that is, its actions acquire meaning. And yet, it remains the case that in endeavouring to justify its actions, that is, in claiming that it did so-and-so because of such- and-such, the body-subject is thereby making causal claims. This because is to be understood as a causal because. I acted thus because of what she said. The body-subject’s freedom is thereby a refusal of the very foundation of its freedom, whereby, through its actions, at every moment it 102 bestows a meaning on its situation, and on the obstacles it encounters. This refusal to experience as such the founding of its own freedom, however, can be explicated by analogy with its experience of the viscous. 103 3.10. The Viscosity of Being. There is a standard Humean notion of causation, exemplified through the behaviour of billiard balls. If one billiard ball bangs against the other, then, in the absence of any impediments, the other billiard ball will move. Such is the outcome of the laws of physics, which admit of no exception, and it may even be the case that mental events are subject to the same laws. The Humean notion of causation may be represented schematically thus: A occurs χ B occurs, whereby the symbol, χ, is to be read as: by virtue of that very fact. A occurs, and, by virtue of that very fact, B occurs. For example, a parent and her children are arguing over mud on the carpet. The parent asks the children, “why is there mud on the carpet?” And one child claims it was because of the dog. And the parent asks, “so how was the dog able to muddy the carpet?” 228 And the child responds, “because I opened the door and let it in, and its paws are muddy.” “But why are its paws muddy?” “Because I let it out after it had been raining, and it played in the muddy garden.” That is, there are embedded becauses, a layering of causation: C occurs χ (A occurs χ B occurs). C occurs, and, by virtue of that very fact, a causal relationship occurs, that is, A occurs, and by virtue of that very fact, B occurs. So there is no a priori reason why we cannot extend this, and embed this causal relationship into another, thus: D occurs χ (C occurs χ (A occurs χ B occurs)). D occurs, and, by virtue of that very fact, a causal relationship occurs, that is, C occurs, and, by virtue of that very fact, a causal relationship occurs, that is, A occurs, and, by virtue of that very fact, B occurs. Which is to say, one causal relationship is embedded in another, generating causal layers. Causal layers are thereby flowing over and into one another, like treacle, an appropriate metaphor that harmonises well with Sartre’s account of the viscous, or the slimy. For the slimy “symbolizes being; that is, so long as the contact with the slimy endures, everything takes place for us as if sliminess were the meaning of the entire world or the unique mode of being of being- in-itself…”229 Our ontology of freedom has been an enquiry into the free attitudinizing that human actuality in its ambiguity directs toward every in-itself which can potentially attract that freedom, which we may symbolise in terms of the slimy, as it entices it into becoming stuck and incapable of progression. And the past of the for-itself and the body may be integrated into the mode of existing things, but the past can be apprehended de novo in a present that conveys itself toward the future, and the body is not an object. Such an integration is possible because for the for-itself its past and its body represent the threat of being permanently either this or that, thereby enticing the for-itself to surrender its free capability of transformation. Slime, in particular, “is the revenge of the In- itself,”230 and “a sugary sliminess is the ideal of the slimy; it symbolizes the sugary death of the For-itself (like that of the wasp which sinks into the jam and drowns in it).” 231 Consciousness is diffused through and through by the body and the past, to an equal extent as they diffuse through and through the objects of the world. The latter are always transcended, but 104 the body and the past are like the objects of the world in that they constitute a determinate point of reference in a manner of being that cannot be reduced into simpler elements, and which thereby solicits the for-itself’s intendings, subjecting consciousness to an increasing inertia, unless it maintains its attentiveness. The metaphor of treacle represents our experiences of such solicitings, together with the concomitant hindrances and impediments that tempt the for-itself, and thereby freedom, to become stuck. Mathieu, for instance, in Iron in the Soul, finds himself in a dangerous situation whereby the choices he has to make are a matter of life and death for him: Mathieu’s gaze painfully retraced the road, slipping on the cobbles, on the tufts of grass in the cracks between the, until it came to rest on the corner. No one. Silence. It is a village in August: the men are in the fields. But he knew that on the other side of those walls were men planning his death. They’re trying to do us as much damage as possible. He foundered in a sea of treacle: he loved the whole world, Frenchmen, Germans, Hitler. In a sort of clammy dream he heard a sound of cries… 232 And Roquentin senses his own existence wedged within an overpowering deviation from the normal course of experience, an experiencing of a stupefying profusion of things around him, together with their superfluity, within which all relations are arbitrary. The chestnut tree, for instance, is “superfluous…over there… a little to the left.” 233 Like honey sliding off a spoon into the honey in the jar,234 “in the slimy substance which dissolves into itself there is a visible resistance, like the refusal of an individual who does not want to be annihilated in the whole of being.”235 However, existential psychoanalysis, which aims toward elucidating the meaning of human action in the natural attitude, is not to be understood in terms of an inappropriate obsession with one’s abhorrence of the viscous, nor in terms of hopes, or the attainment of desires, but in terms of something much more fundamental. Sexuality, or the will to power, or the drive for perfection, are secondary inclinations only. What is of importance is human reality’s fundamental relation to being and its way of living this relation. Action, or doing, as we have seen, is the effort to be, but it is also the effort to have, for to do is to attempt to realise oneself or to appropriate some object. “Scientific research,” for instance, “is nothing other than an effort to appropriate. The truth discovered, like the work of art, is my knowledge; it is the noema of a thought which is discovered only when I form the thought and which consequently appears in a certain way as maintained in existence by me.”236 And such attemptings present a problem for ontology, for what is the relationship between the desire for being and the desire for appropriation? The project of appropriating being manifests itself through tastes, which is to say, the feelings of attraction and revulsion that we have toward the qualities under which particular objects are present to us. “Existential psychoanalysis,” therefore, “must bring out the ontological meaning of qualities”237 since these meanings express, beyond our tastes themselves, the aspects under which we choose to discover and to appropriate being. It is not on the level of a taste for sweetness or for sourness and such like that the free 105 choice is irreducible, but on the level of the choice of a particular appearance of being which is disclosed through and by means of sweetness, sourness and such like. 238 Free choice in the primary sense is a choice of being, because prior to purifying reflection a choice, as we have seen, must be understood ontologically. Such a choice may be instigated immediately or mediately via appropriation of the world, or, more likely, both may be instigated simultaneously. Such is the sense in which my freedom may be said to be a choice to be God. All my acts and projects are translations of this project, reflecting it in a multitude of ways, for my freedom is itself an endless amount of ways of being and ways of appropriating. The objective of existential psychoanalysis is to disclose anew, through these empirical concrete projects, the original manner in which each person chooses his being. But through its very existence consciousness constitutes a subjectivity, a subjective existent, as opposed to a factual existent. And such an existent is as obscure and indeterminate as things themselves. It is this that is the source of Roquentin’s experience of forever being a superfluous impediment, because at the level applicable to such an experience the obscure and indeterminate stream of Being encroaches on and submerges everything, either subjects or things. And through an analogy with the formlessness and indeterminateness of the viscous we can provide a causal layer argument, an argument that is concerned with what it is for an action to be a success, an argument that is not Sartre’s but fits in with his analogy with the viscous, and with the metaphor of treacle that he employs. e my ∅ing x Fig 4. Let us suppose that X, in Fig. 4, is that which causes e, the intended effect of my action, my φing. From our position of Act-Libertarianism we may argue as follows. Let us define X retrospectively. That is, let us assume that X is everything, apart from the choice, or the act, that causes e. We are making this assumption on the following basis. If I choose, I choose within circumstances. From these two terms, choice and circumstances, conceptually it follows that if I choose to φ then I refrain from ¬φing, (Fig. 5). 106 e my ¬∅ing my ∅ing x (Without the diagram having then is not properly represented.) Fig 5. If we then define X in Fig. 5 as the cause of my action of φing, this can be so only if X causally explains my φing, that is, it explains my φing, and it explains my ¬φing. But, as Jeanson has said, “that which explains everything, explains nothing.” 239 There cannot therefore be a cause of a choice, unless we were to grant causes to actions but not to refrainings. But that would lead us to the position whereby, though it is the case that I chose, that does not mean, in the very same circumstances in which I chose, I could have done otherwise, rather, it would mean that had the circumstances been different, I could have done otherwise. That is, the propositions I could have done otherwise and had I chosen to φ I would have φed are logically equivalent. Which is to say, there is some value of φ such that had I chosen, or desired, or willed, to φ, then I would have φed. But this is consistent with I could not have chosen to φ. That is, I could not have chosen to φ but had I been able to I would have φed. And yet, to say I could not have chosen to φ is a denial of freedom. So if we assume that X is everything that causes e apart from the choice, that is, for the sake of argument we are eliminating the choice, we can then ask, what is the relation between the act and X? My φing occurs χ (X occurs χ e occurs); I φ, and by virtue of that very fact, X occurs and, by virtue of that very fact, e occurs. I φ, and by virtue of that very fact this latter causal relationship exists. Through acting I thereby confer causal status upon X. The choice has effects. X does not include, in our example, my shutting the door, it includes the shutting of the door. My shutting the door occurs, and by virtue of that very fact, (the shutting of the door occurs and, by virtue of that very fact, the dog is stopped from entering), that is, X includes the shutting of the door and e = the dog is stopped from entering. Now, the conditional, →, can be embedded in its own context: (P → Q) → R. That is, if (if P then Q), then R. Whereas since, for instance, cannot be embedded in its own context, there is no a priori obvious reason why χ, like →, cannot also be embedded in its own context. Let us assume 107 by virtue of that very fact, which is not a truth functional connective, is, like →, a propositional connective: Assumption: 1. X occurs χ my φing occurs, therefore: 2. X occurs χ (X occurs χ e occurs). From the assumption that X is a cause of the choice we arrive at proposition 2, which is necessarily false. If A causes B, and B causes C, then A causes C. That is, causation is a transitive relation. In this case, my act confers a causal status on X, thus X causes my act, my act causes the effect e and X causes the effect e. But it is a requirement of cause and effect that they be distinct. In this case the cause is entering into the effect. Therefore the act cannot be caused. But it may be objected that all this demonstrates is that X does not cause the act. But X is defined as whatever it is that causes e. The argument therefore shows that X cannot cause the act. But if we were to suppose that Y causes the act, then given that the act causes e, then Y causes e, so Y must be a part of X. The argument is concerned with what it is for something to be my success. Suppose that I attempt to turn on the light, and all these causal relationships are proceeding, and e is caused, the light comes on. I would then be entitled to protest, but I wanted to do that. I have not succeeded in turning on the light. The act presses against resistance, “to modify the shape of the world,” as Sartre has said.240 What is required in order for it to be my success is that the success must be earned, it is not given without any effort on my part. If X causes the effect, but not because of my action, it is not going to be my success. So the act cannot be caused. But there is an obvious response to this. My φing occurs χ (X occurs χ e occurs) is not equivalent to X occurs χ (X occurs χ e occurs), for one embedded because, (X occurs χ e occurs in proposition 1 for example), is not the same as another embedded because, (in this case X occurs χ e occurs in proposition 2). But all the argument requires is for the embedded becauses to be appropriately related, like this, for example: 1. X χ Y (where Y = my φing occurs, for example) 2. Z χ X ZχY We have returned from the ontological to the conceptual, whereby the present argument guarantees incompatibilism, but not Act-Libertarianism. But from the very fact that I intend, it is part of the very concept of action that it is uncaused. The very fact that I intend shows that there is such a thing as freedom. Otherwise I would be intending the impossible, that is, intending to perform something in order to... would in itself be incoherent. So by this means we may return again from the conceptual to the ontological, to avoid the objection that, ontologically, there is no such thing as freedom. 108 Let us suppose that there are two children involved in the fact that there is mud on the carpet. The parent asks one of them: “why did you open the door and let the dog in?” And the child replies, “because she made me.” Cannot we conclude, because of this act of persuasion, that there is mud on the carpet? That is, χ does not capture the whole story. It confers a causal status on the rain that caused the garden to be muddy and on the muddy garden that caused the dog’s paws to be muddy, but it misses out the choice. The parent is trying to find out where the blame lies. She wants to know who is really responsible. A’s act occurred, and B’s act occurred, and so on, and the responsibility for the mud on the carpet is to be located in the child whose intentions extend the furthest in the teleological layering within the context of which the consequence is a muddy carpet. The situation is a complex and muddled matter, because of this self-embeddedness within the teleological layering. For the child that did the persuading initiated the series of events that led to mud on the carpet, but it was the other child that opened the door that let the dog in. And it is precisely when things go wrong in this way that we shoulder people with a responsibility that can only be ours, or explain our action in terms of extraneous factors beyond our control. But if consciousness is translucent, then why do we often claim that we are subject to causation? In the case of the example of the arguing siblings, the parent asks: “why did you open the door to let the dog in to muddy the carpet?” And the reply is: “my sister made me do it.” The project is thereby diluting and spreading responsibility for the action when the responsibility is an all-or-nothing affair. This is a trivial example, but it infects our everyday lives. We do behave in this way. If we claim that we did/said that because.... we intend this because to be taken causally. But if the position we have taken on freedom is correct, then in participating in this kind of behaviour not only are we engaged in a project of seeking excuses, but it would seem that we are in addition engaged in another project, the object of which is to hide from ourselves the fact that we are engaged in a project of seeking excuses. For due to the pre-reflective cogito, and therefore the translucency of consciousness, it would seem that a responsibility that is all-or-nothing would be experienced as such, and a project of excusing oneself, the aim of which is to deny or at the very least dilute a responsibility that can only be ours, would be experienced as such. But if we assume a moral attitude, the latter a product of the attitudinizing activity of consciousness as it attends to its self-governance, and maintain the natural attitude, the latter a product of the attitudinizing activity of consciousness endued with its naturalistic assumptions, these two activities are not partial constituents in a greater totality, contraries that become locked in a mutual antagonism that aims to achieve a counterpoise between, on the one hand, the body- subject’s capacity to initiate a project with inventiveness and dynamism, and on the other hand, that which is implied by the world. A moral value, by definition, cannot be a gradually developed attribute of a particular species, it is rather an individual’s personal appropriation, thereby creating the possibility of the internal rupturing of which we have previously spoken. 109 Such a power is made free only when it is oriented towards the direction of greatest efficacy, 241 as the child discovers in his assumption of the moral attitude; his sister persuaded him to do it, thereby making him do it, so it is not his fault. Were he to attend to the governance of himself from the perspective of compliance to maternal rather than sororal persuasion, the moral value thereby appropriated and conquered would implicate a potential for bursting forth, such energy now to a greater degree released and made free, having been pointed in the direction producing the most preferred result. Freedom is a denial that is neither clearly defined nor determined, as the body-subject is constantly attempting something, extending itself into the future. And it must get round its failures by innovative tryings. For the body-subject cannot act without at each moment giving some meaning to its situation, its action and the tests and obstacles in its path, thereby providing the foundation for its freedom. But having founded it thus, it may refuse to experience it as such, either throwing itself into activity, or to proceed in its endeavours in the manner of a somnambulist. It thereby evades the very question whereby it may transform this restlessness, characteristic of a natural being carried along by momentum, into the action of a body-subject, the question, namely, of the fundamental meaning of any endeavour. For, because of the futile passion, anything and everything that merits the designation attempting is founded on the absolute meaning of failure, from which the question concerning the meaning of the attempting arises. The body-subject will only ever come across in experience that which it is seeking or anticipating, that is, that which it makes appear in a manner conforming to a particular category. But such a manner of making appear is only intelligible, from the scientific perspective as of any other, to the extent that the constitution of the natural object is itself in accordance with the body- subject’s most basic requirements. It is thereby natural objectivity that nourishes scientific objectivity, as the latter dissects the former in order to regain an understanding of it in a more refined and improved determinate context. That which separates scientific objectivity and natural objectivity is thereby a mere separation between, on the one hand, a reflective methodological attainment, and, on the other hand, a pre-reflective spontaneous attainment in which the world discloses itself “as an organised complex of utilizable things.” 242 And, given that in the natural attitude thing-implements always refer the body-subject to other thing-implements, and ultimately to the possibilities that the body-subject itself is on the horizon of these things, we may thereby understand this Sartrean analogy of the human condition: …picture an ass drawing behind him a cart. He attempts to get hold of a carrot which has been fastened at the end of a stick which in turn has been tied to the shaft of the cart… Thus we run after a possible which our very running causes to appear, which is nothing but our running itself, and which thereby is by definition out of reach. We run toward ourselves and we are – due to this very fact - the being which can not be reunited with itself. 243 110 The failure of the body-subject consists in entangling itself in a natural attitude, whether basic or acquired, that no purifying reflection is able to grasp at the reflective level in such a way as to extricate it from itself. The basic attitude and the essential attitude, of a metastable body-subject, are not synonymous, for human reality can fail to coincide with itself either at the level of being or at the level of doing because it never ceases to surpass its facticity. 244 From the fact that the body-subject is capable of describing its own natural attitudes we may conclude that it is not of necessity constrained by them. The failure of the body-subject is thereby not unavoidable, but is rather the effect of a purpose, that is, that of reuniting with itself, but even if we account for the for-itself’s modifying its past and thereby bestowing such modifications upon its present nihilations, it remains the case that any purpose can be discarded in preference for a new one. The ontological perspective we have presented situates all attemptings on the ground of failure, but in doing so the inherent, intuitive attainableness of attempting to achieve adeptness in understanding the ambit of human meaning is thereby projected and made evident. Any attitude is a failure. Masochism is a failure. I may succeed in becoming another’s object, but I can never become that object for myself. I may exist my body as an object present to another, but I am required to give this mode of presence-to-another to myself, and, in addition, I use the other as an implement for my purposes, which, again, places me in conflict with him as a subject to an object. Sartre thereby concludes that “masochism… is on principle a failure. This should not surprise us if we realise that masochism is a “vice” and that vice is, on principle, the love of failure.”245 And what of the attitude of love? In a masochistic attitude the body-subject denies its own subjectivity, but in love it aspires to justification as subjectivity through an objectification of itself on the part of another. But this is merely appearance, and the attempt at love is also destined to fail, indeed, a body-subject in love borders on masochism, for the failure of love borders on the love of failure. On the unreflective level, the body-subject engages in its projects and pursues their success one after another without regard for their fundamental significance. Of the desire to fail, at this level, the body-subject is not conscious, as it cannot attempt to fail. The masochist pleasures himself without acknowledging it, but the lover is forever anxious about his love, for what the lover is afraid of and laments is a specific failure. It may be that the love of another is deficient and thereby unable to justify him, or is deeply felt to the extent of being oppressive, thereby restraining his freedom and impeding his ability to imbue the object of his love with value. There may well be a perfect being in the world for whom success can be achieved in a first engagement. Don Juan successfully pursued woman after woman. But, as Camus has noted, together with the conqueror, the actor, and the creator, Don Juan exemplifies merely an undaunted type of absurdism.246 He can continue with his escapades in the knowledge that his activity is useless and terminable, and without being misled by the kind of optimistic desire that we designate as love: 111 What Don Juan realises in action is an ethic of quantity, whereas the saint on the contrary tends toward quality. Not to believe in the profound meaning of things belongs to the absurd man. 247 Such an ethic of quantity he creates for himself. “Longing for desire killed by satisfaction, that commonplace of the impotent man, does not belong to him.” 248 That is, he is not to be misled by the kind of remedial desire that we designate as regret. And the conduct of the soul of the ancient tyrant in the Platonic myth of Er 249 is to the same extent absurd, as it constantly rechooses the destiny of a tyrant at the start of each new life. Convinced that changes in outer conditions will make his relinquishing of self-change remediable, the tyrant “chose the greatest tyranny he could find. In his folly and greed he chose it without examining it fully, and so did not see that it was his fate to eat his children and suffer other horrors; when he examined it at leisure, he beat his breast and bewailed his choice… and forgot that his misfortunes were his own fault, blaming fate and heaven and anything but himself.” 250 And so, “anyone who, during his earthly life, faithfully seeks wisdom…may hope, if we believe Er’s tale, not only for happiness in this life but for a journey from this world to the next and back again…”251 At the very least, to “reveal the mystery of the world and of reason,” 252 which is the task of phenomenology, can lead to wisdom in the conduct of one’s life. 112 Chapter Four: The Paradox of Freedom The argument for free will we have just presented does, however, lead us to a paradox. As Sartre has pointed out: …there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom. Human reality everywhere encounters resistance and obstacles which it has not created, but these resistances and obstacles have meaning only in and through the free choice which human reality is. 1 But is it a paradox only, or a contradiction at the heart of Sartre’s theory of freedom? To answer this, first we need to recall what is meant by facticity. According to Sartre: Facticity is nothing other than the fact that there’s a human reality in the world at every moment. It’s a fact. It’s not deduced from anything, as such, and isn’t reducible to anything. And the world of values, necessity and freedom – all of it hangs on this primitive, absurd fact. If one examines any consciousness whatsoever, one will find nothing that’s not attributable to it. 2 Obstacles and resistances are both encountered, that is, not self-given, and given meaning through freedom. But freedom can only operate in relation to facticity and situatedness. “Even the most beautiful girl in the world,” Sartre said, “can offer only what she has.” 3 We are always limited by our facticity, our sex, height, economic position in society, and our mortality. But our facticity is the condition of the possibility of our freedom, in particular the facticity that is our factual freedom. If there is freedom only in a situation, what is a situation? Again we encounter ambiguity, for a situation involves an interconnection of the objective and the subjective, which is to say, of the real and of the imaginary. That which surrounds me has a sense for me, a sense that is the outcome of my aims and projects, and my aims and projects implicate the imaginary. I have a project to turn on the light, and because of that fact I see something as a switch to be flipped, and having the aim of turning on the light requires imagining the room as illuminated. My situation is thereby partly a result of my imagination. And we have demonstrated that consciousness is constituting and nihilating, so it is also true that, as Sartre said, “the imaginative act is at once constituting, isolating, and annihilating:”4 …imagination is not an empirical power added to consciousness, but is the whole of consciousness as it realises its freedom, every concrete and real situation of consciousness in the world is pregnant with the imaginary in so far as it is always presented as a surpassing of the real. 5 113 The meaning of a situation is defined only in transcending. And there is a permanent possibility of transcending a consciousness, in effect transcending a transcendence, as the latter intends what is real, toward a distinct imaging consciousness, in relation to which the situation is defined, for such a transcending resembles the inverse of that which is situated. Which is to say, the imaginary symbolizes in every instant the implied meaning of that which is real, as Sartre explains: It does not follow that all perception of the real must be reversed in imagination, but as consciousness is always “in situation” because it is always free, there is always and at every moment the concrete possibility for it to produce the irreal. There are various motivations that decide at each instant if consciousness will only be realising or if it will imagine. The irreal is produced outside the world by a consciousness that remains in the world and it is because we are transcendentally free that we can imagine.6 Imagination is not a capacity within consciousness, for though thinking may direct itself to imaginative thought, the latter is suggested and thereby foreshadowed only when thinking attempts to grasp it, which is to say that imaginative thinking is in effect initiated in a real sense, and is not something that is merely undergone. Given this essential capacity of consciousness, there cannot be a consciousness that could never direct itself to imaginative thinking, a consciousness that only ever intuits what is real, for were this so then imaginative thinking as a possibility would be a non-essential embellishment to our thinking, merely one quality among others of our peculiar kind of consciousness. The positing of any consciousness at all implicates a positing of that which is forever capable of imaginative thinking. We can see this if we distinguish remembering and anticipating from imagining. There is no disengagement from that which is real in the case of an analysand reliving his past to his analyst, with the intention of thereby putting it right. Nor is there in the case of a tennis player anticipating the trajectory of a tennis ball, such pre-reflective anticipation being manifested in his movements to return the tennis ball.7 The mode of presentation of any real existence has a temporal structure, that is, that which is real presents itself as present, and past, and impending. And given that the real incorporates the past and future as essential structures of itself, the past and the future of the real are also real, which is to say, counterparts of the reality hypothesis. Sartre gives as an example his realization of a past Pierre through a direction of his consciousness towards certain events of yesterday, with the intent of finding among them the handshake that Pierre gave him. In this case, Pierre is not presented as absent but is rather presented now as in the past. Pierre’s handshake of yesterday is not thereby irreal, it maintains its reality but is past, placed in retirement, as Sartre puts it. 8 And in the case of the tennis ball, in anticipating the tennis ball’s trajectory the future is the real, not imaginary, development of a pattern initiated by the opponent’s motion. The real motion of the opponent announces its reality 114 in this pattern in its entirety. Such a kind of motion is the realisation of a real pattern with real past and future segments. However, though the past and future of what is real is also real, the possibility exists whereby they are no longer lived as real, nor lived as that which grounds the present, but rather they may be posited purely in virtue of their own temporality and disengaged from reality, thereby presenting themselves as that which is not, the not-Being of which we have discussed above. I can imagine Pierre’s face as it could have been but a moment ago, though I have not seen him since yesterday, or I can imagine Pierre’s face as it may appear when I meet him in but a short while to come. And this is possible for me only if I posit Pierre’s face at the periphery of reality in its entirety, the latter kept at a distance, myself being free of it by nihilating it. Recollection is a rupture in time that discharges its contents in order that the recollector may search for a memory in its appropriate place in past time, whereas in perception the search is for an object in its appropriate place in space. Failure of the object to appear in the real time and space attainable to the recollecting consciousness necessitates a nihilation of this time and space, and, as Sartre said, “for a consciousness to be able to image…it must have the possibility of positing a thesis of irreality.” 9 Such an irreal object presents itself with unconditional aspects, which is to say, it is an imaginary object, and thereby not drawn from conceivable contrasts or likenesses with other objects. An image of Pierre is presented as short or tall, such dimensions being disconnected from Pierre’s relations with his surroundings. And the imaginary object is presented as timeless. The imaginary object, the imaginary face of Pierre, is an amalgam of how Pierre may have looked at different times in his life; it may perhaps be an expression, depending on how I feel about Pierre, of an imaginary perfect age when an imaginary Pierre is imagined as being at his imaginary best. For consciousness to image it must also de-realise. However for an object characterised as real to be then nihilated involves a nihilation of the real to the extent that one posits that object, and the dual nihilations thereby complement each other, for the nihilation of the real conditions the nihilation of the object formerly taken as real. Therefore, for consciousness to image it must rupture itself from the world in accordance with its own nature, which is to say, it must be able to elicit from itself an attitude of withdrawal in relation to the world. And that is to say that consciousness must be free, for were we able to conceive of a consciousness that did not image, such a consciousness would be conceived of as complete in itself, trammelled by existent things, incapable of grasping anything other than existent things. Such is the consequence of representionalism, whereby it is held that mental facts exist within a special kind of container, consciousness itself. Even were such mental contents to transcend the external world, consciousness is thereby subject to psychological determinism, which is homologous with physical determinism. And for such a consciousness to be ensnared by physically existent things, it would also be trapped within the realm of human emotions, be it animosity, affection, excitability, lethargy, or 115 whatever. Such a condition is manifested in the excessive and uncontrollable behaviour of a disorderly multitude, whereby a self-renunciation is undergone by the individual in order that he may participate in a commonly experienced feeling. Or, in the case of an individual in a state of reverie, consciousness images by opposing itself to the world through nihilating the world’s presence, and by positing a not-Being toward which this nihilation is aimed. Such a propensity of consciousness is revealed in a prevalent longing for a past Golden Age, a paradise lost, as Adam and Eve, of whom, as Milton wrote: …in their looks divine The image of their glorious Maker shone, Truth, wisdom, sanctitude severe and pure (Severe, but in true filial freedom placed, Whence true authority in men).10 And what does such a balmy state of filial freedom amount to?: …Though both Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed: For contemplation he and valour formed; For softness she and sweet attractive grace. He for God only, she for God in him.11 And yet, one might think inevitably, Eve will detach herself from such a groundwork of mutual colluding in a particular lived vision of the world, as she puts in place a change of perspective, and new motivations as a consequence, that depend on her intervention. She eats of the fruit of the tree of knowledge: …the fertile burden ease Of thy full branches offered free to all; Till dieted by thee, I grow mature In knowledge, as the gods, who all things know; …Experience, next, to thee I owe, Best guide. Not following thee, I had remained In ignorance.12 Eve’s consciousness thereby manifests its facility for detachment, a detachment that is inconceivable other than within the compass of her collusion, for she must detach herself from the lived vision, thereby freeing herself through the specific application she chooses to make with it. And yet Eve can controvert the world with the imaginary in this manner only to the precise extent that she is utterly situated within the world, for the imaginary, as we have argued, cannot 116 be simply anything. Eve can give to herself an image of a certain kind only in accordance with the actual and distinct motivation within her situation, a motivation which thereby precludes the imaginary in question from all attainable actuality. As Adam and Eve part company, exposing Eve to the wiles of the serpent, Adam can imagine Eve absent only insofar as Eve cannot be actually present for him. The imaginary is not the simple nihilation of the world. The imaginary is the nihilation of the world from a particular point of view. The world having been repelled in this manner, the world thereby persists as a backdrop setting in relief the irreal form of the imaginary. As consciousness images, it appears to be, during the exercise of the imaging capacity, carried away from the world, and yet it is a necessary condition for the possibility of imaging that consciousness be situated within a world. The imaginary forever disappoints, for it can never be presented other than with its absence sense, which is to say that it is part of the meaning of the imaginary that it is present but absent. And this is the same kind of ambiguity that we have argued defines consciousness itself, for consciousness is also free only to the extent that it is in a situation. All consciousness is consciousness of something. Similarly, all freedom is freedom within a situation, which is to say, a nihilation of a state of affairs, that is, a detachment from objectified existents, that is, a transcendence of objectified existents while tending towards their meaning. As we have noted above,13 consciousness is not a captive of that which is actual, it is a relation to the actual, or rather, a relating to the actual. This is its situation and its freedom. Imaging is therefore an essential structure of consciousness, and not a supervenient accident in consciousness, nor a capacity added to consciousness over and above its essential functioning. For consciousness, imaging something is the same thing as consciousness nihilating the world. From the point of view of theoretical consciousness, this nihilation could be seen as a manifestation of that freedom by which all consciousness differentiates itself from things, thereby defining itself as consciousness. But from the empirical point of view, the act of imaging may be conditioned by this capacity for freedom, but the imaging act itself permits that capacity to manifest itself before anything else. An absolute nihilation of the world is impossible, for only an absolute not-Being could effect it, and to controvert the world with an absolute not-Being would, in fact, be not to controvert it in any manner. I can nihilate the world only in relation to some thing or other, a manoeuvre which anyhow comprises nihilating all things. Therefore, whatever this other thing is that I put in disagreement with all things must also be a not-Being in relation to them, and presented intuitively to me, that is, subsisting in some manner apprehensible for me. And this not-Being is the imaginary, for imaging is the transcending of everything existent, whereby one is able to apprehend the existent as actual by detaching oneself from it, thereby permitting oneself to apprehend the particular meaning of the situation in which actuality appears. Therefore, there could not be an actualising, or realising consciousness, without imaging consciousness, and, conversely, there could not be an imaging consciousness without an 117 actualising consciousness. And from the transcendental viewpoint, it is consciousness’s capacity for nihilation that makes imagination possible. From the empirical point of view, on the other hand, it is through imagination that this capacity manifests itself. One can detach oneself from all things only if the detachment aims for some other thing, and imaging allows us the possibility of perpetual detachment. The imaging capacity, that is, constitutes the subject’s freedom, in contradistinction to the inertia of the object. There is a paradox of human freedom, in that human reality is an outcome of chosen ends, but the ends are apprehended by the choosers of those ends as transcendences, 14 thereby restricting their projects, the latter apprehended as outward forces, but any force has to operate against resistance. An essence is given to the choices that we make, which is to say, rather than seeing that the transcendences thereby posited are sustained in their being by ourselves, we assume that we encounter them on their “surging up in the world.” 15 In this manner, our ends are seen as if they originate from God, or nature, or human nature, or society, but not from ourselves. Life is thereby conceived of as a thing in-itself, governed by changeless and inflexible determinations and causes. But, the fact remains that human reality is always free because “its present being is itself a Nothingness in the form of the ‘reflection-reflecting.’ Man is free because he is not himself but presence to himself.”16 And yet, to obviate the fear of not-Being, we grasp and maintain some stable and secure meanings of life and concerning life, resulting in a continual disruption within ourselves as putative immutable truths inevitably conflict with continuously mutable, or metastable, experiences that we unavoidably encounter in the world as we journey through our lives. A person may elect slavery over freedom to intentionally avoid the fear of not-Being, for the freedom that is thus evaded is that “Nothingness which is made-to-be at the heart of man and which forces human reality to make itself instead of to be.”17 In the words of Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, “…nothing has ever been more unendurable to man and human society than freedom!”18 Adam and Eve realise the capacity to freely decide for themselves what is good and evil, but, like Orestes, as soon as God created them they ceased to be His. For the precondition of such a realisation is a capacity for freely deciding to detach themselves from the world vision they were presented with. And soon they discover what a terrible burden is freedom of choice, though they had it from the very beginning, given that once becoming conscious they thereby and necessarily acquired the capability for imaging. And for mankind as a whole: “Freedom, the free intellect… will lead them into such labyrinths and bring them up against such miracles and unfathomable mysteries that some of them, the disobedient and ferocious ones, will destroy themselves; others, disobedient and feeble, will destroy one another, while a third group, those who are left, the feeble and unhappy ones…will cry out to us: save us from ourselves.”19 118 NOTES Chapter One: The Problem 1.1. The Agent as Free Agent 1. The terms act and action will be used interchangeably throughout this work. 2. This is not to ignore the question as to whether actions are events. We are concerned for the moment with an intuitive account of what we are. And however an action is defined, it would seem to involve bringing something about, or causing a change to occur. 3. It may seem strange to talk of owning parts of the body, but we are not presupposing an external relation that implicates some sort of dualist distinction between mind and body. 1.2. The Agent as Embodied Subject 4. Anscombe, Causality and Determinism, in Sosa and Tooley, Causation, pp. 91 – 92. 5. See, for instance, Max Black, Making Something Happen, in Hook, Determinism and Freedom, pp. 31 – 45. 6. Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, P. 54. 7. ibid. 8. A Critique of Pure Reason, p. 120. 9. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 75, Hume’s first formulation of cause. 10. Hume’s second formulation of cause, ibid., p. 75. 11. Beyond Good and Evil, p. 31. 119 12. Twilight of the Idols, p. 92. 13. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 47. Chapter Two: The Method 1. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 23. 2. ibid. 3. ibid., p. 24. 4. Intellectual Impostures, p. 54. 5. According to Husserl, though an essentialist/existential phenomenology will dispute the coherence of this. 6. Cartesian Meditations, introduction, p.2. 7. ibid., p. 5. 8. The Transcendence of the Ego, p. 35. 9. Seeing a phenomenon is not the prerogative of the sense of sight. In the Husserlian sense of seeing, if I hear a piano playing, the sound of the piano is before my eyes. And Husserl can even speak of seeing essences. 10. Though Husserl does not say this. 11. The Divided Self, p. 20. 12. ibid. p. 21. 13. ibid. 14. For instance, Adler’s creative self, making its own future, though he postulates a single drive or motivating force behind all our behaviour and experience. This motivating force is the striving for perfection, the desire we all have to fulfill our potential, to come closer and closer to our ideal. 120 15. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 25. 16. ibid. 17. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 217. 18. Cartesian Meditations, p. 138 19. ibid. 20. Cartesian Meditations, p. 26. 21. ibid., p. 82. 22. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 34. 23. Cartesian Meditations, p. 78. 24. Sketch for the Theory of Emotions, pp 25 – 26. 25. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, pp. 109 – 110. 26. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, p. 91. 27. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 34. 28. ibid. 29. ibid. Chapter Three: The Argument 3.1. Action and Intentionality 1. The theme of Being and Nothingness, Part Four: Being and Doing. 2. ibid., p.433. 121 3. ibid., p. 438. 4. ibid, p. 437. 5. ibid. 6. A mistake that he avoids elsewhere. 7. Being and Nothingness, p. 433. 8. On Concept and Object, in Philosophical Writings, pp. 42 – 55. 9. A paradox attributed to Eubulides, a Megarian logician of the fourth century B.C.. See Bonevac, The Art and Science of Logic, p. 35. 10. See Function and Concept, in Philosophical Writings, pp. 21 – 41. 11. Fear and Trembling, pp. 70 – 71. 12. ibid., p. 72. 13. Being and Nothingness, p. 590. 14. In some sense of the term future, for the question of the ontological differences among the present, past and future, whether or not only present objects and present experiences are real, or whether or not conscious beings recognize this in the intensity of their present experience, or whether the past and present are both real, but the future is not yet real, could be the subject of a thesis in itself. 15. But I can intend to wish. 16. Actions, p. 2. 3.2. Consciousness and Intentionality 17. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 77. 122 18. Sartre is particularly good at unpacking the thesis of intentionality. 19. These include among their number John Locke and Sigmund Freud. 20. Sartre, unlike Husserl, insists upon this consequence. 21. A 19th century psychologist, a teacher of Husserl and Meinong. 22. The Divided Self, p. 51. 23. Though this depends on how you read Frege. 24. See Frege, On Concept and Object, in Philosophical Writings, pp. 42 – 55. 25. As Donald Davidson has said. 3.3. Perceptual Consciousness and Imaginative Consciousness. 26. The Imaginary, p. 18. 27. ibid., p. 7. 28. ibid., p. 53. 29. ibid. 30. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 17. 31. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 74. 32. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in Philosophical Works, p.68. 33. The Imaginary, pp. 8 – 11. 34. See p. 15. 35. Sketch for the Theory of Emotions, p. 91. 123 36. Cartesian Meditations, p. 10. 3.4. Consciousness and Self-Consciousness 37. Being and Nothingness, p. xxviii. 38. ibid., p. 9. 39. ibid., p. xxviii. 40. Sartre provides an argument for the pre-reflective cogito, in the introduction to Being and Nothingness, p. xxvi. But the considerations for the pre-reflective cogito that we are offered are not definitive. The argument for it, as for the theory of Act-Libertarianism as a whole, is the whole work. Sartre offers us in the introduction what are only introductory intuitive feelings. 41. Being and Nothingness, p. xxix. 42. ibid., though this should really precede the disjunctive argument against Alain, ibid., p. xxix. 43. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 113. 44. Another extreme example concerns known cases of autism. An autistic savant, for instance, may identify the 3rd of January, 3030, instantly as a Tuesday. There is a complex mathematical formula whereby we may deduce this, yet the autistic savant may be mathematically incapable and he can still do this whenever he wants to. 45. Critique of Pure Reason, p. 152. 46. It is not clear, however, that this provides a sufficient condition for unity. 47. Being and Nothingness, p. 537. The expression derives from Maurice Barrès. 48. Modern Novelists : Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 62. 49. This is the claim of Meditation One. 3.5. An Encounter with Being 124 50. This is Sartre’s ontological argument, Being and Nothingness, p. xxxvi. Hence the term existentialism; we are committed to the existence of the world. It cannot be bracketed. 51. Being and Nothingness, pp. xxxvi – xxxvii. 52. ibid. 53. Being and Nothingness, p. 177. 54. ibid., p. 308. 55. ibid., p. 618. 56. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 100. 57. ibid., p. 98. 58. ibid., pp. 100 – 101. 59. ibid., xxxvii-xxxviii. 60. ibid., p. 122. 61. ibid., p. 93. 62. Existentialism and Humanism, p. 28. 3.6. An Encounter with not-Being 63. Irreal is Webber’s coinage, in his translation of The Imaginary, of Sartre’s irréel, which is usually translated as unreal. But unreal is misleading, as it suggests a class of objects that could exist but do not. An irreal object, on the other hand, is an object as imaged by consciousness. 64. Being and Nothingness, p. 9. 65. The gestaltists attempted to make much of this fact, considering it to be an empirical claim about perception; it is, in fact, an a priori truth about perception. 125 66. The Sophist, p. 25. 67. ibid., p. 25. 68. ibid., p. 26. 69. Cartesian Meditations, p. 46. 70. ibid., pp. 10 – 11. 71. Being and Nothingness, p. 27. 72. ibid., p. 9. 73. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 119. 74. Being and Nothingness, p. 22. 75. ibid. 76. ibid., p. 21. 77. ibid. 78. ibid. 79. ibid., like a worm, presumably such as we would find at the bottom of a bottle of mescal. 80. The term is used by Hazel Barnes in her translation of Being and Nothingness. See Key to Special Terminology, pp. 632 – 633. And a nihilation is a mobile (translated by Barnes as motive). 81. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 121. 82. Although perhaps we can in Sartre’s philosophy. 83. Language, Truth and Logic, p. 27. 84. Alice through the Looking Glass, p. 197. 126 85. Basic Writings, p. 103. 86. Being and Nothingness, p. 433. 3.7. Consciousness and Resistance. 87. Cartesian Meditations, Meditation Two, p. 44-45. 88. ibid., p. 51. 89. Meditation Six, p. 153. 90. Though it may be objected that Meditation Six does not argue for the conclusion that what I clearly and distinctly perceive is true, that occurred in Meditation Four. Rather, it is an argument for the claim that corporeal things must exist. 91. Macbeth, II.1., l. 35. 92. ibid., II.1., l. 44 – 45. 93. In Meditation Two and Meditation Three. 94. Though Sartre may be wrong in his interpretation. 95. Being and Nothingness, p. 324. The term derives from Gaston Bachelard. 96. ibid., p. xxxiv. 97. See ibid., p. 630. 98. ibid., p. xxxiv. 99. ibid., p. 482. 3.8. The Original Project 3.8.1. The Attainment of Being 127 100. A play first performed during the German occupation of France. 101. The Flies, in Altona and Other Plays, p.309. 102. This is a metaphorical story repeated again and again in Being and Nothingness. 103. Being and Time, p. 32. 104. ibid., p. 33 105. ibid. 106. Though this destroys the metaphor. 107. The Divided Self, p. 164. 108. Being and Nothingness, p. 39. 109. ibid. 110. ibid., p. 457. 111. ibid., p. 480. 112. ibid., p. 570. 113. Sartre approved of Laing’s work on anorexics. It had previously been taken to be the parent’s fault, that is, external causes were to blame for the anorexia, but Laing disagreed. He placed the responsibility entirely on the shoulders of the anorexics. Laing was once talking to an anorexic girl brought to him by her concerned family. He said to her, "Good luck with your hunger strike.” For Laing, anorexia was not a mental illness leading to a loss of the will to eat, but rather the exercise of a will with the intention of controlling both the self and the family environment. 114. The Divided Self, p. 23. 115. ibid. 128 116. ibid. 117. The Way By Swann’s, p. 282. 118. The Age of Reason, p. 300. 119. See Thody, Modern Novelists : Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 109 – 110. 120. ibid. 121. Being and Nothingness, p. 459. 122. ibid., p. 459. 123. ibid., p. 482. 124. ibid., p. 461. 125. ibid., p. 460. 126. ibid. 127. ibid. 128. ibid. 129. ibid. 130. ibid., p. 472. 3.8.2. The Ambiguity of Freedom 131. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 188-189. 132. ibid., p. 189. 133. ibid. 129 134. ibid. 135. Being and Nothingness, p. 476. 136. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 189. 137. The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 437. 138. Minds, Brains & Science, p. 98. 139. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 191. 140. The Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 122. 141. ibid, p. 122. 142. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 122. 143. Agency, in Essays on Actions and Events, p. 59. 144. In some sense of the term control. 145. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 95. 146. The Phenomenology of Perception, pp. 441 - 442. 147. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 192. 148. Beyond Good and Evil, p. 32. 149. Freedom and Belief, Preface, p. v. 150. ibid., p. 26. 151. ibid., p. 26. 152. ibid., p. 28 - 29. 130 153. The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 439. 154. ibid., pp. 438 – 439. 155. ibid., p. 438. 156. ibid., p. 439. 157. ibid., p. 437. 158. The Reprieve, p. 308. 159. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 190. 160. The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, p. 793. 161. Being and Nothingness, p. 572. 162. ibid., p. 479. 163. ibid., p. 82. 164. ibid., p. 84. 165. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 179. 3.8.3. On Voluntary Action 166. Being and Nothingness, p. 553. 167. ibid. 168. ibid., p. 554. 169. ibid., p. 556. 170. ibid. 131 171. ibid., p. 554. 172. ibid. 173. ibid., p. 468. 174. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 177. 175. Being and Nothingness, p. 450. 176. ibid., p. 451. 177. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 178. 178. ibid., p. 177. 179. ibid., p. 179. 180. See Being and Nothingness, pp. 473 – 474, though inferiority feeling is preferable to inferiority complex. 181. ibid., p. 472. 182. ibid. 183. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 180. 184. ibid. 185. ibid. 186. ibid. 187. ibid. 3.8.4. The Futile Passion 132 188. Being and Nothingness, p.90. 189. ibid. 190. ibid. 191. ibid., p. 118. 192. ibid. 193. ibid., pp. 118 – 119, though here, and elsewhere in the text, can not should be cannot in the context of its usage, for there is a difference between saying I can not move my arm and I cannot move my arm. 194. Being and Nothingness is a book about attempting, though it is a word that Sartre does not use much. 195. ibid., p. 615. 196. That is, that every even integer greater than 3 is the sum of two prime numbers. If the conjecture is false, it is necessarily false. But there is no way of knowing if the project is impossible at the outset. 197. The Transcendence of the Ego, p. 39. 198. Being and Nothingness, p. 141. 199. It is important to note that these are not Sartre’s arguments, but they add a coherence to the Act-libertarian theory we have been proposing. 200. Four Phenomenological Philosophers, p. 121. 201. The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 136. 202. We will spell Nausea with a capital N to distinguish it from the empirical nausea that results from such things as food poisoning. For Nausea, as it is revealed through phenomenoloical ontology, is an ontological characteristic of a realising consciousness. 133 3.9. The Unveiling of Being 203. See Cartesian Meditations , Section 31. 204. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in The Works of William Blake, p. 179. 205. A claim made by Crick, in The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul. 206. Sartre’s term, meaning susceptible to sudden changes and transitions, Being and Nothingness, p. 50. 207. ibid., p. 329. 208. The Imaginary, pp. 184-185. 209. Being and Nothingness, p. 338. 210. The Imaginary, p. 193. 211. Being and Nothingness, p. 326. 212. ibid., pp. 338 – 339. 213. ibid., p. 342. 214. Modern Novelists : Jean-Paul Sartre, p. 29. 215. ibid., p. 18. 216. ibid., p. 23. 217. ibid., p. 22. 218. ibid., p. 23. 219. ibid., p. 24. 220. Nausea, pp. 141-142. 134 221. Just as Anguish is the unveiling of freedom, as Kierkegaard has argued, in The Concept of Anxiety. 222. Nausea, p. 184. 223. See ibid., pp. 185 –186, where the example given to illustrate this point is that of a circle. 224. The Imaginary, pp. 191 –193. 225. Julius Caesar, I.2, l. 200 – 203. 226. Gustav Mahler and the Courage to be, p.51. 227. The Birth of Tragedy, p. 8. 3.10. The Viscosity of Being. 228. I am not suggesting that people actually talk like this to each other; it is not presented as a piece of realistic dialogue. Rather, it is supposed to show the sort of reasoning that occurs when people are trying to ascribe responsibility to someone for what has happened. Who is responsible for the wet carpet, in this case? 229. Being and Nothingness, p. 607. 230. ibid., p. 609. 231. ibid. 232. Iron in the Soul, p. 215. 233. Nausea, p.184. 234. Being and Nothingness, p. 608. 235. ibid. 236. ibid., p. 577. 135 237. ibid., p. 599. 238. Sartre’s psychoanalysis has been accused of sexism, given the association he makes between women and slime. The mode of being of the slimy “is neither the reassuring inertia of the solid nor a dynamism like that in water which is exhausted in fleeing from me. It is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking…” (Being and Nothingness, p. 609). And the slimy as a revenge of the in-itself is a “a sickly-sweet feminine revenge” (Being and Nothingness, p. 609), perhaps an allusion to heterosexual intercourse, but the imagery can suggest a rejected mistress clinging to her former lover and refusing to be cast off. And, in addition to the woman’s character, so too does the woman’s body recall the slimy, when the dripping honey from a spoon melts back into the honey still contained in the jar is likened to “the flattening out of the full breasts of a woman who is lying on her back,” (Being and Nothingness p. 608). However, to accuse Sartre’s psychoanalysis of sexism is to ignore the point that “the object itself is not irreducible. In it we aim at its being through its mode of being or quality. Quality…is a mode of being and so can only present being in one certain way. What we choose is a certain way in which being reveals itself and lets itself be possessed,” (Being and Nothingness p. 599). The taste of a tomato is not an irreducible given, rather, through representation it interprets to our perception a certain manner that being has of giving itself, and we thereby react by disgust, or desire, or indifference, in accordance with how we see being emerge in one manner or another from that quality’s appearance. 239. Sartre and the Problem of Morality, p. 109, though he was referring to the Kantian noumena. 240. Being and Nothingness, p. 433. 241. But it is beyond the scope of this work to give a description of such an oriented freedom, as that is a subject for ethical philosophy. 242. Sketch for A Theory of the Emotions, p. 90. 243. Being and Nothingness, p. 202. 244. This answers the objection of Thody (Introducing Sartre, p. 59) that, rather than trying to be a for-itself and in-itself at the same time, if we observe how people actually behave, the desire to do, which Sartre regards as comparatively unimportant, is in fact far more important than the longing to be. That is, I may say that I want to be a great philosopher, but this is simply a manner of speaking. What I really want is to do philosophy well, and, the objection goes, there is no 136 problem about doing philosophy and at the same time being conscious of the fact that this is what I have done. But even at the level of doing the body-subject in a natural attitude is perpetually surpassing its facticity, thereby failing to achieve identity with itself. The ass attempting to catch the carrot illustrates this point nicely enough. 245. Being and Nothingness, p. 379. 246. The Myth of Sisyphus, p. 94. 247. ibid., p. 69. 248. ibid., pp. 67-68. 249. The Republic, pp. 447 – 455. 250. ibid., 453. 251. ibid. 252. The Phenomenology of Perception, preface, p. xxi. Chapter Four: The Paradox of Freedom 1. Being and Nothingness, p. 489. 2. War Diaries, p. 109. 3. Being and Nothingness, p. 434. 4. The Imaginary, p. 181. 5. ibid., p. 186. 6. ibid. 7. ibid., p. 182 8. ibid., p. 181 137 9. ibid., p. 182. 10. Paradise Lost, Bk. iv., l. 272 – 276, p. 114. 11. ibid., Bk. iv., l. 276 – 280. 12. ibid., Bk. ix., l. 801 – 809, p. 280. 13. See p. 76. 14. Being and Nothingness, p. 440. 15. ibid. 16. ibid. 17. ibid. 18. The Brothers Karamazov, p. 290. 19. ibid., p. 297. 138 BIBLIOGRAPHY Anscombe, G.E.M. (1957), Intention, Blackwell, 1985. Ayer, A.J., (1936), Language, Truth and Logic, Penquin, 1990. Berkeley, G., Philosophical Works, Everyman’s Library, 1975. Blake, W., The Works of William Blake, Wordsworth Poetry Library, 1994. Camus, A., (1955), The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. Justin O’Brien, Penquin, 1975, Carroll, L. (1865/72), Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, Penquin, 1998. Crick, F., The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Simon and Schuster, 1995. Critchley, S., & Schroeder, W.R., A Companion to Continental Philosophy, Blackwell, 1998. Davidson, D. (1980), Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford, 1980. Descartes, R. (1637-1641), Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. by Donald A. Cress, Hackett, 1980. Descartes, R. (1637), Discourse on Method/The Meditations, trans F.E. Sutcliffe, Penquin, 1968. Dostoyevsky, F. (1866), Crime and Punishment, trans. by David McDuff, Penquin, 1991. Dostoyevsky, F. (1880), The Brothers Karamazov, trans. by David McDuff, Penquin, 1993. Frege, G., Philosophical Writings, ed.by P. Geach and M. Black, Blackwell, Third Edition, 1980. Hammond, M., & Howarth, J., & Keat, R.(1991), Understanding Phenomenology, Blackwell, 1991. Hegel, G. W. F., The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford 1977. Heidegger, M., Basic Writings, trans. David F. Krell, Routledge, 1978. Heidegger, M., Being and Time (trans. 1962) , trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Blackwell, 1993. Holbrook, D., (1975), Gustav Mahler and the Courage to be, Vision, 1975. Hornsby, J., (1980), Actions, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980. Howells, C. (ed.) (1992), The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, Cambridge, 1992. Hume, D. (1740), Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Oxford, Third Edition, 1975. Hume, D. (1739/40), A Treatise of Human Nature, Oxford, Second Edition, 1978. Husserl, E. (1929), Cartesian Meditations, trans. Dorian Cairns, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991. 139 Husserl, E. (1901), The Shorter Logical Investigations, trans. by J.N. Findlay, Routledge, 2001. Jeanson, F. (1965), Sartre and the Problem of Morality, trans. by Robert V. Stone, Indiana University Press, 1980. Kant, I., (1787), Critique of Pure Reason, trans. N. Kemp Smith, MacMillan, 1933. Kierkegaard, S., The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte, Princeton, 1980. Laing, R.D. (1960), The Divided Self, Penguin, 1990. Levinas, E. (1974), Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. R. Cohen and M. Smith, Northwestern University Press, 1998. Levinas, E. (1963), The Theory of Intuition in Husserl’s Phenomenology, Northwestern University Press, 1999. Locke, J., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Everyman, 1976. Macann, C. (1993), Four Phenomenological Philosophers: Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau- Ponty, Routledge, 1993. McCulloch G. (1994), Using Sartre, Routledge, 1994. Merleau-Ponty, M. (trans. 1962), The Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, 1992. Milton, John (1667), Paradise Lost, Arcturus Publishing Limited, 2005. Moran, D. (2000), Introduction to Phenomenology, Routledge, 2000. Moran, D. & Mooney, T. (eds.) , The Phenomenology Reader, Routledge, 2002. Natanson, M. (1973), Edmund Husserl : Philosopher of Infinite Tasks, Northestern University Press, 1996. Nietzsche, F. (1886), Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann, Vintage, 1974. Nietzsche, F. (1878-1880), Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge, 1986. Nietzsche, F. (1871), The Birth of Tragedy, trans. S. Whiteside, Penquin, 1993. Nietzsche, F. (1887), The Gay Science, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penquin, 1973. Nietzsche, F. (1888), Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Penquin, 1968. Plato, The Republic, trans. Desmond Lee, Penquin, 1974. Plato, The Sophist, trans. Nicholas P. White, Hackett, 1993. Proust, M. (1913), The Way By Swann’s, trans. Lydia Davis, Penquin, 2002. Sartre, J-P. (1943-60), Altona and Other Plays, trans. various, Penquin, 1962. Sartre, J-P. (1943), Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes, Routledge, 1991. Sartre, J-P. (1965), Essays in Existentialism, trans. various, Citadel Press, 1995. Sartre, J-P. (trans. 1948), Existentialism and Humanism, trans. P. Mairet, Methuen, 1989. Sartre, J-P. (1938), Nausea, trans. Robert Baldick, Penquin, 1965. Sartre, J-P. (1945), The Age of Reason, trans. Eric Sutton, Penquin, 1977. Sartre, J-P. (1940), The Imaginary, trans. Jonathan Webber, Routledge, 2000. Sartre, J-P. (1949), Iron in the Soul, trans. Eric Sutton, Penquin, 1978. Sartre, J-P. (1945), The Reprieve, trans. Eric Sutton, Penquin, 1978. 140 Sartre, J-P. (trans. 1962), Sketch for A Theory of the Emotions, trans. P. Mairet, Methuen, 1976. Sartre, J-P. (1937), The Transcendence of the Ego, trans F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick, Hill and Wang, 1993. Sartre, J-P. (1939-40), War Diaries : Notebooks from a Phoney War, trans. Q. Hoare, Verso, 1984. Searle, J., (1984), Minds, Brains & Science, Penquin, 1989. Schopenhauer, A. (1839), Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will, Cambridge, 1999. Shakespeare, W., Julius Caesar, New Penquin Shakepeare, 1967. Shakespeare, W., Macbeth, New Penquin Shakepeare, 1967. Smith, A.D. (2003), Husserl and the Cartesian Meditations, Routledge, 2003. Sokal, A., & Bricmont, J., (1998), Intellectual Impostures, Profile, 1999. Solomon, R.C. (1972), From Rationalism to Existentialism, Littlefield Adams, 1972. Stewart, J. (ed.), The Debate Between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Northwestern University Press, 1998. Strawson, G. (1986), Freedom and Belief, Oxford, 1991. Thody, P. (1992), Modern Novelists : Jean-Paul Sartre, MacMillan, 1992. Thody, P. & Read H. (1998), Introducing Sartre, Icon Books, 1999. 141