Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity

5 Sartre’s Relation to His Predecessors in the Phenomenological and Existential Traditions

Classic philosophical questions concerning the nature of “Being,” “Knowing,” and “Death” tend to preoccupy Sartre’s predecessors in the phenomenological and existential traditions, and these questions also find their way into Sartre’s work. In this chapter, I shall consider Sartre’s relation to these perennial questions with the ultimate aim of showing that he avoids many—although not all—of the problems that these questions can engender, and that provide the basis for Adorno’s criticisms of his predecessors. This is particularly important, I believe, because, as Adorno’s critiques show, a philosopher’s position on these questions tends to influence his conception of subjectivity. This chapter will thus clear the ground for an analysis of Sartre’s overall notion of subjectivity, which I shall consider in the following chapter. BEING The beginning of Being and Nothingness—roughly, The Introduction (“The Pursuit of Being”) and first four sections of part I, chapter 1 (“The Origin of Nothingness”), which conclude with Sartre’s claim that “nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being—like a worm” (B&N, p. 56)—is arguably the most ignored segment of Being and Nothingness. Because this segment is also the hardest one in the book and, moreover, is seemingly unrelated to Sartre’s celebrated discussion 87 5 Sartre’s Relation to His Predecessors in the Phenomenological and Existential Traditions of “bad faith,” which follows shortly thereafter, this is understandable. Nevertheless, in much the same way that Hegel’s master-slave encounter seems to be unrelated to the three “epistemological” chapters that precede it, but is in fact the aufhebung of the prior theories with which these chapters deal, Sartre’s discussion of bad faith and his ensuing analyses of being-for-itself, being-for-others, “the situation,” freedom and responsibility, and existential psychoanalysis are all based on the ways that he sublates the phenomenological and ontological theories of Husserl and Heidegger. This alone provides ample reason for examining the initial segment’s treatment of the ontological and epistemological problems that have arisen in the “pursuit of Being.” Moreover , for the purposes of this book, there is another reason to consider this segment. In Part I, we saw how Adorno brought to light the theoretical traps into which the “first philosophies” of Kierkegaard, Heidegger , and Husserl fell. In my attempt to mediate the theories of Sartre and Adorno with respect to the question of subjectivity, it is important to show that Sartre himself does not fall into the same traps. An understanding of these prefatory pages, which have given rise to innumerable misconceptions, is essential to this task. As Arthur Danto discusses in Sartre, misconceptions about Being and Nothingness arise even before this first segment is examined— indeed, even before the book is opened. For many commentators, the subtitle of the book, “A Phenomenological Essay in Ontology,” manifests a contradiction, for phenomenology deals with the way the world appears to consciousness, while ontology deals with the way the world “really is.” According to Danto, however, this conclusion is a shallow one. On the one hand, phenomenology does not just seek to record our experiences of the world, as its more hostile critics suppose, but rather attempts to comprehend phenomena in terms of the functions they perform with respect to the structuring of our experiences. Much as was the case with Kant, the phenomenologist’s inquiries into the nature of the world begin with the way that our experience is structured by it. On the other hand, ontology does not just seek to catalog the furniture of the world in a way that is divorced from our experience of it, for it knows that all such inquiries invariably take place within the horizon of language, meaning, and truth.1 Thus, according to Danto: Phenomenology is concerned with the structures of consciousness , and ontology with the sorts of being that such structures 88 SARTRE AND ADORNO must commit us to on the assumption that consciousness is “true.” So the question again is not what there is, but what we are constrained to suppose there is with reference to the structures we have determined as belonging to consciousness. Sartre believes, in a way, that there is no difference to be marked here at all, that the world is just the way it is revealed through the structures of consciousness to be; and a kind of argument can be mounted in support of this view, which will imply that we...