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23 Chapter 1 I de n t i t y a n d H um a n Incom p l e t ion i n Sartr e The Nature of Human Action Human beings do many different things. Why, then, does someone do one thing rather than another? What explains the action ? Our answers to these questions will point to a great range of “causes,” “reasons,” “motives,” or “motivations”—in ordinary conversation we do not distinguish between these words very carefully. Often, however, a satisfying answer falls into one of two categories. A first type of answer tells us something about who the person is and what the person is like: “She treats the patient because she is a doctor”; “He runs away because he is a coward”; “They go to the cinema because they like films.” These explanations refer in some way to the identity of the acting person. A second type of answer says something about the circumstances that give rise to the activity: “We feed the children because they are hungry”; “He washes the cup because it is dirty”; “I get out of bed because the office where I work opens in an hour.” These explanations refer in some way to the objective demands of the situation, to whatever it is that needs moving forward or putting right, to the change that needs bringing about in the world. So we can understand why human beings act by looking to some aspect of their personal identity or to the objective demands to which they respond. Jean-Paul Sartre, however, is unsatisfied with this kind of explanation because he thinks it is back to front. It is not true, in his 24 = human being view, that we act in a certain way because of our identity and the objective demands we meet. Rather, it is by acting in a certain way that we establish a particular identity and allow a certain set of demands to guide our action. Instead of saying “He runs away because he is a coward,” we should say “He is a coward because he runs away.” Instead of saying “I get out of bed because I have to be at the office in an hour,” we should say “It is by getting out of bed that I turn the possibility of going to work into an obligation.” These descriptions are counterintuitive and may seem forced; they may even strike some readers as patently false. Surely, to take one of the other examples, she is a qualified doctor, whether she treats the patient or not. Surely the cup is dirty, whether he washes it or not. I hope to clarify in this chapter what Sartre does and doesn’t mean by his awkward inversion of everyday language. He wants to show that our freely chosen actions establish our identity and give force to certain demands. Our commitments allow us to become people we might not have become and illuminate a set of priorities that might have remained obscure. We are not slaves to our being but creators of our existence. In his reflections on action Sartre goes to the very heart of what it is to be human. He shows that our free actions are not the consequence of our identity, they are its foundation, and it is our nature as human beings always to go beyond who we are toward a freely chosen self. In this chapter we will examine the ambiguity of human identity that arises because of the nature of human consciousness as being-for-itself. Then we will be in a position to understand how human beings create imaginative possibilities for themselves and choose to pursue certain of these possibilities, thus establishing their identity as persons. Anguish, Vertigo, and the Ambiguity of Identity It should be made clear at the outset of this chapter that Sartre is very aware of the many factors that do constitute an identity for each human being. His aim is not to deny the reality of human identity but to question whether it is enough to account for one’s actions. It is worth alluding to some of these factors that make up our identity as human beings in Being and Nothingness.1 La facticité (“facticity”) is the word Sartre uses to stand for the innu1 . BN is subtitled “An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.” Its four parts deal with “The Problem of Nothingness” (negation, bad faith, etc.), “Being-for-Itself” (presence to self, factic- [3.15.27...

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