Sartre's second century

1945-2005: Existentialism and Humanism Sixty Years On 77
However, Sartre is never content merely to follow. As Nik Farrell Fox
states in his excellent book, The New Sartre, "Sartre's attachment to the
Cartesian cogito in his early work is never a complete or exhaustive
one". 12 The later Sartre tries to distance himself from an overtly Cartesian
emphasis on his early work, and his comments made during the 1960s
seemed to resonate with the times when he said it was never his intention
to reiterate Cartesianism. But what exactly do we understand by this term
"Cartesianism", specifically from a humanistic perspective? Sartre avoids
the substantiality of the subject by creating the pre-reflective cogito as the
foundation to its Cartesian counterpart. As he puts it very succinctly in
VEtre et le neant: "[T]here is a pre-reflective cogito which is the
condition of the Cartesian cogito." 13
First described in La Transcendance de VEgo {The Transcendence of
the Ego, 1936), the pre-reflective cogito challenges some fundamental
assumptions made by Descartes. For Sartre, Descartes assumes the
subjective, isolated presence of the cogito which exists at a specific
moment in time: the instant or now. And it is this aspect of the Cartesian
cogito which Sartre is, of course, anxious to challenge. He does this in two
main ways. Firstly, in order to get outside this problem of instantaneity,
the pour-soi (for-itself) is constructed as a non-material, temporal being. It
is itself this process of temporalisation by which the past and present
ecstasies are continually transcended towards an "open" future. Secondly,
to refute the charge of subjectivity, while at the same time distancing
himself somewhat from his erstwhile mentor, Husserl, the ego is made
transcendent to consciousness. It does not "inhabit" the pour-soi. Then, in
a further radical move for phenomenology, the Sartrean cogito is called
into question by the presence of the Other. The existence of the Other is as
certain as our own existence, and a condition of it. In this way, the charge
of subjective "isolation" implied in the Cartesian cogito is counterbalanced
by Sartre with Hegel's intuition of the Other. In other words, it is
counterbalanced by the ontological significance of alterity. Only the Other
has power to confer value to my own subjectivity. I may consider myself
to be good, bad, cunning, out-going, generous, etc., but I cannot confer
these values on myself outside of the presence of others.
absolue de la conscience s'atteignant elle-m§me. [...] cette thdorie est la seule a
donner une dignitd a rhomme, c'est la seule qui n'en fasse pas un objet" (Sartre,
VExistentialisme est un humanisme, 63-64, 65).
12 Farrell Fox, The New Sartre, 14.
13 "[I]l y a un cogito prgrgflexif qui est la condition du cogito carte'sien" (Sartre,
L'fore et le neant, 19).