JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

178Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsto be. Situations obtain in hierarchies: Sartre’s being about to smoke dependsupon the existence of smoking as a practice in mid-twentieth-century France.Keeping an appointment depends upon friendships or meetings. These inturn depend upon the existence of human beings, their projects andsituations. All of these depend fundamentally upon being-in-the-world, thesituation of all situations.Sartre’s concept of a situation is anti-Cartesian. Descartes thinks a personcould in principle exist in abstraction from their physical and socialenvironment and it makes sense to specify someone’s mental states withoutreference to the ways in which those states are embedded in the world,without reference to what they are typically or paradigmatically about. Sartre’suse of ‘situation’ and ‘being-in-the-world’ is sharply opposed to this picture.As a mental and physical agent what I do only makes sense if I am existentiallyrelated to an external and public world populated by other people who aresimilar agents.In our unreflective taken-for-granted living we do not think of the situationas constituted by our freedom. It is my acquiescence in authority, rather thanany objective constraint, that determines my behaviour. Once I recognise myfreedom to disobey, to rebel, I am deconditioned. The fixed cognitivecontribution of my acquiescence is stripped from the world and the possibilityof my changing it is opened up.In Sartre’s existentialism, human being and human situation form amutually dependent totality. The relations between a human being and hisor her situation are dialectical or reciprocal. The situation presents the agentwith a range of possibilities. The agent acts to realise some of thesepossibilities and this action alters the situation and thereby presents a newrange of possibilities. Agency constitutes both the agent and the situation.The situation only exists as a situation for some agent. The agent only existsas an agent in some situation so to be in a situation is to choose oneself ina situation. It follows that the relation between agent and situation is veryclose. The reciprocal relation is not only causal. It is not even only constitutive.Agent and situation may only be adequately understood as two aspects ofone reality. Sartre does not put it this way, but it is as though the agent is theinside of the situation and the situation is the outside of the agent.In order to reconcile this dialectical relation between agent andenvironment with Sartre’s absolute libertarianism we need to invoke hisdistinction between freedom and power. Although our freedom is absolute,our power is limited. Although there is no situation in which we do not have