JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

62Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsassociationists, and contemporary psychologists do not forbid themselves tointerrogate and to interpret. But they try to confront their subject as the physicistconfronts his. We must, however, delimit this concept of experience when we speak ofcontemporary psychology, for there is, after all, a multitude of diverse experiencesand we may, for example, have to decide whether an experience of essences or ofvalues, or a religious experience, really exists or not. The psychologist tries to makeuse of only two well-defined types of experience: that which is given to us by spatiotemporalexperience of organized bodies, and the intuitive knowledge of ourselveswhich we call reflective experience. When there are debates about method amongpsychologists they almost always bear upon the problem whether these two kinds ofinformation are complementary. Ought one to be subordinated to the other? Or oughtone of them to be resolutely disregarded? But there is agreement upon one essentialprinciple: that their enquiries should begin first of all from the facts. And if we askourselves what is a fact, we see that it defines itself in this way: that one must meetwith it in the course of research, and that it always presents itself as an unexpectedenrichment and a novelty in relation to the antecedent facts. We must not then countupon the facts to organize themselves into a synthetic whole which would deliver itsmeaning by itself. In other words, if what we call anthropology is a discipline whichseeks to define the essence of man and the human condition, then psychology—eventhe psychology of man—is not, and never will be an anthropology. It does not set outto define and limit a priori the object of its research. The notion of man that it acceptsis quite empirical: all over the world there is a certain number of creatures that offeranalogous characteristics. From other sciences, moreover, sociology and physiology,we have learned that certain objective relations exist between these creatures. No moreis needed to justify the psychologist in accepting, prudently and as a workinghypothesis, the provisional limitation of his researches to this group of creatures. Themeans of relevant information at our disposal are indeed more easily accessible sincethey live in society, possess languages and leave records. But the psychologist doesnot commit himself: he does not know whether the notion of man is arbitrary. It maybe too extensive; there is nothing to show that the Australian primitive can be placedin the same psychological class as the American workman of 1939. Or it may be toonarrow; nothing tells us that there is an abyss separating the higher apes from anyhuman creature. In any case, the psychologist strictly forbids himself to consider themen around him as men like himself. That notion of likeness, upon which one couldperhaps build up an anthropology, seems to him foolish and dangerous. He will gladlyadmit, with the reservations mentioned above, that he is a man—that is, that he