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Jean-Paul Sartre and the HOT Theory of Consciousness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Rocco J. Gennaro
Rocco J. Gennaro*
Affiliation:
Indiana State University, Terre Haute, IN, 47809USA
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Extract

Jean-Paul Sartre believed that consciousness entails self-consciousness, or, even more strongly, that consciousness is self-consciousness. As Kathleen Wider puts it in her terrific book The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind, ‘all consciousness is, by its very nature, self-consciousness.’ I share this view with Sartre and have elsewhere argued for it at length. My overall aim in this paper is to examine Sartre's theory of consciousness against the background of the so-called ‘higher-order thought theory of consciousness’ (the HOT theory) which, in turn, will shed light on the structure of conscious mental states as well as on Sartre's theory of (self-) consciousness and reflection. Another goal of this paper is, following Wider, to show how Sartre's views can be understood from a contemporary analytic perspective. Sartre's theory of consciousness is often confusing to the so-called ‘analytic Anglo-American’ tradition, but I attempt to show how this obstacle can be overcome against the backdrop of a specific contemporary theory of consciousness.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 32 , Issue 3 , September 2002 , pp. 293 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2002

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References

1 Kathleen Wider, The Bodily Nature of Consciousness: Sartre and Contemporary Philosophy of Mind (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1997), 1. I will hereafter refer to this book as BNC. Wider also provides us with a very good sense of the tradition behind the view that consciousness is self-consciousness through an examination of Descartes, Locke, and Kant, in ch. 1.

2 Rocco J. Gennaro, Consciousness and Self-Consciousness: A Defense of the Higher-Order Thought Theory of Consciousness (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishers 1996). This book will hereafter be abbreviated as CSC.

3 Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, Hazel E. Barnes, trans. (New York: Philosophical Library 1956). All future references to this work will be abbreviated BN in the text followed by the page number. The page references will be to the paperback edition. The passage I am referring to here is BN 11.

4 I will return briefly to Sartre's puzzling notion that consciousness violates the Law of Identity later, in Section IV. On this topic, however, also see BNC 43-53, 150-4. For a good discussion of the for-itself/in-itself distinction, see Joseph Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1974), 41-8.

5 For much more on Sartre and intentionality, see Phyllis Sutton Morris, Sartre's Concept of a Person: An Analytic Approach (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press 1975). For more background on Sartre and his predecessors (especially Husserl), see BNC 41-3; Catalano, Commentary, 4-13; and William Schroeder, Sartre and his Predecessors: The Self and the Other (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1984).

6 It is questionable, however, that all mental states are intentional in this sense. For example, pains are not ‘about anything.’ There are no ‘pains that p’ or ‘pains about x.’ On the other hand, we might of course agree that pains are still ‘representational’ in some sense of the term, e.g. directed at a part of my body.

7 Robert Denoon Cumming, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Random House 1965), 51n.

8 My understanding of the secondary literature is that in her ‘Key to Special Terminology’ at the end of BN, Hazel Barnes should not have equated pre-reflective or unreflective consciousness with non-thetic or non-positional self-consciousness. Nor should she have equated reflective consciousness with thetic or positional self-consciousness.

9 Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick, trans. (New York: Hill and Wang 1957), 62. All future references to this book will be abbreviated in the text as TE followed by the page number. It should also be noted here that Sartre does eventually distinguish between pure and impure reflection, which I briefly address later in Section III.4. I am primarily concerned with pure reflection throughout this paper, but the basic definition of reflection from TE is sufficient for my immediate purposes.

10 See David Rosenthal, ‘Two Concepts of Consciousness,’ Philosophical Studies 49 (1986) 329-59. I also defend the HOT theory at great length in CSC.

11 Thomas Nagel, ‘What is it Like to be a Bat?’ Philosophical Review 83 (1974) 435-50.

12 See CSC 17-18 for several additional reasons.

13 This is a quotation from the translator's introduction at TE 21. On this point see also Phyllis Berdt Kenevan, ‘Self-Consciousness and the Ego in the Philosophy of Sartre,’ in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Schilpp, ed. (LaSalle: Open Court Press 1981), ch. 7.

14 The other major difference is Sartre's rejection of Husserl's ‘bracketing’ of the belief in the existence of outer phenomena.

15 Robert Van Gulick, ‘A Functionalist Plea for Self-Consciousness,’ Philosophical Review 97 (1988) 149-81. I argue that Van Gulick's notion of self-consciousness is too weak in CSC 147-51.

16 Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1992), 194

17 In this section I will use the terms ‘unconscious’ and ‘nonconscious’ interchangeably.

18 Of course, a full answer to the question ‘What makes a higher-order thought ‘‘suitable’’?’ would require a lengthy digression that I cannot pursue here. One condition, for example, is that the HOT must be a momentary or occurrent state as opposed to a dispositional state. See CSC chapters 3 and 4 for my attempt at answering the above question. Moreover, the terminology can be a bit confusing. Sometimes the term ‘thought’ is used as a generic term covering all kinds of mental states, but it is also sometimes contrasted with ‘perception.’ For our purposes, we can think of the higher-order state a s so me kind of higher-ord er awareness. S ee CSC 95-101 for some discussion of this matter.

19 The topic of bad faith is a major issue in its own right that I cannot address here. For a small sample of the literature, however, see Robert Stone, ‘Sartre on Bad Faith and Authenticity,’ in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Schilpp, ed. (LaSalle: Open Court Press 1981), ch. 10; Jeffrey Gordon, ‘Bad Faith: A Dilemma,’ Philosophy 60 (1985) 258-62; Joseph Catalano, ‘Successfully Lying to Oneself: A Sartrean Perspective,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (1990) 673-93; Ronald Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre's Early Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 1995); Yiwei Zheng, ‘Ontology and Ethics in Sartre's Being and Nothingness: On the Conditions of the Possibility of Bad Faith,’ The Southern Journal of Philosophy 35 (1997) 265-87.

20 Phyllis Sutton Morris, ‘Sartre on the Self-Deceiver's Translucent Consciousness,’ Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 23 (1992) 103-19. The quotation is from page 115, but also see her footnote 28.

21 Lee Brown and Alan Hausman, ‘Mechanism, Intentionality, and the Unconscious: A Comparison of Sartre and Freud,’ in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, Paul Schilpp, ed. (LaSalle: Open Court Press 1981), ch. 23

22 Ivan Soll, ‘Sartre's Rejection of the Freudian Unconscious,’ in The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ch. 24, 586. Soll also argues that Sartre ignored or misunderstood some of Freud's more developed views.

23 Ivan Soll, ‘Sartre's Rejection of the Freudian Unconscious,’ 602

24 This is unlike, say, Leibniz who unambiguously believed in the unconscious and who also held a version of the HOT theory, I argue in ‘Leibniz on Consciousness and Self-Consciousness,’ in New Essays on the Rationalists, Rocco J. Gennaro and Charles Huenemann, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press 1999).

25 Rosenthal, ‘Two Concepts of Consciousness,’ 330, 340-8. See also David Rosenthal, ‘A Theory of Consciousness,’ Report No. 40 (1990) on MIND and BRAIN. Perspectives in Theoretical Psychology and the Philosophy of Mind (ZiF), University of Bielefeld, 22-4. A version of that paper is reprinted in The Nature of Consciousness: Philosophical Debates, Ned Block, Owen Flanagan, and Guven Guzeldere, eds. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1997), ch. 46.

26 Rosenthal, ‘A Theory of Consciousness,’ 21-2.

27 CSC 21-4. I also show that Rosenthal mistakenly argues that intrinsicality entails essentiality and that extrinsicality entails contingency.

28 I will often use the expression ‘meta-psychological thought’ (MET) instead of ‘higher-order thought’ (HOT) because, on my view, the conscious rendering state is part of the first-order conscious state and so is technically not ‘higher-order.’

29 I describe five advantages in CSC 26-30.

30 Rosenthal, ‘Two Concepts of Consciousness,’ 331

31 Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint (New York: Humanities Press 1973 [1874])

32 Marjorie Grene, Sartre (New York: New Viewpoints 1973), 121

33 See also, for example, much of Rosenthal's argument in ‘Thinking That one Thinks,’ in Consciousness, Martin Davies and Glyn W. Humphreys, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell 1993), 197-223. Among other things, Rosenthal argues there that HOTs cannot be intrinsic to the conscious state because it would seem almost contradictory to have, for example, a doubt that it is raining but also an affirmative thought that I am in such a state. In other words, the very same conscious state cannot have parts with more than one mental attitude, e.g. doubting and affirming (assertoric). However, it is unclear why this should be so and that there is really a problem here for the WIV. In such a case, we would have a first-order conscious doubt directed at the weather accompanied by a MET of the form ‘I (nonconsciously but assertorically) think that I am doubting it is raining.’ The MET affirms the doubt and that affirmation is what makes the lower-order doubt conscious. Thus the complex conscious state is still a first-order world-directed conscious doubt, albeit with an assertoric meta-psychological component.

34 For an example of this type of error, see Peter Carruthers, ‘Brute Experience,’ Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989) 258-69. See my reply to Carruthers in ‘Brute Experience and the Higher-Order Thought Theory of Consciousness,’ Philosophical Papers 22 (1993) 51-69.

35 See BN 14. Also see Catalano, Commentary, 32-3; and BNC 86-7 and note 14

36 Thomas W. Busch, ‘Sartre's Use of the Reduction: Being and Nothingness Reconsidered,’ in Jean-Paul Sartre: Contemporary Approaches to His Philosophy, Hugh Silverman and Frederick Elliston, eds. (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press 1980), 19, emphasis added

37 Peter Caws, Sartre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1979), 55

38 Catalano, Commentary, 33

39 Morris, Sartre's Concept of a Person, 31

40 Morris, ‘Sartre on the Self-Deceiver's Translucent Consciousness,’ 108

41 Catalano, Commentary, 32

42 Thomas Busch, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre's Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1990), 5

43 Morris, ‘Sartre on the Self-Deceiver's Translucent Consciousness,’ 108

44 Thomas Busch, The Power of Consciousness and the Force of Circumstances in Sartre's Philosophy, 7, emphasis added

45 Thomas Busch, ‘Sartre's Use of the Reduction: Being and Nothingness Reconsidered,’ 19, emphasis added

46 See, e.g., Catalano, Commentary, 126, 129-130.

47 The previous three brief quotations are from Catalano's Commentary 130, 126, 130 respectively.

48 Catalano, Commentary, 130

49 See CSC 19-21.

50 This is related to what Wider calls her ‘internal critique’ in BNC ch. 3, but the unity problem is most forcefully argued in Wider's ‘Through the Looking Glass: Sartre on Knowledge and the Pre-reflective Cogito,’ Man and World 22 (1989) 329-43. I will hereafter refer to this paper as TLG.

51 Wider does point out that Sartre recognizes the problem to some extent, but he is much too quick to dismiss it. See TLG 334.

52 For more on this condition, see CSC 84-7, and Rosenthal, ‘Two Concepts of Consciousness,’ 335-6.

53 As we saw in Section III.1, it is perhaps once again open to Rosenthal to argue that, even though the HOTs are distinct and extrinsic from their targets, the unity in question is the amalgam of both states. The problem for Rosenthal here is twofold: (a) As was mentioned in Section III.1, if ‘unity’ means ‘one single conscious state,’ as Sartre ultimately seems to believe, then much of what Rosenthal says is at odds with this way of understanding the HOT theory. (b) On the reflective level, recall that Rosenthal's theory has three distinct states in contrast to what is expressed in figure 4. This would then make it even more difficult for him to treat the unity in question simply as an amalgam of three distinct parts. As I hope I have made clear in this section, however, I believe that we are all struggling to make sense of this ‘parts in a unity’ idea. Nonetheless, I have argued that the WIV holds out the best prospect for success.

54 Phyllis Sutton Morris, ‘Sartre on the Self-Deceiver's Translucent Consciousness,’ 105

55 Joseph Catalano, ‘Successfully Lying to Oneself: A Sartrean Perspective,’ 680

56 Lee Brown and Alan Hausman, ‘Mechanism, Intentionality, and the Unconscious: A Comparison of Sartre and Freud,’ esp. 541ff. and 552

57 I cannot pursue this topic here, but see BN (especially Part Two, Chapter Two entitled ‘Temporality’) and BNC 43-57 & 150-4.

58 And, of course, the mere fact that mental states are directed ‘outside of themselves’ does not violate the Law either. To think so would be to confuse the mental state with the content of the mental state.

59 They have to do with dreaming, people with blindsight, and Armstrong's wellknown long-distance truck driver case. Obviously, I do not believe that such cases threaten the CESC Thesis, but I will not digress into a lengthy discussion of them here. It should be noted also that Wider defends Sartre and the Thesis to some extent later in BNC 164-169. She is right, however, that if Sartre completely rejected the unconscious, then it is much more difficult for him to handle the blindsight cases.

60 Indeed, this is precisely what I have done at book length in CSC.

61 Rosenthal, ‘A Theory of Consciousness’

62 Ibid., 26. The next quotation is also from 26.

63 Ibid., n. 28

64 Rosenthal, ‘Two Concepts of Consciousness’

65 For another criticism of the BN 11 passage, see Soll, ‘Sartre's Rejection of the Freudian Unconscious,’ 593-6.

66 Indeed, this is what I argue at greater length in CSC 78-84.

67 See again CSC 78-84, but also CSC ch. 9. Actually, I argue that any conscious lower animal is at least capable of having both the type 2 and the type 3 I-concept.

68 It occurs to me that the above four I-concepts correspond somewhat to Sartre's distinction between four types of self-consciousness (see BNC ch. 3) in the following way: (a) type 1 = being-for-others; (b) type 2 = impure reflection; (c) type 3 = pure reflection; and (d) type 4 = pre-reflective (or ‘bodily’) self-consciousness.

69 For more on the connection between Kant and the HOT theory, see CSC chs. 3, 4 and 9. For more on the connection between Sartre and Kant, see BNC 20-39 and TE 31ff.

70 Rosenthal, ‘A Theory of Consciousness.

71 Thanks to Kathleen Wider and Yiwei Zheng for some helpful correspondence during my work on this paper. Thanks also to a referee for several helpful comments.