Early Sartre: Unsatisfactory Account of Alterity :: Philosophy Philosophical Essays

Early Sartre unsatisfying Account of AlterityABSTRACT This paper critically examines the way in which Sartre dealt with the riddle of alterity in his early works, proposing that Sartre presented an unsatisfactory account of alterity in his first philosophic work entitled The Transcendence of the Ego, though his study of imagination offers productive opportunities to re-examine the question of alterity and to arrive at a more sufficient formulation of the way in which the self relates to the other. I therefore gravel by demonstrating that the Transcendence of the Ego perpetuates the Cartesian tradition where the self is define primarily in terms of thinking-that is, self-consciousness and immanence. Next, I turn to the Sartrean psychological science of Imagination to find another way of conceptualizing the problem. I inquire into his habitual theory of the complex number consciousness defined as a picture consciousness and bespeak that it reduces the alterity of the imaginar y object to sheer absence. As such, the theory of imagination does not allow us to bring the fundamental character of alterity to light. Still, we uncover a more adequate way of dealing with alterity in the context of the imaginary life. I show that the intuitive feeling of the picture itself allows us to conceptualize alterity as the fore withdrawal of the other. Finally, I make evident that the imaginary subject is necessarily divided between itself and itself as another and due to that internal split, wad grasp the alterity of another person. The first properly philosophical work indite by Sartre-The Transcendence of the Ego (1) -is an investigation into the problem of otherness, of alterity or-to use Sartres terminology-of transcendence. Sartre develops the ruling of transcendence in a radical opposition to that of immanence i. e. of a uniform and homogenous sameness. His ultimate aim is to arrive at the notion of immanence purified of any transcendent elements and to use that notion as a clue for his definition of subjectivity. That is to say, to the question What am I? Sartre would reply I am an immanence without transcendence. I am a pure sprout of consciousness without any contents. I am an absolute transparency without opacity. I am no more than the temporal unity of my life-which means-a pure poised flow that no alien element can interrupt or contaminate.The idea of pure self-transparent subjectivity has a long muniment behind it. It originated in the philosophy of Descartes and was further developed by Husserl.