Sartre, the subjective and subjectivity

Sartre, Subjectivity and the Subjective

A recent secondary text hoping to help A Level Philosophy students understand Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism is quite useful but gets something fundamental about his work quite wrong. Part of the problem lies with the translation they rely upon but a broader problem concerns anglo philosophical misunderstandings of what has become known as continental philosophy, of which Sartre is a key figure.

Let's start with the Philippe Mairet translation of one of Sartre's key foundational sentences:

il faut partir de la subjectivité

which is translated by Mairet as;

we must begin from the subjective.

So the French la subjectivité is translated as the subjective. This is misleading because there is a big difference between the notion of the subjective and the notion of subjectivity (subjectivité).

So let's take a look at (the very good, incidentally) Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy. There is no definition of subjectivity but there is a definition of subjective which includes four senses of the term, the fourth of which is -

what is subjective is a mere matter of personal taste or preference; lacking in truth or validity; arbitrary.

A French dictionary of philosophy (Dictionnaire de Philosophie - Jacqueline Russ, Larousse Bordas, 1996) also emphasises this weak version of the notion of the subjective:

individuel et dependant des preferences personelles (individual and dependent on personal preferences).

But in the French dictionary there is a separate entry for subjectivité - a much stronger conception of subjectivity as vie consciente (conscious life).

Elsewhere in L'Être et Le Néant (Being and Nothingness) Sartre defines subjectivité as: la conscience de conscience - consciousness of consciousness.

A French commentary on Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism by Sophie Bilemdjian (Puf, 2000, 24) links the Sartrian notion of existentialism to a very strong conception of subjectivity.

L'existentialisme s'inscrit dans la tradition initiée par Descartes des philosophes de la subjectivité . . . . La subjectivité est la specificité d'un être conscient de soi, présent au monde et à soi, qui a rapport à soi et pour lequel son être est en question permanente. Ce mode d'être spécifique de l'homme, Sartre l'appelle dans L'Être et Le Néant le pour soi . . .


Existentialism inscribes itself within the Cartesian tradition of the philosophy of subjectivity . . . Subjectivity is the specificity of a being conscious of itself, present to the world and to itself, which has a relationship to itself and for which its being is in constant question. This mode of being, specific to man, Sartre calls, in Being and Nothiingness, the for-itself . . .


Later she defines subjectivity in opposition to the weaker notion of the subjective:

La subjectivité . . . n'est pas, . . . une hypothése idéaliste enfermant l'individu dans son interiorité et donc occultant le poids du monde materiél . . . . mais c'est le socle théorique minimal de quiconque prétend tenir un discours vrai. (Belemdjian, 38)

Subjectivity . . . isn't . . . an idealist hypothesis locking the individual up in his interiority and thereby obscuring the real weight of the material world . . . but it is the minimal theoretical foundation for anyone who claims to maintain truthful discourse.

So there is a big problem with Mairet's translation of the term subjectivity as subjective. Subjectivity is (epistemologically) something very strong and a starting point for any truth claims, not a starting point for personal preferences and weak claims about the world.

So Mairet gets it very badly wrong. This has consequences for a new book aimed at A level teachers and students, which is a secondary commentary in English, on Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism. (Jones, Cardinal Hayward, Philosophy in Focus, John Murray, 2003).

They say that Sartre's notion of the 'subjective' (or subjectivity) entails the following:

"While the rest of philosophy blunders on with its foolish project to reach objective knowledge about the world, existentialism turns to focus on all that we can know, our own individual subjective experiences." (28)

This is wrong. Sartre the atheist, believes that we should start from human subjectivity rather than the subjective biases of the individual or a purported omniscience.

The authors go on to develop lines of argument based on this misreading, indeed they treat the 'subjective' as a foundational element of Sartre's existentialism. He may reject objectivity in the sense of a non-human godlike view on the world, but his notion of subjectivity holds onto the idea of truth claims very strongly. In fact the subject for Sartre is much more like the notion of the person in the anglo-analytic tradition.

One unfortunate consequence of this text may be that prejudices and ignorance about French philosophy may be reinforced in a whole new generation of philosophy students.