Notes on Sarah Richmond's New Translation of Sartre's Being and Nothingness

 In her "Translator's Introduction" and "Notes on the Translation", Sarah Richmond preps her readers with what is absolutely required, given that the only other English translation of Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, by Jean-Paul Sartre, is 70 or so years old, and it's the only other English translation: where are today's intellectuals with Being and Nothingness, and just what, if anything, is new about her translation?

That's a huge task in itself, beyond the immense effort of translation itself. The reader may ask - as I did, having read and studied and written on Being and Nothingness in 1991-2 when Sartre's work evoked little interest in American academic philosophy if it in fact ever did - what can we learn of reality, of what's important, from Sartre's work 80 years since he published it? Richmond sets to answering that question, and others, and I admire and thank her.

Continental philosophy didn't sit still in the meantime, of course, and Sartre himself lived and worked for 40 or so years after he published Being and Nothingness. In that time thinkers in France and elsewhere in the continental tradition busied themselves with structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, feminist critique, metamorphoses of Marxism, and other strains, threads, and movements of thought.

Not least of which, phenomenology, as I note below.

Of structuralism, she writes, "As the name suggests, structuralism's basic insight is that the production of meaning...depends on preexisting and socially shared structures or systems that determine and delimit the signifying possibilities available to the people who inhabit them. A host of famous French thinkers are associated with this paradigm, including [Roland] Barthes, [Michel] Foucault, [Claude] Levi-Strauss, and [Louis] Althusser. Across the different fields of investigation, the structuralist model denies explanatory primacy to individual subjectivity, and emphasizes instead the often quoted 'decentering of the subject' and the 'death of the author.' Sartre was portrayed as an advocate of the individualist humanism held by this body of work to be untenable." [p. xxxi-ii]

In my Philosophy and the Evolution of Consciousness, in the chapter "The Impossibility of Interpenetration as the Problem of the Other", Sartre's 'individualist humanism' stands against, not structuralism, but his own ontological bias: consciousnesses can't, and don't, interpenetrate. It's a bias because he accepts it, then 'proves' it as justification to keep on with it as he analyzes experiences of other humans. 

Structuralism achieves the same thing, though on the surface structuralism may only deny "explanatory primacy to individual subjectivity" [my emphasis]. The consequence of structuralist thought at issue: you can't know the other, including your readers, and they can't know you - as an interior - so the author no longer 'controls the narrative' and can't proscribe to the reader what the meaning of the book/essay/performance/play is.

In both cases - Sartre's phenomenological existentialism, and structuralism - consciousnesses don't overlap, and the only way to understand others is externally. Derrida's deconstruction in no way changes this bias.

In "Notes on the Translation", Richmond explains her translational decisions and patterns regarding single words and terms, of various sorts, for different reasons: some, because Sartre used them in a variety of ways, or because the French doesn't directly one-for-one translate to English. She also deals with collections of words and terms that she traces to Sartre's direct and indirect use of and engagement with the published writings of the three Hs: Heidegger, Husserl, and Hegel.

In the "Husserl Vocabulary" section, Richmond covers epoche, appresenter, both of which I take to be very important to understanding both Sartre and Husserl. The epoche begins the practice of phenomenology, and without it, there is nothing to phenomenology.

Appresenter, Richmond writes: "Husserl uses this verb for intentional objects that are mediately (i.e., indirectly) given to the subject. A central example would be other people's consciousness, which, for Husserl, is appresented in their bodies." [p. lii] This shows that there are two biases that proscribe thinking of interpenetrating consciousnesses: Sartre's ontological bias, and Husserl's methodological bias. This is especially frustrating in Husserl, because the epoche, executed cleanly, brackets any such bias!

In his Philosophy of Freedom, in the appendices, one issue Rudolf Steiner takes up with, as an objection to the implications of his arguments, is this very idea of impenetrable consciousness. In that discussion, he begins with the brute appresentation of the body, instead of ending there. He goes on to 'argue':

"What is it, in the first instance, that I have before me when I confront another person? The most immediate thing is the bodily appearance of the other person as given to me in sense perception; then, perhaps, the auditory perception of what he is saying, and so on. I do not merely stare at all this, but it sets my thinking activity in motion. Through the thinking with which I confront the other person, the percept of him becomes, as it were, transparent to the mind. I am bound to admit that when I grasp the percept with my thinking, it is not at all the same thing as appeared to the outer senses. In what is a direct appearance to the senses, something else is indirectly revealed. The mere sense appearance extinguishes itself at the same time as it confronts me. But what it reveals through this extinguishing compels me as a thinking being to extinguish my own thinking as long as I am under its influence, and to put its thinking in the place of mine. 

I then grasp its thinking in my thinking as an experience like my own. I have really perceived another person's thinking. 

The immediate percept, extinguishing itself as sense appearance, is grasped by my thinking, and this is a process lying wholly within my consciousness and consisting in this, that the other person's thinking takes the place of mine. Through the self extinction of the sense appearance, the separation between the two spheres of consciousness is actually overcome. This expresses itself in my consciousness through the fact that while experiencing the content of another person's consciousness I experience my own consciousness as little as I experience it in dreamless sleep. Just as in dreamless sleep my waking consciousness is eliminated, so in my perceiving of the content of another person's consciousness the content of my own is eliminated. 

The illusion that it is not so only comes about because in perceiving the other person, firstly, the extinction of the content of one's own consciousness gives place not to unconsciousness, as it does in sleep, but to the content of the other person's consciousness, and secondly, the alternations between extinguishing and lighting up again of my own self-consciousness follow too rapidly to be generally noticed. This whole problem is to be solved, not through artificial conceptual structures with inferences from the conscious to things that can never become conscious, but rather through genuine experience of what results from combining thinking with the percept. 

This applies to a great many problems which appear in philosophical literature. Thinkers should seek the path to open-minded, spiritually oriented observation; instead of which they insert an artificial conceptual structure between themselves and the reality."

Richmond's "Heidegger Vocabulary" provides other proscriptions on thinking consciousnesses interpentrating, including the verb being itself. The other even more obvious term from Heidegger is exteriorite d'indifference, or 'exteriority of indifference'. This phrase "occurs frequently in BN. Both the idea and the language are familiar in the German Idealist tradition, but less so in contemporary anglophone philosophy. Sartre would have found them in Hegel as well as Bergson. In both these philosophers, the adjectives 'extremal' and 'indifferent' are used to describe on form of relatedness, in contrast to another. Hegel, for example, holds that in mechanistic thinking an object consists of parts that are interrelated only 'externally' and are 'indifferent' to each other. This contrasts with objects that exhibit a genuine, intrinsic unity - for example, the soul, whose parts are not 'indifferent' to each other."

Notice that the soul is an object whose 'parts' are 'intrinsically' related, within, but not with other souls.

So Sartre had it coming from lots of directions, that the only way to understand - and experience - another person was externally. So far as I can tell, that taboo is still firmly entrenched in Continental and anglophone philosophy. That makes me sad.