Sartre Studies International

‘All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not a necessary reflection, can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future work.’ There are few more (in-)famous ‘last words’ than those with which Sartre concluded Being and Nothingness in 1943. The ‘ethical question’ continued to preoccupy Sartre, in one form or another, for the rest of his life, and has recently become a renewed focus for critical enquiry on the part of Sartrologues, with the publication in 1991 of L’Espoir maintenant and its subsequent translation into English.

In June 1951, Sartre’s play The Devil and the Good Lord (Le Diable et le Bon Dieu) was first produced at the Théâtre Antoine in Paris. Set during the German Peasants’ War, the play recounts the story of Goetz, a military leader who transforms himself from a feared and notorious war criminal into a saint and folk hero through a series of arbitrary acts of clemency and generosity. First sparing the besieged town of Worms from total destruction, Goetz then proceeds to break up his own estates and redistribute the land among the peasantry. Far from being presented as an ethical conversion from Evil to Good, however, Goetz’s generosity is twice criticised within the play as a strategem to achieve even greater domination over the beneficiaries of his mercy and munificence.

In their 1971 interview with Sartre concerning L’Idiot de la famille, Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka asked him: ‘Aren’t you a little afraid of the idea that someone might try to elucidate you as you did Flaubert?’ Sartre answered calmly, ‘On the contrary, I would be happy. Like all writers, I hide. But I am also a public man and people can think what they like about me, even if it is severe.’1 My project of ‘elucidation’ thus has his complete approval.

Exactly what does Jean-Paul Sartre mean when he describes some conscious awareness as ‘non-thetic’? He does not explicitly say. Yet this phrase, sprinkled liberally throughout his early philosophical works, is germane to some of the distinctive and fundamental theories of Sartrean existentialism. My aim in this paper is to examine the concept in terms of the role that Sartre claims it plays in bad faith (mauvaise foi), the deliberate and motivated project of refusing to face or consider the consequences of some fact or facts. I will argue that non-thetic awareness could play the role Sartre ascribes to it in bad faith only if it is understood as being equivalent to the nonconceptual representational content currently discussed in anglophone philosophy of mind. I will proceed by first providing an initial rough characterisation of ‘non-thetic’ awareness through a discussion of the philosophical background to Sartre’s term, then showing how this rough characterisation needs to be refined in order that bad faith may evade the two paradoxes of self-deception, next drawing the distinction between conceptual and nonconceptual content, and then arguing that non-thetic awareness must be construed as nonconceptual content. This clarification of one of the most pervasive and one of the most obscure concepts in Sartrean existentialism will have the additional ramifications that Sartre’s theory of consciousness in general must be understood as involving both conceptual and nonconceptual structures and that his discussion of the interplay of these structures can provide innovative and valuable contributions to the debates over the role of conceptual and nonconceptual contents in perception and action currently raging in anglophone discussions of mind.

This article is intended as ‘sequel’ to Adrian van den Hoven’s article in Sartre Studies International (vol. 6 no. 2 , 2000) entitled ‘Some Of These Days’. I would like to examine the significance of the jazz tune ‘Some Of These Days’ for Sartre, both from an autobiographical and from a philosophical point of view, referring in detail to the text of La Nausée.

Geneviève Idt, ‘Les Mots’: Une Autocritique ‘en bel écrit’ Jean-Pierre Boulé

Finn Bowring, André Gorz and The Sartrean Legacy: Arguments for a Person-Centred Social Theory Natascha H. Lancaster

Ingrid Galster (ed.), La Naissance du ‘Phénoméne Sartre’: Raisons d’un Succès 1938-1945 Ion Georgiou

Jean-Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism. (A. Haddour, S. Brewer and T. McWilliams trans.) Ion Georgiou

Notes on contributors