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

Early Sartre Unsatisfactory Account of AlterityABSTRACT This wallpaper critically examines the appearance in which Sartre dealt with the problem of alterity in his early works, proposing that Sartre presented an disappointing account of alterity in his world-class philosophical work entitled The favorable position of the egotism, though his study of imagination offers ample opportunities to re-examine the caput of alterity and to generate at a more adequate formulation of the way in which the self relates to the other. I therefore begin by demonstrating that the Transcendence of the self-importance perpetuates the Cartesian tradition where the self is defined primarily in toll of thinking-that is, self- sentience and immanence. Next, I turn to the Sartrean Psychology of Imagination to find other way of conceptualizing the problem. I inquire into his general theory of the imaginary consciousness defined as a picture consciousness and argue that it reduces the alterity of t he imaginary object to kink absence. As such, the theory of imagination does not allow us to exercise 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 touch sensation of the picture itself allows us to conceptualize alterity as the radical withdrawal of the other. Finally, I appoint evident that the imaginary subject is necessarily divided between itself and itself as another and due to that internal split, can grasp the alterity of another person. The first properly philosophical work written 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 notion of transcendence in a radical opposition to that of immanence i. e. of a uniform and homogenous sameness. His final aim is to arrive at the notion of immanence purified of any intuitive 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 consummate(a) stream 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 self-contained flow that no outsider element can interrupt or contaminate.The idea of pure self-transparent subjectivity has a long history behind it. It originated in the school of thought of Descartes and was further developed by Husserl.