Hostname: page-component-76fb5796d-2lccl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-28T13:16:04.427Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Contradiction and Freedom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

B. H. Slater
B. H. Slater
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Jean-Paul Sartre, in describing the realization of his freedom, was often inclined to say mysterious things like ‘I am what I am not’, ‘I am not what I am’ (‘as I am already what I will be …, I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it’, ‘I make myself not to be the past … which I am’.) He was therefore plainly contradicting himself, but was this merely a playful literary figure (paradox), or was he really being incoherent? By the latter judgment I do not mean to reject his statements entirely (like many of his Anglo-Saxon contemporaries); for I believe there is an intimate link between contradiction and freedom, as I shall explain in this paper. But a minor thing we must first have out of the way is the suggestion that Sartre's language was just a rhetorical trope, designed merely to express some banal platitude in a bemusing way: ‘I am not yet what I will be’, ‘I am no longer what I was’ are sane and sensible, for instance, but cannot be the meant content of Sartre's sayings, since, while they would indeed describe the reform of some character, they would be appropriate only before or after some metamorphosis, not, as Sartre clearly intended, in the midst of some process of riddance and conversion, whether radical or otherwise. Yet, in the turmoil of such a change, ‘I am not what I am’ (or the everyday ‘I am not myself’) still, surely, cannot be true, and if that is the case, Sartre must be being inocherent, and therefore, obfuscating and deliberately obscure, and hence, it seems, must properly be rejected by all right and clear thinking men.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 63 , Issue 245 , July 1988 , pp. 317 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Sartre, J.-P., Being and Nothingness (London: Methuen, 1958), 32, 33.Google Scholar

2 Kant, I., Critique of Judgement, trans. Meredith, J. C. (Oxford University Press, 1952), 114, see also 92.Google Scholar

3 Op. cit. note 2, Introduction.

4 Op. cit. note 2, 93–117.

5 Op. cit. note 1, 31.

6 Op. cit. note 2, 110.

7 Op. cit. note 2, 98.

8 Prior, A. N., Objects of Thought (Oxford University Press, 1971), 82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Hintikka, J., Knowledge and Belief (Cornell University Press, 1962), 24Google Scholar; see also Linsky, L. ‘Interpreting Doxastic Logic’, Journal of Philosophy (1968), 500.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Hintikka, J., ‘Impossible Possible Worlds Vindicated’ in Game-theoretical Semantics, Saarinen, E. (ed.) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979).Google Scholar

11 Hintikka, J., The Intentions of Intentionality and Other New Models for Modalities (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1975), 186–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Ajatus 32, 1970.Google Scholar

13 Op. cit. note 11, 188.

14 Op. cit. note 8, 82.

15 Op. cit. note 8, 54.

16 Stalnaker, R., ‘Propositions’ in Issues in the Philosophy of Language, MacKay, A. F. and Merrill, D. D. (eds) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 87.Google Scholar

17 Op. cit. note 16, 89–90.

18 For a more specific argument to the same general conclusion, see Yagisawa, T.'s ‘The Pseudo-Mates Argument’ in Philosophical Review XCII, No. 3 (1984).Google Scholar

19 Quine, W. V. O., Methods of Logic (M. I. T. Press, 1981), 148.Google Scholar

20 Dennett, D., ‘Beyond Belief’ in Thought and Object, Woodfield, A. (ed) (Oxford University Press, 1982), 87.Google Scholar

21 See for instance Ducasse, C. J.'s ‘Critique of Hume's Conception of Causality’, Journal of Philosophy 63 (1966)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, also Nature, Mind and Death (New York: Open Court, 1951).Google Scholar

22 Olson, R. G., Introduction to Existentialism (Dover, 1962), 93–95.Google Scholar

23 Op. cit. note 2, 145.

24 Heidegger, M., Being and Time (London: 1962), 164–165.Google Scholar

25 Op. cit. note 1, 59.

26 Schlesinger, G., ‘The Central Principle of Deontic Logic’, Philosophy and Phenamenological Research. XLV, No. 4 (1985).Google Scholar

27 Sartre, J.-P., Existentialism and Humanism (London: Methuen 1948), 35–38.Google Scholar

28 Op. cit. note 26, 515.

29 Op. cit. note 26, 552.

30 (a) van Fraassen, B., ‘The Logic of Conditional Obligation’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 1 (1972)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, see also (b) ‘Values and the Heart's Command’, Journal of Philosophy LXX (1973).Google Scholar

31 ‘On Evaluating Deontic Logics’, Journal of Philosophical Logic 1 (1972) 443.Google Scholar

32 See also my ‘A Grammatical Point about Obligation’, Philosophical Quar terly 28 (1978).Google Scholar

33 Op. cit. note 30 (b), 7.

34 Op. cit. note 30 (b), 14.