Self-consciousness and uses of I. Sartre and Anscombe

Sartre is well known for being an advocate of what we might call, coining Vincent Descombes’ phrase, ‘philosophies of consciousness’. A philosophy of consciousness is a post-Cartesian, post-Lockean philosophy, which takes (self-)consciousness to be a key feature of humanity and a point where to start philosophy from. Such philosophies of consciousness have been subject to intense debates and criticisms, questioning notably the idea of a subject that would be fully transparent to herself (thereby following Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud’s ideas of an unconscious). These criticisms gave birth to la querelle du sujet: is there such a thing as a fully conscious and responsible subject? If not, how are we to think of ourselves as human (and moral) agents? In what sense are we determined by psychological (e.g. unconscious) or sociological factors? Sartre himself took a critical stance in this dispute, claiming that the human’s condemnation to freedom forces us to be responsible agents; in spite of any kind of determination liable to influence our actions, these actions are bound to remain ours. However, according to Vincent Descombes, the most radical criticism of these philosophies de la conscience is not to be found in the literature related to the querelle du sujet, but rather in Ludwig Wittgenstein (see Descombes/Larmore 2009). Indeed, Wittgenstein is the one who genuinely allows us to trade a philosophy of the self (une philosophie du moi) for a philosophy of the first-person (une philosophie de la première personne). A philosophy of the self is an egotist philosophy (see Descombes 2014: 17 sq); it is written in the first-person (at least until the ‘I’ pronoun becomes a ‘Self’ of whom we can talk in the third-person). While a philosophy of the first-person tries to shed light on the specificity of the first-person: what could we not do if we did not have the use of the first-person pronoun? What would it imply regarding our form of life? As we shall see a philosophy of the first person simply undermines the possibility of a philosophy of consciousness, understood as a philosophy which speaks of oneself in the first person but somehow treats the self as an abstract third-person. If Sartre really is a philosopher of consciousness in this sense, it may appear very surprising that contemporary philosophers, such as Béatrice Longuenesse (2017) or Richard Moran (2001), have seen in the work of Sartre echoes of Wittgensteinian accounts of the first-person (such as Elizabeth Anscombe’s or Gareth Evans’). Indeed, rather than systematically opposing the French and the Austrian philosopher, these authors try to show how combining their views may provide a more fruitful and phenomenologically accurate account of self-consciousness (Longuenesse 2017: 44 sq) and self-knowledge (Moran 2001: 77 sq). In this paper, I would like to acknowledge the fruitfulness of such a confrontation, although ultimately I suspect that they do not save Sartre from the Wittgensteinian radical critique. To show so, I will first turn to what Sartre and the Wittgensteinian agree on; then, drawing on Elizabeth Anscombe's paper on the first person, I will consider the idea that self-consciousness is something manifested by the use of ‘I’. Finally, I will explore the extent to which the question ‘Who am I?’ may be symptomatic of a kind of pathology of self-consciousness, such as Sartrian mauvaise foi.