Jean-Paul Sartre Quotes on Mind
Sartre's Transcendence of the Ego (1936) and the more developed Being and Nothingness (1943) reorganize the philosophy of mind around the irreducibility of consciousness to any object — including the supposed transcendental ego of Husserlian phenomenology. Consciousness is always consciousness of something other than itself; the I is not a permanent inhabitant of consciousness but a worldly object that consciousness reflectively constitutes. The for-itself (pour-soi) is therefore non-thetic self-awareness rather than the self-presence of a subject standing over against its objects, and the analysis of bad faith, of the look, and of the body for the other in Being and Nothingness extends this distinctive ontology of consciousness to the analysis of self, freedom, and intersubjectivity.
Quotes
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“Hell is other people.”
Alors, c'est ça l'enfer. Je n'aurais jamais cru... vous vous rappelez: le soufre, le bûcher, le gril... ah! Quelle plaisanterie. Pas besoin de gril, l'enfer, c'est les autres. -
Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre:
“Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth.”
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Attributed to Jean-Paul Sartre:
“Life begins on the other side of despair.”
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“Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realizes its freedom .”
L'imagination ( Imagination: A Psychological Critique ) (1936) -
“L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”
He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being. -
“L'âge de raison ( The Age of Reason ) (1945)”
He yawned. He had finished the day and he had also finished with his youth. Various well-bred moralities had already discreetly offered him their services: disillusioned epicureanism , smiling tolerance , resignation , common sense stoicism - all the aids whereby a man may savour, minute by minute, like a connoisseur, the failure of a life. -
“For Genet, reflective states of mind are the rule. And although they are of an unstable nature in everyone, in him...reflection is always contrary to the reflected feeling.”
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr(1952) | p. 278 -
“I think they do it to pass the time, nothing more. But time is too large, it can't be filled up. Everything you plunge into it is stretched and disintegrates.”
Nausea(1938) | Diary entry of Friday (2 February), concerning a card game -
“The consciousness of being betrayed is to the collective consciousness of a sacred group what a certain form of schizophrenia is to the individual...it is a form of madness.”
Saint Genet, Actor and Martyr(1952) | p. 193 -
“I think of death only with tranquility, as an end. I refuse to let death hamper life. Death must enter life only to define it.”
No Exit(1944)