G. W. F. Hegel

G. W. F. Hegel is presented as a philosophical interlocutor whose account of consciousness and self-judgment Sartre both draws on and sharply limits. Hegel’s insight that a person has already become other than the self described in any present judgment helps articulate the instability of self-knowledge; Sartre rejects, however, the expectation that consciousness’s internal division will culminate in a higher integration.

Hegel on Self-Judgment

Sartre cites Hegel among thinkers who recognize that a judgment about oneself is already false at the moment it is pronounced. Whatever a person is doing or saying, Sartre explains, by the time that person wishes to identify with the act, it has already become something past. The claim is not merely that judgment lags behind a changing subject, as a hunter’s bullet might miss a bird by aiming at where it was seen. Treating the self as a succession of fixed states would mistake consciousness for a sequence of stationary images. For Sartre, the deeper issue is that being and its present modes are heterogeneous: consciousness is not simply identical with the predicate it assigns itself.

The Past and Essence

Sartre connects Hegel’s account of selfhood to the past as the dimension in which a person’s essence is located. He invokes the formula “Wesen ist was gewesen ist” to express the thought that what a person has been remains constitutive: the past is an ontological law of the for-itself. Yet the past is also fixed and contingent. It has consumed its possibilities, become in-itself, and cannot be altered in its content, even though its meaning may be changed through later projects. Sartre accordingly distinguishes the past from value: value is founded through the for-itself’s surpassing action, whereas the past is the fact the for-itself must assume without being able to undo it.

Sartre’s Critique of Hegel

The sharpest criticism appears in Sartre’s discussion of consciousness’s self-division. He recognizes in it the division Hegel makes characteristic of consciousness, but disputes its consequence. In the Phenomenology of Mind, Sartre says, the division leads toward a higher integration; in his own account it instead deepens the nothingness that separates consciousness from itself. Consciousness may therefore be Hegelian in its division, but Sartre calls the prospect of its eventual reconciliation Hegel’s greatest illusion. Hegel’s ideas serve as a point of departure, while Sartre’s account refuses to resolve the gap between consciousness and itself into a completed unity.