Sartre's Private Language Argument

Abstract

Abstract Various commentators have noted striking parallels between Wittgenstein's reflections on privacy and Sartre's discussions of the body in Being and Nothingness. Nevertheless, these aspects of Sartre's thought have seldom been explored in detail. This article therefore offers a reconstruction of what can be labelled ‘Sartre's private language argument’. Sartre explores the primary ways in which subjects consciously relate to their own embodiment, where these include affective modes of bodily self‐awareness that one would have to be the relevant experiencing subject to enjoy (or suffer). At the same time, he argues that these forms of self‐awareness are not sufficient to ground cognitive attitudes to one's own psychophysical condition. Specifically, he thinks that objective thought about, reference to, and thus knowledge of one's own condition involve shareable concepts mediated through a public language. The immediate aim of the article is thus to make sense of Sartre's obscure idea that consciousness ‘exists for itself as known by the Other’. More broadly, however, it works to correct views of Sartre as a thoroughly Cartesian ‘philosopher of consciousness’: whilst he understands embodiment in terms of first‐personal bodily awareness, he maintains that our cognitive attitudes to our bodily condition are essentially sharable.