In reflecting upon Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophical writings in their entirety, the question arises as to whether these writings constitute a harmonious development or rather provide clear evidence of breaks. Generally, the critical literature assumes that the ontological, epistemological, and anthropological positions that are taken in the early philosophic-psychological writings are further elaborated and deepened in the first major work Being and Nothingness. Consequently, there would seem to be no grounds to suppose that in the period between 1934 (the year during which Sartre, in Berlin, worked on The Transcendence of the Ego) and 1943 (the year when the first major work was published) alterations in Sartre's philosophical conceptions occurred of such a magnitude as to interfere with the continuity of his thinking.

Matters are quite different with respect to the period between 1943 and i960, the year when the second major work, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, was published. Whereas Being and Nothingness represents an existentialist conception of man, in which the unique individual - essentially still free even when in chains - is master of his own fate, in the Critique the superiority of a historical-materialistic view of man and history is defended, while existentialism is reduced to the status of an enclave within the tenets of Marxism. Evidently, during the course of - and after - the Second World War, Sartre's ideas altered to such a degree as to necessitate a radical revision of his anthropological viewpoints.

Across its long history moral philosophy has been as concerned with the cultivation of certain moral dispositions, or traits of character, or moral psychologies, as it has been with establishing the validity and universality of moral rules and principles. Moral psychology begins with the inner person: not how we outwardly conform to external moral rules, but how we are in our hearts and souls and, particularly, how we are when we are truly flourishing as human beings. It is therefore concerned with the ethics of virtue, and a casual glance at the respective moral psychologies of Aristotle, Augustine, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, and the existentialists would reveal analyses of such virtues as integrity, justice, prudence, courage, magnanimity, sincerity, and authenticity. These are not innate dispositions, or inherited traits of personality like shyness or cheerfulness. They are acquired by teaching or practice or reflection, and to a certain extent reveal what we have made of ourselves; thus they express our moral way of being, and our fundamentl moral outlook, and not just something we happen to have.

Sartre's concern with the ethics of character, the conditions of self-determination and human agency, and the phenomenology of moral life, places him within this tradition of moral and philosophical psychology. This essay is concerned with elaborating and clarifying a number of interrelated aspects of Sartre's moral and philosophical psychology, particularly as they are developed in Being and Nothingness: self-determination and agency, responsibility for self, the unity of a life, moral reasoning, and self-knowledge.

INTENTIONAL ANALYSIS

The title of one of Sartre's essays, Questions of Method, is perhaps a sufficient reminder of how remote from us he was as a philosopher. Questions of methodology, Charles Taylor long ago pointed out, are “usually thought to be a waste of time” in England, where most philosophers prefer to adopt “the stance of the inarticulate gardener with a green thumb being interrogated by the agronomist - I just plants it and it grows.” Sartre takes over from Husserl's phenomenology two methodological procedures, “intentional analysis” and “eidetic analysis.” Intentional analysis is a procedure for analyzing consciousness with respect to its “meaning-endowing” acts, by which I identify something as being what it is. Thus I am conscious of it as “a triangle,” as “a table,” as “anger.”

Sartre takes over from Husserl's phenomenology two methodological procedures, "intentional analysis" and "eidetic analysis." Intentional analysis is a procedure for analyzing consciousness with respect to its "meaning-endowing" acts, by which I identify something as being what it is. Thus I am conscious of it as "a triangle," as "a table," as "anger." Phenomenological analysis is in-tentional in the etymological sense that it follows out the identifying reference of the "act" to the object "aimed at" as the "target" of the reference. Sartre's dedication to intentional reference is manifest in the succession of two titles: Having reviewed traditional theories of the imagination under the title L'Imagination, he conducts his own analysis under the title L'Imaginaire. The difference in title indicates a change from the traditional analysis in which the imagination is one of the faculties of the mind, to an intentional analysis in which characteristics of the imagination are determined by following out the reference to the imaginary object. I shall offer an example of this intentional analysis as soon as I have brought out how an intentional analysis is also "eidetic."

THE CURVE OF THE EPOCH

By the time of Sartre's death in 1980, Structuralism, as a movement, had evaporated, and various forms of Post-Structuralism were in full swing. At the beginning of his career, in the 1920s and 1930s, Structuralism was just beginning to be thought of, in a few localities remote from Paris and existentialism in disciplinary and in geographical space - for example technical linguistics in Prague. There is a sense, then, in which Sartre's life and that of Structuralism run in parallel, a tempting observation enough in the light of his theory of oracular lives, of the “curves” of epochs, in the third volume of L'Idiot de la famille. The conjecture that Sartre and Structuralism might have had a serious affinity seems at first glance however to be a nonstarter, given the lack of apparent overlap between his concerns and those of the major structuralists (whether by avowal or attribution): Althusser, Barthes, Dumézil, Foucault, Lacan, Lévi-Strauss.

What the structuralists had in common was a preoccupation with embodied relationships - whether political, literary, religious, historical, psychoanalytic, or ethnological - taken to be objective, sharing or borrowing the structure of language, and reflecting the unconscious structure of mind. What Sartre emphasized, in contrast, was the complete lucidity of the conscious subject as free to enter or not into relationships, and the responsibility of the agent for the constitution and maintenance in practice of the group structures to which he or she might belong.

How does one of the twentieth century's great thinkers help us illuminate one of its great paradoxes? What does Sartre contribute toward clarifying the problem of thinking about history as it has emerged in the late twentieth century? After a century and a half of celebrating and living by the idea of progress, amidst staggering scientific-technological progress, almost no one in the West continues to believe in progress. In the current climate of intellectual disillusionment no serious thinker is willing to defend Bury's formulation that the world is slowly advancing in “a definite and desirable direction” leading to a “condition of general happiness”that will “justify the whole process of civilization.” On the one hand, the postmodernist temper shows, as Lyotard says, “incredulity toward metanarratives” such as the idea of progress. On the other, the current mood seems sympathetic toward negative metanarratives - those that suggest that things are getting worse. Witness, for example, the remarkable success of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, or the works of Christopher Lasch - which suggest that as time goes by, we are losing the most vital of values, attitudes, and skills. The negative mood is starkly captured in Theodor Adorno's claim: “No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one that leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.”

Even though Sartre repeatedly emphasized the divergences between Hegel and himself, this chapter discusses their convergences. It will be seen, moreover, that these often conflict with Sartre's own stress on the differences between them.

Sartre does not refer to Hegel in his early works; he seems to have become familiar with him only from Being and Nothingness onward, where Hegel, along with Kant, Husserl, and Heidegger, is one of his chosen interlocutors and adversaries. This essay deals with certain specifically philosophical aspects of the debate: the conception of being-for-itself and being-for-others in Sartre and Hegel. Being and Nothingness also discusses the dialectical conception of nothingness. Juliette Simont has analyzed this question in an important footnote to her article "Sartre et Hegel: le probleme de la qualite et de la quantite." I shall not therefore return to it directly.

In Sartre's analysis of being-for-itself and for-others, the most significant references are to the two Logics (the Science of Logic and the first part of the Encyclopedia) and to the Propédeutique. Sartre's perceptiveness with respect to these dry texts leads one to conjecture that he had more than a merely academic knowledge of Hegel - did he perhaps discuss him with some of Kojève's pupils, with Jean Wahl, Lefèbre, and Hartmann, authors of a collection of selected texts from Hegel, Hyppolite, and Maurice de Gandillac? It is possible, but as yet unproven.

Introduction

Middle English

The period covered by this volume, conventionally Middle English, is of special importance for the history of the language – for precisely the reasons suggested by the adjective ‘middle’. It marks the transition between English as a typologically ‘Old Germanic’ language and English of the type now familiar to us. These four centuries are particularly rich in radical and system-transforming changes in both phonology and morphology; they also provide a much richer corpus of evidence than Old English, both in numbers of texts and regional spread.

During this time as well, linguistic (along with political) dominance shifted from Wessex in the south-west to the south-east and particularly the southeast midlands, and the roots of today's standard dialects were laid down. The wider regional variety of texts allows us to examine more specimens of more dialect types than we could earlier; this is made even more helpful by another general characteristic of the period: the profound isolation of regional writing traditions. There was not, until quite late, much in the way of strong influence from any regionally localised standard or Schriftsprache.

In later Old English times, even regions far from the political centre in Wessex often showed West Saxon influence; after the Conquest anyone who wrote in English normally wrote in his own regional dialect, according to more or less well-defined local conventions, some of them of great phonological informativeness. This lack of standardisation also encouraged orthographic experimentation; and we have some very useful ‘eccentric’ texts like the Ormulum (see 2.1.3), whose authors have to one degree or another ‘invented’ their spelling systems, and in the process told us a great deal about aspects of linguistic structure that tend to be invisible in less fluid traditions.

Beginnings of the study of Middle English

Traditionally, the start of Middle English is dated in 1066 with the Norman Conquest and its finish in 1485 with the accession of Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch. Both dates are political and historical, and the events they represent may have an impact on the development of the English language in the longer term but they are hardly appropriate as guides to the dating of periods in it. In any case language does not change as abruptly as such stark dates would suggest and the whole matter of when Middle English began and ended depends on the features which are regarded as significant in marking a change in the language. The period is called ‘Middle’ English because it falls between Old and Modern English. To most people today Middle English has seemed closer to Modern than to Old English for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most important of these has been the influence of Geoffrey Chaucer. His reputation as the ‘Father of English Poetry’ has meant that many people have some familiarity with Middle English through his writings. More importantly, his work has been almost constantly available since Caxton issued the editio princeps of The Canterbury Tales in 1476. Each subsequent century has seen its great editor of Chaucer (Ruggiers 1984) and these editors have kept Chaucer and Middle English very much in the public eye. The only other author who comes anywhere near Chaucer in this respect is Malory, whose Le Morte Darthur was published several times in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Introduction

The title of this chapter, ‘The literary language’, suggests that there is a clear division between literary and non-literary languages in the Middle English period. As is true of any period in English, there exists a highly literary style at one end of the spectrum and an equally clear non-literary style at the other end, but in between there are so many gradations that it is difficult to draw a precise boundary between them. One can, however, say that if one were to attempt to draw such a boundary, it would for the Middle English period be drawn in a rather different place from the one which we would recognise as appropriate for the modern situation. Today literature is traditionally regarded as both an exclusive and an evaluative term; works which lack an aesthetic structure or an emotional appeal are readily dismissed as being not literature. The growth of a book-buying market has led to literature being advertised and sold as something quite separate from other printed material. The word literature comes ultimately from Latin littera, ‘that which is written’, and this definition reflects Middle English attitudes to literature more adequately than contemporary ones do, though the beginnings of a modern attitude can be traced at the end of the medieval period. It is in the fifteenth century that literary texts like the Canterbury Tales begin to be produced by themselves in de luxe manuscripts as though they were special texts which needed a specialized form of reading. Until that time, and in most cases long afterwards as well, literary texts appeared with other written material in compendia of one type or another. What we would now classify as literary texts do not have a different status in presentation or format.

Dialect method and the study of Middle English

Introduction

The most striking fact about Middle English is that it exhibits by far the greatest diversity in written language of any period before or since. Before 1100 – in the Old English period – extant written sources for the study of variation are rather sparse, and much of the Late Old English literary output is in a relatively invariant West Saxon literary language. Similarly, close to the end of the Middle English period (in the fifteenth century), we witness the rise and subsequent spread of a relatively uniform written variety – the beginnings of ‘standard English’. From that century onward, the vast bulk of printed documents is in this variety, regardless of the geographical provenance of the author: documents do not readily betray their region of origin, and the dialectal diversity that continued to exist in speech is suppressed in writing. For this reason, much of our knowledge of Early Modern English variation depends much more on indirect evidence, such as contemporary commentaries on pronunciation (on which see especially Dobson 1968), and much less on variable forms attested in the texts themselves. For written Middle English, on the other hand, our access to variation is direct, and it is this primary source that we use to reconstruct the diversity of spoken Middle English.

Variability in written Middle English is very wide-ranging at every linguistic level: spelling, morphology, syntax and lexicon. There are also several non-linguistic dimensions in which this variation can be observed. Of these, the geographical and chronological dimensions are most immediately obvious: texts from different areas are different, and later texts differ very markedly from earlier ones (for some examples see Lass in this volume).

Introduction

In many ways ‘Middle’ is an appropriate term for the syntax of the period that will be the subject of discussion in this chapter. As Roger Lass says in chapter 2 (section 2.2) of this volume, ‘middle’ indicates the transitional nature of the language in this period; ‘transitional’, of course, only with hindsight. Lass further refers to the typological use of the term ‘middle’ within the family of Germanic languages, representing among other things a language with a relatively ‘poor’ inflectional system. Translated into syntactic terms, a ‘middle’ language tends to have a fairly strict word order, and to make greater use of periphrastic constructions; i.e. it relies more heavily on auxiliary verbs, prepositional phrases, etc.

Compared with the Old English period, when the syntax of the language was relatively stable (see vol. I, section 4.1), the Middle English period is indeed one of change. Much has been written about the causes of the rapid loss of inflections, which started in the Late Old English period in the northern part of the country and which was more or less concluded in the fourteenth century with the exception of some enclaves in the extreme south. Without doubt the fact that Old English had initial stress played a role. It must have contributed to the neutralisation of vowel qualities in inflectional endings and their almost total subsequent demise. However, when we consider the fact that other Germanic (initial-stress) languages did not all lose their inflections, it cannot have been a decisive factor.

Sources and methodology

General principles

Names, whether of places or of people, have by definition a distinctive standing vis-à-vis the language at large. Although ultimately derived from elements of common vocabulary (not necessarily that of the language they currently grace), they have become emptied of their original etymological denotation; and this is true even for those whose form still coincides with that of the related lexical items: no-one expects to find cattle wading across the river at Oxford and, should a Mr Butcher actually be in the meat trade, the coincidence almost excites mirth.

On the one hand, this semantic detachment promotes cross-cultural survival: some Present-Day ‘English’ place names are traceable to Celtic forms at least two millennia old, a few even suspected of going back to pre-Celtic times; some ‘English’ baptismal names have Hebrew origins. On the other, it lays names open to phonological attrition, for no more of any form need survive than is required for acting, in context, as an unambiguous signal or pointer. Name compounds are thus subject to early obscuration, to having their unstressed syllables reduced more drastically than similar ones of analogous ‘meaningful’ forms, and to being ‘folk-etymologised’ (Lass 1973; Coates 1987; Colman 1989a and b; Clark 1991). As well as complicating the etymologising process, this makes name material an unreliable guide to the incidence and the chronology (though not the nature) of general sound changes; it raises, indeed, a possibility of there having been specifically onomastic changes, related to the general ones but carrying them further (see further below, pp. 593–4).