1. I disagree with Marjorie Grene in Sartre (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973) when she maintains that Sartre does not reject the Cartesian starting point. I think her position rests in part on a misinterpretation of Sartre's claim that pre-reflective consciousness is self-conscious. In an interview in 1975, Sartre did describe himself as a Cartesian philosopher inBeing and Nothingness, but I think that is because he starts with consciousness as Descartes did. However, his analysis of consciousness and its relation to the world, the body and others takes him far away from a truly Cartesian view of thecogito.See Jean-Paul Sartre, “An Interview with Jean-Paul Sartre,” conducted by Dr. Michel Rybalka, Dr. Oreste F. Pucciani, and Miss Susan Gruenheck,The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1981), p. 8.
2. Jean-Paul Sartre,Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 337. All future references to this work will be followed in the text by BN and the page number.
3. Sartre, BN 319–22 acknowledges that he took from Hegel the view that the Other is necessary for the existence of my consciousness as self-consciousness, but he argues, against Hegel, that the claim only works on the ontological and not on the epistemological level.
4. Barnes,Sartre(New York: Lippincott, 1973), pp. 78–79 gives a good discussion of this point.
5. See Sartre, “No Exit,”No Exit and The Flies, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), p. 61 for a similar remark and Arthur Danto,Jean-Paul Sartre(New York: Viking Press, 1975), chapter four, especially pp. 107–21.