Why is it that some people will act compassionately in certain situations when others will not? Why do some people lie or cheat or steal while others are honest in one, two, or all three of these ways? One way of answering these questions is to explain the aetiology of character traits, to point to the origins of character in nature or nurture or some combination of the two. But another, more fundamental kind of answer tries to explain the constitution of traits, to point to current facts about some people that make them behave compassionately or honestly in those situations. This is more fundamental because it identifi es more precisely the state of affairs whose origins the aetiological answer attempts to identify. It aims to tell us what character consists in. Once we know this, we can know what we need to change about ourselves in order to change our characters. We can also ask about the basis and reliability of our everyday beliefs about our own char- acter traits and those of other people. Sartre’s famous theory of bad faith is an answer to this epistemic question, as we will see later on in this book.
But he has also formulated a theory in answer to the constitutive question, and this is more fundamental in his philosophy than his account of bad faith, as we will also see, because he thinks of bad faith itself as something that character traits can consist in. Our investigation of Sartre’s philosophy of character will therefore begin with the constitutive question. But fi rst we need to clarify that question itself.
Before trying to work out what character consists in, we need to defi ne the thing we are asking about. What does the language of character refer to?
We can start by defi ning a trait as a relatively stable disposition to behave in a certain way when in situations with certain features. That this disposition must be relatively stable seems beyond doubt. Just as one swallow does not make a spring, one cowardly act does not make a coward. This does not mean that traits must be fi xed, however, since there is nothing contradic- tory in the idea of character development. This idea that character traits explain our behaviour but are nonetheless aspects of ourselves that we can change is central to Sartre’s philosophy. We must be careful, furthermore, not to confuse the notion of a character trait with something characteristic of a person: a trait can be widespread or even universal, and so not serve
to characterise anyone in particular. But of course a trait might equally be relatively uncommon or even entirely idiosyncratic, and therefore be char- acteristic of a few individuals or even just of one.
Refi ning this initial defi nition, we are presented with two options. One is to require that someone cannot possess a particular trait without reli- ably behaving in certain ways in certain kinds of situations. One cannot be honest, on this view, unless one usually acts honestly in situations in which one could act dishonestly, and a brave person rarely shrinks from danger.
An infl uential argument that people do not have character traits as tradi- tionally conceived is based on a version of this view, according to which character traits ‘are reliably manifested in trait-relevant behaviour across a diversity of trait-relevant eliciting conditions that may vary widely in their conduciveness to the manifestation of the trait in question’ (Doris, Lack of Character, 22). Our other option is to understand traits purely in terms of inner mental events. We can defi ne a trait, on this view, simply as a disposi- tion to see the world in certain ways, to think and feel in certain ways in response to certain kinds of situation. Such perceptions, thoughts, and feel- ings will generally incline the bearer of the trait towards the relevant kind of behaviour, but nonetheless this behaviour might not be forthcoming, due to the presence of countervailing traits. Somebody might be honest but insecure, for example, so be inclined to tell the truth on a particular occa- sion, but end up lying for fear of being disliked. The more compassionate someone is, the more they will think about the suffering of others and the more upset they will be by news of such suffering, but whether they are more likely to try to avert or alleviate such suffering will depend on their other traits.
To see more clearly the difference between the two options, consider again Milgram’s experiments described in the last chapter. Did any of those who continued to obey the experimenter right up to the maximum shock level, only stopping when the shocks could not get any stronger, manifest the trait of compassion in that experiment? If we insist that traits are gener- ally manifested in the relevant actions, then the fact that hardly any of these subjects behaved compassionately points to the conclusion that few of them possessed the trait of compassion. But if we take our second option, we can say that all those who protested against the experiment and who were clearly upset by their role in it displayed the trait of compassion to some extent, even if this was outweighed by other traits so that they went on to behave in an apparently uncompassionate way.
So which of these two understandings of traits should we adopt? There can be no empirical answer to this question, because in this area empiri- cal data can record only the subjects’ responses to their situations, whereas what we want to know is how such responses should be classifi ed. Theoreti- cal considerations, however, seem to support the idea that we need not build behavioural response into the defi nition of character traits. This is essentially because including behavioural response in our understanding of a particular
trait requires us to understand each individual as possessing a vast array of traits, each of which disposes the individual to a specifi c kind of action in response to a situation specifi ed in great detail. Subjects in the Milgram experiment who failed to show disobeying-an-authority-fi gure-compassion might well show compassion-in-the-absence-of-an-authority-fi gure. But if we exclude behavioural response, we can talk about general compassion.
This more general notion of a trait has greater explanatory power, as it allows us to explain an individual’s behaviour in a vast range of situations by referring to the same limited set of traits. This brings with it a greater pre- dictive power: we can predict someone’s mental and behavioural responses to a novel situation so long as we know enough about that situation and enough about that person’s general traits. What is more, the task of keeping track of our own traits and those of the people around us becomes vastly more complicated if we understand traits to be more limited in scope and hence more numerous. We would no longer be able to refl ect that we are somewhat too timid among strangers or too keen to blurt out the truth, for example, but would have to think of ourselves as having displayed a wide variety of traits on a wide variety of highly specifi ed occasions and would be unable to prescribe any remedy for the future. The moral purposes of thinking in terms of character would therefore be hamstrung.
Not only is it preferable to think of character in terms of mental events, moreover, but this understanding fi ts more squarely with Sartre’s account.
Character infl uences our perceptions, thoughts, and feelings, on this view, not in the sense that we explicitly try to decide how to see things, think about them, and feel about them, taking our character into account, but rather in the simpler sense that these mental events refl ect the underlying dispositions that we describe in the language of character. ‘Consciousness does not know its own character’, Sartre writes, ‘except in determining itself refl ectively from the standpoint of another’s point of view’. Instead, con- sciousness ‘exists its character in pure indistinction non-thematically and non-thetically . . . in the nihilation by which it recognizes and surpasses its facticity’ (B&N: 372). Character accounts for the ways an individual tends to experience the world and tends to think and feel about it, that is to say.
We will investigate this account of the structure of conscious mental events in more detail in the next chapter. For present purposes, what matters is that we should understand an individual’s character as the set of relatively stable dispositions to experience, think, and feel in certain kinds of ways, which thereby generally inclines that person to behave in related ways.
Notice that not all of our character trait terms actually pick out such dispositions, however. An inconsiderate person, for example, seems best described as someone whose perceptions, thoughts, and feelings notice- ably lack consideration of other people, rather than someone who sees, thinks, and feels inconsiderately. It seems better, that is, to say that incon- siderate people lack a disposition that considerate people possess than to say that there are two dispositions here and that one person cannot
have both. We can distinguish, therefore, between positive trait terms that name dispositions and negative trait terms that are applied when someone lacks a disposition.
Given that we apply positive and negative character trait terms in this way, it seems that we should understand them as functional terms: they refer to properties of the individual concerned only by reference to the func- tions those properties have in infl uencing the ways in which the individual perceives, thinks, and feels. Calling somebody an honest person is merely to claim that they have some property or set of properties that are responsible for certain patterns in their experiences, thoughts, and emotions. The lan- guage of character, therefore, leaves it entirely open just what these prop- erties are. We are still left with the constitutive question that we began with: what is it that makes the brave person brave, the coward cowardly, and so on? This question, we can now see, is to be answered by pointing to whatever properties play the functional roles that our characterological language indicates, whatever it is about a person that explains why they behave in these ways. John McDowell rightly says that the concept of a virtue that it is ‘the concept of a state whose possession accounts for the actions which manifest it’ (‘Virtue and Reason’, § 2). We can extend this point to cover all character traits, not just virtuous ones.
Sartre argues that the patterns in the way an individual sees, thinks, feels, and behaves refl ect the projects that individual has chosen to pursue and could choose not to pursue. Our projects therefore warrant the ascrip- tion of character traits. Despite the centrality of this theory of character to Sartre’s work as a whole, most commentators have failed to draw attention to it or to analyse it in any great detail. They usually ignore the issue of character altogether, but when they do not they tend to read him as claim- ing that there is not really any such thing as character. We will see in the next few chapters how this has distorted their readings of Sartre and hence the understanding of Sartre among the intellectual community in general.
But fi rst, in order to see that this really is Sartre’s view, we will consider precisely why commentators have so often gone wrong here and the ways that they should have gone instead.
The problem seems to arise from two aspects of Sartre’s philosophy.
One is his account of human existence as comprised of ‘transcendence’ and
‘facticity’. The other is his theory that the self or ego is a ‘transcendent’
object. Terminology plays its role in generating these diffi culties, as we will see. These two aspects of Sartre’s philosophy involve two distinct senses of the term ‘transcendent’, both of which are derived from its root meaning of ‘going beyond’. An individual’s facticity is the set of facts true of them at a given time. Imagining that things were otherwise, wanting them to be otherwise, and acting to make them otherwise are ways in which we all transcend our facticities all of the time. In describing the ego or self as tran- scendent, Sartre means only that it is external to consciousness rather than contained within it, something that has more to it than we can be aware of
at any given time. Transcendence of this sort is contrasted with immanence:
the ego is not in consciousness. Ordinary worldly objects like chairs and tables are also transcendent in this sense, according to Sartre, as are certain non-physical objects like melodies and mathematical formulae.
Commentators often take Sartre’s discussion of our existence in terms of facticity and transcendence to exclude character. In his book Using Sartre, for example, Gregory McCulloch equates ‘transcendence’ with ‘freedom’
and understands ‘the doctrine about freedom’ as being ‘opposed to the idea that we have a nature or essence which determines how we should act or live’ (57). This latter claim is unclear: it can be read as the denial that one’s ‘nature or essence’ determines how one ought to behave, the denial that one’s ‘nature or essence’ in fact determines one’s behaviour, or the denial that we have a ‘nature or essence’ at all. His discussions of the rela- tion between freedom and the lack of a nature elsewhere in his book are similarly vague (43, 56–64). But since his defi nitions of facticity make no reference to character traits, he seems to take Sartre to deny that we have a
‘nature or essence’ at all. Facticity, he writes, is made up of ‘the body, and its material history and environment’ (4) or ‘our material surroundings, our own bodily form of existence, [and] our past decisions and choices that have brought us to where we are now’ (57).
This interpretation can also be found in Joseph Catalano’s infl uential work, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (see 82–4), Gary Cox’s recent Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed (66, 96), Peter McInerney’s article ‘Self-Determination and the Project’ (674), and many other works. Phyllis Sutton Morris presents a variant of it in her book Sar- tre’s Concept of a Person (ch. 4), one that has recently been echoed by Nik Farrell Fox and T. Storm Heter (The New Sartre, 15–16; Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement, 29–30). According to this variant, Sartre considers one’s character to be the same as one’s pattern of past actions so that one is a thief just if one has stolen things often enough in the past. The difference between this and the explicit denial of character is merely verbal. Since character traits are defi ned functionally as dispositions towards certain types of behaviour, the theory Morris describes is equivalent to denying that there is any such thing as character, since the patterns of one’s past behaviour can hardly be thought to play this functional role (see Sartre’s Concept of a Person, 99–100). Heter sees this problem and sees that the outright denial of character is implausible, so suggests that we revise Sar- tre’s theory to allow that we form habits through our behaviour (Sartre’s Ethics of Engagement, 32–3). Neither Morris nor Heter allow, therefore, that Sartre has any account of what it is that plays the functional roles picked out by character terms.
This reading of Sartre seems to be based on various comments in Being and Nothingness. One of the most important is the phrase, ‘Essence is what has been’ (B&N: 59; see also B&N: 461, 472, 518). McCulloch refers to this phrase when he describes Sartre’s case of the guilt-ridden homosexual
who denies his sexuality as a man denying that his past sexual behaviour fi ts a homosexual pattern rather than as a man denying that he has a char- acter trait of homosexuality (Using Sartre, 59–60). We will consider what Sartre means in his discussion of this case in chapter 6. What is important here is that this description of the essence of an individual as ‘what has been’ (ce que a été) need not be understood in the way that McCulloch, Catalano, Cox, McInerney, Morris, and Heter seem to understand it. In one place where Sartre uses the phrase, he goes on to say that:
Essence is everything in the human being that we can indicate by the words—that is. Due to this fact it is the totality of characteristics which explain the act. But the act is always beyond that essence; it is a human act only in so far as it surpasses every explanation which we can give of it, precisely because the very application of the formula ‘that is’ to man causes all that is designated, to have-been. (B&N: 59)
If essence is to explain an action, it could not be composed simply of past actions: there needs to be some explanation of how these past actions connect with the action to be explained. If essence is to be everything about a person that can be indicated by the words ‘that is’, moreover, it must include the body. It is not diffi cult to see how the body enters into the explanation of action, but it is diffi cult to see how it might be, at the time of action, something that ‘has been’ in the past. We should rather inter- pret this passage as claiming that a person’s essence inclines them towards certain courses of action, but does not determine those courses of action.
Action surpasses the inclinations that explain it. So describing a person in terms of body and character traits provides an explanation of that person’s past behaviour, but not a defi nitive prediction of their future behaviour, since that person could always behave in ways contrary to their inclina- tions. The language of character, on this view, is not simply shorthand for patterns of past behaviour. It is genuinely explanatory of behaviour, but it is not fully predictive: it indicates only what one has been and done so far, not what one must continue to be and do.
This reading is supported by Sartre’s subsequent discussion of what he terms ‘psychological determinism’, a view of human beings that ‘provides us with a nature productive of our acts’ and thereby ‘denies that transcen- dence of human reality which makes it emerge beyond its own essence’
(B&N: 64). In this passage, Sartre contrasts the notion of an essence with the deterministic notion of a nature. He objects not to the idea that humans have characters that explain their behaviour, which he calls ‘essences’, but to the idea that these characters are fi xed and determine their behaviour, which he calls ‘natures’ (see also B&N: 461–2, 465–6). It is therefore a mistake to take Sartre’s terms ‘nature’ and ‘essence’ to be synonymous, as McCulloch does, for example. Failure to see this distinction in sartrais, that ‘nature’ names a particular kind of essence, is one central reason why