“Get the Guests:” Jean-Paul Sartre’s Theory of Intersubjectivity and its Implications for Communicative Action
Abstract
In this paper, I will show that Jean-Paul Sartre’s ontological theory has broad and
devastating effects on the possibility of successful language use. First, Sartre’s ontology
of the isolated individual or being-for-itself leads to a complex dilemma with striking
similarities to the paradox of Immanuel Kant’s moral theory. Sartre’s resolution of this
paradox follows the same track of sociality found in Hegel’s earlier Master-slave
dialectic, although Sartre alters the initial course of such a characteristic interaction. This
change of direction causes Sartre’s social ontology to develop into a zero-sum exchange
in which one can only serve as a free subject by casting the other into the mode of an
object or instrument. Within such a system, the free subject who issues a speech act is
incapable of taking the requisite communicative orientation towards the hearer, because
she is wholly unreceptive to the potential of criticism from the hearer. With the speaker
incapable of adopting the appropriate performative attitude towards a hearer, the two
participants can never reach a cooperatively secured and shared understanding of any
given speech act and linguistic communication becomes impossible within the framework
of Sartre’s social ontology.