Sartre rejected Cartesian dualism by treating material givens as meaning-sedimented facticities

Evidence

Sartre, as I read him, is not a Cartesian, however. He does not understand the givens of our situation as pure materialities devoid of human intentionalities. Th ey are facticities. Th at is, consciousness is not, as with Descartes, a passive meaning fi nder as much as it is an active meaning giver. In disclosing the meanings of the world, consciousness also constitutes them. Given that every materiality we confront is already sedimented with historical, social, political, economic, and cultural layers of intentional acts, and given that consciousness fi nds meaning already inhering in the materialities that confront it, it appears that materialities are meaningful in themselves. Facticities, materialities imbued with human meaning, that is, appear to be facts, material givens that seem to be immune from, and independent of, our intentionalities. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 63

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clears up the en-soi/pour-soi misreading by explaining facticité as meaning-sedimented materiality rather than inert matter.
• DEEPTHINKING: The insight that facticities appear as facts precisely because they are already saturated with sedimented intentional acts — meaning hides its own constitution — is dense and worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Sartre rejects the Cartesian split of free will from determined passions — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1078; Sartre denies any phenomenal-noumenal distinction in being; The Cartesian cogito is the only absolute truth grounding all other knowledge. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 21 (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• Sartre divides being into free for-itself consciousness and inert in-itself matter #qualifies (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 496