Sartre’s Existential Epistemology

So we may ask, is Sartre’s existential epistemology analytic or synthetic?

This is a really tough question to answer. Sartre wrote in the French rationalist tradition such as did Descartes if we are to rely on his own statements. Descartes wrote about propositions though. He would string together analytic propositions and consider their logical relation. At least he did so in The Meditations. Jean Paul Sartre did not pursue such a linguistic philosophy of the analysis of analytic propositions as a proof of self existence.

Perhaps we should stipulate right off that it would be convenient to accept that Sartre’s existentialist works abandon the analytic/synthetic distinction, and did so before Quine formally abandoned that position. If Sartre has also abandoned the subject-object distinction in Being and Nothingness and the Critique of Dialectical Reason has he done so subjectively as a philosophical point or explicitly saying that fundamentally there is no difference between mind and referents of mind? The limits of Sartre’s own mind, or that of any other mind, in perceiving what is regarded as the inanimate universe or better, that inert material without thought, could find no border to the realm of objectivity they input except for the brilliance of the illumination of their own awareness of that which is. In such an extension of the function of ego and awareness in-the-world, self-awareness such as Descartes utilized is replaced by a consciousness of consciousness in directly describing the experience of the knower. 

Descartes proposition based analysis of existence as a self-standing beingness is a kind of secondary language loop isn’t it? Does one need to justify or explain in analytical propositions the self-awareness of existing at all? Admirable and useful as the procedure may be to the evolution of philosophical ideas, for the circumstances of the actual living soul it may be enough to be aware of the awareness of mind and its experience within a malleable field transformable both by the exterior forces of the primordial nature and by the knowledgeable insights of the thinker. Such awareness of mind may be a kind of analytic synthetic apprehension of qualities of experience.

Sartre’s first person description of subjective and objective experience is a kind of pre-theory of knowledge regard for the phenomenality of being. It would be perhaps therefore an error to try to place Sartre’s epistemology within either an analytic or synthetic field, unless we were to classify as analytic only thoughts couched in propositional logic and then by default place his first-person descriptions of experience from a philosophical point of view within the alternative synthetic camp. It would seem wrong to classify as synthetic thoughts that do not particular or delimit in some objects what is a monistic field occasionally reduced to pluralistic components selected for representative analysis. 

If Sartre’s experience of experience is the context of his epistemology then it is appropriate to classify Sartre’s language about it within Quine’s camp of Ontological Relativity. The epistemology of Sartre’s existentialism is a specialized word and thought ontology that when considered subjectively by readers pursue an equally ambiguous phenomenalism of words for themselves unified in analytic-synthetic terms. 

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