What follows is less than a book review and more than a book report – I hope. My plan is to convey a first impression, chapter-by-chapter, every week or so.
Practical Identities, Singular and General: Differing Conceptions of “We.”
Spontaneous action, individual or common, has a tragic dimension. Sophocles’ Oedipus is the archetype: although he did not intend to kill his father, marry his mother, and bring the plague upon Thebes, that that is what he turned out to be is as horrifying to him as to anyone, and he accepts blame for the pollution he has caused. As Pinkard observes, “[i]t is not merely the thought that things turn out differently than we might have thought, but the realization that this different outcome turned out to be included in our ends after all and that we ourselves were responsible for these unanticipated results” (33). Although the case of Oedipus is singular, Sartre ascribes the consciousness of “who we turned out to be” to collective action as well.
Collective action may take one of several forms. One is a kind of “togetherness,” which characterizes a group of individuals who share an aim, who understand one another as sharing an aim, but are somehow not engaged with one another in sharing that aim (they are “without any real sharing of the aim” [my emphasis]” (35). A real aim, I take it, would be a reason for action that reaches beyond the “inert” purpose that in fact unites them. Sartre’s term for this is “seriality.” Being one of a series seems to mean being aware that one counts as a member of a set – and no more than that. Thus, the individuals on the corner of 34th and Vine count as members of the set of people waiting for a certain bus, but they perceive no reasons for action, no potential for spontaneity, beyond what they have done often in the past and expect to do often in the future. Given their equivalence as mere members of a set, counting as such owing to a single easily-acquired property, no individual is necessary to the group and each is dispensable or “superfluous.”
