Banca de DEFESA: LUCIENE BRAGA RAMOS BORGES

THE CONFLICT OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY IN THE book Being and Nothingness

Conscience; Humanism; Intersubjectivity; Freedom; Other.

Sartre approaches intersubjectivity, in his work Being and Nothingness (1943/2014), taking into
consideration the perspective that man, described by him as human reality, relates to other men in a
fundamentally conflictive way. We opt, following Sartre himself, to use in the Dissertation the term
“human reality” in most of the times that we refer to man.2 Other times, depending on the context, we
use the terms subject, subjectivity, being-for-itself (ontologically) or conscience, but each of the terms
will be placed in due time and fully related to the context mentioned in the topic or chapter in which it
will be approached. That said, as it appears, the conflictive way we talked about above, a result of the
encounter between human realities, concentrates in the manner we encounter, fundamentally, the
other, as constitutive of our being-in-the-world, and in the fact that this constitution reflects itself on
the concrete world of our actions. This would imply, in any case, in the encounter between freedoms,
in a constant process of transcendence of their original situations. The radicality of freedom would be
in the core of the conflict. The question about how each human reality exists in the world, in the
presence of the other, and how Sartre explains this constant tension, that follows the encounter, must
accompany us as a guiding thread in the process of writing this Dissertation, since we strive to
understand if this tension, in human relations, for Sartre, means isolation and dehumanization. We
consider, first, that, Sartre addresses, above all, man as being-in-the-world, conscience understood as
freedom; second, the encounter with the other as contingent; third, human actions as free and,
consequently, as responsible, therefore ethical; and, fourth, that it is based on overcoming, that is, of
transcendence of these contingencies, that it can be expected the accomplishment of humanism, as
Sartre defends in Existencialism is a Humanism (1946/2010), his most famous lecture. In the final
considerations, we will have a dialog with Franklin Leopoldo e Silva, presenting his analysis of the
sartrean humanism, described by him as hard humanism.