What does Sartre mean by quote B&N Page 161

Moliere

Picking Sartre back up after the break and restarted temporality because I wanted to get a clearer picture than I was getting in order to do the compare/contrast with Descartes' cogito -- it's a good exercise for me to get very specific about what Sartre means.

I'm presently reading the phenomenological investigation of the past, which is meant as a precursor sketch for the metaphysics of temporality to draw from.

There's an analogy that he makes between his notion of the past having being. The topic is memory, and Sartre comes down squarely on there being a difference between memory and the present such that memory is not a modification of one's present neurological goings-ons.

The sentence in question is the final sentence at the bottom of the paragraph on page 161, and it reads:

We shall not succeed in constituting the dimension "past" out of elements borrowed exclusively from the present any more than "geneticists" have succeeded in constituting extension from unextended elements

I have no idea what this analogy is supposed to be saying. This book is written before the double helix -- my copy says 1943, and google says double helix was 1953. I know the current theory but I have literally no clue what these geneticists were supposed to be doing, which makes the analogy hard to interpret.

I understand his side in the matter is to say that they've failed at doing it and seems to draw rhetorical force for his distintion between the past and the present being a real distinction on pain of being unable to distinguish between reality and hallucination.

But what on earth is constituting extension from unextended elements with respect to geneticists in 1940's-ish France?

EDIT: I've found the beginning of a lead here -- interesting to learn that there actually is this quirk in the history of French biology in the first place! Not sure if it'll lead to clarification or not as of yet...

View Answer

T Clark

I have no idea what this analogy is supposed to be saying. This book is written before the double helix -- my copy says 1943, and google says double helix was 1953. I know the current theory but I have literally no clue what these geneticists were supposed to be doing, which makes the analogy hard to interpret. — Moliere

I don't know much about Sartre and I won't participate in the discussion beyond this post. The study of genetics did not begin with the discovery of DNA in the 1950s. Gregor Mendel did studies in the 1850s and 1860s that laid out the basics of sexual inheritance without identifying a mechanism. His work sat on a shelf until about 1900 when it was rediscovered. I don't know if this is what Sartre was referring to or not.

Probably not relevant, but Erwin Schrödinger of cat fame wrote a neat little book in the late 1940s that laid out what the mechanism of inheritance would look like without specific detail. That was added by Crick and Watson in 1953. Schrodinger's book is "What is Life." Here's a link if you're interested.

https://archive.org/details/WhatIsLife-EdwardSchrodinger

hypericin

But what on earth is constituting extension from unextended elements with respect to geneticists in 1940's-ish France? — Moliere

I think the link you found is a good clue. Sartre no doubt inherited the French anti-Mendelian sentiment of the time. One strain of that argument may have been: how can you get from the mere notion of genes, which had no known, and perhaps no conceivable, physical mechanism, to the concrete, physical features the traits supposedly correspond to? There was a gap, perhaps a reversal of today's gap in the hard problem: instead of an impossible leap from physical neurons to non-physical qualia, we have a leap from non-physical genes to physical traits.

Similarly, Sartre seems to say, how can we bridge the gap between present elements, such as artifacts, or memories encoded in neurons, to the past as such? We can no more arrive at the past by accumulating present artifacts than we can arrive at physical traits by accumulating or manipulating non-physical genes.

Moliere

I don't know much about Sartre and I won't participate in the discussion beyond this post. The study of genetics did not begin with the discovery of DNA in the 1950s. — T Clark

This makes more sense of the quote to me. Especially with....

Similarly, Sartre seems to say, how can we bridge the gap between present elements, such as artifacts, or memories encoded in neurons, to the past as such? We can no more arrive at the past by accumulating present artifacts than we can arrive at physical traits by accumulating or manipulating non-physical genes. — hypericin

The only thing I'm really wondering now is what does "elements" refer to?

Wow, never expected to delve into the history of biology while reading Sartre! :D

hypericin

Oh cool, I didn't notice accepted answers were a thing now.

Gregory

↪Moliere

Philosophers often make up there own language while writing about science. Some words like elements might have a mere generic meaning. I think your quotation is saying something like you cann't get purposive organism from matter without providing a form, any more than you can have a permanent now by adding up past moments.

What does Sartre mean by quote B&N Page 161

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Categories

More Discussions