Toward Ecosophy

A little while ago I picked up a copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's hefty philosophical tome Being and Nothingness at a used book store in Providence. I know, I have odd tastes, but there it was, and Sartre's one of the thinkers who's been on my get-to list for a long time. I also know that most people don't do well plunging headfirst into an 812-page doorstop of a book with no previous exposure to existentialism other than a few scraps in college thirty-five years ago, but that's also my style -- put it down to a youthful infatuation with Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, but big books don't scare me, and I'd rather get the whole picture in a single massive lump than have to piece things together from more obviously accessible books. 

So I launched into Being and Nothingness, and as I got used to Sartre's technical language, which is fairly opaque -- he's a twentieth century philosopher, after all -- I noticed something very odd: a peculiar kind of déjà vu. 

It's not as though I've read Being and Nothingness before -- I'm quite sure I haven't. It's as though I'm encountering, for the first time, the systematic logic behind the way the world has always appeared to me. 

Sartre makes sense to me. The way he puts consciousness at the center of the human experience, rather than (say) the reasoning mind or the will; the way that he distinguishes between the ordinary engagement of consciousness in the details of everyday life, in which the big questions stay hidden, and the experience of disengagement through reflection, in which a dizzying gap opens up between consciousness and all its objects; the incisive way in which he shows that deterministic theories that reject the freedom of the will (as popular in his time as ours) are simply ways to try to evade the consequences of reflection, and try to be something the way a rock is a rock, which is the one thing consciousness can never do -- it all makes a very peculiar kind of intuitive sense, not as though I've thought these things before, but as though these things are implied by the way I naturally think, and I'd have known them if I'd followed things out systematically enough. 

It's an intriguing experience. I'm left wondering if I read the existentialists in my last lifetime -- I died around 1960 that time around, so the time factor works out nicely -- and they made enough of an impression on me that the habits of thought made the leap between lives. Or is it just that my mentality is the kind that fits an existentialist model unusually well?