A ‘Drainage Hole’ in Being: Sartre and First-Person Realism

ABSTRACT Both classical phenomenology and contemporary first-person realism accord a special metaphysical status to perspectives. Yet ‘inegalitarian’ forms of first-person realism are, I argue, vulnerable to Sartre’s response to the problem of other minds in Being and Nothingness. After discussing the special status Sartre accords to the first-person perspective (‘ipseity’) and signaling its affinities with first-person realism, I argue that Sartre’s description of encountering the other undermines Giovanni Merlo’s argument for metaphysical solipsism. I then show how a metaphysical notion of standpoint borrowed from the first-person realist literature irons out a wrinkle in Sartre’s transcendental argument regarding other minds. I close by suggesting a kinship between Sartre’s notion of a ‘detotalized totality’ and the ‘fragmentalist’ idea embraced by some first-person realists that reality does not form a coherent whole.