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Animals

Crabs

Peter Royle shows no vexation over Sartre’s crustacean fixation.

Crabs? What have crabs to do with philosophy?

It is well known that at a certain stage in his life Jean-Paul Sartre felt himself to be persecuted by lobsters, crayfish and other crustaceans, including crabs; and that crustaceans, especially crabs, figure prominently in his literature. But surely this obsession can be attributed to his experimentation with mescaline, or belongs to the individual vision of the world that Sartre says each and every one of us has by virtue of the project that defines him as a unique human being? I’ll argue, on the contrary, that crabs emerge from some of Sartre’s deepest thinking.

One of the distinctive features of Sartre’s philosophy is the role played within it by such qualities as hardness, softness, wetness, sweetness, and viscosity, phenomena that would generally be considered as irrelevant to philosophy, but which Sartre regards as universally significant. Viscosity (stickiness or sliminess, for example), is universally repugnant, says Sartre, because it reverses the relations between observer (a ‘being for-itself’ in Sartre’s jargon) and physical object (a ‘being in-itself’). The universal ideal that underlies the unique project of every individual is the hypothetical combination of observer and object as an ‘in-itself-for-itself’.

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