Jean Paul Sartre may be the last of the great philosophers of the modern period (fr. 16th century to late 20th C). It is often noted that the rise of modernity from Descartes forward is largely characterized by an increased emphasis on the "thinking subject" which is the starting point for all inquiry, whether scientific, moral or social. Sartre takes the focus on individual subjectivity and "absolute" free will to a level seldom seen before or since. From the standpoint of the 21st C, after postmodernists and cognitive scientists have (for very different reasons) debunked the idea of free will and rational subjectivity, Sartre may appear terribly "dated." But I wouldn't be surprised if this giant of the 20th century gets a warmer reception from philosophers and concerned citizens in years to come. Why? What does Sartre offer us now? What did he offer to his post-war contemporaries, whether they were philosophers, radio audiences, lay readers, journalists or concerned citizens the world over in the mid 20th C? The answer is deceptively simple: Integrity, Responsibility and Empowerment. Like the knock of good conscience at the proverbial door after the horrors of WW2, Sartre unremittingly made the argument that a) each person is responsible for their own actions b) that there are no alibis, no excuses for not doing what you believe is right and c) there are no alibis for doing things that you believe to be wrong.
This is so simple, so undiluted, that it might seem uninteresting. Wrong. Context is everything here. So let's set the stage. The year is 1945, the myth of progress and Western moral supremacy has been horrifically exploded like so much shrapnel on the battlefields of WW2. Some religious Jews can no longer believe in a God that would or could allow the Holocaust, the death camps and the gas chambers. There is confusion and shock that ordinary decent Germans were complicit in carrying out Nazi policies; and there is shame and incredulity that most of the French played along with the Aryan piper in Vichy France.
Enter Sartre, a young philosopher, novelist and playwright who had been pushed to the moral breaking point. One can imagine him declaring, "I cannot and will not accept this! I must do whatever I can to resist the Nazis. No one can deprive me of my conscience and ability to choose my actions even at the point of a gun. I will resist even if that means death." So, Sartre's mature philosophy, his "Humanistic Existentialism" emerged directly in response to what he saw as the lame excuses made by so many "respectable" Europeans who *chose* to crawl under a rock while the Nazi goon squads passed through, or *chose* to collaborate with Hitler's minions in Fascist Occupied France. His experience in the French Underground steeled his nerve, and provided impetus for his philosophy that there are no good reasons to violate your own conscience by inaction or collaboration. The term he made famous for trying to get yourself off the hook, trying to deny your own responsibility is "Bad Faith." Bad Faith is the state you are in when you say, to yourself or others, "What can I do? I didn't start the war!" or "I have a bad constitution, awful nerves, I *can't* fight in the underground. I'm afraid" or "What did I know. I knew only what they told me. Everyone did the same. Why am I so bad? We all did it." In 1945, a lot of Germans and French people (and many other Europeans) woke up from the nightmare-war of all time in a state of "Bad Faith." They were giving alibis to themselves and others by the score, They were writing them in essays, reading them in editorials, and basically explaining away the blood on their own hands as best they could, even if that meant simply not discussing the matter (which was common). British rocker, Pete Townshend, has discussed the fact that fathers in his generation would sternly refuse to answer the question,"What did you do during the war, Daddy?" It is, in part, the trauma passed down the generations, the legacy of denial and Bad Faith that is at the center of his "rock opera," Tommy.
JP Sartre, his mistress Simone de Beauvoir, and in the beginning Albert Camus were all part of a movement that embraced literature, drama, philosophy and a humanistic form of journalism. It was Sartre who founded Le Temps Moderne https://en.wikipedia.org/wi..., which is still in print and edited by Claude Lanzmannm , humanitarian activist and director of the famous Holocaust documentary Shoah. During the 40s and 50s, Sartre called out those who had collaborated with the Vichy Gov't as cowards and hypocrites using every medium possible. But he didn't just criticize, *he built a philosophical system based almost completely on the concept of human beings as "absolutely free" and fully responsible for a) what they do b) what they are and c) the state of the world. His famous "formula" is "Existence precedes essence," meaning we exist in a state that does not determine what we become. The nature of our choices determines what we call our "essence" or core character. Not genetics, divine will, upbringing etc. Whatever forces exert themselves on us, the question "Now what?" is always squarely placed on our shoulders. Nobody else can make your next choice or mine. We cannot pass the buck.
What about constraints on our choices? Sartre (borrowing and re-defining concepts from Heidegger) distinguished Facticity from Consciousness. The basis of freedom and responsibility is consciousness itself ("Being-for-itself"), while the situation in which I find myself, like it or not, is "facticity" ("Being-in-itself"). Facticity is the world into which I am born or "thrown" (Heidegger's term) without asking to be thrown there. It may be that I am born and grow up in a war zone, or as a Jew during the 30s, or as a dwarf, or a cripple in a wheel chair. These are conditions of "things" or entities in the world. Buildings, diseases, political parties, weapons, parents, neighbors, sexist and racist behaviors-- all of these are objective ingredients of the overall situation in which you as a free subject find yourself. Taken as a whole, they comprise Facticity, the context within which free will must operate.
Then there is Consciousness or Being-for-itself. This involves the notion of absence. You are *not*a "thing" among other things, like chairs and desks; nor are you a product or "result" of social training by parents, teachers, policemen and soldiers. These are all defined. They are social-types.Their nature is fixed or defined either by nature or institutional norms. Consciousness (Being-for-itself) is *not* fixed or defined. It is to be understood as the open space ("nichts" or"nothingness") of awareness out of which come your "projects." Sartre's depiction of consciousness as "nothingness" might be compared to the proverbial "clear blue sky" as when we say something occurred to us "out of the blue" such as a new idea, a plan, a brilliant song we run to record. These are not the "results" of norms, rules, or institutions. They are the best evidence we have that we are not passive objects thrown into the world like so many rocks with fixed essences or natures .To use Heidegger's terms, we are "thrown projects" ( for a image of this we might render it "thrown projectile" as unlike a thrown rock, we are not inert, but may change direction or speed, i.e. purpose or plans, in mid-flight) Yes, we are thrown into a world that constrains us, and which we did not choose; yet we are also the sum total of our "projects" going forward(i.e. our plans, choices, goals) which for Sartre (but NOT Heidegger) are "Absolutely Free." We also experience the world actively through spontaneous creativity and rationality. These allow us to devise projects and respond to the very real pressures of the world.
Now, it is often objected that Sartre isn't considering the impact of strong emotions, passions, unconscious drives, influence of socialization, trauma, coercion, natural temperament, and, for the religious, the will of God. Sartre is unflinching. There is no God. Stop, as it were, waiting for Godot.As for strong emotions, like buildings and walls, they are simply ingredients in the objective situations, factors to be dealt with like obstacles on a road you are driving on. Fear is not an excuse for avoidance, it can also be confronted. Anger is not license to hurt or kill, it is a force that we can respond to in various ways. I can leave the room rather than hurt the other. I can count to 100 rather than having a tantrum. Every act committed is committed at the expense of all other possible acts at that time. If I leave the room , I can't kill the other. If I kill the other, I must stay in the room. This is reminiscent of Kierkegaard's "either/or". There are no half-measures in the realm of action. An act is something you do to the exclusion of all other possibilities at a given time. If you freeze and do nothing, *that* is NOT inaction, but an act of "Bad Faith" because you are trying to flee from your own Freedom, from your own being. Fleeing or avoiding something is an act issuing from the goal of escape. (see Erich Fromm's book, Escape From Freedom).The self in denial of free will is a "False Self" in a state of "Bad Faith." Starkly, Sartre tells us, there's no way out of this, we are "condemned to freedom" in his words.
What about Freud and Co.? Sartre bravely tried to construct an "Existential Psychoanalysis." Without undue detail here, the key difference between himself and the Freudians is that Sartre refuses to endorse any notion of unconscious determinism. He speaks of pre-conscious forces that (like the physical environment or facticity) we may have to accept as ingredients of the situations. They may influence us but do not determine what we choose and thus what we become. For when the time to act arrives, and we are always compelled to act, we, and nobody else, must choose. An example he gives is "falling in love." It sounds comfortingly passive, like "falling" into a pile of fluffy pillows and roses. We may be pre-consciously attached to someone erotically, but for Sartre it is a cop-out to say "I had no say in the matter. I had to date, then ultimately sleep with this person. It's a function of my Oiedipal Complex according to my analyst." (Btw, Sartre had quite an eventful sex life often involving threesomes with de Beauvoir's female lovers, some of whom were students and minors--but they chose all of that and stood by their choices whenever scandals arose). Falling in love, a typical topic for the analyst, is much more than unconscious feelings and drives before which Cupid's victim is helpless. Sure, strong drives and emotional forces are present moment by moment in a relationship.But again, so are the constraints of the factical world in all other areas. Nazi drill sargeants also exert force on young Germans, but for Sartre that does not absolve the young German of responsibility. Likewise, in love we make little choices while experiencing the push and pull influence of other people and situations. But it is bad faith to say our choices and responses are pre-ordained.Responsibility can be seen as the undeniable ability we have to respond to pressures in life , i.e. response-ability.How should I respond to flirtations? Should I invite her upstairs? Should I accept the invitation to dinner? Even if, (in the ultimate Freudian cliche) I "forget" my lighter upstairs before leaving his/her apartment, I can either choose to go back upstairs and try to spark the romance, or I can say to myself "not now" and thus pull back a bit. We are like navigators-- we can't deny the power of the tides at sea, but we must navigate our way through tee forces with our own purposes firmly in mind rather than being tossed around and finding ourselves washed ashore in a place we do not want to be. We act our way into the romantic relationship, we don't literally fall into it starstruck and love-drunk. This doesn't deny Freud-like urges, but *urges* they remain, *not determinants*. That is his response to Freud. There is no good reason to insist that drives, however strong, *must* override all else. In some sense, our choices influence our future drives, and so Sartre says that to some extent we "choose our emotions." By choosing to go upstairs for the lighter, I also choose the path of erotic love which sets the stage for certain emotions to the exclusion of others going forward. We don't usually experience it that way until we look back and ask "had I not done this or that what might have happened?" So marriage, career, place of residence-- once you factor in the "facticity" that is objectively constraining elements, all the rest is ultimately on you. The Talking Heads' "Once in a Lifetime" captures Bad Faith perfectly. "How did I get here?"
What about the deterministic scientific account of human behavior given in terms of neurology and biology? Sartre, recalling Kant before him, claims that there are 2 perspectives we can adopt when considering ourselves. This goes back to the distinction between Facticity and Consciousness. A scientist looks at the world of "things," i.e. entities or forces that cause other entities and forces to behave in specifiable, mechanistic ways. Kant called this the "phenomenal" realm and Sartre sees it as the world of Facticity, of objects, forces, causes and effects.But there is also the world irreducible to naturalistic inquiry; the world of freedom and spontaneity which is immediately experienced, he say, by all of us at certain times. Sartre does not *argue* for it but tries to directly show the reader its undeniability. (John Searle does much the same but without the passion in the cognitive science debates) Though we experience the results of multiple causes (a toothache, for example), we also experience our own spontaneity in which new ideas and responses to the pain simply come up, out of the blue or "nothingness" which is the space of consciousness itself. Consciousness is not an object or cause, we cannot visualize it through introspection, it is the "space" in which we become aware of ourselves as spontaneously acting on others and situations rather than being acted on by them. A prime example is the power of "negation." We can always say "NO!" to a certain interpretation of a situation, consciously or semi-consciously. My toothache cannot be wished away, it acts on my nerve fibers etc. But the interpretations of the pain are choices. I don't have to indulge the thoughts "this will never pass! I can't take it! Why me!" But if I do not negate those in an act of "stepping back" or detaching, I am choosing to suffer. "Pain is unavoidable, but suffering is an option" according to some self-help book I saw once. This sounds like Sartre.
Indeed cognitive behavioral therapy, and "schema" based therapy are both aimed at mastering the art of detecting and acting on those interpretations ("schemas") that get us into trouble. It seems some of Sartre's thinking has inadvertently become part of mainstream therapy! But Sartre goes further and connects the ability to impose a perspective on a situation with *morality* and creativity. Suppose I am sitting on a bench in a park looking at a mountain. I can see it as a beautiful object to behold. I can see it as a geological formation to be analyzed according to scientific facts and methods. I can see it as an obstacle to something I want to do on the other side of it. I can see it as an interesting challenge should I choose to climb it.The point is that *it is not defined for me in advance, but can be experienced differently depending on my choices, my projects* (for those who read Nietzsche, note the debt to his Perspectivism).
This is a good segue into the final topic I will broach here, Sartre's ethics. If I can impose a different interpretations on things and interpersonal events in accordance with my plans and projects, then the issue is, for Sartre, is to notice which interpretations and plans are really our own ("Authentic") and which we derive from pressure to conform ("Inauthentic/Bad Faith") I may convince myself and others that I support a popular war, but deep down, says Sartre, there's the call of conscience. We know we don't really support it, but fear standing out or being ridiculed perhaps.None of this reduces to ethical "rules" or norms. There are no rules, no norms that can tell us what is good. Only acting out of "integrity", a state in which my beliefs and convictions are in alignment with my actions, and not overpowered by manipulations of others ("other people are Hell"). We are subject to all manner of head games and challenging interactions, but must we lose or sacrifice the projects we *know* we have already chosen? Sartre gives an example of a peeping-tom who is doing exactly what he wants to do with no guilt until he's found out by one of the neighbors. He is now subjected to the "gaze" of the other which turns him from a spontaneous actor (free) to an object of scrutiny and condemnation. It is easy to lose the sense of being a free actor and succumb to the guilt. Notice, this would be buying into the interpretation that you are guilty, not because of the content of the act. After all you enjoyed it til you were "caught." It is the scrutiny of the other that thwarts your capacity to make choices based on your own evaluations and plans. Many people caught being Jewish experienced shame and guilt in Germany, even though they knew better and hated themselves for succumbing to the immense forces at work trying to stigmatize and shame Jews. The courage to be true to your already known convictions in the face of others' machinations and attempts at social control is called "Authenticity" (another term snatched from Heidegger, who hated all this free will existentialism and railed against the French 'perversion' of his philosophy!) At any rate, Sartre's version of Authenticity is to be pictured as the person who is through with alibis and apologies for being as she is. She is the first Lesbian to leave the closet in her small town; the first child in a school to call out a teacher who is abusive; the one who will risk adversity rather than have his/her passions, desires,plans and convictions snuffed by those who claim to represent the "normal" way to live and do business.
When I get to Postmoderism in the next discussion, this will all look extremely quaint and dated. But I hope it will also be clear that individual integrity, and courage in the face of war criminals and politicians, descriptions of civil disobedience as authenticity, and a call to resist oppression even at pains of death-- that these will also be absent from the discourse.And if it is not absent, it will lead to internal tensions in these later philosophies. But that's for next time. For now, I submit that Sartre is very likely the last great modern philosopher. Not because he had all the best arguments. Often he became impatient with arguments and pointed directly to the details of life whether in journalism, fiction or essays. Rather, he had an uncompromising view which was part and parcel of the post war attempt to hold transgressors countable for their wartime deeds. A vision that allows us to recognize the dignity of "man"/humanity, and empower those who are either oppressed or else convinced that they are helpless in a world of social structures that determine or strongly shape *who * they are and what they may do. The postmodern world of Foucault often resembles the latter, a world in which subjects have always already been "constituted" by disciplines, norms and other forces that act not *on* us but from *within* the socialized subject, as I plan to explore next time.
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Some possible things to reflect on:
-What do you think of Sartre's conception of Freedom?
-Does his discussion of Bad Faith have any practical value?
-Even if there are flaws in the arguments, what do you make of his overall vision? His "Humanistic Existentialism"?
-Is it likely that protestors in an authoritarian state would risk their lives to oppose their leaders *if they didn't feel that their opposition is freely chosen and has the potential to change the system they oppose?* Can people who feel like they lack causal power take the act of protest seriously?
-Arguments against free will are a dime a dozen in philosophy from the Greeks right up to contemporary philosophy. Sartre doesn't so much argue as try to evoke a sense of the reader's freedom with examples, and illustrations. He tries to appeal directly to your perception of your own life. Is he convincing?
-Do we live in an age where existential gumption and integrity have lost much of their meaning? Do such values as integrity and authenticity even make sense to you?
These are only suggestions. Please leave *any* comments, questions or responses that you wish, as long as they have to do with Sartre. The point is not to be right or "sophisticated" but to think and hopefully exchange ideas. Thank You.
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