Introduction
Reading this book was the single greatest reading feat of my
life (although that statement sounds pathetic), and may prove to be the most rewarding.
I’ve taken time on ideologically heavy books before, spending sometimes an hour
on a single page to make sure I really understood. But I took 5 months on this
800 page beaut. I read Being And
Nothingness (B&N throughout) in
conjunction with an incredibly enlightening and comprehensible book of course
notes by Paul Vincent Spade from Indiana University on the subject of Sartre
and B&N. See http://pvspade.com/Sartre/pdf/sartre1.pdf.
It was VERY difficult. Sartre uses ideas and language that have long been used
and specialized by many other philosophers in history—philosophers who Sartre often
just assumes his readers are read-up on—and if these obscure allusions and
nomenclature weren’t a big enough hurdle, Sartre also speaks with neologisms
and turned-on-head phrases to introduce original ideas that he was trying to
break out of conventional modes of understanding. If you’ve ever heard someone say
they have read B&N through with
no problems, they are, as Sartre put it, in “bad faith”—fooling themselves. Someone recently asked me about what I was
reading, and after I told them, they took out a piece of paper to write it
down, and asked me if I thought the library carries it. I warned them not to
even look in its direction until they read a few smaller works by Sartre that
convinced them they can’t NOT read it. It’s a monumental task.
So, why did I read it, assuming I’m not a total a-hole and
wanted just to brag that I read it? Well, I wanted to read this book because I
had started to read more and more by Sartre that I liked; works such as Existentialism Is a Humanism, 2 plays—No Exit and The Flies, and excerpts from B&N
in Existentialism edited by Robert
Solomon. I was immediately attracted to
how Sartre places a large emphasis on freedom and responsibility—no regrets and
no excuses—and seems to recognize much unrealized potential in people. I know
many consider him to be an intellectual tour
de force, and I agree, but I find his bravery to be most inspiring. He
starts from the beginning, poring over the nature of being (ontology) and thought,
and attempts to set forth a new theory of consciousness and reality that
seriously challenges in imagination and utility the best systems I have ever
heard of; and he may have come as close as anyone yet to understanding the nape
of the infinitely-regressive cogito. More to the point, after reading it, I
feel I better understand my world to a degree that I feel much more optimistic,
appreciative of my life with its good or bad, and better able to see that I am capable
to meet its challenges, identify opportunities, and make progress.
There were many moments in the book in which I truly felt I
was understanding for the first time what’s
going on. In life. In general. Imagine that. That’s my honest-to-God
reaction. We (I) often attempt to
forfeit our understanding of the world and our responsibility in it to a
religious resignation, or we distract ourselves with busy-ness, blithe
indifference, or destructive rage; but a better framework for understanding the world and
myself in it—not to be confused with a complete,
or perfect understanding—is often uplifting and advantageous. Some may say Sartre’s philosophy is
superfluous and ineffective. I’ll be the judge of that for my own life anyway,
and I say that Sartre’s views have positively impacted my life.
Sartre’s ‘nothingness’ is not nihilism
Let it be noted at the outset that the real Sartre, or who I understand to be the more authentic Sartre as I have come to know
him through reading some of his writings, cannot be tainted by the grossly
exaggerated and largely misunderstood appellation—and what has become a
hackneyed epithet towards postmodern thinkers— nihilism. I used to think 'nothingness' in Sartre’s philosophy, and
especially in the title of this book, was a reflection on a sort of
metaphysical ‘dead-space’, crushing meaninglessness, the impossibility of certainty,
and a kind of moral about how the world, our hopes, and our dreams all come to
naught. Complete misunderstanding. The
opposite seems to be true actually. Nothingness and non-being exist only on the surface of being, as Sartre
pointed out, “Being secretes nothingness.” In other words, what is not can only be supported and defined by
what IS; so the emphasis and foundation of nothingness is ‘something-ness’.
Sounds absurd at first, but the moment you use the word
‘nothing’ in everyday language, you’ve tacitly endorsed the validity of further
exploring why such a concept is useful in our thought and language, and Sartre
leverages this notion quite well for his purposes; but any brand of nihilism that he espouses still affirms
a consciousness (being-for-itself)
which has been occasioned by the absolute, affirmative positivity of
reality—what he called being-in-itself.
Absences and holes do not consume consciousness, but rather are created by
consciousness. Nothingness and mental negation, as far as Sartre is concerned
here, is the distinction between this and that, here and there, me and you. “This
not-being its objects is the deepest
stuff of consciousness; it is what consciousness fundamentally is. In the end, the most profound way to
say what an act of consciousness is,
is to say that it is not-being its object” (Paul Vincent Spade, Indiana
University course notes). Our
consciousness receives its very definition of essence from the way in which it
distinguishes itself—“nihilates itself”—from the world of objects and its
possibilities. This distancing of self
from the world is the relief, or topography,
of what we recognize as reality. Any differentiation,
and, therefore, definition, that is
created by consciousness is partly a property
of consciousness, and this differentiation does not exist as such on the plain
of the world “in-itself” apart from our consciousness. Nothingness can also be
understood as the boundaries of what is consciousness and being. This book is
an exploration of how we know our world through “IS” and “NOT”, being and
non-being, affirmation and negation. It’s the binary of ontology. Of course, it
lends itself to a great joke, for, as the translator of my book Hazel Barnes,
points out, “There is no thing without
consciousness, but there is not nothing.”
For an excellent, fuller treatment of the idea of ‘nothingness’ as it
developed historically, check out http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nothingness/.
Ontology
Throughout the book one must also keep in mind, and Sartre
insists on this again and again, that the author is not setting forth a theory
of why being is or how it came to be, which Sartre reserves
the term metaphysics for; but rather he
is offering an explanation of what is
and how it appears to work—what he
delineates as ontology. I’m not sure
he is entirely successful in teasing out the differences between the two terms,
and there appears to be quite a bit of overlap. However, this doesn’t bother me
a bit, because we’re all out in deeper water here, and the ultimate test for an
idea is not how cleanly it squeezes into a dictionary definition, but how
helpful it is in thought experiments and, of course, real living.
A New Duality
He starts the book by establishing a simple duality of the
finite and the infinite, which he argues offers more illumination than the
antiquated dualities of matter and idea, flesh and spirit. This ‘finite and
infinite’ duality slowly morphs into a ‘mind and world’ sort of pairing, and he
eventually dubs them Being-In-Itself, and Being-For-Itself. These terms are throwbacks
to other philosophers, viz. Heideggar and Kant, but of course Sartre is doing
something new here which takes quite a bit of back-story and poetic intuition
to keep up with.
In-Itself
All we know, or rather what we can gather from the best of
what we understand about the world, is that there IS a reality external to our
own minds, some source material that our thought is constantly handling,
shaping, and interpreting in order to benefit itself. But other than that
absolute reality—being-in-itself—IS, we know nothing, nor can we know anything,
about it. It is absolutely undifferentiated, affirmative, and untouched by our
mental constructs of space and time, and hence immovable and unchangeable. It
is amazing to me that Parmenides, in the early 5th century BCE
developed his philosophy around this idea of the “IS-ness” of ultimate reality transcending
our mental digestion of it. He believed there is no change or coming-to-be in
absolute being or reality. There is no destruction or annihilation—and has
atomic or quantum theories, at least, been able to deny this? There is no time.
There is no differentiation. You could tune a metronome to Einstein’s nodding.
Now, this is all metaphysics—oops, I mean “Ontology”—par excellence. This argot and way of
thinking about reality at first appears entirely useless on the streets where
men and women bust their bums for bread and love; but the idea is there, in
other forms. For instance, what educated person can deny that space and time
has come to be understood as categories holy-birthed by the brain, and that all
of our mental ideas of the world are in the end just that—ideas of the world—and may or may not have an accurate relation to
what IS apart from our perspectives. Our mind butchers the world and our
experiences, and feeds a dead objectivity to a ravenous subjectivity. So what
is real? Well, what you live, for one answer. But what is real beyond our
individual perspectives and passions? We can’t know apart from our perspectives
and passions, but dang it, something IS real. Something IS!!
And just like that we’re back in bed with Parmenides.
Sartre wants us to swallow three points about his idea of
reality: 1) Being “is” [unexplained], 2) Being is “in itself” [self-contained,
uncaused], and 3) Being “is what it is” [pure actuality…no process or
potentiality]. The nasty existentialist term ‘absurd’ comes into play here, but
not in the way we might first take it to mean. The fact that reality is
‘absurd’ actually refers to the utter supra-rationality of all the givens that
we must first start with as a foundation. Apparently philosophers on every
level have to concede, like the rest of us, that they don’t know everything. We
all have to start somewhere, call that ‘somewhere’ faith, or instinct, or
intuition, or experience.
Being-For-Itself
That’s Being-In-Itself. Being-For-Itself is…us. We are a
part of reality turned in upon itself, trying to realize itself, setting goals
and working on ‘projects’ to confirm, recognize, and expand its being. We are the
universe become self-aware, craning its neck to study its belly, unable only to
see its nape and own beginnings. Being-For-Itself is a “negation in the heart
of being” which “secretes nothingness” in its attempt to understand. Consciousness
is described as ‘not being what it is’ in that it is not fully summed up by any
instant, since it is in a process of becoming; and it ‘is what it is not’ in
that it is already a manifestation of what it has not fully become yet.
Consciousness in this language looks much more like a process, not an entity,
and Sartre even said that what we objectify as ‘self’ is not actually the part
of us that objectifies, so it is only a proxy for a subjective process that is
happening which itself can’t be reached to be objectified. And yet, it is
somehow trying to define itself, without losing itself, which Sartre ultimately
says is a ‘useless passion’. To study oneself, can one be oneself? This truth
is heavy: I am more than me. For
instance, when I think of me, I am still “me to the extent that I realize
constantly my identity with myself across the temporal flux, but it is no
longer me—due to the fact that it has
become an object for my consciousness.” Being must be at a distance from itself
to realize itself, but being strives to be itself in all of its complete and
undifferentiated reality. So there is a division, a distancing that being
strives to open and close simultaneously, and this is the tension that is
humanity and Being-For-Itself.
So, there arise questions like, “where did the mind come
from if there is no change in being?” and “what sense does it make for a
mindless universe to form a mind to understand itself only to create a tension
of wanting-to-be and simultaneously not-wanting-to-be its isolated self?”
Answer: I don’t know. Sartre doesn’t know. Nor does he care. The task of the
phenomenologist—which Sartre is, at
least in part, as he has borrowed a lot of phenomenologist ideas and methods—is
not to defend a theory, but to describe what he sees and best understands. There’s
a handy little muffler phenomenologists use called “epoche”, which is an
ancient Greek word meaning ‘suspension’, and it is used to suspend ultimate
judgment to allow a thinker to start with describing the world as he grows to
understand it without needing an immediate ‘theory of everything’ on hand.
Reality is beyond us, and so are the roots of our own cogito
and being; which is as much to say: who we are can’t be measured by us, for who
will then measure the measurer? This is what Sartre refers to as a
reflection-reflecting regression. Our consciousness is beyond our reach, and
thus beyond our explanation. The In-Itself and the For-Itself are ‘transphenomenal’,
which means that they are partly constituted by, but ultimately beyond, any one
appearance. Of course Sartre does not mean to say that being is different than appearance, but that the
totality is greater than any one part.
Freedom
Freedom is the crux of Sartre’s philosophy. It is not
something we have, rather it is our
nature. We are able to ‘secrete a nothingness’, or separate ourselves from the
tidal flow of the world or reality in such a way that our isolation
protects us from determinism in the material world. Our separateness, our
ability to look from a distance onto the world, is our ability to keep our
shoestrings out of its gears. We reflect on it, and our objectified self in it, without being ground up in
it. In this sense, we are free from the world. And we are this freedom, we are
this separation. Freedom is not a
thing or quality in the world, it is the transphenomenal being of the
For-Itself.
The beauty of this (and the anguish, as I will mention
momentarily) is that I—the ‘I’ transcending the objectified ‘self’—choose
without being coerced or programmed. My choices are beyond any known source.
This may not be appealing for some, but what this ultimately means for Sartre,
is that I can live knowing that nobody is making me do anything. My life is my
choice. Choosing oneself is a HUGE theme in B&N, and this means that we,
at the core of who we are, want to be
who we are, or we would not be who we are. Sartre builds the case that the
For-Itself is essentially the universe become conscious of itself (though he
never says it in those words), and now nothing determines it but itself. Now,
that does not mean that we chose to be—that
is our “facticity”, the only thing we haven’t chosen—but now that we are, we choose to be every second we
live.
This is a powerful point, which bends into the next ramification:
we choose our lives as they are. Our
situation—the world that we find ourselves in, our bodies, our minds and
constitutions, our relationships…everything—we choose it all. Sartre even goes
so far as to say that we are ‘co-authors’ of our situation. In choosing
ourselves, we choose our trappings, which often we cannot even conceive of
ourselves detangled from. In choosing our situation, we choose ourselves; in
choosing ourselves, we choose our situation. What’s more, we can no longer
blame others. Blame and regret are gone. “What happens to me, happens through
me…what happens to me is mine.” How can this be true?
It’s simple really. Sartre says there are two ways to end a
situation and our ownership of it: desertion or suicide. I know. As long as I live through something, I support it by my
very existence. Now, we may be working to change it, using it to transcend it,
but if we stick around corporeally or mentally to solve a problem, we are, in
effect, sustaining the problem by our very presence. It is a beautiful philosophical
redemption of the good and bad in life, really; one of the finest I have ever
considered. No more regrets. No more blame. My life is my own, can be blamed on
no one but me, and ultimately can be enjoyed/suffered by no one on my behalf.
This can help to illuminate the most tragic of circumstances as meaningful and
part of my choice, and can empower one to make the best of life in whatever
situation they find themselves in. Sartre illustrates that even if bound in
chains, we determine if those chains represent our courageous resignation and a
desire to find peace with the world and our enemies, or if they represent our
fight and indefatigability in attempting without rest to break out of them.
Chains could even represent love, if I as a father accepted imprisonment to
provide for his family, or they could represent one’s creative aesthetics if one
took to polishing them. My acts, and not
my materials, define me. This is the deeper meaning of being free over and
above my facticity. My birth and death are unchangeable, unbending, and
impersonal facts; but the way I live my life is my freedom. And it’s is no use
demurring that we have certain desires that we did not elect, like desires for
hunger, sex, ease, or beauty that drive our actions; the fact still remains
that those are things we want, and no
one wants them on our behalf. Our efforts to escape are multifarious, but are
fools’ errands each; for in the end, it is ourselves and our responsibility we
are trying to escape, and not merely our circumstances.
As all good art is not judged solely by the type or quantity
of materials that are available as tools and medium, but rather how the materials are utilized, so is
one’s essence ultimately revealed and expanded through the medium of one’s
existential placement, with the
ceiling of each one’s possibilities being as infinite in potential as there are
an infinite number of choices available in one’s freedom. What’s more, we
cannot completely distinguish ourselves from our situation, as we can’t
conceive of our personhood without the formative settings and experiences from
which we establish our identity. The philosophy behind the adage ‘make the best
of your situation’ is exactly what Sartre is aiming at for humanity. Goethe may
have put it in words we can better understand, “Man’s highest merit always is,
as much as possible, to rule external circumstances, and as little as possible
to let himself be ruled by them. Life lies before us, as a huge quarry lies
before the architect…All things without us, nay I may add, all things on us,
are mere elements: but deep within us lies the creative force, which out of
these can produce what they were meant to be.” What happens to you, what you
have, and where you’re at are all the same—they are yours to do with what you
can, and they are only there because of your choice and your goals. The potential
use or disuse of the world lies with you, so your situation and its potential
is as much you as you are.
Anguish
Now, this power of freedom lies deep, and all this talk of
ownership and responsibility for the best and worst in life, as many will chafe
at hearing, lends to our feelings of anxiety (“anguish”) because it scares us
that some part of us is this much in control, and we are, as Sartre puts it,
“afraid of our own spontaneity.” Again, from the translator, Barnes, in his
introduction, “We feel vertigo or anguish before our recognition that nothing
in our own acts or discernible personality ensures our following of any of our
usual patterns of conduct. There is nothing to prevent consciousness from
making a wholly new choice of its way of being.” Sartre’s famous expression, we
are “condemned to be free” has a certain ring of despair. “All the barriers, all
the guard rails collapse…I do not have, nor can I have, recourse to any value
against the fact that it is I who sustains values in being. Nothing can ensure
[protect] me against myself.” It’s not as if the For-Itself is sabotaging
itself, but the point here is that one’s life is ultimately lived beyond the
ability to pinpoint concrete, objectified motives, which could only succeed the
creating subject.
Well, folks, dems the breaks. Professor Spade of IU put the
nail in the coffin when he commented in his course notes to the text, “I am not
free NOT to choose.” Frightening indeed. Those who attempt to avoid the anxiety
and anguish such a realization may cause are accused by Sartre of being in ‘bad
faith’, or trying to exist as a conscious being without assuming the
responsibility of living with full freedom.
Bad faith is a “lie to oneself”, denying the full power and
responsibility of freedom which each one of us understands most deeply. We must
admit to ourselves our situation if we’re ever to make the best of it. His book
Nausea is about coming to the
realization of our absolute freedom, and learning to live with it. However, the
anguish, as we have seen, is offset by the real jewel of getting it in our
cranial organ that we are not programmed by external forces. We, in some sense,
are truly masters of ourselves and our situations, and only sustain those
situations that we choose to sustain. My life, within the limits of its
facticity, is exactly what I want it to be.
Others
Now Sartre gets to the meaning of our relationship in the
world with other people. To begin with, the Other exists. Or rather, we act as
though he does. In life, “we encounter
the other; we do not constitute him [mentally]”. Something in us accepts the
Other’s existence, not only as an external, objective reality; but we encounter
him with an internal, subjective necessity for his existence. We only doubt his existence to the same
extent as we may doubt our own existence, which we can’t really seriously.
Psychologists have shown for quite some time that self-awareness develops in
the presence of others as one learns to distinguish one’s self from other
selves, and Sartre would go a step further in adducing that “the cogito of the
Other’s existence is merged with my cogito” and therefore “the Other penetrates
me to the heart. I can not doubt him without doubting myself since [as Hegel
put it,] ‘self-consciousness is real only in so far as it recognizes its echo
(and its reflection) in another.’” Ultimately our self-awareness cannot be dissociated
from our awareness of others, and this is what Sartre elsewhere (most notably
in Existentialism Is A Humanism) expands
in his idea of ‘intersubjectivity’ (and I’m actually surprised I didn’t meet up
with this term in this book, as it would have been helpful.)
I cannot know the other as they exist absolutely, because to
do so, I would have to be that person. Intersubjectivity allows me to intuit
their existence, but it does not allow me to assimilate them. So I am reduced
to being able to encounter a person existentially, but I can only know a person
by making them an object in my system, or becoming an object in their system by
which they affirm my existence, which is also what I want. I want to affirm the
Other, so that the other can affirm me. That’s messed up. But apparently
accurate. But still messed up.
Sartre says that we perceive objects in the world as
instrument-complexes. An infinite chain of instruments stretches from my being,
the center of my acting freedom, to the ends of the world in order to manifest
my being. Every object that registers in my mind is a tool by which I order my
world, including my own body and mind, as they are exterior to my primal consciousness.
This may be summed up in a small phrase: I know, to do. The moon only registers
in our systems or science because it has, or may have, an impact on what we do
next. Look around you: the tack on the wall, the guy riding his bike down the
street, the penny under the carpet, the furthest star in the sky…every object
of thought has some bearing on your goals and thus your present action. Even
the murky ‘unknown’, abstract concepts, and dreams may become a potential
factor in my system of instrument complexes, a potential coefficient for how
things might transpire should I do this or that. This is the meaning of much of
fiction and non-fiction. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said near the close of his
book The Phenomenon Of Man, that many
would wonder “whether I have been leading them through facts, through
metaphysics, or through dreams.” Maybe he was, in truth, leading through all
three as if they were one, for, as he said, “I do not pretend to describe
[history or prehistoric stages of life] as they really were, but rather as we
must picture them to ourselves so that the world may be true for us at this
moment.” Everything impinges on our present course of action. We must see that
each of us are the center of a million, magnificent chain of events, like a
detective’s corkboard stringing apparently unrelated events, pictures, clues in
a vast web of possible solutions and complicated algorithms to help me wend my
way through my world. We may like to believe we think and live simply, but
every single thing from the past, present, future, or in our imagination, is
another tick on a long list of tools and tweaks that one day might change
everything.
This is where the Other, according to Sartre, might pose a
problem. What happens when my infinite web of instrument complexes exposes
another web with another center—an Other who is organizing the world according
to his goals and projects and not mine?! When another person comes into the
picture they become a part of, an object in,
your ‘system’; but the problem is, they also have a system of interpreting the
world, and one risks becoming integrated into their system! Our system
begins to “hemorrhage” when the Other ‘sees’ us, when the Other begins to
calculate with us as a factor. My
world starts falling apart because a cog is suddenly bucking my clockwork universe.
“Thus, suddenly, an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me…The
appearance of the other in the world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding
of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the
centralization which I am simultaneously effecting.”
Then comes the endless tug of war. Will it be my system in
which you are a cog, or your system in which I am a cog? Here’s the problem
with me winning: I need that other person to not be merely a cog, because I’m
looking to them for validation and vindication of myself. I want the other system-builders
to validate me as the master ‘system-builder’; yet I must continue to receive
their validation and ultimate subservience by an act of their own free will. If
their free will is overridden, then they aren’t fully assimilated into my
system in as a ‘system-builder’ but a slave, and a slave can only reflect my
own validation back to me.
Love
Sartre views on love and affection branch out from here. He
states, “To love is to demand to be loved”, and thence love becomes an infinite
frustration. I want the Other to love
me, but when I am loved, I become the subject and center of the world, and my
lover the object. But how can my subjectivity and freedom be profoundly
supported by my puppet in my world? Again we see that this would
be self-affirmation merely, and as Sartre says, “if the beloved is transformed
into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone.” So I want the other to
maintain her freedom and subjectivity so that she can “found my being as a ‘privileged
object’” as Sartre phrases it, and so transfer power again to me as the
organizing principle of the world. But as soon as I become the center again, she
becomes a mere object, and loses the power to validate me. Thus it is a vicious
cycle to love, to be loved; to love, to be loved; ad nauseum. In one instant a person feels like the pivot of the
cosmos, but feels utterly abandoned; like a god, but friendless. Love is a
constant thirst that is never completely satisfied, but like real thirst, may
be satisfied in part in a kinesis of giving and taking. This balancing act
might explain why love may be experienced as always fresh to some, but futile
to others to gravitate to one of the extremes. Sartre himself probably had a
tough time with it, for he drops a perhaps overstated hint in a phrase tucked
away in one of his most famous plays No
Exit, “Hell is—other people.”
Meaning Matters
I developed a formula in grad school to determine whether or
not I throw out an idea, or hold on to it. I decided that an idea only holds meaning if you can find where it matters. So, how does Sartre’s views
matter? Well, for me, I can say a few ways I benefit from his philosophy. I
have a more coherent view of the meaning of myself, others, the world, and my
place in it. I am not merely, as Robert Frost put it, “nothing, or a God’s
regret”, but I am more closely united to others and God (though Sartre might
object) than I could ever have dreamed. We are not another ‘thing’ in the
cosmos, but the cause and condition of all things. We are not alone, but
inextricably tied to each other. We don’t have to fear death and non-being,
since non-being has no meaning
outside of being. We don’t have to regret anything, because the sealing of the
past is nothing but the opening of the future, and both are direct acts of
consciousness in setting new goals (future)
with a stable foundation (past). Nobody
really gets away with anything, because the past only stops hunting you when
you’re dead. Suffering can be seen in a whole new light, the light of our goals
and desires…without which our sufferings would cease to exist. We can feel
empowered in knowing that our lives are our choice—all of it, no exception. I
don’t have to worry about what happens after death, because my life has meaning
without knowing my origins, and it will still hold meaning without knowing what
happens after death (also, “death is the only part of my life I don’t have to
live”).
Motifs
One of the most important contributions of Sartre’s philosophy
is his proclamation that we choose our lives. Every moment we live is a chosen
moment. To live is to realize oneself in situation, inseparable from a
physical/social environment that is as real and necessary as our original
inheritance of our own bodies. “To live this [situation] is to choose myself
through it and to choose it through my choice of myself.” It is ours, and no
one else’s. No one but us can be blamed. We may want to change things in our
lives, but everything that is in our life is material (our ‘situation’ or
‘facticity’) which may be used by us to create something better. We are the architects, and to work with what
has been given to us is to, in some sense, accept what has been given to us,
which is to accept our self that has been revealed through this
situation.
Now, if I may be so bold so as to rephrase another major
premise of what I think Sartre is getting at in his writings, it’s this: we all
live 'in story'. At no point are we ‘out of story’. There is always a beginning
and an ending (which posts are constantly being adjusted by ourselves),
obstacles in between, joy of progress, and awareness (even if it is indirect awareness, or, what Sartre
terms ‘non-positional awareness’) that all this is happening. It’s not possible
to live outside of story. Sartre’s 'projects', or what you and I call stories,
determine the meaning of everything we do and say and think, and if we
suppose we are able to think or live outside of story, we are simply looking
for a way into the next chapter.
Sartre thinks that being honest with ourselves about our projects (and
our ‘original project’ as he calls the primary thrust of manifesting our self
in the universe) can help us to better adjust to different settings, or situations.
Furthermore, we will know how to respond when someone else attempts to foist
their stories or religion on us as if we have no right to be creators of our
own story; for though we are caught up in ‘story’ together (intersubjectivity),
we can’t coerce each other’s stories to conform to our own without objectifying
the Other.
Efficacy And Ethics
Sartre put much effort into refuting portions of Freud’s
theories of psychoanalysis—he was extremely turned off by a separation of
conscious/unconscious—he actually admired and adapted many of Freud’s practices,
and even dubbed his version of psycho-therapy, “Existential Psychoanalysis.”
Through this therapy one would be able to recognize their own ‘bad faith’—their
denial of their freedom, choices, and responsibility—and trace their choices
and ‘projects’ back the roots of an original project, or one’s deepest desire.
This original desire is the choice to “BE”, or to manifest oneself as a
distinct consciousness in the world which is attempting to balance one’s self
as a solitary entity, yet recognize one’s self as a being ‘in-situation’ and
intersubjective with other beings. This is a paradox, but it is who we are, and
the sooner we admit it, the sooner we can adjust our practices and advance in
our pursuits.
And yes, I have to be honest, Sartre’s ideas become very
messy, convoluted, and a bit contradictory at points. He is forever forming new
ideas, whirling with established conceptions only to slingshot beyond them,
repurposing words and creating neologisms on the fly. As a matter of fact, his
progressive style is very much expressive of his view that every person is living,
speaking, and acting in ways which no one has before, and in the end we are
each ‘doomed’ to spontaneously think, speak, and act in ways that are utterly
novel and unprecedented, and even evolving in new ways all the time with regard
to the existent’s own experience. Dr. Spade comments in his course notes, “No
matter how we look at it, it is clear that something funny is happening here
with [Sartre’s] notion(s)…We can either regard this as a hopeless muddle on
Sartre’s part, a weakness in the theory, and perhaps a symptom that everything
has fallen apart. Or we can regard it as a renegotiating of the doctrine and
the notions involved.” And unfortunately
Sartre sentenced himself to his critics’ blunt and often agitated dismissals
when he summarized his findings with the abortive phrase, “Man is a useless
passion.” However, he was not merely articulating disgust with the human
experience as a whole, but was characterizing humanity as a ‘lack’ that desires
completeness with the rest of reality, a yearning for harmony between mind and
matter which are doomed to remain fundamentally distanced. Self and the world
have been parted, never more to be one by the nature of their contrast. Will
mankind ever find fulfillment of one kind or another? Sartre doesn’t venture a
guess, but leaves this to the metaphysician to see if he can uncover missing
links. I’m guessing there’s more to the story.
Sartre knew his ideas were on the top shelf for many. It is
true of his works, as was said of St. Paul’s writings in the New Testament,
that they contain, “some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and
unstable people distort, as they do the other Scriptures, to their own
destruction.” In Existentialism Is a
Humanism, Sartre expresses grief in trying to simplify to bare bones some
of his more complex ideas for the layman without bleeding his philosophy to
death. “Many of the people who interview me are not qualified to do so. This
leaves me with two alternatives: refuse to answer their questions, or agree to
allow discussion to take place on a simplified level.” I suppose this was one
of the things that I found so alluring about his writing: they promised
something deeper. They did not disappoint, although, to be fair, I probably
only understand half of what I read, even with a lot of help. But the half I
did understand...!
Conclusion
Oddly enough, though to some it may seem that Sartre is
attempting to divest the world of meaning and magic, the opposite is actually
true. He is helping us see that meaning is not so far removed from us that we
must wait with saintly patience to one day see the veneer of this world peeled
back to reveal the ‘truest truth’—the real meaning of the universe. This is the
essential meaning of his duality of finite/infinite: everything we see is a
REAL manifestation of the infinite. As a matter of fact, all we do, or say, or
see IS the infinite, at least in part. Meaning is HERE, everywhere. And the universe is not one big, impersonal machine
that plows blindly ahead without rhyme or reason. He blows mechanamorphism—an
attempt to explain the meaning of the universe in purely mechanistic terms—out
of the water. “The world is human” he states, and nothing is so completely
inhuman so as not to be penetrated through and through with our meanings and…personality.
Measurement can’t even begin in science without human scale and location. “The
real is realization [by a person].” The
real is here. Not a bad place to start.
Well, I loved it all. I loved my ideological gleanings, as
well as the challenge of trying to ‘break my eye open’ with complex logic and innovative
thought and language. I’m actually interested in reading more from Sartre, if that
says anything. I think he cares about others, I think his ideas are courageous,
and I think he helped to topple pedantic and petrified academic philosophy that
looked down loftily from the height of detached, anemic ideals onto the world
of living, bleeding, thinking folk every bit as ‘real’ and valid as the pale-faced
intelligentsia. Sartre affirmed that each of our stories are existential centers
of the universe, and we affect each other no matter how seemingly insignificant
one feels themselves to be. I hope I
never forget what I read. I truly think Sartre’s ideas are a contribution and
advancement to philosophy, and help to iron out some of the wrinkles in the
way we think about ourselves and the world. I have a notebook full of 11 pages
of quotations and notes from B&N,
Barnes introduction to B&N, and Spade’s
course notes available for anyone who may be interested in receiving a copy of
them. Chew before swallowing.
