Philosophy

by Sharon Kaye

  Or perhaps things got off track. How did we come to see ourselves in such a limited way? Sartre pinpoints the problem in science. When empiricism overtook innatism, banishing the supernatural outlook on the work, intellectuals became giddy with the power of the scientific method. They came to believe that it could explain everything, including human existence.

  But science also helped to produce two world wars during Sartre’s lifetime. Witnessing their ravages first hand, Sartre came to believe that science has its limits. Heidegger’s great insight, in Sartre’s view, was to reject the objectifying metaphysics of Western philosophy in favour of a subjective ontology which would allow for a richer description of reality. Yet Heidegger’s obsession with the effort to conceptualize being itself left him without enough insight into the particular human way of being.

  Sartre was a keen observer of humanity. He loved nothing more than to sit at a café, smoke a cigarette, and watch what people do. It’s no wonder that he won a Nobel Prize in Literature for his many novels and plays. He wove a great deal of literary description into his philosophical works as well. One of the things he noticed while people-watching became the key to his solution to the problem of human existence.

  Nothingness

  You arrive at the café expecting to meet your friend Pierre. You push through the door, perhaps a bit flushed and out of breath from your effort to be there on time. Your eyes are bright and expectant. You scan the room…

  No Pierre.

  Your face changes. You scan the room again, your eyes searching. They are seeing, not what is in the room, but a void in the shape of your friend.

  Pierre is not there.

  It is a simple fact. We can state it objectively and analyse its logic. Let P = the proposition ‘Pierre is there.’ Then what you have discovered is:

  ¬P

  This proposition is logically equivalent to:

  ¬R

  where R = the proposition ‘Roger is not there’ and so on for a thousand other propositions just like it.

  And yet it’s not the same at all.

  When you arrived at the café, you experienced Pierre’s absence. You didn’t experience the absence of Roger or anyone else. But Pierre’s void was tangible. Sartre goes so far as to assert that it ‘haunted’ you.

  Everyone has experienced the absence of something. According to Sartre, this common experience is evidence that the logic of objective, scientific description is inadequate. For humans, there are not just objects in the world, but also their absences. There is being, and there is nothingness. The discovery of nothingness is crucial because it gives us free will.

  Spotlight

  Sartre is sitting in a café writing in a notebook about nothingness.

  A waitress approaches him, saying, ‘Can I get you something to drink, Monsieur Sartre?’

  ‘Yes,’ he replies. ‘I’d like a cup of coffee with sugar, but no cream.’

  Nodding agreement, the waitress walks off to fill the order and Sartre resumes writing. A few minutes later, however, the waitress returns and says:

  ‘I’m sorry, Monsieur Sartre, we are out of cream – how about with no milk?’

  Free will

  The scientific world view championed by empiricist philosophers leads to the conclusion that free choice is an illusion. For example, Thomas Hobbes, whom we met in Chapter 6, argues that human beings are just animals driven by animal desires. Although our advanced intelligence makes it seem as though we make choices, in reality the strongest desire always determines what we do.

  Sartre rejects this determinist outlook, which he thinks is produced by focusing only on what exists. By focusing on nothingness, we discover that non-being is the birthplace of possibility.

  Right now you are reading this book. Stop for a moment and think of yourself getting up and throwing the book out of the window …

  Because this version of you doesn’t exist, it is pure nothingness. Although you can’t experience something that doesn’t exist, you can experience the void it creates.

  There are two possible versions of you: the one that goes on reading this book and the one that gets up and throws the book out of the window. Both are pure nothing, and therefore both are genuine possibilities for you.

  Awareness of nothingness is a state of mind. You have to notice the things you are not in order to realize you are free. The problem is that most people most of the time avoid this realization because they are mired in bad faith.

  Bad faith

  Going back to the café scenario where you hoped to meet Pierre, Sartre describes the waiter. He comes to your table and greets you with an eager speech he has given a thousand times. His movements are so efficient that they are mechanical. He smiles considerately without ever quite looking you in the eye. He is playing his role. He has turned himself off. He doesn’t want to think or feel anything because his job doesn’t allow it.

  Sartre argues that most of us spend much more time acting like the waiter than we would like to admit. We find ourselves in rigidly defined social roles: student, parent, spouse, employee and so on. In order to carry out these roles day in and day out, we become passively detached, ignoring all the possibilities free will presents to us.

  Sartre calls this way of living bad faith. Although the waiter is trying to forget that he is free, he nevertheless freely chose to allow himself to descend into this disenchanted state. He is therefore responsible for what has happened to him. Moreover, he still catches a glimpse, from time to time, of what he has become. He is engaged in an elaborate form of self-deception.

  Looked at one way, the waiter is disciplined – a true professional. Looked at another way, he has lost his humanity. By refusing to engage with the world subjectively, he has become an object in the world – a mere thing.

  A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a grocer, just as the soldier at attention makes himself into a soldier-thing with a direct regard which does not see at all, which is no longer meant to see, since it is the rule and not the interest of the moment which determines the point he must fix his eyes on (the sight ‘fixed at ten paces’). There are indeed many precautions to imprison a man in what he is, as if we lived in perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly elude his condition.

  Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 102.

  The waiter, the grocer and you may as well be androids. While Wittgenstein is content to accept this, Sartre is not.

  Sartre calls a mere object in the world a being-in-itself. A chair, a cat and an android – each of these is a being-in-itself. You, on the other hand, have the potential to become a being-for-itself: a conscious subject that defines itself by making choices.

  Existentialism

  Self-definition is the task we must all undertake in order to realize our potential, according to Sartre. He places self-definition at the centre of his philosophy, which he calls existentialism.

  Traditionally, philosophers see it as an important part of their job to define things by identifying their essence. For example, it is the essence of a cup to hold liquid. Needless to say, the definition of humanity has always been hotly debated. Existentialists go so far as to deny that humanity can be defined, asserting that, in our case, existence precedes essence.

  What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that l
eap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of existentialism.

  Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/sartre/works/exist/sartre.htm)

  The possibilities that free will presents cannot be limited.

  Granted, everyone is born with a set of ‘givens’ – gender, language, family, environment. Sartre calls this the ‘facticity’ that each individual must transcend. If you are a female in a Spanish-speaking family in Southern California, then you must either willingly embrace this identity or willingly change it. As Sartre puts it, freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

  Whether you willingly embrace what you have or willingly change it, the wilful element makes your new identity authentic. Authenticity is the antidote to bad faith. It means having the courage to follow your passion, breaking out of imposed social roles to be true to yourself.

  But how does one go about accomplishing this?

  The fundamental project

  Because authenticity is an expression of radical freedom, existentialism cannot specify how to achieve it. Existentialists focus, not so much on what you do, but how you do it. You could wait tables authentically if this was part of your fundamental project.

  For Sartre, a fundamental project is a long-term commitment that begins with a free choice, giving unity and meaning to your subsequent actions. It becomes the ultimate reason for virtually everything you do.

  It’s easy to think of projects that aren’t fundamental, such as fixing the garage door, training for a marathon or planning a holiday. These are temporary pastimes that have little lasting impact on your identity as a person.

  The fundamental project transcends the trivial concerns of daily life. Sartre describes it as an abstract desire for pure being that transforms you. There are three main candidates for the fundamental project, each of which comes with its own difficulties.

  First candidate: relationships

  Sartre had a lifelong love affair with Simone de Beauvoir (1908–96), who was a philosopher in her own right. Their relationship was famously stormy, unconventional and controversial.

  Falling in love may not exactly be a choice, but it is your choice whether or not to pursue the relationship. In a relationship, you want to become something new by uniting with the other in mind and body. The other has to be just as radically free as you are in order for you to create a partnership of mutual desire.

  The problem is that radical freedom makes the unity inherently unstable. The effort to stabilize it turns desire into possessiveness and control, which in turn undermines freedom. The other person becomes the ‘Other’: an objectified subject.

  Sartre and de Beauvoir tried to pursue their relationship creatively. They never married and never had children. They allowed each other to have affairs and often included others in their sexual relations. In fact, they seduced their own teenage students, many of whom apparently suffered emotional damage, including suicide in one case. Perhaps it would be possible for love to be the answer for an existentialist, but it was not for Sartre.

  Second candidate: political activism

  After he was released from the Nazi prison camp, Sartre joined the French Resistance, publishing subversive tracts and contributing to the subsequent peace movement in many ways.

  Because authenticity is based on radical freedom, the question arises whether Nazism – Hitler’s bid to take over the world – could constitute a fundamental project. In a popular lecture he gave concerning the basic tenets of existentialism, Sartre argues no. An unethical project can never be authentic because it is destructive of, rather than desirous of, pure being. Harking back to Kant (whom we met in Chapter 9), Sartre claims that a truly authentic project must somehow be universalizable – the kind of thing one could consistently will everyone to will.

  Sartre later renounced this lecture, however, saying it was the only work he ever regretted publishing. Critics charge that Sartre’s belated and half-hearted interest in duty contradicts his original claim that individuals define themselves from pure nothing. They also criticize his political activism as opportunist and self-serving. Perhaps it would be possible for political activism to be the answer for an existentialist, but not for Sartre.

  Third candidate: art

  Sartre seems to have found his greatest fulfilment in life through his novels and plays, which were instant sensations and have become world classics. Ten thousand people turned out on the streets of Paris on the day he died in 1980 – a testament to his ability to touch people’s hearts as an artist.

  Sartre asserts that one of the chief motives for artistic creation is the need to feel that we are essential to the world. Existentialism encourages individuals to define themselves, and art is a vehicle for expressing that individuality. It connects us to other human beings so that we aren’t alone in our freedom.

  Yet Sartre was ambivalent about this connection. Though he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, he became the first ever to reject it (along with its cash reward). He called it too ‘bourgeois’ – referring to the middle class, which existentialists have long criticized as a class of mediocre people devoted to material gain. In the end, Sartre hid from his adoring fans and became addicted to amphetamines. So, evidently, art was not the answer for him either.

  Spotlight

  Despite its enthusiastic celebration of human freedom, there is a dark side to existentialism. Sartre memorably quipped that we are ‘condemned to be free’. While freedom is intoxicating, it also produces the overwhelming sense of responsibility that Sartre calls nausea. You cannot blame anyone else for what you become. And, as it turns out, it’s not at all easy to become something good.

  Case study: Simone de Beauvoir and feminism

  Throughout Western history women have been denied the respect and leisure time required to make important intellectual contributions. Towards the end of the twentieth century, when women were finally allowed to pursue higher education, they began to appear in all academic areas, including philosophy. Simone de Beauvoir, Sartre’s lifelong partner, became one of the first female philosophers. She was also a strong proponent of feminism, the movement defending equal rights for women.

  De Beauvoir’s most important work is a two-volume treatise called The Second Sex (1949). In it, de Beauvoir analyses the status of women as second-class citizens in Western culture. She writes:

  One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society; it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as Other. […] If, well before puberty and sometimes even from early infancy, she seems to us to be already sexually determined, this is not because mysterious instincts directly doom her to passivity, coquetry, maternity; it is because the influence of others upon the child is a factor almost from the start, and thus she is indoctrinated with her vocation from her earliest years.

  Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York: Penguin, 1972), pp. 273–4 (http://hagocrat.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/de-beauvoir-simone-second-sex.pdf)

  The vocation of the female is to serve the male, and this is something that must change.

  De Beauvoir further developed Sartre’s existentialism, applying it more specifically to the female point of view. Patiently collecting and editing Sartre’s work, she was a constant inspiration for him, even after they ceased to be lovers. As in the case of John Stuart Mill’s partner, Harriet Taylor, some give de Beauvoir credit as Sartre’s unacknowledged co-author.

  Feminists would insist that the situation of Taylor and de Beauvoir was not at all unusual because, behind every great man, there is a great woman.

  Key ideas

  Authenticity: having the courage to follow your passion, breaking out of imposed
social roles to be true to yourself

  Bad faith: Living in denial of freedom

  Being-in-itself: A non-conscious object in the world

  Being-for-itself: A conscious subject that defines itself by making choices

  Existentialism: The view that human beings must define themselves

  Facticity: The set of givens that each person is born with

  Fundamental project: A long-term commitment that begins with a free choice, giving unity and meaning to your subsequent actions

  Feminism: The movement defending equal rights for women

  Nausea: The overwhelming sense of responsibility freedom produces

  Nothingness: The lack of being that gives us free will

  The Other: The other person as objectified subject in a relationship

  Fact-check

  1 Sartre famously wrote: ‘Hell is other people.’ To which of the following is this most likely to refer?

  a The problem of divine punishment

  b The problem of the objectified subject

  c The problem of nothingness

  d The problem of bourgeois authenticity

  2 Sartre argues that freedom arises from which of the following?

  a Nothing

  b Everything

  c Inner peace

  d People-watching

  3 According to Sartre, an android is which of the following?

  a A being-for-itself

  b A being-in-itself