What is the relevance of existentialism (Sartre and Nietzsche) to the philosophy of well-being?

254 Heidegger

factical potentiality—for—Being, and in such a way that Dasein itself is this revealing and Being-revealed. To any truth, there belongs a corresponding holding-for-true. The explicit appropriating of what has been disclosed or discovered is Being-certain. The primordial truth of existence demands an equiprimordial Being-certain, in which one maintains oneself in what reso— luteness discloses. It gives itself the current factical Situation, and brings it- self into that Situation. The Situation cannot be calculated in advance or presented like something present-at—hand which is waiting for someone to grasp it. It merely gets disclosed in a free resolving which has not been de— termined beforehand but is open to the possibility of such determination. What, then, does the certainty which belongs to such resoluteness signify? Such certainty must maintain itself in what is disclosed by the resolution. But this means that it simply cannot become rigid as regards the Situation, but must understand that the resolution, in accordance with its own meaning as a dis— closure, must be held open and free for the current factical possibility. The certainty of the resolution signifies that one holds oneseflfree for the possibil- ity of taking it hack—a possibility which is factically necessary. However, such holding—for—true in resoluteness (as the truth of existence) by no means lets us fall back into irresoluteness. On the contrary, this holding-for-true, as a resolute holding-oneself—free for taking back, is authentic resoluteness which resolves to leeep repeating itsefl. . . .

Anticipatory resoluteness is not a way of escape, fabricated for the “over— coming” of death; it is rather that understanding which follows the call of conscience and which frees for death the possibility of acquiring power over Dasein’s existence and of basically dispersing all fugitive Self-concealments. Nor does wanting—to-have—a-conscience, which has been made determinate as Being—towards-death, signify a kind of seclusion in which one flees the world; rather, it brings one without Illusions into the resoluteness of “taking action.” Neither does anticipatory resoluteness stem from ‘idealistic’ exac- tions soaring above existence and its possibilities; it springs from a sober un- derstanding of what are factically the basic possibilities for Dasein. Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for—Being, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility. In it Dasein becomes free from the entertaining “incidentals” with which busy curiosity keeps providing itself—primarily from the events of the world. . . .

Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre was born in Paris on June 21, 1905. His father died when he was only one, and he was brought up by his mother and grandparents. He graduated from the prestigious E’cole Normale Supe’rieure in 1929, and for years he taught philosophy at various ylce'es (roughly equivalent to American high schools). It was also in 1929 that he met Simone de Beauvoir, his con— stant companion and co-worker until his death. During a period of study in Berlin in 1933-34, Sartre discovered phenomenology and wrote his early works, Nausea and The Transcendence of the Ego. His Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions appeared in 1939, followed by The Psychology of the Imagination in 1940, and Being and Nothingness in 1943. The 19408 also saw the publica- tion of such literary works as The Wall, The Flies, No Exit, and The Age of Reason. Sartre was imprisoned by the Germans in 1940 (during which time he taught Heidegger to his fellow prisoners), and was active in the Resis— tance during the war. In 1945, he began editing Les Temps modernes, the most important journal for French intellectuals until the 19605. The same year he delivered his lecture, “The Humanism of Existentialism” (published in 1946), inaugurating the vogue of existentialism. Throughout the 19505 and 1960s Sartre was involved in a number of political movements. He was gen- erally a staunch supporter of communism, though he criticized Stalinism and attacked the Communist Party for not supporting the student uprising of May 1968. In the 19605 Sartre sat with Bertrand Russell on a committee to judge American politicians as war criminals for US. involvement in the Vietnam War. Among his many important later works are Saint Genet (1952), Critique ofDialectical Reason (1960), The Words (1963), and The Idiot of the Famiyl (three volumes, 1971-72). Sartre did most of his writing in cafes’ because, he said, the noise and activity helped him concentrate. In 1964 he refused to accept the Nobel Prize for literature as a protest against the way such priz'es transform writers into institutions. When he died on April 15, 1980, tens of thousands of people accompanied his coffin to its fi- nal resting place.

What is Existentialism?

Of the writers whose works appear in this volume, Sartre is the only one who explicitly characterized himself as an existentialist. It is Sartre, in 'fact, who lays out what is widely accepted as the defining idea in existentialism.

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This is the idea that, for humans, existence precedes essence: that what we are, and what gives our lives significance, is not pre—established for us, but is something for which we ourselves are responsible. The meaning of this idea is worked out in “The Humanism of Existentialism,” where Sartre contrasts existentialism with the traditional view that, for humans, essence precedes existence.

Let us begin by exploring the terminology used to state these ideas. In the Aristotelian scheme, a description of the essence of a thing answers the question: “What kind of a thing is it?” And thus, a thing’s essence is made up of the characteristics it has that make it the kind of thing it is- characteristics that cannot be removed without the thing ceasing to be the kind of thing it is. For example, the Aristotelian idea that humans are essen- tially rational animals implies that in order to be a human, an entity has to be a organism with a certain degree of biological structure and has to have the potential for rational reflection, and if these characteristics were removed from an entity, it would cease to be human.

Sartre thinks that there do exist entities for which their essence precedes their existence. Tools are one example. A tool like a hammer has an essence: it is a tool designed for a particular purpose, driving in nails, and that pur- pose defines its nature as the particular tool it is. To say that this essence precedes the existence of any particular hammer means that for a thing to exist as a hammer at all, it must have this essence—it must be a tool designed for driving in nails. If something doesn’t have this essence, if it isn’t a tool designed for driving in nails, then it cannot exist as a hammer.

For human beings, by contrast, existence precedes essence. This means, first of all, that there are no characteristics whatsoever that we must have in order for us to exist as human beings. Sartre’s view is illuminated by a con- trast to the religious belief that God creates human beings as having an es- sence. In this picture, God has endowed us with certain characteristics that make up our true nature as human beings, for example, the characteristic of having the purpose to glorify God. Now Sartre suggests that this sort of “essentialism” is untenable once we realize the force of Nietzsche’s claim that God is dead. He thinks that if there is no “absolute” lying above or beyond the world, if there is no transcendent First Cause or Rational Princi- ple governing the universe, then it becomes difficult to see how there could be a pre—established set of characteristics that determines our true nature and proper function on earth. And this leads to Sartre’s radical rejection of essentialism: his claim that, for human beings, existence precedes essence. “If God does not exist,” he says, “there is at least one being in whom exis— tence precedes essence, and . . . this being is man, or, as Heidegger says, hu- man reality.” Sartre thinks that humans initially just exist: they show up on the scene; they just appear one day in the midst of beings, with no fixed

257Introduction

characteristics or plan determining what they are or what they ought to be. And thus, there is no Form of Humanity or proper function of humans, no genetic code or neurophysiology that fixes our identity in one specific set of traits or accomplishments rather than others. Sartre expresses this idea dra- matically by saying that humans find themselves “forlorn” in a world that is not of their choosing; they are “abandoned” in the midst of beings, with no pregiven nature or identity that gives purpose to their lives.

Once we exist, however, it is up to each one of us to create an essence for ourselves through our actions. Specifically, we create an essence for our- selves through our “projects,” life-defining plans that we freely choose. In Sartre’s view we do not create a single essence for human beings as a whole in this way, but rather by deciding on projects each individual creates an es- sence just for him or herself. It is therefore up to each one of us to shape his or her own individual identity and defining traits by choosing projects. And thus, each human being is a self-making or self-constituting being: we are what we make of ourselves throughout our lives.

In “The Humanism of Existentialism” Sartre says of a human being that “at first he is nothing, . . . only afterward will he be something, and he him- self will have made what he will be.” Because we enter the world with no determinate characteristics that make us one kind of thing rather than an- other, we are initially nothing in particular. If I have a small frame by na— ture, or if I come.from a bad part of town, those traits by themselves do not determine that I have to he, say, a coward or a loser. For I always have the ability to take a particular stand on my traits and transform them through my actions. Even if I am short and thin, I can stand up to bigger kids and refuse to be pushed around. I can learn martial arts and become stronger through exercise. If I have come from a poor family, I can make an effort to learn the social graces needed to be at ease in high society. Or, to take Sartre’s example, no one can simply be a coward (as, say, a glass simply is brittle). “There is no such thing as a cowardly constitution.” If a person is a coward, it is because he has made himself a coward by backing down or run- ning away when faced by threatening situations—“he has made himself a coward by his acts.”

Sartre’s point, then, is that I always have the ability to rise above my con- dition and transform it through my actions. This is what he means when he says, “Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” My essence or identity as a human is not something forced upon me; it is something I make in my actions. And so: “Man . . . exists only to the extent that he fulfills himself; he is therefore nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.”

The idea that existence precedes essence can be clarified in terms of Sartre’s conception of humans as combining both “facticity” and “transcen-

258 Sartre

dence.” Sartre holds that humans can be understood as having two aspects or dimensions of their being. On the one hand, humans are factieal beings to the extent that they just exist in the world (like cauliflowers and lecterns). They are embodied beings with specific traits, and they find themselves al— ready engaged in situations and in social contexts where they must deal with other people. Our facticity includes particular sexual desires and bodily needs that are just there, as things we have to make something of. At the level of facticity, humans are not much different from other animals: they have bodies, immediate needs, and desires and cravings that push them to do certain sorts of things.

In Sartre’s view, however, humans are different from animals in an im— portant respect. For human consciousness at its deepest level always goes beyond the level of mere facticity. This “going beyond” Sartre calls tran— scendence. Humans transcend their facticity to the extent that they are never simply trapped by their drives and desires, never forced to act in certain ways. In Sartre’s view, nothing in our facticity can be thought of as abso— lutely fixed and determined, for our facticity always presents itself to us as already endowed with a meaning that is constituted by the projects we freely choose. As Sartre says, I can never directly apprehend my facticity (as if it were the brute factual nature of a thing), for my past and my present situa- tion always show up for me through a web of meanings that are determined by my transcendence. Thus, if I see my size as meaning that I will never be able to stand up for myself, or if I see my disadvantaged background as meaning that I can never accomplish much in life, then these are my choices. I am choosing to see my facn'city in these ways, for I could just as well choose to see my physical condition and background in different terms (for example, as the assets I need to be a jockey or as equipping me to be a social worker). If I instead go around feeling like a victim of circumstances and fate, or feeling depressed because my facticity is holding me down, then that is my choice, and I am responsible for it.

The idea that human existence is characterized by transcendence explains why Sartre says that “if existence really does precede essence, [then] man is responsible for what he is. Thus, existentialism’s first move is to make every man aware of what he is and to make the full responsibility of his existence rest on him.” We will return to this crucial Sartrean idea of responsibility later. For now, it is enough to see that the being or essence of a human is made up by the projects the person chooses throughout his or her life. Sartre sums this up at the end of “The Humanism of Existentialism” by saying that “a man is nothing else than a series of undertakings, . . . he is the sum, the organization, the ensemble of the relationships [or involve— ments] which make up those undertakings.” '7‘

259Introdurtion

In the same essay Sartre also says that existentialism means that the “sub- jectivity of the individual is . . . our point of departure.” As he is well aware, this comment is potentially misleading, for it opens existentialism to charges that it is “subjectivistic” in the sense of emphasizing emotions and denigrating rationality. But Sartre has a different notion of subjectivity in mind here. In saying that subjectivity is the starting point, he means that, because there are no transcendent truths that are given to us to serve as foundations for our inquiries, existentialism must begin with the concrete, existing individual and that individual’s own sense of self and world. The bedrock for description and theory must be “the absolute truth of con- sciousness becoming aware of itself.” Though Sartre connects this idea to Descartes’s “I think, therefore I exist,” it would be a mistake to think that he is buying into the whole framework of Cartesian philosophy. On the con— trary, what he has in mind here is something much closer to the meth- odological starting point of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. His point is that any attempt to work out an ontology (an account of the Being of beings) must start from a description of the way our own lives and the world present themselves to us in the course of our actual, pre-theoretical experience. Our aim must be to avoid introducing uncritical ontological assumptions taken from various specialized disciplines (for example, from physics or psychol— ogy), and instead build up our account of reality in terms of what Husserl called “the things‘themselves.” Like Heidegger before him, Sartre believed that it is only on the basis of such a bedrock account of life as it is actually experienced that we will have a way of evaluating the various views of reality presented by religion, science, and so-called common sense.

Being, Consciousness, and Nothingness In Being and Nothingness, Sartre develops a metaphysical view that supports and explains the basic existentialist picture we have just outlined. Like Heidegger in Being and Time, Sartre aims to answer the question, “What is Being?” And like both Husserl and Heidegger, he maintains that in answer— ing this question we should avoid presupposing the duality of subject and object, and should instead start out by characterizing being-in—the-world as a totality. In an earlier work, Transcendence of the Ego (1936), Sartre argues that an accurate description of what presents itself in ordinary experience does not reveal a self or ego understood as a conscious subject. For example, in my experience of chasing a bus, what is revealed is a “bus-to-be-caught,” not a conscious subject who is chasing a bus. Anyone who has attained some skill at a sport like skiing is familiar with this kind of experience. When you are skiing down a slope, you are “out there” with the turns and moguls, at

Sartre260

one with the skis, the poles, and the trails. There is no consciousness of a self who is doing the skiing. In fact, as soon as you become self-conscious, you usually lose your ability to handle the slopes.

Sartre’s conception of human existence borrows two fundamental ideas from Husserl’s phenomenology. First, Sartre adopts Husserl’s view that the defining characteristic of consciousness is “intentionality.” To say that con- sciousness is intentional is to say that whenever one is conscious, one is con- scious of something. Consciousness always points beyond itself toward something—it is always directed toward some object. Thus, when I feel fear, the fear is of, say, this bee buzzing around my head, and when I have a de- sire, it is a desire for a pizza or for world peace. ’

Second, Sartre takes from Husserl the idea that consciousness is always a meaning-giving activity. My conscious acts do not just passively represent some object in the world. On the contrary, in consciously intending any ob- ject, I simultaneously endow that object with a meaning. Even ordinary per— ception involves more than simply receiving sense impressions and register- ing them in my awareness. For when I perceive something, I always perceive it as such and such—I see the pizza as delicious when I am hungry, or I see the bee as capable of stinging me. This perceiving as involves activity on my part. Even when we do our best to be detached, objective observers, we do not just passively receive sense data. For what we call “objectivity” is just one special way of conferring meaning on what we encounter (in the case of objective observation, we endow things with a special meaning, such as “item that exists independent of my consciousness”). In Sartre’s words, hu— man being is the “being which is compelled to decide the meaning of being——within it and everywhere outside it.”

Of course, most of us are not at all aware that we are endowing the world with meaning in our experience. Most of us assume that we are just seeing things the way they are (for example, the threatening bee or the tasty pizza). So, to make his story plausible, Sartre has to do two things. First, he has to give an account of being that displays the crucial role of human conscious- ness in constituting what shows up for us as reality. And, second, he has to explain why we normally do not consider ourselves accountable for the meaning of things in our experience—why we are disinclined to believe that we are partly responsible for the way we experience things.

Turning to the first of these tasks, the best way to understand Sartre’s view of human meaning-giving activity is by looking at Sartre’s view of being as it is “in—itsel,f” independent of any human consciousness. For Sartre, being—in-itself is just undifferentiated stuf,f and in this respect it is similar to the unformed matter of Aristotle or the prime matter of St. Thomas Aquinas. It is also a “plenum,” filling everything and extending everywhere. Further, he says that there is no “non-being” or “not” within

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261Introduction

the totality of being-in-itself. And because there is no “not” in being-in- itself, it does not admit of any distinctions, such as the distinctions between red and non—red or dog and non-dog. (In various respects, this view of being—in-itself recalls the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides’ descrip- tion of being.) Sartre evocatively characterizes being—in—itself as a bloated overflow, a superabundance; it is, he says, de trap, superfluous. It fills every- thing and, like porridge, is sticky, slimy, viscous, constantly oozing into every nook and cranny. It is because hot cereal is a primal symbol of being- in—itself that all children naturally feel disgusted when they first encounter oatmeal.

For Sartre, one effect of being-in—itself is that it is nauseating. Since it sucks everything into itself, it seems to suck your very being out of you. In his early novel Nausea, Sartre describes a character named Roquentin who for a moment is able to experience the being-in-itself of the roots of a chestnut tree under his park bench.

All of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence [i.e., pure being-in—itself] had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things, this root was kneaded into existence. Or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass, all that had vanished: the diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder—naked, in a frightful, obscene nakednness.‘

Sartre’s point here is that since diversity and order imply a “not” (this thing, not that one; this way, not that way), and since there is no “not” in being—in—itself, it contains neither diversity nor order. When Roquentin ex— periences pure being, then, he experiences an amorphous massiveness with- out any differentiation or organization. And because this plenum obliterates all differences and fills all holes, sucking everything into it, Roquentin expe— riences this as nausea. Being is suffocating; its sucks your breath out; it emp— ties your stomach: “I understood that I had found the key to Existence,” he says, “the key to my Nauseas.”2

If there are no differentiations within being-in—itself, then how does dif- ferentiation arise? For Sartre, the answer to this question is found in the fact that in addition to being-in-itself, there we conscious beings (ourselves), beings who care about their own existence and who, given this concern, make distinctions in their dealings with the world. Determinate reality arises with the appearance of consciousness into the totality of what is.

1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. Lloyd Alexander (Norfolk, Conn: New Direc— tions, 1959), 127. 2. Ibid., 129.

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Sartre introduces his discussion of the role of human consciousness in shaping the world by first looking at the nature of questions as such. He points out that to ask a question, such as the ontological question asked in Being and Nothingness, is to step back and adopt a detached attitude of inter- rogation toward being—in-itself (§l).3 Sartre notes that this attitude of ques- tioning is not our original relationship to being—in-itself. On the contrary, in our everyday activities we are not at all detached, but are instead absorbed in doing things in a pre—reflective way. In an everyday activity like counting cigarettes, to take Sartre’s example, what I am conscious of is the cigarettes, and I have only a tacit, background sense of my activity of counting.“1 Sartre calls this nonfocal, unexplicit background awareness of what one is doing the “pre-reflective togito,” and he claims that this is our normal condition as being-in—the—world. For him our questioning is a rather specialized, reflec- tive mode of consciousness that is first made possible by modifying our ordi- nary, pre-reflective way of being—in—the-world.

Nevertheless, questioning shows us something about what human con— sciousness introduces into the world. Sartre says that in the act of question— ing, I open up a space in which the “not” can arise in the midst of being. First, questioning presupposes an expectation of a certain sort: to ask how it stands with things is to be open to the answer that it is not such and such. “The reply will be a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’. . . . There exists then for the questioner the permanent objective possibility of a negative reply.” Second, the ques- tion, “What is X?” assumes the possibility of arriving at a determinate an- swer of the form, “It is so and so.” But to say it is so and so is to say it is not something else, which means once again that the act of questioning intro- duces a “not” into being. The very fact that questioning can open a range of possibilities, including the possibility of a “this, not that,” serves as a clue to the fact that it is human consciousness that is the source of the “not” or “nothingness” in our experience.

In Sartre’s view, then, if there were no such thing as consciousness, there would be no distinctions or differentiations within the realm of being. Tak- ing over from Spinoza and Hegel the basic principle that “all determination is negation,” Sartre claims that determinate reality with its differentiations and distinctions is possible only because one thing is distinguished from an— other, and this means that there must be negations within being.5 And it is consciousness that introduces determinations into reality by introducing negations. For example, the very existence of males is dependent on con—

3. Section numbers refer to selections below from Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956). 4. Ibid.,lii—liii. 5. Ibid., 14-15.

263Introduction

scious beings thinking of males as not being female. Human consciousness cuts up the world in accord with its concerns and projects, and this activity of cutting up is the metaphysical foundation of the existence of distinctions. Sartre describes the process whereby distinctions come to be as “a limitm‘g cutting into being by a being, which, . . . already is a process of nihilation.” For there to be distinctions in the realm of being-in-itself, then, there has to be a conscious being that takes things as such-and-such and takes other things as not being such-and-such.

Sartre’s claim that distinctions require consciousness is opposed to the scientific realist position, according to which the fact that the world is carved into natural kinds such as electron and proton is independent of con— sciousness. Even if there were no conscious beings, in this view, the world would still really be cut up into electrons and non—electrons. Hence, there are distinctions in being without consciousness. For Sartre, by contrast, dis- tinctions are made, not found. They are our creations, not our discoveries. They are produced by our introducing nothingness into the realm of being— in-itself.

Furthermore, Sartre claims that the existence of nothingness can be grounded phenomenologically: nothingness is something we encounter in the world. His most famous example of how this is so is his story about ar- riving in a cafe’ and looking for his friend, Pierre, who is supposed to meet him there (§2),., He looks around the cafe’ and sees that Pierre is not there. Sartre claims that the cafe’ by itself, independent of anyone’s consciousness, contains no non—being or absence: “its patrons, its tables, its booths, its mirrors, its light, its smoky atmosphere, and the sounds of its voices, rat— tling saucers, and the footsteps that fill it—the café is a fullness of being.” Nevertheless if one is a consciousness seeking something in the café, one can apprehend an absence or non-being in the café, in this case, the absence of Pierre.

In order to clarify the experience of perceiving an absence, Sartre makes use of the figure-ground distinction central to Gestalt psychology. Accord- ing to this distinction, a figure can emerge into the foreground in order to be perceived only against a background that determines how that figure can ap- pear. Thus, the appearance of a figure is possible only against a background that recedes into something peripheral or nonfocal in relation to the figure. That is why there can be familiar sorts of figure-ground reversals like the vase that flips into two people kissing and then back into a vase again. Using this figure-ground distinction, Sartre describes the experience of looking for Pierre in this way: as he looks around the room, the being-in-itsclf of the cafe retreats to the margins of consciousness where it functions as the ground upon which the figure of Pierre is expected to appear. In this experi- ence, everything in the cafe keeps receding into the background, while the

Sartre264

absence of Pierre keeps flickering against that backdrop. From a phe- nomenological standpoint, then, one directly apprehends a certain lack or “not,” the absence of Pierre, which Sartre calls a “flickering of nothing- ness.”

Another example of how a “not” or “negativity” can appear in the heart of being is found in experience of destruction (§2). According to Sartre, without consciousness there could be no such thing as destruction. Being- in-itsclf can contain no destruction. Earthquakes and storms “do not de— stroy,” he says, “or at least they do not destroy directly; they merely modify the distribution of masses of being. There is no less after the storm than be- fore.” A storm can knock down a field of wheat and tear apart a house. But all this is, at most, a redistribution of matter within the totality of being. In Sartre’s view, it is only if there is a consciousness who cares about these events (a farmer, for example) that this rearrangement or displacement of matter can count as “destruction.” Similarly, the biological functions of cat- tle can be terminated by a flood. But only if there is some conscious being who makes a project of caring for the cattle could those biological transfor- mations count as the destruction of a herd. Thus, only when being-in—itself is apprehended by a consciousness is room made for the possibility of de— struction in reality. So again, it is consciousness that first makes possible negation within being-in—itself.

What is it about consciousness that makes it possible for it to introduce nothingness into the world? Sartre’s answer is that consciousness at its very core is itself a nothingness. On this view, consciousness is not an object or thing, but is instead a nothing. The “upsurge” of consciousness in the midst of beings is what introduces a lack or a gap into the heart of being. Con- sciousness opens a fissure or absence by virtue of which the “not” is first introduced into the world.

We can understand why he argues this way if we recall that consciousness for Sartre has a dual structure. On the one hand, humans are factical beings that are just there among other beings in the world. We have bodies with distinctive characteristics, we have made decisions in the past that we must live with now, we are involved with other people who tend to see us as ob- jects, and so on. Sartre calls this dimension of facticity in humans their being as “in-itself” (en 50:), and he sees it as correlated with the past—what we have been up until the present moment. On the other hand, as we have seen, humans are beings who can transcend their being as mere facticity. Sartre tries to capture this dimension of transcendence by saying that, for humans, their own being is in question for them. That is, humans have an ability to see their own lives as mattering or as being at stake for them in some determinate sense. And because our being is in question for us in this way, our facticity is always encountered not as something fixed and un-

265Introduction

changeable, but as presenting a task or undertaking that we must accomplish in living out our lives. We have to make something of our facticity, and we do so by endowing our lives with a meaning that is defined by the projects we Choose for our lives. To be human, then, is not just to be in-itself, but also “for—itself” (pour 501'). To the extent that we are always taking some stand on our own existences and making something of our lives in what we do, our being is something that is for us.

To return to our earlier example, if I am short and frail by nature, I can never encounter those features of my stature as they are in themselves. That is so because such things can never be purely neutral to me. In my society, there is a temptation to think of such traits as limitations or shortcomings, and I might have fallen into step with this public interpretation in such a way that I see my size as a handicap. Or I might have seen through the ster- eotypes of my society so that I see my stature as something to be proud of. In any event, because I always encounter my facticity in terms of some inter- pretation or other, I always transcend my being as in-itself. And for Sartre that in turn means that there is always a gap or leeway——a “nothingness”— between my being as in-itself and my being as for-itself. In his words, “The Being by which Nothingness arrives in the world is a being such that in its Being, the Nothingness of its Being is in question.” It is precisely this fissure within consciousness that first makes possible the kinds of self-detachment found in questioning, doubting, abstaining from belief, and other forms of reflective consciousness.

Freedom

The most central concept in Sartre’s account of human beings is freedom. In Sartre’s view, nothingness first arises only because human existence is characterized by a particular kind of freedom. As we have seen, human con— sciousness embodies a gap between facticity and transcendence, between the in-itself and the for—itself. This gap implies that, as for-itself, humans are not ever the same as they are in-itself, and they are always more than they are in-itself. For us, there can never be a perfect coincidence of the in—itself and the for-itself. Or, as Sartre puts it, “human reality, in its most immedi- ate being, in the intrastructure of the pre-reflective cogita, must be what it is not and not be what it is” (§5).

The noncoincidence found within the self is possible, Sartre contends, only because human existence is characterized by freedom. Sartre tries to clarify this conception of freedom through a description of “anguish.” He begins by distinguishing anguish from fear (§3). Both fear and anguish are manifest in the experience of vertigo or dizziness one feels at high altitudes. Suppose I am on a narrow path that runs along a high cliff where there is no

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guard-rail. In a such a situation I will, first of all, feel fear that I might be caused to fall over by objects or events that are beyond my control, like slip- ping on a stone or having the earth crumble under my feet. Sartre says, “a situation provokes fear if there is a possibility of my life being changed from without.” My fear is directed toward something outside of me in the world, and in my fear I experience myself as a thing among other things in the world, as something passive to which things might happen.

In response I will react with circumspection: “I will pay attention to the stones in the road; I will keep myself as far as possible from the edge of the path.” This reaction involves projecting a number of possibilities for future conduct. Sartre notes that these possibilities do not appear to me as deter- mined, either by causes outside me or by causes within me, for otherwise they would appear not as genuine possibilities, but instead as things that are simply “about-to-happen.” In particular, I do not apprehend myself as psy- chologically determined to choose one of these possibilities. Although I am conscious of having motives for acting in particular ways given my horror of the precipice, “I am conscious of that horror as not determinant in relation to my possible conduct.” Instead, actions other than those suggested by my fear present themselves to me as real possibilities, including even such ex— treme actions as throwing myself over the cliff.

And here anguish comes into play. The fact that one can feel a fear of heights even when one is relatively safe is due not to fear, but to anguish. Anguish results from the awareness that I have several possibilities of action available to me, none of which is determined in advance, and that I can choose any one of them. This means that I might go on protecting myself from danger, or that I might hurl myself over the precipice. My anguish, then, is my experience of myself as a being which is capable of freely choos— ing from among an array of possibilities. In anguish, I encounter my own life as not determined by forces beyond my control, but instead as something I must choose. Thus, anguish is not directed toward some object outside me in the world, but rather toward my own self as a for—itself capable of choos- ing from a range of open possibilities. As Sartre puts it, “fear is fear of beings in the world whereas anguish is anguish before myself.”

At the close of his discussion of anguish, Sartre draws some conclusions about human existence. On the one hand, the experience of anguish shows that “I am indeed already there in the future; it is for the sake of that being which I will be there at the turning of the path that I now exert all my strength.” Because I am concerned about the being that I will be in the fu- ture, I exist as a projection into the realm of future possibilities. In this sense, “I am the self which I will be.” But on the other hand, it is also true that “I am not the self which I will be.” This is so not just because time separates me from my future being, but because my present being is not the

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267Introduction

foundation of my future being. Since I stand out into an open range of pos- sibilities, none of which is determined in advance, it seems that nothing ac- tual in the present can determine where I am going in the future. Thus, “a nothingness has slipped into the heart of this relation” within myself (§3). As capable of taking a stand on my facticity, I am, as transcendence, always more than I am as facticity, and that means, according to Sartre, that I can never be completely determined by my facticity.

Sartre’s notion of ontological freedom has the radical consequence that we can always transform our situation through our free choice of projects. It is because of this freedom that Sartre says in “The Humanism of Existential— ism” that we are “condemned to be free.” Each of us “carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being.”

To illustrate this notion of our responsibility, he discusses the experience of finding oneself in a situation where a war has broken out (§8). Surely, we might say, a war is something that just happens to us. If, independent of anything I decide, my country goes to war and I am inducted into the army, there would seem to be an intuitive sense in which I am not responsible for the war. But Sartre claims that nevertheless there is a also sense in which I am responsible for the war:

If I am mobilized in a war, this war is my war; it is in my image and I deserve it. I deserve it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by desertion,‘ these ultimate possibles are those which must always be present for us when there is a question of envisaging a situation. For lack of getting out of it, I have chosen it. . . . But in addition the war is mine because by the sole fact that it arises in a sit- uation which I cause to be and that I can discover it there only by engaging my— self for or against it, I can no longer distinguish at present the choice which I make of myself from the choice which I make of the war. To live this war is to choose myself through my choice of myself. (§8)

The point here is that by taking a concrete stand—by choosing to engage myself in the world in some determinate way or other—I simultaneously confer a meaning on the worldly context in which I find myself. If I choose to encounter the war as a terrible force befalling me from outside myself, then that interpretation of the war is my choice, and I am responsible for it. This is so because there are always other ways of interpreting the war avail— able to me: I could see it as a chance to develop my character, for example, or as a noble crusade to stamp out a tyrant.

Moreover, there is always the “ultimate possible” in every situation—the possibility of committing suicide and putting an end to both my own on— gagement and the world as I encounter it. So if I decide to go on living, I have chosen to be engaged in the world, and in doing that I have chosen an

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attitude that makes the world show up in a specific way. In that choice, how- ever, I have chosen the war as meaning such and such to me, and I am there— fore responsible for that war. (When Sartre says that at present I cannot “distinguish” the choice I make of myself from the choice I make of the war, he means that there is no way for me to drive in a wedge between the war as it really is and the war as it is encountered as a result of the choices I make.)

To show the extent of our responsibility for the world as we encounter it, Sartre goes so far as to say that “I choose being born.” This does not mean, of course, that I chose my parents or that I caused them to have me. It means, rather, that I am responsible for what the fact of my birth means to me, that is, for how it counts in my life. If I go around complaining about being born too late or whining about my unhappy childhood, then that is my decision. I am choosing to let my birth have a negative meaning for me. I could always change my interpretation if I wished to. As Sartre says, the “fact of my birth never appears as a brute fact but always across a projective reconstruction of my for-itself.” It is the way I project the meaning of my birth that determines what the event of my birth means to me. And because I always encounter events in the world as endowed with a meaning through the choices I make, there is no way to make sense of the idea that I could come face to face with my birth as it is in itself.

“Facticity is everywhere,” Sartre says “but [it is] inapprehensible; I never encounter anything except my responsibility” (§8). In other words, even though our condition is characterized by facticity, we can never gain access to that facticity as it is in itself, but only as it shows up in a specific way as a result of the choices we make. What we deal with in life is not raw facts, but opportunities for creating specific meanings through our choices. As Sartre says, “every event in the world can be revealed to me only as an oppor- tunity.” And because even other people “are themselves only opportunities and chances, the responsibility of the for—itself extends to the entire world as a peopled-world.” To be human, then, is to be “a being which is compelled to decide the meaning of being—within it and everywhere outside of it” (§8). The only thing we are not free about is whether or not we are free.

One might question whether our consciousness of freedom has the dra- matic consequences for the structure of the self Sartre thinks it does. My future may indeed appear to me as an array of possibilities among which I may freely select. But this does not entail that I am realyl free. It may be that given all the causal factors that precede any particular situation of choice, I do not have the power to choose otherwise than how I in fact choose. And if this is so, consciousness of freedom is an illusion. This could reveal a prob— lem for Sartre’s phenomenological project. If, in the last analysis, his ac- count of freedom and human existence is simply a matter of how things ap- pear to us, and it may not really be true, then perhaps we should undertake

269Introduction

an investigation other than the phenomenological one to decide how relevant the consciousness of freedom is to the meaning and structure of our lives.

Bad Faith and Authenticity Sartre believes that the structure of human existence as a combination of facticity and freedom results in a pervasive tendency toward bad faith (§§4— 6). Bad faith occurs when a conscious being denies her freedom to choose from among a range of possibilities, or when she denies an aspect of her fac— ticity, for instance, that there are certain choices that she has made in the past, or that these choices make up a certain pattern. Sartre believes that these are cases of a certain kind of sefl—deception, the kind in which the sub- ject is conscious that she is free and at the same time denies it to herself, or is conscious that her past actions have a certain character and simultaneously denies it to herself.

In order to explore the notion of bad faith, Sartre develops a number of vivid examples. One of these is of a waiter in a cafe’:

His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflex— ible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the reckless- ness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually bro— ken equilibrium which he perpetually reestablishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his ges- tures and his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. (§5)

Sartre analyzes this waiter as giving in to a societal demand for someone oc- cupied in a trade to be nothing other than someone who has a certain oc- cupation: “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.” But it is false that the waiter is a waiter, in the sense that “this inkwell is an inkwell, or the glass is a glass” (§5). The waiter is someone whose choices for future possibilities are open to him; he is not a thing that is restricted to certain functions, the way an inkwell is. And thus, when the waiter thinks that he is a waiter, he is deceiving himself. As a con— scious and free being, he is not a being—in-itsel,f but rather transcendence, a being—far—itself.

Nonetheless, in Sartre’s View, there is a sense in which the waiter is a

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waiter, for otherwise he could just as well be called a diplomat or a reporter. He is not, however, a waiter in the mode of being-in-itself, but “in the mode of being what I am nat” (§5). Though being a waiter is a role he plays, it is his role, and if he is to avoid bad faith, he must acknowledge that it is and not deny it.

For Sartre, there are two sorts of bad faith. In one kind of bad faith, a person denies (some aspect of) her being-for-itself, her freedom, and in the second, a person denies (some aspect of) her being-in-itself. Sartre thinks that bad faith is a pervasive feature of human beings, and further, that it is very difficult to avoid because of the structure of consciousness. He con— siders one sort of attempt to avoid bad faith, the pursuit of sincerity, a quality he characterizes as trying “to be what one is” (§S). Sartre argues that any attempt to achieve sincerity will itself result in bad faith. He develops his case with the example of a homosexual who refuses to acknowledge that he is a homosexual. The homosexual’s friend, the champion of sincerity, becomes irritated at this refusal, and wants him to “be what he is,” to declare that he is a homosexual. In Sartre’s view, there is truth in the homosexual’s refusal, for no person is a homosexual in the way that a table is a table. No person is a homosexual as being-in-itself. And thus, the homosexual would be right if he denied being a homosexual in the sense of “I am not what I am” (§S). He might declare to himself, “To the extent that a pattern of conduct is defined as the conduct of a paedemst and to the extent that I have adopted this con— duct, I am a paederast. But to the extent that human reality can not be finally defined by patterns of conduct, I am not one.” But this is not how Sartre’s homosexual is thinking: “he understands ‘not being’ in the sense of ‘not being-in-itself.’ He lays claim to ‘not being a paedemst’ in the sense in which this table is not an inkwell. He is in bad faith.” This man maintains that he is not a homosexual even as being—in-itself—insofar as he is constituted by past choices and actions. And in this respect the homosexual deceives himself.

But would he also be in bad faith were he to become sincere? His friend is asking, Sartre explains, that the homosexual acknowledge that he is a homosexual, because admitting some aspect of what you really are lets you disown it as something merely in—itself. The friend wants the homosexual “to be what he is in order no longer to be what he is.” But if the homosexual were to undertake this psychological maneuver, Sartre claims, he would be in bad faith. He would then be agreeing that he is a homosexual in the sense that an inkwell is an inkwell. He would be affirming that he is a homosexual in the sense of being-in-itself, yet at the same time he would be aware that this view of himself is false.

In Sartre’s view, no one can ever simply be anything. This is because being something in particular (for example being a student or a woman) is always a matter of assuming a particular identity and sustaining its existence. But inso-

271Introduction

far as our own identity is something we make, it is not something we really are. There is always a gap or a not between ourselves as for-itself and what we are as in-itself, and of this we are always in some sense aware. Thus sincerity—trying to be what you are—always results in bad faith.

In Sartre’s view, bad faith is extremely difficult to avoid due to certain structural features of human ontology. We are a combination of being-for— itself, whose nature it is to strive perpetually to complete itself, and being— in-itself, which does not strive because it is already complete. As being-for— itsel,f we attempt to achieve the completeness of being-in-itself, while at the same time not forfeiting our being—for-itself, for that would eliminate our character as conscious and free. In short, we want to achieve completed being—

for—itself, or as Sartre describes it, to become “in-and—for—itself.” We wish to realize “the ideal of a consciousness that would be the foundation of its own being-in—itself by virtue of the pure consciousness it would have of itself” (§9). Sartre calls our desire to realize this ideal “the desire to be God.” But we cannot achieve this ideal, because as being-for-itself we can never be completed. In consequence, as a combination of being-in-itself and being- for—itself, we are perpetually unstable or “metastable” constructions: we are constantly flipping back and forth between regarding ourselves solely as being—in—itself and solely as being—for-itself (§5). Because we aim at com- pleteness, we tend to regard ourselves as being-in-itself and deny our being— for-itself, and because we aim to affirm our freedom we tend to regard our- selves as being—for-itself and deny our being—in-itself. The pervasiveness of bad faith is therefore grounded in our being metastable constructions of this sort.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre does not talk about how one can avoid bad faith and be authentic. We might, however, imagine a criminal saying, “To the extent that a pattern of conduct is defined as the conduct of an evil person and to the extent that I have adopted this conduct, I am an evil per- son. But to the extent that human reality can not be finally defined by pat— terns of conduct, I am not an evil person. Though it is true that I am evil, it is also true that I am not identical to that evil person I have been, for I always have the ability to change” (§5). No deception about his own nature and ca- pacities is manifested, in this attitude. According to Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity, authenticity involves, first of all, a lucid awareness of the structural ambiguity in a person between being-in-itself and being- for-itselffi The authentic person is lucidly aware of her past actions and what they add up to, but at the same time does not view these past actions as determining what she will be, for she clearly sees herself as being able to freely choose from among the possibilities that open up for her. In addition,

6. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Amhig‘uio', trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel, 1970), 77-78, 156-59.

Z72 Sartre

according to Beauvoir, the authentic person assumes her freedom as opposed to fleeing it, and she does this by being activeyl engaged in her projects in the world, and also in rejecting all forms of oppression.

The Other and the Question of Ethics Sartre has been cn'ticized for developing a view of human existence that seems to undermine ethics. Like Nietzsche before him, Sartre believes that if God is dead and there are no transcendental bases for value judgments, then values can only be human creations. But if this is the case, then values seem to lack any higher justification or grounding. In “The Humanism of Existentialism,” he says that “if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct.” For Sartre, all values are products of individual choices, and, furthermore, any criteria by which we might evaluate values are also products of our choices. “So, in the bright realm of values,” he concludes, “we have no excuse behind us, nor justifica- tion before us. We are alone, with no excuses.” A similar point is made in Being and Nothingness where Sartre says, “my freedom is the unique founda- tion of values, [and so] nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that particular value, this or that particular scale of values.”7 From this standpoint, it seems that if someone were to decide in favor of racist or genocidal values, there would be no way to criticize such a choice. And thus it would seem difficult to secure ethical standards to which we could legit- imately hold in our attempt to live together in this world.

Moreover, Sartre’s account of human relations in Being and Nothingness makes it hard to see how one central component of a moral point of view, genuine respect for others, could arise. We can get a sense of why this is so if we look at the description of human relations in that work. Sartre claims that my awareness of my own self is dependent on others: I can only become aware of my self through what he calls the “look” of another person. To support this claim, he considers a case in which someone is peering through a keyhole (§7). If I am secretly watching someone in this way, I am aware of the scene I am watching, but I do not yet have any awareness of my own self. Suppose now that I hear footsteps coming down the hall and I become aware that someone is looking at me. When this happens, I will suddenly become aware of myself: “I see myself because somebody sees me.” Now also for the first time I can feel something like shame. As Sartre points out, a feeling like shame is not just an inner state I can discover through introspection or

7. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 38. This passage, and the issue it raises, is discussed by Richard Bernstein in Prams and Action (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 146-48.

273Introduction

inward-turning. My “inner” experience of shame is something I can dis- cover only through the look of another person, for shame necessarily in- volves seeing myself as another sees me.

With his “look,” the other views me in a way that is quite different from the sense I had of myself before I noticed him. The other views me as an object, that is, as a being that lacks transcendence and freedom and is driven merely by basic drives and needs—in this case, as a voyeur or peeping Tom. In the eyes of the other, I just am a voyeur, as a rock just is a rock. By look— ing at me as “in-itself" in this way, the other seems to deprive me of my being as a “for-itself.”

And further, the objectifying look of the other makes it possible for me to become aware of an aspect of myself that was not explicit earlier: my being- in-itself. Seeing myself through the other’s eyes, I begin to regard myself as an object. I internalize his perception of me, and begin to think of myself as a subhuman thing driven by basic animal motivations. Moreover, I can see myself in this way only because the other presents himself as being-for- itself, that is, as a conscious and free subject who is capable of interpreting and evaluating what he sees. In this respect, he presents himself as superior to me, and I feel dehumanized by his look. My response will be to try to prove that I am more than he sees me as, and this means that I will treat him as an object whose look carries no special weight.

Sartre believes that this type of conflict extends throughout human rela- tionships.8 Human relationships are characterized by a struggle for self— assertion that will never result in stable and tranquil co-existence. In at- tempting to assert his transcendence, the other will objectify me. I will then resist the other’s objectification of me by trying to make him recognize me as a free and creative subject capable of transcendence. But in this process, I objectify him. In response, he will resist my attempts at domination, and will try to assert himself as the truly free and creative subject, but he will thereby objectify me again.

This struggle for self—assertion has been vividly described by Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex.9 There she claims that what motivates people is not just a desire for happiness, but a desire or need to realize one’s transcen- dence: “Every individual concerned to justify his existence feels that his ex- istence involves an undefined need to transcend himself, to engage in freely chosen projects.” In fact, a person’s very being as a subject is defined by

8. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 361-430. See also Piotr Hoffman, The Human Self and the Life' and Death Struggle, (Gainesville, Tampa: University Presses of Florida, 1983). 9. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957). All quotes are from pp. xxviii—xxix.

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“exploits or projects that serve as a mode of transcendence; he achieves lib- erty only through a continual reaching out toward other liberties.” Ul- timately, merely feeling good or being contented will not be fulfilling. It can be experienced as a loss of humanity: “Every time transcendence falls back into immanence [being a thing among others in the world], stagnation, there is a degradation of existence into the ‘en-soi’—the brutish life of subjection to given conditions—and of liberty into constraint and contingence.”

But the project of self—affirmation—of realizing and manifesting one’s own being as “for-itself”—generally takes the form of lording it over an- other person, whom one treats as an inferior being, as mere “in—itself’.’ His— torically, this has been evident in the way men have treated women:

Now, what peculiarly signalizes the situation of women is that she—a free and au- tonomous being like all human creatures—nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of Other. They propose to sta— bilize her as object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego which is [treated as] essen— tial and sovereign. The drama of woman lies in this conflict between the funda- mental aspirations of every subject (ego)—who always regards the self as essen- tial—and the compulsions of a situation in which she is [treated as] the inessential.

Thus, the oppression of women has been motivated by a deeper dynamic according to which one subject tries to demonstrate its sovereignty and su- periority by objectifying another.

It is perhaps because of this rather pessimistic view of human relations that Sartre tried, three years after the publication of Being and Nothingness, to present a basis for ethics in his essay, “The Humanism of Existentialism.” This essay takes on a Kantian turn to the extent that it emphasizes a kind of universalizability——choosing to govern our actions by reasons and principles that we can and would want others to choose to govern their actions by as well. This seems to be what motivates such passages as the following:

When we say that man chooses his own self, we mean that every one of us does likewise; but we also mean by that that in making this choice he also chooses all men. In fact, in creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. . . . We always choose the good, and nothing can be good for us with— out being good for all.

The tangle of problems this passage creates might explain why Sartre la- ter repudiated his “Humanism” essay. Even granting for the moment the claim that we always choose what we perceive as being good for ourselves (a questionable bit of moral psychology), what reason could he have for saying that anything I regard as good for myself I should also regard as good for

275Introduction

everyone? Yet he claims, for example, that “if I want to marry, I am involv- ing all humanity in monogamy and not merely myself. . . . In choosing my- self, I choose man.” Given Sartre’s picture of the individual self as the source of all values, however, it is not at all clear why I should have any re- gard for the good of others, or why others are necessarily implicated in the value-choices I make.

Both Sartre and Beauvoir at times hoped to formulate an ethics according to which acknowledging one’s own freedom would lead to a commitment to acknowledging the freedom of all humanity. In “The Humanism of Existen- tialism” Sartre says,

Of course, freedom as the definition of man does not depend on others, but as soon as there is involvement, I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom I can take freedom as my goal only if I take that of others as a goal as well. Consequently, when, in all honesty, I’ve recognized that man is a being in whom existence precedes essence, that he is a free being who, in various circumstances, can only want his freedom, I have at the same time recog— nized that I can want only the freedom of others.

A passage like this gives us a sense of Sartre’s heartfelt moral commitments. Here he presents us with a picture of an ideal state of affairs: a society characterized by a universally shared commitment to the freedom of all peo- ple. Nevertheless, it is hard to see the connections Sartre is making in this passage. If all people are already free (as a matter of ontological fact), then why would they also want to be free? And if I am “a being which is com- pelled to decide the meaning of being,” then why must I care about the con- dition of others?

Sartre spent years attempting to formulate an ethics, and the verdict is not yet in on whether his efforts were a success.10 But whatever we think of the possibility of developing an existentialist ethics, we have to be struck by the insights in Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s characterization of human relations as involving a struggle for self-affirmation and self-realization. Seen from their standpoint, the Romantic assumption that people tend to be good and loving by nature seems highly questionable. And we cannot fail to be struck by their account of authenticity and of the fundamental place of freedom in hu- man life. In its emphasis on responsibility and our ability to take charge of our lives, Sartre’s thought still addresses the most critical issues in the search for meaning and fulfillment in human existence.

10. Sartre’s Colliers pour une morale (Notebooks for an Etlu'rr) was published in 1983.