Sartre

A student comes to Sartre during the occupation with a problem he cannot solve. His brother has been killed by the Germans. He wants to leave for England and join the Free French. He also lives alone with his mother, who has already lost one son and whose only consolation he is. If he goes, she may fall into despair. If he stays, he does nothing about the thing that killed his brother.

He wants to be told which is right. Sartre’s answer is that no doctrine can tell him.

Christian ethics says love your neighbour, and both options are loving a neighbour: one is the mother in front of him, the other is a nation in the abstract. Kantian ethics says never treat a person merely as a means, and both options treat someone as a means: staying uses the soldiers who fight without him, going uses his mother as the cost of his choice. The doctrines are not silent. They are too general to decide the case, and the student has to decide it anyway.

Sartre’s conclusion is not that ethics is useless. It is that the student is going to invent his answer, and no appeal to anything outside himself will do it for him. “No rule of general morality can show you what you ought to do.”

Everything Sartre argues comes out of one claim, and the student’s dilemma is what that claim looks like from inside a life. The claim is short and the derivations from it are short. If you can state it and reconstruct the chain, you can get to almost everything else without having memorized it.

1. Existence precedes essence

Essence is what a thing is: the properties that define it and the purpose it was made for. Existence is the bare fact that the thing is there.

Take a paper-cutter, a blade for slitting envelopes. Before any paper-cutter exists, somebody has the concept: a thing for cutting paper, made by a particular method. The artisan does not produce the object and then wonder what it is for. Purpose and production routine are settled in advance, and the object is made to satisfy them. Nobody, Sartre says, postulates a man who produces a paper-cutter without knowing what it is used for.

So for the paper-cutter, essence precedes existence. What it is comes before the fact that it is.

Apply the same structure to a person. If God exists and is understood as a creator, God is a superior sort of artisan. God has the concept of man the way the manufacturer has the concept of paper-cutter, and produces individuals as realizations of that concept. On that view a human being also has an essence before existing: a human nature, fixed in advance, which each person instantiates.

Sartre’s move is to remove God and follow the consequence: for man, existence precedes essence. You turn up first, and what you are gets settled afterwards, by what you do. “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.”

“Precedes” here means logically prior rather than earlier in time. Nobody is claiming you exist for a while and then acquire properties on a Tuesday.

One step matters more than it looks. Removing God does not automatically remove human nature. Sartre is explicit that eighteenth-century atheism suppressed God and kept the essence: philosophers who dropped the deity still held that man possesses a human nature found in every man, so that each is a particular example of a universal conception. That position is available and coherent. Sartre’s atheistic existentialism is more consistent than that, and the consistency is the whole point: if there is no God, there is no mind in which a conception of man could have existed prior to men.

Why it is called subjectivism, in two senses

The word does two jobs and Sartre uses both.

The weak sense: the individual chooses himself rather than being determined from outside. That is the sense already established.

The strong sense, and the one that surprises: man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity. There is no standpoint outside human choosing from which values could be validated. This is the deeper meaning of the word and the one Sartre says is the profounder of the two.

Choosing for yourself is choosing for everyone

The consequence people find hardest, so here is the argument rather than the slogan.

In choosing, you do not choose an arbitrary act. You choose what you take to be good, and nothing can be good for you and not good for everyone in your position. To choose is to affirm the value of what is chosen.

So: “in fashioning myself I fashion man.” If I decide to marry and have children, even if the decision proceeds from my circumstances, “I am thereby committing not only myself, but humanity as a whole, to the practice of monogamy.” Choosing is legislating.

That is where the anguish comes from, and it is not a feeling Sartre added for atmosphere.

2. What the claim forces: anguish, forlornness, despair

Three consequences, each naming a different absence. They are not three moods.

Anguish is the absence of anyone to share responsibility. Because your choice legislates for everyone, you carry the weight of all humanity in every decision, and there is no one to hand it to. Sartre’s illustration is a military leader ordering an attack in which men will die: he chooses, nobody validates it, and he acts anyway. The anguish is not what stops you acting. It is the condition of acting.

Forlornness is the absence of any external authority for values. God does not exist, and Sartre insists on drawing the full consequence rather than the comfortable one. Nothing in the sky underwrites right and wrong. “We are alone, with no excuses.” His compressed statement: man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself; free, because once thrown into the world he is responsible for everything he does. There is no determinism, and there is no given value to appeal to.

The student’s dilemma is what forlornness looks like as a decision procedure. And notice what Sartre says about seeking advice: choosing an adviser is already choosing the answer, because you know roughly what a priest of a given kind will say. Even the appeal to another person is your own decision wearing a disguise.

Despair is the absence of guarantees. You act on what is within your will, and reckon only with what depends on your will, without hoping that circumstances or other people will cooperate. Sartre is not saying give up. He is saying act without a guarantee that the world will meet you, because there is no such guarantee available.

Why these three and not others

Each one names something that is not there. Anguish: no one else to bear the choice. Forlornness: no authority above you. Despair: no assurance about outcomes. They exhaust the places you might have looked for support and find each empty. That is why the list is three and why it is closed.

3. Facticity and transcendence

Two structures, both true of you at once, and every form of self-deception Sartre describes works by using one where the other was called for.

Facticity is everything already true of you: your body, your class, your past, your job, the fact that you are in this chair. It is what you are in the manner an object is what it is. Given, and mostly not chosen.

Transcendence is your escape from all of it. You are never simply your situation, because you relate to it and project beyond it. Not God. It means passing beyond.

The compressed formula, and the sentence worth reproducing exactly: human reality is a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.

Read it slowly. It is what it is not, because it is its possibilities and projects, none of which it currently is. It is not what it is, because it is never simply identical with its given properties the way a stone is identical with its properties.

The underlying vocabulary is being-in-itself (en-soi) and being-for-itself (pour-soi). The in-itself is the mode of objects: this inkwell is an inkwell, with no gap between the thing and itself. The for-itself is consciousness, defined by not coinciding with itself: “consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.”

Sartre’s test of this is sadness. If I am sad, I have to keep making myself sad from beginning to end. I cannot let it run on its own momentum the way a body keeps moving after a shock. There is no inertia in consciousness. A stranger appears, I lift my head and put on a lively cheerfulness, and what remains of the sadness except that I promise it an appointment for later. So if I make myself sad, it is because I am not sad. The being of the sadness escapes me in the act by which I affect myself with it.

4. Bad faith

Lying to yourself should be impossible. To lie, you have to know the truth and hide it from someone who does not. If you are both people at once, that is not hiding. The liar must be in possession of the truth he conceals, and in bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth, so the duality of deceiver and deceived does not exist.

Freud’s answer is to split the person: the unconscious knows, the conscious mind does not, and a censor sits between them. Sartre rejects it, and the objection is precise. The censor has to know what it is repressing in order to repress it, and has to not know it in order not to be conscious of it. So the censor is in bad faith, and you have explained bad faith by positing a smaller thing that is already in bad faith. The problem has moved rather than been solved.

His own answer is that a person is not one thing. Because you are both facticity and transcendence, and the two do not resolve into a stable synthesis, there is permanent room to affirm one while the other is called for.

The operation: bad faith does not want to coordinate the two or surmount them in a synthesis. “Bad faith seeks to affirm their identity while preserving their differences,” affirming facticity as being transcendence and transcendence as being facticity, so that at the instant you apprehend one you find yourself faced with the other.

He calls the result metastable, meaning subject to sudden changes or transitions. The formulae of bad faith are “formed so as to remain in perpetual disintegration,” so you can slide from one to the other at any moment. That word is worth using, because it names why examination never catches it: the structure is stable enough to hold a belief for a moment and unstable enough to escape inspection.

The waiter

A café waiter with a movement a little too precise, a little too rapid, bending forward a little too eagerly, voice and eyes expressing an interest a little too solicitous for the customer’s order. He is playing at being a waiter in a café.

The point is not that he is insincere. What he is doing is trying to be a waiter in the mode of the in-itself, the way the inkwell is an inkwell. But he cannot be one that way. He is a person who has taken up being a waiter as a project, and he sustains it continuously, and there is nothing in him that simply is a waiter.

Sartre’s comparison is the grocer who dreams: 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. The role is offered as a nature, and taking the offer is the bad faith.

The two literary formulae

Sartre gives titles as prototypes of the two directions.

Love Is Much More Than Love starts in facticity, the contact of two epidermises, sensuality, egoism, and escapes into transcendence, the longing for the infinite.

I Am Too Great for Myself throws us into full transcendence and then imprisons us in the narrow limits of our actual essence. Sartre notes this one is “the source of an infinity of excuses for our failures.”

Two temporal versions of the same trick: the man who arrests himself at one period of his life and refuses to consider later changes affirms that he is what he has been; the man who dissociates himself from his past by insisting on his freedom affirms that he is not what he has been.

The test, and it is the usable one: ask which structure the sentence stands on, then ask whether the situation called for the other. “I am a shy person” affirms facticity, and suppresses that shyness is sustained rather than possessed. “That is not who I really am,” said after doing something, affirms transcendence, and suppresses that the act was done and a person is the ensemble of his acts.

5. The Look

Everything to this point describes one consciousness on its own. Another person changes the structure, and Sartre’s account of how is the part of the argument that matters most for recognition.

Imagine yourself at a keyhole, absorbed in what is on the other side. In that state you are not an object to yourself. There is no self standing there being observed; there is only the scene and your involvement in it. Your possibilities are yours, the corridor is arranged around your project.

Now footsteps in the hall. Someone is watching you.

Everything reorganizes. You are suddenly something: a person crouching at a keyhole. You have acquired a nature you did not give yourself and cannot see from inside. And the nature is not one you can revise by deciding, because it exists in someone else’s consciousness.

Shame is the experience of that, and Sartre’s definition is the one to quote: shame is recognition. “I recognize that I am as the Other sees me.”

Take the two halves. It is recognition because something is being correctly registered: you really are crouching at a keyhole, the Other is not mistaken. And it is shame because the registering is done by someone whose consciousness you cannot enter, so the self you have just acquired is real and not yours.

This is not comparison. Shame here does not mean measuring badly against a standard. It is the shame of being an object at all, of having an outside, of appearing.

The second consequence: the Other steals the world. Before the look, objects around you were arranged by your projects: the door is for opening, the corridor for moving through. When the Other appears, those objects reorganize around a second centre. The corridor is now also the corridor along which he approached. There is a whole arrangement of the world that is oriented to him and inaccessible to you. Sartre’s phrase is that the Other’s appearance produces an internal haemorrhage of my world, a draining away toward a point I cannot occupy.

So a third mode of being appears alongside the in-itself and the for-itself: being-for-others. What I am for another consciousness. It is genuinely mine, it is not something I constituted, and I cannot get at it directly.

6. Where this puts Sartre on recognition

The course runs on recognition, so it is worth putting the positions next to each other.

Hegel requires mutuality. Self-consciousness needs recognition by another self-consciousness whom it recognizes in turn, and the master’s arrangement fails exactly because recognition from someone he counts as nothing is worthless.

Sartre inherits the problem and changes the answer. The Other’s look confers a self on me without my consent and without any mutuality being required. It works whether or not I recognize the Other, whether or not I want it, whether or not I approve. And Sartre’s word for the experience of it is shame.

So recognition in Sartre is not a good to be achieved but a condition to be undergone. For Hegel, failed recognition is a problem to be solved by achieving mutuality. For Sartre, being recognized is itself the difficulty: it is how I acquire an outside I cannot control.

That contrast is what most comparisons between the two turn on, so have it in one sentence: Hegel’s problem is that recognition fails when it is one-sided; Sartre’s problem is that recognition succeeds whether or not I consent to it.

7. The four charges and Sartre’s answers

In the lecture Sartre answers four accusations. Useful compressed, since each answer is a restatement of the core claim.

1. Quietism, that existentialism leads to doing nothing. Answer: the opposite. There is no reality except in action, and man is nothing other than the ensemble of his acts. A doctrine that identifies you with what you do cannot counsel inaction.
2. Pessimism, that it dwells on human badness. Answer: it is optimistic in the only sense that matters, since it says a person’s destiny is within himself.
3. Isolation, that it cuts the individual off. Answer: the cogito discovers others as the condition of my own existence. I cannot know anything about myself without the Other, since I need him to know what I am. That is being-for-others, arrived at as a conclusion rather than assumed.
4. Caprice, that values become arbitrary. Answer: the argument that freedom must will the freedom of others. Once I recognize freedom as the ground of all value, I cannot coherently will it for myself alone, because I have recognized it as valuable rather than as mine.

Existentialism is a Humanism is marked optional on the syllabus. The pieces of it that carry into the assigned reading are the paper-cutter, the three consequences, the student’s dilemma, and the freedom-wills-freedom argument.

Reading a passage cold

The paper hands you a passage you have not seen. A method that works on Sartre specifically.

He argues by denying an identity. Almost every hard sentence in Being and Nothingness says that some thing is not identical with itself, or that a person is not what they appear to be in the manner of a thing. “Human reality is a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is” is the general form.

So on an unfamiliar passage: find the identity being denied, then find what the denial makes possible.

Worked on one line: “Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being.”

What identity is denied? That consciousness coincides with itself the way an object does. What replaces it? A being whose nature includes awareness of its own lack of fixed being. What does that make possible? Freedom, because the gap between consciousness and itself is the room in which choice happens. A stone cannot become other than it is, since there is no gap in it. And what does it make impossible? Ever being able to say what you are in the way you can say what a chair is.

Vocabulary to deploy

• Existence precedes essence — “Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.” The paper-cutter has it the other way round.
• Subjectivism, two senses — the individual chooses himself, and, the profounder sense, “man cannot pass beyond human subjectivity.”
• Choosing for all men — “in fashioning myself I fashion man.” To choose is to affirm the value of what is chosen.
• Anguish — no one to share the responsibility. The military leader who orders the attack.
• Forlornness — no external authority for values. “We are alone, with no excuses.” “Man is condemned to be free.”
• Despair — no guarantees. Reckon only with what depends on your will.
• Facticity — everything already true of you and not chosen.
• Transcendence — your escape from it. Not God; passing beyond.
• The formula — “human reality is a being which is what it is not and which is not what it is.”
• Being-in-itself (en-soi) — the mode of objects, full coincidence with itself.
• Being-for-itself (pour-soi) — consciousness, “conscious of the nothingness of its being.”
• No inertia in consciousness — the sadness has to be continuously remade; a visitor arrives and it is promised “an appointment for later.”
• Bad faith — self-deception without a second person. The lie needs a deceiver and a deceived, and here they are the same.
• The objection to Freud — the censor must know what it represses in order to repress it, so the censor is already in bad faith and nothing is explained.
• Metastable — the formulae of bad faith are “formed so as to remain in perpetual disintegration.”
• The waiter — playing at being a waiter, trying to be one in the mode of the in-itself. The grocer who dreams “is offensive to the buyer.”
• The two formulae — Love Is Much More Than Love (facticity into transcendence) and I Am Too Great for Myself (“the source of an infinity of excuses”).
• The Look — the keyhole, then the footsteps. You acquire a nature you did not give yourself.
• Shame is recognition — “I recognize that I am as the Other sees me.” Not comparison: the shame of having an outside at all.
• Internal haemorrhage — the Other’s appearance drains the world toward a centre you cannot occupy.
• Being-for-others — the third mode of being. Genuinely yours, not constituted by you, not directly accessible to you.
• Freedom wills freedom — once freedom is recognized as the ground of value, it cannot coherently be willed for oneself alone.