10. Existentialism
The Problem of Definition
Any attempt to describe existentialism must take into account the problem of definition. Existentialism is not a systematic philosophical theory and occasionally even fails the test of logical coherence. It is, however, a valuable approach that is characterized by distinctive attitudes and obsessions. First and foremost, existentialism is concerned to the provide a meaningful framework for modern men and women who live in a world bereft of meaning. Second, it offers individuals an ethical framework, albeit one that demands extreme integrity and full responsibility for all one’s actions.
The character of existentialism can be seen most clearly in its harsh critique of reason. “Reason is a whore,” wrote Kierkegaard. Since the rise of the Greek city states, western philosophers have attempted to understand — to give meaning — to nature and human nature. The western tradition in philosophy is inextricably linked to the belief that human life has significance that can be understood by reason. But existentialists believe that all rationalistic systems, including ratio-religious systems like Christianity, are fundamentally flawed. The starting point of the existentialist is that life does not have any intrinsic meaning that can be discovered by reason. Human life is meaningless.
This statement must be internalized if we are to understand its stark consequences for existentialist thought. What does it mean to say that human life lacks significance? If we cannot approach human life through the abstract categories of reason, how can we hope to comprehend it. If life has no intrinsic meaning, how is ethics possible? Equally problematic, how are we supposed to act if there are no ultimate goals towards which humans can aspire?
Before even beginning to tackle these issues, we need to make a critical distinction. Many of the key existential writings were not written by people who called themselves existentialists. All of these writings are touchstones because they describe the pain and anxiety that became central to later existentialist writers like Kierkegaard, Sartre and Camus. But this did not make their authors existentialists. Dostoyevsky, in particular, brilliantly depicted the existential condition of the underground man in his classic Notes from the Underground. But he remained a devout Christian all his life. Nietzsche was much closer than Dostoyevsky to the existentialist frame of mind. But all of his writings were an attempt to transcend the existential condition, rather than to cohabit with the pain and dread that characterize a true existentialist philosopher. Nietzsche’s attack on the western philosophical and religious canon, his introspective approach, and his failure to solve the existential dilemma, however, mark him as a kindred spirit of Sartre, Camus and Kierkegaard.
Both Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche were existentialists to the extent that they regarded reason as an illusory and dangerous approach to the big questions of life. It was illusory because it pretended to provide meaning where none existed. It was dangerous because its inevitable failure led to a crisis of identity and conscience. The inevitable decline of reason left a huge sense of loss in its wake. Moreover, the historical progress of western rationalism systematically eliminated the many of the refuges of religion, art and enchantment that made life meaningful in the past. Thus, to paraphrase Nietzsche, science eventually leaves man standing defenceless in a world that was neither designed for or against him. Not only does modern underground man lack a purpose but, upon his death, his universe will be obliterated.
Nietzsche forced his readers to confront this perdicament in all its horror:
“Whiter is God” he [the madman] cried. I shall tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this?…Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space?…Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods too decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves?
This is the essential problem for the intelligent underground man — the man who is not stupid, who is aware, who has an acute consciousness of the human perdicament. Simply being able to recognize the problem differentiates those who, like Dostyevsky’s underground man or Neitzsche’s Zarathustra, are intelligent and aware, from those who lead a merely bovine existence.
To be sure, bovines lack much in the way of reason. The superman or underground man has superior reason, but understands that rational systems are not only wrongheaded but destructive of the dignity of man. Science is the ideal type of rational system that ends up describing men and women as combinations of atoms, or to cite Dostoyevsky’s disgust with evolutionary theory — “you are descended from a monkey.” This does not, however, imply that it is better to be ignorant. Reason cannot be dismissed entirely because it is key to appreciating the dilemma of the modern man. Even Kierkegaard’s renunciation of Descartes’ clear and distinct thinking is never fully convincing, and only makes sense in terms of that philosopher’s reaction to reason’s impotence. The existential attack on reason, therefore, needs to be viewed as the anti-philosophical stance of a philosophical man.
Kierkegaard, in particular, wished to substitute passion for reason. Nietzsche wanted to balance an essentially Apollonian reason with Dionysiac passion. Dostoyevsky took considerable pains to demonstrate that man and women were passionate animals, capable of spite and self-loathing; But the underground man ultimately is salvaged because he knows that he acts this way, even when sickened by what he sees inside himself.
The Path Interior
The existential question: how are we to comprehend life in an irrational world, therefore, is answered by the practice of the underground man. We must look at life with clear eyes and accept it for precisely what it is, in all its horror. This means being willing to adopt an introspective approach and to walk on the path interior. The underground or existential man looks within himself in order to understand his own individuality. The existentialist approach is psychological rather than sociological. Only be intensely examining one’s inner workings, without shunning the nausea that invariably must occur if we take Socrates’ dictum serious. When Socrates advised his followers to know thyself, of course, he meant to use reason in ways that flattered the human heart. When Dostoyevsky’s underground man gets to know himself, however, we are exposed to raw nerves. Being an existentialist means never being spared this uncomfortable experience.
Existentialists believe that we humans are not what we flatter ourselves to be. The psychological/introspective approach illuminates humans as egotistical, spiteful and petty creatures. For an existentialist, the term psychology has a particular meaning that is quite distinct from either the scientific discipline or clinical practice. The later are merely rational academic systems that can never capture the nature of the human beast. Existentialist psychology, in contrast, exposes human dread and human guilt.
As an academic discipline, psychology is a set of cause and effect abstractions that can never capture the real individual. The underground man can never be encompassed in such systems. Dostoyevsky caricatures those who practice the science of psychology in the following passage:
“Possibly,” you will add on your own account with a grin, “people will not understand it either who have never received a slap in the face,” and in that way you will politely hint to me that I, too, perhaps, have had the experience of a slap in the face in my life, and so I speak as one who knows. I bet your are thinking that. But set your minds at rest, gentlemen, I have not received a slap in the face, though it is absolutely a matter of indifference to me what you think about it.In sharp contrast to the psychologist who seeks the causes of the underground man’s malaise, the underground man scornfully affirms the reasonableness, indeed superiority, of his own deep understanding of himself. He demands to be understood on his own terms, and not as someone who is diseased.
The underground man encapsulates the stark individuality of existentialism. Existentialists believe that, paradoxically, western thought has distorted and confined the individual. Psychology is just one other rationalistic system that contorts and convulses the genuine individual. What existentialist psychology does is affirm the individual within his own painful condition. The subject matter of existentialism is the individual in all of his suffering and preoccupation with dread, death, failure and annihilation. Existentialism characteristically explores those extreme states of mind that can only be understood in highly individualistic terms. That is precisely why thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Neitzsch, and the heroes or anti-heroes of existentialist novels, can only be understood in terms of their own highly personal experiences.
This extreme emphasis on the subjective experience of the individual — as the most meaningful way of understanding the modern human condition — is absolutely characteristic of existentialism. As such, it has found its way into modern art and literature generally, wherein the individual consciousness is manifest by techniques like the stream of consciousness. This obsession with the individual headspace, which originated with Dostoyevsky, also helps to explain why Marxist literary critics invariably regard such forms as degenerate. Despite the fact that these are works of great genius and incredible insight, modern literature draws our gaze away from an objective and into a subjective reality. Existentialists have replaced the search for objective meaning with a highly personal meaningfulness.
Ethics for a Meaningless World
Life has no intrinsic meaning for the existentialist. All related meanings, including that of God, are now dead. On the surface, this would seem to make ethics impossible. The existentialist disagrees and suggests a fascinating alternative. If life has no meaning, then it is up to individuals to give it an admittedly limited meaning. In other words, human beings themselves give moral meaning to a world that is amoral.
In a meaningless word, moral behaviour can only be a reflection of human feelings. These human feelings are no less real because they lack ultimate significance. The morality of the existentialist affirms human life on its own terms. Whatever does not affirm the underground man’s life and essential humanity is immoral. Systems that negate man’s life must be rejected.
This moral belief can be expressed negatively or positively. In The Rebel, the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus argues that our original moral impulses have been twisted into machine like systems that negate human life. Thus, the human rebellion against injustice is often carried to an extreme that results in murder. The existential man continually walks an ethical tightrope, attempting to stay in touch with his humanitarian passions while avoiding distorting ethics within a dogmatic and dangerous system. In Camus’ view, no codes are permitted; ethical action is always an individual choice; and the individual accepts full responsibility for each and every one of his behaviours. The ethical individual can never be sacrificed for an abstraction like the good of mankind. This would destroy the very root of moral feeling and autonomy.
Neitzsche saw the ethical issue very differently. He believed that it was necessary to create a new ethical paradigm, one that was sharply distinct from Christian morality, which put the weak on a pedestal while it destroyed the strength of their masters. This brave new morality would reinforce all that is quintessentially human — exhuberence, will, and even the lust for life and power. Thus, Nietzsche villified traditional notions of good and evil:
For the good — cannot create: they are always the beginning of the end; –
They crucify him who writes new values on the new law-tables, they sacrifice the future to themselves — they crucify the whole human future!
The good — have always been the beginning of the end.Nietzsche’s solution contains so much optimism, is so very positive, that it is quite uncharacteristic of the existential frame of mind. And that is precisely what existentialism is — a frame of mind. Nonetheless, his solution to the problem of ethics, like that of other existential writers, tells us much more about the problem of meaning than it does about the solution.
For the majority of existentialists, moral action of any kind is problematic in a world that makes no sense. Like Camus’ stranger, how is it any different, ultimately, whether we are the Arab who is being killed or the killer? Moral action, or any sort of meaningful action, becomes difficult once we internalize the meaninglessness of our lives. This insight, therefore, leads us to the final existential issue. If there is no goal towards which it makes any sense to strive, how is any action possible?
In Notes From the Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky underlined the problem by stereotyping the man of action. Invariably, the man of action is stupid. He falsely believes that there is a good reason for what he does, and this allows him to act aggressively to achieve his ends. He rarely worries about the validity of a cause, his own rightiousness, or the wider significance of his actions. Like the cow in the field, he acts more instinctively than reflectively. In other words, he is a mental midget. Yet, he is also representative of the vast majority of men who believe in rules and goals.
The intelligent underground man, in contrast, continually comes up against the wall of human nature, necessity and the meaninglessness of human existence. He finds it difficult to act. This is not because he is lazy; far from it. The man of action is much lazier because he does not expend valuable energy thinking about things. Rather, the underground man is paralyzed; like Hamlet, he cannot decide what to do because he is so aware of all the mitigating circumstances. Yet he wants to act and despises himself for not acting. If he could act, perhaps he would be someone like Nietzsche’s U”bermensch (superman). But he cannot.
Actually, the last statement is not completely accurate. Sometimes the underground man acts out of ennui or boredom. In order to escape boredom, he mimics emotion. For example, the underground man can will himself to be in love, and can actually feel all of the pain of love. But deep down he realizes that he is only playing games, creating meaningless adventures for himself, being a prankster. Ultimately, it becomes obvious that he is completely lacking in direction. He despises himself for his lack of purpose, but consoles himself with the fact that men of action have also been victims of the law of their nature. They have not been able to overcome their petty emotions by deploying reason. The most active of them have achieved little more than spilling the blood of their fellow men.
The existential frame of mind is introspective. When the underground man takes the path interior, he discovers that he is not a rational mind but a contradictory creature, full of all sorts of opposing elements that can be best described in a stream of consciousness. This underground man inhabits a natural universe that is meaningless and that does not conform to human nature. How can such a complex entity act morally in a world that was neither designed for nor against him? The best an individual can do is to create an ethical framework that seems to accord with the features of human nature. This morality is a tentative guide because, ultimately, our actions have no significance in the wider universe.
Nietzsche wrestled with this underground mentality, and tried to overcome it in all of his writings. But it takes considerable willpower to transcend the existential frame of mind of the intelligent man and woman of the twentieth and twenty-first century. That’s why Nietzsche’s prose is so strident:
Why so hard? the charcoal once said to the diamond; for are we not close relations?
Why so soft? O my brothers, thus I ask you: for are you not my brothers?
Why so soft, so unresisting and yielding? Why is there so much denial and abnegation in your hearts? So little fate in your glances?
And if you will not be fates, if you will not be inexorable: how can you — conquer with me?
And if your hardness will not flash and cut and cut to pieces: how can you one day — create with me?
For creators are hard. And it must seem bliss to you to press your hand upon millennia as upon wax, bliss to write upon the will of millennia as upon metal — harder than metal, nobler than metal. Only the noblest is perfectly hard.
This new law-table do I put over you, O my brothers; Become hard!
Confronting the Wall
Jean-Paul Sartre, the greatest of all existentialist philosophers, is most easily approached through his short stories. In one of these stories, we are introduced to the wall or the limitations of the human condition. The greatest limitation, of course, is death. When an individual is confronted with death, invariably he/she attempts to escape it. The condemned man, before he comes to grips with the fact of his own annihilation, will always seek to press through the wall to avoid his fate. Only when one’s death is accepted does the struggle ceases, although the fear may persist.
This is the human condition. All men and women are sentenced to death. Whether it comes prematurely, as in an execution, or late, as the result of natural causes, makes little difference. The fundamental distinction is in the manner in which one approaches one’s death. If one fights against it emotionally and irrationally, one practices a form of self-deceit. One hides from the truth; like the character Juan, one puts oneself into a fever in order to protect oneself.
The character Ibbieta, on the other hand, faces the truth like a mature person. This doesn’t mean that he feels no fear; far from it. However, it does suggest that a great change has come over a person once he internalizes the inevitability of death. That fact that Ibbieta might die today, while others will live to see tomorro, makes no real difference. Death comes to all. Once the inevitability of death is accepted, nothing is of significance any more. Loved ones are not important; the cause of Spanish freedom is not important; all that remains important is maintaining one’s own integrity when one stands alone facing one’s death.
It may appear difficult to build any kind of ethics from Sartre’s description of the human condition in The Wall. There are some ethical elements in this story. Self-deception, obviously, is condemned in the characterization of Juan, while the integrity of Ibbieta is elevated to a supreme value. But it is difficult to see how we can move from this individual integrity to a more general ethics. In fact, ethics appears absurd, even to Ibbieta who protects Ramon Gris, but not out of any sense of concern or loyality. When his comrade is captured, Ibbieta laughs at the absurdity of it all.
In order to move out of this ethical cul de sac, Sartre needed to deal with the tendency towards pessimism and paralysis in existential thought. Moreover, he needed to redefine the existential individual or underground man in such a way as to force him to make the hard choices of living in a world without meaning. Sartre achieved this by reaffirming humanist values in a Godless world and by relentlessly pushing the introspective approach to the point where human beings accepted full responsibility for generating meaningfulness.
Existentialism as a Humanism
In the famous essay Existentialism as a Humanism, Sartre argued that existentialism confronted man with the problem and possibility of choice. This confrontation stemmed from that fact that existentialism’s foundation is predicated on the fact that existence precedes essence. Classical western philosophy and religion erred in attempting to build ethical systems on the nature or essence of human beings. These ethical systems defined human nature in ways that have allowed individuals to evade the problem of choice and responsibility. Thus, even if he gave us a free will, God the creator is responsible for us at least to the extent of providing us with a code of ethical behaviour. In a godless world, responsibility rests squarely on the shoulders of the individual.
What exactly is an individual. Even if we can never know the essence of human nature, we still need to know enough about individuals to make moral behaviour possible. How are men and women different from moss or fungus?, asks Sartre. They are different because they possess a mind and experience a subjective reality, he answers. This subjective mind if free to create and to project itself through action. Without a god, or a predefined meaning for life, the mind is totally free to project itself in any way that it chooses. If existence and action are prior to essence, then men and women literally create themselves and their meaning.
The subjective mind of man is totally free. It is always free, even if only to say No. There is nothing, no human nature, nothing that limits the will. This implies that the self is not fixed. Men and women are continually engaged in the process of self-transcendence. They are impossible to classify in the manner of a moss or a fungi. This self-transcendence is not confined to the subjective mind, but has objective significance in terms of the actions that an individual takes. The individual continually defines himself or herself by actions.
This phenomenon is simultaneously exciting and terrifying. Man is free; man is in no way determined. This gives man a certain humanistic nobility, but not in the sense of classical humanist arguments. The humanists of old viewed men and women as ends in themselves. For Sartre, a human being does not have a defined or predetermined value as, say, a creation of God. What a human being is continually being redefined. Sartre’s existential humanism focuses on man as creator and the process of continual transcendence. Men and women are their own legislators and they actively define themselves.
But, if men and women are free, that is dreadful. They cannot seek ends or goals outside of themselves. They feel alone and know that their values are, ultimately, arbitrary. As the creators of their own meaning, men and women have to accept full responsibility for all their choices. There is never any refuge from choice making, because even refusing to make a choice is to make one. Moreover, the consequences of our choices are laid at our own feet. We cannot blame them on anything else, including God or human nature. We practice self-deceit every time we try to place responsibility or blame on others.
This, then, is what Sartre means by the awful dignity of man. Existentialist philosophy puts the ethical ownus on the individual and forces him or her to accept full responsibility for each and every action. The ethical emphasis is always on the individual rather than the collective, because there is no universal human nature to which we can appeal. To make such an appeal would be to deny our dignity and abdicate our responsibility. It would also mean acting without any integrity.
The term integrity is a key concept in existentialist ethics, and the one that allows existentialism to create a bridge between the individual and society. Integrity combines responsibility with constancy, thereby creating a role model for others to follow. While this model is not dogmatic, and cannot have direct influence on others, it does have influence. Influence happens when individuals watch one another’s behaviour prior to making their own choices. When the individual freely chooses a particular course of action, he defines that pathway as better. Not only does he affirm the value of his choice, but he also wills that same choice for others. The ethical individual creates an image of humanity that others are encouraged to follow; in other words, he or she necessarily legislates ethics for all of mankind. When Sartre joined the Communist Party, for example, he was suggesting that it would be good for others to join the party. He was setting a good example. He was offering an ethical role model for everyone else to follow.
Our actions are individualistic, to be sure, but they can never be solitary. We interact with one another constantly, suggesting and evaluating possible roles. Moreover, we inhabit a symbolic universe where our actions are guided by symbolic exchange. Every time we affirm or reject a particular symbol, therefore, we affirm it or reject it for everyone else.
In the discipline of sociology, Sartre’s analysis parallels the school of thought known as symbolic interactionism. This sociological framework emphasizes the freedom that individuals have to create distinct identities by active role playing with others. The particular choice of role, and the ability to play it effectively, necessarily relates to the roles that others are playing at any given time. Individual behaviour is neither determined nor conditioned by existing social roles. An individual can always say No to the roles and attendant rules suggested by others. But, our actions will always have consequences for others in terms of example and influence. Despite the fact that we live in a meaningless universe, our actions have universal significance.
There’s a high price to be paid for moving exitentialist ethics from the subjective and personal to the objective and social domain, however. We are no longer responsible just for ourselves, but for others as well. Knowing that we have a plurality of roles to chose from, we are responsible for continually affirming the roles that we have chosen. Thus, when Sartre decided to join the International Communist Party, he accepted responsibility for the actions of the organization as well as himself. He always retained the right to leave the group if its collaborative and creative actions did not conform to his individual ethical choices. But, as long as he remained a group member, he need to contribute to the well-being and success of the organization.
An Existential Marxist
Existentialism can be fruitfully explored by examining the case of the existential Marxist. Marxist communism claims to be a scientific theory that conforms to human nature and objective reality. For an existentialist like Sartre, it is not only wrong but unethical to surrender one’s independent will to any scientific truth. Thus, when Sartre joined the Communist Party, he knew that he was making a creative choice in a world where there was no such thing as an absolute truth. He had to commit himself to a party platform and agenda that was better than any of the other alternatives.
Marx believed that human nature was nothing more than a reflection of material life at a particular stage of economic growth. An existentialist like Sartre rejected the notion of historical determinism because each and every human being had responsibility for his or her actions. To believe in historical determinism was to deny the freedom of will and therefore unethical.
Marx defined human beings as members of social classes. As such, individuals were responsible only for pursuing their class interests in accordance with historical laws. For Sartre, the starting point always had to be the individual rather than a social class. Only the individual could act with responsibility and integrity. It made no sense to attach ethical responsibility to a class of people.
Classical Marxism is a great philosophical system that can never assimilate or capture man. Its emphasis on objective reality is ultimately misguided because human beings are essentially subjective creatures. At the same time, Sartre argued, Marxism was the most advanced philosophical system of the modern age. Marxism rightly focuses on praxis or the actual experience of men and women in the world. It highlights the injustice and alienation that are characteristic of modern life. It provides a framework for increasing the well-being and freedom of all people.
But, says Sartre, existentialism goes way beyond Marxism in its understanding of the human condition. It is a philosophy of freedom and responsibility that will retain all of its power, even if a communist society is achieved. Even when Marxism has run its course, existentialism will provide an intellectual vehicle for understanding the new human condition.
Subjective mind, rather than objective reality, is the key to understanding and discussing the human condition for the existentialist. In this respect, Sartre remained much closer to Descartes and Hegel than to Marx. What Marx achieved, however, was to demonstrate that any philosophical discussion of the human condition was limited if it obscured the practical conditions under which the majority of people lived.
A Relentlessly Subjective but Social Philosophy
Sartre was the most relentless prober of subjective reality since Descartes. Unlike many of the literary writers or clinical psychologists of his day, however, Sartre refused to allow subjectivity to interfere with our responsibility to act. In fact, he believed that a thorough analysis of subjectivity demonstrated that human beings had no excuse or rationale that could justify any action or inaction. He pushed the issue of integrity so far as to suggest that human beings were even responsible for their passions.
Sartre’s discussion of passion is fascinating and directly supports his definition of human behaviour and his philosophical principle that existence precedes essence. We often say without thinking that men and women act out of passion rather than reason, says Sartre. To say this is to ignore the fact that humans are not instinctual beings but social role players who always reflect on their behaviour and compare it with others. Thus, to feel sad is not to respond automatically to a passion. It involves putting oneself into the posture of sadness. There is no authentic feeling apart from this action or social role playing. It is only by acting sad that we become sad. What this means is that we ourselves are responsible for our own sadness or other behaviours, such as anger or cowardice.
Existentialism is the philosophy of the deed. For Sarte, to do is to be. We are not only free to act but we have the duty to do so. The axis of existential philosophy, therefore, is Descartes cogito informed by the realization that mind can only make its free will effective by engaging in purposeful action. The existential frame of mind has been accused of isolating individuals within their own subjectivity, but Sartre argued that humans are inter-subjective beings who can only know themselves by interacting with others and evaluating and choosing social roles. The self that Sartre describes is a looking glass self. Before an individual can “decide what he is” he needs to explore “what others are.”
While human nature is not fixed and is constantly being transcended by the individual, ethics is possible because we: 1) need to make our lives meaningful in a social sense; 2) have a demonstrated capacity to share meanings and social roles; and 3) always define the good in terms that are universalizable. This universality is not a given; rather it is constantly being made. When I chose a particular purpose for myself, I also chose it as a universality for all men. We commit ourselves to universality in the meanings that we attach to our actions, even if we realize that there is no such thing as universal truth.
Morality in this inter-subjective world may be relative, but it is anything but capricious. Ethical choices are never random. In the first place, they are creative and therefore artistic. We do not take our morality off the shelf like a ready made suit; we tailor that suit to fit ourselves. Second, our ethical choices must be authentic. We can never excuse our behaviour by appealing to our past, our passions or any other deterministic mechanism. Third, morality must be highly situational if there is no black and white guide that governs all behaviour. This implies looking at each and every situation on its own merits before coming to an ethical judgement. Fourth, despite being situational, existentialist ethics is characterized by consistency. Given the serious sense of responsibility that he/she takes for all actions, the existentialist will always try to relate ethical choices to personally derived principles.
Self-Deceit
This last point — that of responsibility and consistency — is crucial if the existential framework is not to dissolve into self-interest. Like many of the ethicists of the past, Sartre did not consider self-interest to be a guide to moral behaviour but, instead, believed that the appropriate function of ethics was to keep self-interest at bay. In fact, Sartre went further than any writer on ethics in demonstrating how human beings practice self-interest and deceit.
If human beings are distinguished by consciousness; if man’s rationality dignifies him in an irrational cosmos; and if right behaviour means acting in full consciousness; then men and women are responsible for all their actions at all times. One should never blame others for one’s actions, because humans always have the power to say No. Sartre’s discussion of responsibility, at least as we have developed it so far, however, does not explain why so many people act irresponsibly. In his brilliant account of self-deceit, Sartre showed how people deceive themselves about their own behaviour and made a contribution to psychological thought that rivaled and eclipsed that of Sigmund Freud.
Let us consider a liar, Sartre suggests. The liar’s character is easy to analyze. The liar fully intends to deceive; he does not hide this intent from himself; he is in complete possession of the truth when he lies. “Thus,” writes Sartre, “the lie does not put into playa the inner structure of the present consciousness.” This is very different in the case of self-deception. In self-deceit, the person who tells the lie, and the person to whom the lie is told, are one and the same. In order to tell oneself a lie, an individual must be possessed of the truth. But, if a person is possessed of the truth, how can he tell himself a lie?
For the clinical psychologist, this question is answered with reference to the distinction between the conscious and the unconscious mind. The Id, says Freud, differs from the Ego, permitting an individual to be both self and other. For Sartre, this claim is preposterous because it presumes the existence of a censor who prevents subconcious information from rising to full consciousness. For Sartre, censor is simply a word invented to cover the logical hole needed in the form of an explanation.
Additionally, this distinction between the conscious and subconscious mind does not conform to real life experience. Sartre notes that Freud himself reported resistance from patients when a psychologist was discovering the truth. Resistance cannot come from the sub-conscious; it must come from the Ego itself. But, if the Ego, is not aware of what is in the unconscious mind, how can it resist? The Ego must be conscious of what it is repressing and, if so, how can we talk about the separation of the Id and the Ego?
Sartre condemns Freud for denying the conscious unity of the human psyche and, especially, for letting individuals off the hook for problematic behaviour. He scathingly refers to the materialistic mythology of psychoanalysis and the supposed sympathetic magic that allows the psyche to contain to different elements at one and the same time. He argues that psychoanalysis has merely hypothesized and reified self-deception rather than explained it. Indeed, Freud obscured the single most revealing characteristic of self-deception — the fact that it is done consciously.
Sartre uses the case of a particular kind of psychosis, that of female frigidity, to illustrate his point. Research on this topic indicates that frigid women deliberately and consciously detach themselves from any pleasure they experience in the sex act. There is no need to relate these or other psychoses to different levels of mind. The self-deceit is quite conscious. The appropriate question is: how is it possible for an individual to consciously deceive himself or herself? What are the characteristics of consciousness that support this self-deceit? It is here that Sartre’s argument becomes fascinating even if his illustrations are partriarchal and chauvenistic. Take the example of a young women out on a date with a man, he says. Typically, the woman will refuse to view the sexual aspect of the event. Although she likes the attention of the male, and fully appreciates that his attraction is sexual, she declines to see the date in those terms. Instead, she defines the attention of the male as attraction to her entire personality. In other words, she views his actions in a transcendent fashion, which allows her to relinquish responsibility for her actions. When the man takes her hand, for example, she is able to retain her transcendent state by simply ignoring it.
How is she able to keep up such a façade? The woman, as a body, is a material object. However, she is also a rational being who transcends her material body. By concentrating her attention on her transcendent reality — by viewing herself as the refined mental entity — she is able to translate her date’s actions as something other than they really are. Consequently, she can easily absolve herself for leading him on, when in actual fact she knows that she is doing just that. If she focused on the synthesis between herself as body and herself as transcendence, argues Sartre, it would be impossible for her to carry out this charade. She deliberately manipulates the two aspects of her personality in order to hide from the truth. But she clearly and consciously does this in bad faith. She is far from being honest with herself or her date.
Self and Transcendence
Similarly, individuals often practice this kind of disintegration of personality when they say things like I am no longer the person that I was. This is another fascinating tactic that is clearly deployed in bad faith. When confronted with the fact that he has acted badly on a number of occasions, a person can resort to a number of strategies. He can say that he was not himself when he acted in such a way and, perhaps, point to the circumstances that made him behave that way. He can claim that his personality has changed since he committed certain actions and, therefore, can no longer be judged for past misbehaviours because he has completely transcended his old self.
Sartre wants us to think about the rationale behind these mental gymnastics. They would be impossible, he suggests, were it not for the fact that they contained a modicum of truth. But the truth is hard to fathom when one is dealing with a deceiver. It is easier to compare such an individual to someone who is acting responsibly and sincerely.
A sincere person has a single ideal — to be what he is and only what he is. He conforms to the truism that everyone should be themselves. But, since human beings are constantly changing, it is hard to pin down exactly who one is. Every person is constantly making himself what he is. And this process of making means that he is what he is not. If this sounds to metaphysical, Sartre provides us with the now classic image of the waiter in a café. This individual consciously plays at being a waiter. For him, it is just a role, and does not circumscribe his personality. Some waiters are so good at playing this role that they can completely detach themselves from the role that they are playing. They go through all the motions like a machine. They simultaneously are, and are not, waiters.
This is no mere semantic game. Sartre wants to tell us something significant about being human. Because we create ourselves continually, there is a very real sense in which we cannot be defined solely in terms of our creation of the self at any given time. We are always moving beyond particular objectivications. We are always free to become something else. This is true, even in the case of feelings that we regard as most sincere. Let us suppose, for example, that one of our parents has died. We would feel genuine grief, to be sure. But the moment we adopt the posture of grief, we know that it is a posture, that it is not fully genuine in the sense that it is a social role. We cannot be our grief; we are conscious of attempting to sustain it artificially. Even as we announce or display our sincerity, we are conscious of the fact that total sincerity is impossible.
This explains why Sartre is so critical of individuals who act as champions of sincerity. These are people who claim to want to tell it like it is but whose real purpose is to label others and turn them into objects or things — this is the ultimate power trip for some people. To turn humans into things that one can control is to create master-slave relationships between oneself and others. The champion of sincerity uses the process of transcendence to control others. He lets the other person know that, if only he or she will accept the label as provided, he will then transform object making into transcendence. This power tripper — characteristically a ruler or minister or teacher — treats others as things until they accept the status and judgement of the master. If they resist accepting the label, the master disallows any possibility of transference. In other words, he or she denies the humanity of the other.
When people power trip with others, it is relatively easy to see what they are up to. It’s when they play games with themselves that you really have to observe closely what is going on. Because human beings can distinguish between themselves as being or object and transcendence, they are able to lie to themselves. This is not the cynically direct lie of the liar discussed able, but a twisting of the nature of truth. It is important to recognize that this twisting of the truth is rarely done with good faith. It is done with bad faith to mask one’s motives and to shirk responsibility for ones actions. Thus, for example, a wife beater many appear truly repentant, and may blame his actions on any number of circumstances that include intoxication, jealousy, and even love. The real purpose of the wife beater, however, is self-deception. He doesn’t want to accept the label of wife-beater and its consequences.
When individuals are acting in bad faith, they will reject evidence that puts them in a bad light. The ideal of good faith is to really be what one is; but the ideal of bad faith is to be what one is not. This is only possible because of the nature of the human condition — one is simultaneously what one is and what one is not. The individual consciously puts himself into self-deception as into sleep. The critical thing is that this in not a process that happens unconsciously but requires a conscious act of will. Once the action is taken, however, the self-deceiver is perfectly capable of believing almost anything that he wants to believe. Once in this self-created world, any damaging evidence can be dismissed and one can shake off all responsibility for one’s behaviour.
In philosophical terms, the self-deceiver makes a fallacious dichotomy between being in itself and being for itself. It is only possible to entertain an impossible belief if one knows that, ultimately, even the interpretations of those acting in good faith are not objectively real. We are never quite who we seem because our capacity for subjective reality puts us outside of the domain of objects. But, just because absolute sincerity is impossible, that does not mean that sincerity should not push in the right direction. Thus, the self-deceiver refuses to believe what he knows to be true while the man of good faith struggles to believe in what he knows will never be totally true. The latter looks into a mirror that reflects something like reality. The former walks in a distorted hall of mirrors created by himself.
Conclusion
His analysis of self-deceit brings Sartre’s philosophy full circle. Because he wanted to give modern men and women a humanist guide to ethical action in a meaningless world, Sartre explored the free and creative side of human subjectivity. But he also recognized that certain ambiguities related to human being and transcendence allowed individuals to play mental games to obscure ethical responsibility.
In the process, Sartre was able to fashion a new ethical framework or paradigm that escaped the pessimism and paralysis that plauged existential writing and thinking from the fin de siecle to the Second World War. While Sartre’s philosophical contribution to existentialism is well documented, however, less has been said about his devastating critique of clinical psychology and, particularly, the work of Sigmund Freud. Sartre’s discussion of self-deceit implicates psychoanalysis as a method for systematically hiding from full responsibility for one’s actions.
Like Descartes, Sartre was willing to explore the body-mind dualism and to affirm the autonomy and dignity of our subjective reality. Also like Descartes, and unlike many of his existential contemporaries, Sartre was an ardent defender of the human capacity for reason — no longer as a vehicle for obtaining objective truth but as a method of achieving a more limited self-knowledge. His faith in the importance of human reason meant that we was not prepared to accept the separation of the conscious and the subconscious mind that Freud and others advocated. Just because the objective world was unknowable and even dreadful, that did not mean that we should abdicate our free will or full responsibility for the choices that we make. Therein lies the dignity of the existentialist individual who is capable of creating meaning in a meaningless world.