In his third
lecture of the series titled “Self Under Siege” Roderick talks about Jean Paul
Sartre, one of the most famous intelectuals in the 20th century. Satre’s
journey both as an intelectual and as an activist, which is reflected in his
own life apart from his intelectual work, marks out a certain search for
meaning in the 20th century. It is interesting to mention,
especially since the last post was about Heidegger and Rejection of Humanism,
that Sartre’s existentialist philosophy is very different from Heideggers’s
account on human dasein. In fact, Sartre profoundly misunderstood Heidegger’s
account of human being in the world, which is evident in his famous essay
“Existentialism is a Humanism” where he puts himself, Heidegger, and other
French existentialists in the same category (Heidegger has an important reply
to Sartre which I will discuss at the end of this piece).
According to
Roderick, this misunderstanding cuts very nicely in Sartre’s direction and
gives him a very different project, one that is in pursuit of a road to
freedom, trying to live in a way that one might say of oneself that “you are
free”. We can distinguish at least two distinct phases in Sarte’s life, and in
both we can identify this attempt to find the path to freedom. The first one is
the young existentialist Sartre, and the second one is the Sartre the
revolutionary Marxist. Accodring to Roderick many in the US are much less
familiar with Sarte’s second phase, since they are not really familiar with
this intelectual traditionl in Europe. It is perhaps another sign of American
marketing genius and mastery of propaganda machine (quite evident these days
during the US presidential election), that has hollowed out this significant
intelectual tradition and has turned it into an image that projects into
people’s minds Soviet-style beauracratic Marxism, cold war, and the image of
Russian kids with their hands on barbed wire craving for McDonalds and Coca
Cola!
Roderick believes
that perhaps no one more than Sartre, in the intelectual world, has faught
harder to maintain a sense of self. The best way to summarize Sartre’s
existentialist philosophy is to quote him from his own essay, Existentialism is
a Humanism: “What they [meaning Heidegger, himself, and other French
existentialists] have in common is simply the fact that they [we] believe that
existence comes before essence… What do we mean by saying that existence
precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself,
surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the
existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is
nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes
of himself. Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a
conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives
himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after
already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is
nothing else but that which he makes of himself. That is the first principle of
existentialism… If, however, it is true that existence is prior to essence, man
is responsible for what he is.”
The glory of
existentialism is really based on the insight that it offers, along the path to
freedom, that life has no meaning other than the one constructed by the self.
Two important implications of this insight are that we do not have anyone to
protect us, and therefore we do not have anyone to stop us. Dastayovsky delicately
brings up this view through his character Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers
Karamazov (1880), where he says “if God does not exist, everything is
permited.” For the existnetialists this is both frightening and exihilirating
since one’s life becomes her own construction and the sum of her own actions. We
can trace this notion of freedom in Nietzsche as well, where he says in
Antichrist that “if there were gods, how could I bear not to be a god?”, or in
Milton’s Paradise Lost where Satin, the main hero (or perhaps more accurately
the anti-hero) describes himself as “"Better to reign in Hell than serve
in Heaven." And it is this very extreme view of freedom that comes out of
existentialism, which to many was revolting.
Roderock poses a
very interesting and sharp observation, as a quick aside, about existentialism
in the US. He suggests that existentialism was populaized in the US through a
cultural search for meaning, but the way the American soceity became familiar
with existentialism was not much through reading the books that Sartre wrote,
but through the cultural artifacts that were produced through the moods of existentialism (anxiety,
despair, death, dread, the absurd, etc.), namely dozens of plays, movies,
novels, and also through the moods of bahaviour that came along with it:
coffeeshop attitudes, the fad of non-conformity, Beat poetry and so on. And
this is exactly where the rubber meets the road, this goes exactly to the heart
of “self under siege”, the fact that American genius in marketing and
“entrepreneurship” can even market existentialism, can even market death! It
can turn on its head the very thing that is trying to revolt against self under
siege in the search for meaning and freedom, and sells that to you! Roderick,
in a witty remark, jokes that if Christ came back today, he would probably get
a deal with Nike! Perhaps even more importantly, this cultural feature of the
American society that Roderick acurately describes has
propogated throuhout the world since the American culture to a large extent is
now the world culture, but not necessarily due to its superiority or uniqueness,
but rather due its dominant power through controlling modes of cummunication
like media, cinema, pop culture, and its marketing genius.
Let’s get back to Sartre. As Sartre gets older he finds himself drawn to a
major paradox that he talks about in his autobiography “The Words”. He admits
that when he was younger and was writing about death, despair, nausea, and anxiety
as the essential moods of existentialism, he was in fact extremly happy and was
also aware of the irony. His mature view was that the road to freedom, and the
only project that owns a scale grand enough to be a worthwhile project, was to
be a revolutionary, and in that period in Europe, that meant to be a Marxist of
some sort. However, the kind of Marxist Sartre was is not the populist version
often understood (or better to say misunderstood). What is Marxism except from
a secular way to try to recover the lost meanings from the previous sacred
period? And this is exactly the kind of Marxist Sartre was. Sarte could see no
way through the 20th century without a revolutionary change,
changing radically the way we relate to each other (and we now see moderate
versions of this idea in the Occupy Wall Street movement and more recently
Black Lives Matter and Bernie Sanders campaign and supporters).
Sartre, Roderick argues, is perhaps more important as a figure, a
personality of thought. He engages in experiences of three generations in
trying to create an authentic worthy self: the second world war generation when
he is a freedom fighter against Nazis (and Roderick argues that this is where
existentialism is born, out of the hedious experiece of Europeans during the
Second World War), the reconstruction generation after the Second World war and
his commitment to be a revolutionary Marxist. The most major experience of
Sartre’s generation was fascism, and it shaped the way he thought about many
things. Fascism was completely a different experience for Europeans than to
Americans. For Europeans, Fascism was both an internal and an external threat:
having friends or neighbors who were Nazi collaborators, having friends or
neighbors who were just silent pretending not to hear what is going on.
Sartre’s career (as an activist) however came to culmination when he joins the
great student strikes (his third-generation experience) in France and their
failure perhaps blocks his way to escape the 20th century.
Another point or argument worth underlining about Sarte is his argument
about a certain kind of ethical theory, which cuts agains Kant’s moral theory.
Sartre emphasizes decion and action as what makes up one’s life, and here is
the example he gives in form of a moral dillema:
You have a mother at home in occupied France and you don’t think she will
survive if you don’t stay. On the other hand, you also feel obligated to go
with your friends who have joined the resistence.
Sarte goes through this moral dillema using standard moral theories:
Kantean moral theory, utilitarian moral theory, etc. and argues that these
standard theories are not worth anything. It doesn’t do any good to come up
with a categorial imperative based on what is the greatest good to the greatest
number! Saving my mother’s life or saving my country’s life? Sartre argues
brilliantly that this is not amenable to the kind of logic-chopping
philosophers do, it is amenable however to the kind of person you are going to
see yourself as. This again goes to the heart of self under siege, which really
draws so little support from moral theories. Self under siege is not really
what conservaties think, that it is immoral. It is, as Nietzsche puts it,
beyong good and evil, it is more tokens in the marketplace upon which we trade.
I want to end this piece by going back to the start and briefly discuss the
Sartre’s misunderstanding of Heidegger and his account about the self because I
believe it has important implications. Sarte had read Heidegger and his account of human
being in the world as a form of humanism, which is evident in his famous essay
titled “Existentialism is a Humanism”. Heidegger indirectly responds to
Sartre’s account of humanism in a letter to his French colleague Jean Beaufrat,
which was published later on under the title “Letter on Humanism.” As a quick
aside before I go back to Heidegger’s response, I should mention that this essay by Heidegger has considerable
significance as it is his first major work after the second world war and the
intense scrutiny he was subjected to in the de-Nazification hearings after the
war due to his continued teaching at the University of Freiburg throughout the
war and thus, his apparent complicity with the Nazi regime. It would be fitting
therefore to consider this essay as a first reflection by Heidegger on the
question of the relationship between philosophy and action, of that between the
thinker and the political. This essay is also the first fruitfull exchange
between German and French philosophy after the collapse of Nazi Germnay in 1945.
Heidegger, in a
direct reference to Sartre, argues that “We are far from pondering the essence
of action decisively enough.” It is important to note that he is not arguing
that we don’t have any theory of action, or any method to evaulate action, but
rather are far away from being able to “decisively” think about action. This
resonates strangely with Sartre’s Existentialism which has already taken
“essence” for granted and assumes we know what it means, and assumes it is
determined by our actions and deeds. Heidegger however takes a step back and
argues the essence of action has not been fully carved out. He does not agree
with Sartre that existence preceeds essence. He believes that our essence,
which follows our existence, is determined by an act, the essence of which
preceeds our esscence and also our existence. Heidegger belives that the
essence of action is “accomplishment”, an unfolding of something into a
fullness. For Sartre, the action that determines our essence is an
accomplishment of a being that already is (hence existence comes before
essence). For Heidegger, in
contrast, that which “is” before action
(and only unfolds through action) is “Being” and it is through thinking (not
action) that the relationship between Being and the essence of man is
accomplished. In this receiving and giving back to Being, Being comes to
langauge. He writes in a remarkable passage that:
“Language is the
house of Being. In its home man
dwells. Those who think and those who
create with words are the guardians of this home. Their guardianship accomplishes the manifestation
of Being insofar as they bring the manifestation to language and maintain it in
language through their speech. Thinking
does not become action only because some effect issues from it or because it is
applied. Thinking acts insofar as it
thinks. Such action is presumably the
simplest and at the same time the highest, because it concerns the relation of
Being to man. But all working or
effecting lies in Being and is directed towards beings. Thinking, in contrast,
lets itself be claimed by Being so that it can say the truth of Being. Thinking accomplishes this letting. Thinking is the engagement by Being for Being.
Heidegger agrees
with Sartre that essence of man is not a priori determined (idea of God, or
human nature). For Heidegger that which Sartre has forgot about is Being. He
disagrees with the implication of Sartre’s view that being is the nothingness
of existence until essence is born through action. He disagrees that Being is
human subjectivity, which Sartre views as the main player sorounded by
existence, abondoned to a world where there are only human beings. Heidegger
argues that since Plato it has been held that essence preceeds existence.
Accodring to him, Sartre simply reverses the order, “but, the reversal of a
metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement. With it he stays with metaphysics in oblivion
of the truth of Being.” Heidegger invites to step back from this distinction
itself and examine the situation out of which this distinction between essence
and existance has arised. He contends that “humanism” depicted in
Existentialism is inadequate to the “higher essence of man”. Yet, he does not
attach a metaphysical structure to what he has in mind about “higher essence of
man”. He contests that this higher essence of man is not meant to be perceived
as metaphysical subjectivism (or as anthropocentrism) in which man is the
tyrant of Being to which each and all is subject. He
writes in an stellar passage that:
Man is rather
“thrown” from Being itself into the truth of Being so that ek-sisting in this
fashion he might guard the truth of Being, in order that beings might appear in
the light of Being as the beings they are.
Man does not decide whether and how beings appear, whether and how God
and the gods or history and nature come forward into the clearing of Being,
come to presence and depart. The advent of beings lies in the destiny of
Being. But for man it is ever a
question of finding what is fitting in his essence that corresponds to such
destiny; for in accord with this destiny man as ek-sisting has to guard the
truth of Being. Man is the shepherd of
Being.
Heidegger
believes that in order to guard the truth of Being we need to retreive the
element in which thinking can properly be, otherwise thinking will turn
into a technical interpretation of thought, an ideology or world view. Thinking
belongs to Being, accodring to Heidegger, as an aspect of Being itself, and
thinking of Being is a listening to Being.
All this might
sounds very abstract, difficult, or poetic, but what Heidegger is doing is not
articulating his thoughts or ellaborating on his idea, he is rather thinking in
the way he believes thinking should be, he is implementing his very idea
of thinking as listening to Being, he demonstrates the very structure of
language prior to ideologies and divisions into sub-disciplines, prior to
division into logic, ethics, and physics. Heidegger is not drawing a road map,
he is walking the path.
In order to get
close to Being again, Heidegger argues that we need to “learn to exist in the
nameless.” We must take a step back from our seduction to the public realm and
the plethora of beings and be open – in silence – to the manifestation of Being
itself, and allow ourselves to be claimed by Being. According to Heidegger, we
cling always and only to beings, this collapses the ontological difference
between beings and Being, and leads us to forget Being.
Heidegger has
received a lot of criticism for his philosophy and his poetic, abstract, and
often difficult account of human dasein and being. One issue with this level of
abstraction is that it provides little support/discouragement for more concrete
situations, to the extent that Heidegger allegedly considered his support of
National Socialism and Nazi party consistent with the essence of his
philosophy. This could really questions the essence of a philosophy that partly
due to its high level of abstraction and vagueness can justify such atrocious
actions. Edmund Husserl lays out a similar criticism of Heidegger’s philosophy,
and argues that it provides an abstract and incorrect portrait of human being
and fails to contribute to an ontology independent of human existence. Herbert
Marcuse, a student of Heidegger who later became associated with the Frankfurt
School also criticizes Heidegger for his "false concreteness" and
"revolutionary conservativism." In Jargon of Authenticity, Theodor
Adorno lays out a serious criticism of Heidegger and argues that the jargon of
authenticity used by Heidegger abstracts from social causes of discontent by
forming an ahistorical formulation. He argues that Heidegger’s writings are
infected with ideological thrust of a vocabulary that thrives on ambiguity.
