I keep trying to come up with a way to express myself about my thoughts on morality and realize that moral theory is just not a subject I’m even remotely interested in.  I don’t relate to it at all which makes me wonder how many women are involved in Moral Theory?  I recently read Kyra by Carol Gilligan who claims that men and women come at morality completely differently.  For men, moral development is based on rules, abstract values and guiding principles.   But women don’t function this way because we are far more interpersonal.  Our concerns are primarily care and compassion, not hypothetical situations and impersonal justice.  Our focus is on affiliative ways of living.

What I keep coming back to is how misunderstood Nietzsche’s ideas on morality were.   People say he was immoral because he took issue with the moral theory of his time.  But dig into his private life and it’s clear that he was a virtuous, morally upstanding person from most moral perspectives.  (Unless, of course, you judge homosexuality as immoral.  Nietzsche was very likely gay.)

Nitezsche believed it was “the passions” that created greatness.  Nietzsche is called the great immoralist because he felt the main thrust of morality was an attempt to reign in “the passions” which undermines human greatness.   Also, Nietzsche didn’t promote the sort of mindless selfishness that seems to run rampant these days (and is sometimes committed in his name).   He demanded that we engage in self-scrutiny and self-criticism in order to get to know our passions.  What he was promoting was selfishness with a capital “S” and what he was denouncing was Morality with a capital “M”.

He wrote in Daybreak

It goes without saying that I do not deny - unless I am a fool - that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or many called moral ought to be done and encouraged - but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto.   We have to learn to think differently - in order at last, perhaps, very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently.

Maybe he was calling for a swing from the male views on morality to something a bit more feminine?  Maybe his yin/yang was more balanced than the average thinking male of his time?

The problem Nietzsche had with moral theory was that it was based on impersonal, externally imposed abstract values and virtues.   Nietzsche denounced this sort of morality because he said it created a herd morality.  People went along with what everyone else was doing rather than being true to who it is they are.   The Passions are about human creativity - tapping into our inner genius.   But tapping into this genius can come at great cost because you have to be willing to go against the herd.   If you have the capacity to do so, however, it creates a rich inner life that is not necessarily attractive to those on the outside.  (Makes me think of Beck living in a shed so he could dedicate time to his music rather than taking time away from his music in order to have a nicer place to live.)

What Nietzsche has in mind about dedicating your life to your passions is not about doing whatever it is you want to do because there is no morality.  What he’s saying is that we have the capacity to dig inside ourselves and discover what it is that makes us tick beyond current cultural definitions, academic theories and societal expectations.  However, we must be willing to see through the trappings and limitations of Morality with a capital “M” in order to do so.  When we are true to who it is we are, we have what Nietzsche calls a Master Morality.   Those who simply go along with what everyone else is doing, or adopt the principles of others rather than engaging in the self-criticism and self-scrutiny to learn for themselves what engages them have a Slave Morality.  Petty selfish behavior is more likely based on Slave Morality than Master Morality.  And it’s likewise Slave Morality to denounce homosexuality as immoral simply because the Bible denounced it as immoral or because society currently defines it as immoral.

“The Will to Power” was not about enslaving others to your point of view, it was about embracing a master morality which requires being true to who it is you are.    If you are a person who doesn’t steal, then you don’t steal.  It’s as simple as that.  It’s not because someone has told you that you shouldn’t steal, or because it makes you feel bad when you steal, or because you value honesty, or because you think it makes you a good person not to steal.   You don’t steal because it’s not who you are!

My husband and I tend to be very honest about monetary negotiations.   We’re not fanatically perfect about it or anything, but if we know we’ve underpaid for something or accidentally got out of the grocery store and noticed the toothbrush didn’t make it on to the conveyor belt.  We’ll generally go back and pay for the toothbrush or point out that we weren’t charged enough.  We don’t always do it, but we usually do.

Several years ago, we had purchased something at a store and then realized we had been undercharged.  We were right outside the store.  It was nice day.  The kids were perfectly happy.  So my husband went back inside to correct the error.   The minister of our church happened by and asked us why we were hanging around outside the store so I explained to him that my husband was doing.   Before the minister left, my husband came back laughing about how the cashier was shocked that he would have insisted on paying the correct amount.  (She was probably annoyed with him!)  Next Sunday, the minister had a sermon on honesty and integrity and used my husband and I as an example except he turned it into a grand story.   According to him, it was a hot, blustery day and the babies were crying but nevertheless, we insisted on doing the “right” thing.

He turned what we did into some sort of grand moral triumph but there wasn’t anything moralistic about it at all and it had nothing to do with it being the “right” thing to do.   If the babies had been crying and it was a hot day, maybe we would have decided it wasn’t worth the trouble.  But the babies weren’t crying and it was a nice day so it was no big deal.

The minister was promoting Morality with a capital “M”.  If you are “good” here is what you should do.   But we knew he was lying!  The minister lied in order to make a point about morality!  I confronted him about using us in that way because it genuinely angered me.  He expected me to understand that he manipulated the story for the greater good.  Clearly the minister thought of himself as morally superior if he felt it was OK to tell a manipulative lie in order to make a point about honesty.

The thing is, no one is exempt from their darker side.  No one!!   It’s all part of human nature.  So why insist on “the moral choice”?  The only way you can truly insist upon it is by denying your darker nature.  Maybe what we need to do is embrace our darker natures so that we can transcend them?  This doesn’t mean go out and do whatever it is you want to do.  A little self-scrutiny goes a long way - what you want to fix out there generally needs to be fixed within, too.  (Take the log out of your own eye before trying to remove the splinter from your neighbor’s.)

Perhaps what we really need is the ability to feel who it is we are.  That way, we can feel our way around relationships much better, too.   We can weigh actions against our own internal governors.  Does this action support who it is you are?  Or does it compromise who it is you are?  Are you doing this to be perceived as good, powerful, honest, sincere, cool, etc.? Or are you doing this because it’s who you are?

John brought up Sartre’s example of the waiter.  Sartre describes the waiter as being just a little too eager to please because he has too heavily identified with being a waiter.  Sartre uses the term “bad faith” to describe the waiter’s actions because he is doing what is expected of a waiter rather than being himself.   He’s acting.  We may enjoy his acting, but we recognize it as acting so it is only himself he deceives and even he is conscious of this self-deception.

The U.S. is about to have a new President and this example fits.  What does President-elect Barack Obama want?   The power of the Presidency?  A legacy?  To be perceived as “good”?   If so, he’s driven by slave morality and is in “bad faith”.   But everyone keeps saying that Barack Obama is the real deal.   We are used to politicians pulling the wool over our eyes, but it doesn’t seem Obama is acting.  He acknowledges he won’t be perfect.  He acknowledges mistakes he’s made.   According to those who have read his memoirs, he seems to be incredibly self-aware and willing to confront his darker nature head on.   His decisions seem to be sincerely inspired, even if we don’t always agree with them.

Not too long ago, I read a book by Ronald Aronson about Camus and Sartre’s infamous argument over Algiers and Communism, etc.  According to Aronson, both Camus and Sartre were ultimately in bad faith because both were concerned ultimately with France.  Camus claimed to be interested in Algiers, but always made France the audience for his books. (He didn’t write to be read in Algiers, he wrote to be read in France.)

No matter how hard Camus and Sartre tried to dispense with ideology, they maintained it.   The were in bad faith because they got trapped inside Morality with a capital “M”.   It’s really tough.  How do we know when we are acting authentically, especially when social circumstances have pulled us into that wonderful either/or situation?  Not too long ago, Bush said “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”.  That makes me think of Star Wars, Revenge of the Sith, when Anakin Skywalker says to Obi Wan Knobe, “If you’re not with me, you’re my enemy”, and Obi Wan says, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes.”

I guess I’m kind of all over the place again.  The reason I thought of Aronson was because I was musing about Obama and thought that perhaps Obama might meet with Aronson’s hope for a new sort of politician:

“The deepest issues motivating and dividing Camus and Sartre are still with us…the time is ripe for a new type of political intellectual who might bring together each man’s strengths and avoid each man’s weaknesses. We can imagine someone speaking the truth at all times, and opposing oppression everywhere, uniting each man’s characteristic power of insight under a single moral standard. Such an intellectual would illuminate today’s systemic violence while accepting the challenge of mounting an effective struggle against it without creating new evils.” Aronson admits this might be like asking for an angel (as Sartre once said). “Angels do not exist, but they can be a yardstick for human beings.”

I found Camus & Sartre: The Story of the Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It at the HalfPrice Bookstore. Couldn’t even believe it. I had wanted to read it since I first started researching Sartre and Camus but it wasn’t available through our library and was quite expensive so I decided to forgo it (especially since there are so many other books I’ve read that I haven’t gotten to yet.) Glad I found it because it was quite helpful.

Doing a decent summary of the book would be far too time consuming because it involves a lot of history. So here is a quick and dirty summary…

Camus and Sartre were great friends. They were both becoming famous about the same time and shared philosophical and literary interests. There were definitely differences, but nothing friendship threatening. For the most part, they were able to laugh with each other about them. With the occupation of France, Camus swung into action and joined the Resistance movement. He took huge personal risks. Sartre admired this in Camus and tried to do the same but couldn’t quite bring himself to do so. It took him several years to work through his philosophy before he could figure out how to act on it.

Both he and Camus became involved with the Communist party because it seemed to be the only means of supporting the working class. But Camus became disillusioned early on because of it’s violent nature and decided that he did not want to be a part of a system that used violence as a means of control. Sartre, on the other hand, became a spokesman for the Communist party saying that Camus no longer knew what it iwas he stood for. Passivism wasn’t a stance.

The problem was the Cold War. It drew a line in the sand and people had to choose - are you Communist anti-Communist. Camus and Sartre had both desperately attempted to come up with a third option. But there was no room for that third option at that time so the choice was either/or. Camus chose anti-Communism (although at one point he spoke harshly against anti-Communism) and Sartre chose Communism.

But Sartre wasn’t actually a Communist and Camus wasn’t actually an anti-Communist, either although those were the sides they chose. What it boiled down to was that Camus didn’t want to get his hands dirty and Sartre did. Camus had been born into a working class family in Algiers and already felt that his hands were dirty. He wanted to do the humane thing and could no longer condone violence. Sartre had been born into a well-to-do bourgeoisie family. What Sartre wanted to do was “come down” and be a spokesman for the working class. He felt the only way he could do this was through Communism because anti-Communism wasn’t speaking for the working class.

The division began after Camus published The Rebel which was his bomb dropped on Communism, linking it with violence and pointing it at Sartre. Many took the book to say that if Camus was right, Sartre was wrong. Camus expected to see Sartre’s review in Sartre’s Magazine but it didn’t come for months. When it finally did come, the review wasn’t by Sartre, it was by one of Sartre’s assistants and it slammed Camus’ book. This was insulting to Camus (because of the condemning review but primarily because it was not Sartre who reviewed the book.) Sartre replied to Camus through his newspaper and a very public quarrel was on with each man representing one side of the two sides of the Cold War division. Infact, they each became the main spokepersons for anti-Communism and Communism in France.

By keeping his hands clean, Camus’ completely lost sight of the Algerian struggles even though he became a spokesperson for Algerian issues. He was more hindrance than help. By wanting to get his hands dirty, Sartre got in touch with the people he wanted to get in touch with, but failed to notice the horrors that were being committed in the name of Communism.

It is very likely that without the divisive nature of the Cold War, Camus and Sartre would have remained friends despite their differences. But the world had moved into “either/or” thinking and it didn’t allow for dialogue. It demanded a militant stance. Aronson contends we are still living with that “either/or” thinking from the Cold War and that it is time we find a way out of it.

Both Camus and Sartre were ultimately in bad faith. Both were concerned ultimately with France - even Camus, who claimed to be so interested in Algiers, always made France the audience for his books. (He wrote to be read in France, not in Algiers.)

Aronson writes: “The deepest issues motivating and dividing Camus and Sartre are still with us…the time is ripe for a new type of political intellectual who might bring together each man’s strengths and avoid each man’s weaknesses. We can imagine someone speaking the truth at all times, and opposing oppression everywhere, uniting each man’s characteristic power of insight under a single moral standard. Such an intellectual would illuminate today’s systemic violence while accepting the challenge of mounting an effective struggle against it without creating new evils.” Aronson admits this might be like asking for an angel (as Sartre once said). “Angels do not exist, but they can be a yardstick for human beings.”

Sartre is the last Existentialist Solomon covers in his lecture series, No Excuses (Lectures 19-23).

Sartre is the ultimate existentialist. He named the movement and when people talk about existentialism it’s usually Sartre’s philosophy they have in mind. Emphasis on freedom and choice and responsibility are the center of Satrean philosophy. (These are not central for Nietzsche or Heidegger. They are problematic.)

The title of Solomon’s lecture comes from Sartres idea of “No Excuses” and is based on the idea that one is always responsible.

Sartre denounced his fellow French men for their cowardice, their collaboration, cooperation, etc. He questioned their choices and motives. If you want to understand human nature, you have to look at humans under stress and so he watched his fellow citizens while being occupied during one of the most brutal wars in history.

What he noticed is that their answers all came out as excuses:

• What can I do? Impotence.
• I didn’t start the war. Innocence.
• Everyone else is doing it. The herd instinct.
• I’m just looking out for myself. Self-preservation.
• I had no choice. Helplessness.
• I was afraid. The appeal to emotion.

We are absolutely free, so we don’t have any excuses. We are responsible for what it is we do. We aren’t free in the sense that we can choose anything we want to do - but that we always have choices.

Absolute freedom is the absence of ultimate constraints. It is our responsibility to recognize our choices even in the most limited circumstances. One is always responsible for what one makes of what is made of one. Also, one is not caused to behave by his or her emotions or motives, but rather emotions and motives are part of the situation in which one chooses what to do. We have a picture of emotion being inside us but intruding upon our rationality. We say, I didn’t really mean it. I was just very angry. But the friend you insulted and you know yourself, that what you said was not just the product of anger but a deep and cutting insight about something you really feel. There is a sense in which the anger is a choice. When we get angry, we make a decision. We feel that flush and we have to decide - keep our mouth shut or act on it?

We are as responsible for what it is we do as well as what it is we don’t do. We make choices to the exclusion of other choices we simply choose not to think about. We are not just responsible for deliberate choices, we are responsible for choices made out of default, or out of neglect. No excuses.

Emotions are choices; they involve alternatives and options; and they involve purposiveness. They are “magical transformations of the world.” He wants to move away from the idea that emotions are bodily upsets of physiological intrusions. They are our responsibility and not a source of excuse.

William James, an American Philosopher, wrote an essay called “What is an Emotion?” in 1884. He said an emotion is an upsetting perception which causes in us a physiological disturbance. This perception of the physiological upset IS the emotion. Sartre says James ignores two important features of emotion. 1) Emotions are necessarily intentional. 2) Emotions are always about something. You can’t just be angry, you have to be angry about something. You can’t just be afraid, you have to be afraid of something. All emotions are intentional in that they are always about something. They can’t be mere sensations or feelings because sensations and feelings aren’t about anything. A headache is not about anything. It might be caused by something, like your mother in-law coming to visit. But your mother in-law didn’t cause the headache. A pain in your toe might be because you stepped on a nail. But the pain is not about the nail. But we are sad or joyful or depressed or angry about something.

Emotions have finality. Emotions are purposive. This is a bold thesis because we typically think of emotions caused in us and if they have a purpose, they aren’t our purpose. An emotion is a strategy, a way of dealing with the world. It is chosen and chosen with a purpose for a reason.

There is a story that comes from Aesop called Fox and the Grapes from Aesop that explains this. A fox sees some yummy, delicious grapes and craves them. But with all of his ingenuity, he can’t reach them. So he says, they are probably sour anyway. What Sartre says is that the fox has made a magical transformation of the world. The grapes haven’t changed. But the fox has changed his attitude - he comes to see them as sour. What has changed isn’t the world. What is changed is the fox’s way of seeing the world. This makes sense from a phenomenological point of view. But what about the magical? The fox refuses to accept himself as a failure. He refuses to see himself as up to the difficulty of getting the grapes. He’s not willing to expend anymore energy on a wasted project. This is using emotions to escape from the world. Emotions are a mode of escape behavior. We have our emotions not because they are caused in us. We have them because they are a way to deal with the world so that we can see ourselves as better off than we would otherwise be.

Sartre rejects Freud’s idea of the unconscious. Unconscious mental events are not just unconscious, but those that cannot be made conscious. They are repressed. Sartre also rejects Freud’s idea of psychic determinism. Sartre thinks they are strategies rather than forces within us as Freud says they are.

Part of the magical transformation of the world is the transformation of the body. For instance, fear could be seen as “getting ready to flee” and the bodily sensations follow from the emotion and are not causes of it.

By separating the discussion into two terms, consciousness on the one hand and the world on the other, Sartre puts himself in the French tradition in which he was raised (Cartesianism). But he had read Heidegger and was convinced by the argument that there is nothing to distinguish consciousness and the world at all.

Sartre says consciousness is freedom. Freedom is consciousness. Responsibility is the idea that we are the incontestable author of our actions. Consciousness is nothingness. Consciousness is intentionality. It is always about things. We don’t have to look at it as a transcendental ego. We can look at it as an activity. It’s like looking around a room with a flashlight. Consciousness is the beam of the flashlight (without the flahslight). It is nothing but an awareness of things in this world. Consciousness is outside of the causal relations of the world. Kant says that consciousness imposes causal categories on the world. It is by seeing the world in a certain way that we see things in terms of cause and effect relationships. But when we examine ourselves, that is not how we see ourselves. Consciousness is not an object of consciousness. It is not a thing. And consciousness is not a thing.

The idea of Spontaneity allows Sartre to carve out a middle range between indeterminism and determinism. Much of what we do is pre-reflective. We don’t think about it, we just do it. Consciousness acts and it acts without prior causality.

Sartre eventually gives up the idea that all emotions are a mode of escape behavior. Emotions are still not causes of behavior, but they are spontaneous outpourings of consciousness in which one takes the world in a certain way. Not emotions in consciousness, but emotions as ways of structuring consciousness as one way among many.

Consciousness has the power of negation. What I see is always more than what I see. When we see, we are never passive receivers. Consciousness is an activity not only of receiving, but also of shaping. Desire isn’t just seeing the world. It’s seeing the world in terms of what it is we want. We see things in terms of what we can do with them and how they fit in our plans. Consciousness is also able to perceive lack. If we are expecting our friend at the bar, we notice our friend isn’t there. We construe it in terms of what’s not there.

Sartre tries to focus on the key, essential experiences that define our experience in general. He wants to use this in place of the kinds of arguments philosophers have often given. Nausea is a dissatisfaction and revulsion with the meaninglessness of the world. The status of the external world or the status of our knowledge of the external world is in question. The broader philosophical idea is that somehow we are stuck inside our own experience or own consciousness. It’s a philosophical fabrication that comes out of the Cartesian split. But is the world “out there”? Or is it just an idea? Sartre says existence is not inferred from other experiences it forces itself upon us in a way that is undeniable. Anguish is the sudden spontaneous realization that I could, at any moment, take a step and go hurtling to my death if I’m standing on a cliff. Anguish gives one the basic experience of one’s own freedom. “Nothing stands between me and my self-destruction.” [except my own decision].

Philosophers ask, how do I know that other people exist? Sartre says we know other people exist when we notice someone looking at us when we are doing something embarrassing and we feel embarrassed.

His Being in Nothingness is a Phenomenological Ontology. It is phenomenological because it is from the first person standpoint. It is an ontology because we are describing things in this world.

He uses three concepts: 1) Being-for-itself. When we reflect, we recognize that we are conscious. Consciousness is aware of itself aware of objects all the time. 2) Being-in-itself. 3) Being-for-others. Shame and embarrassment.

The self is out there in the world like the self of another. It is an accumulation of actions and experiences. To find out who we are, we have to look back and see what it is we’ve done. Consciousness is an activity directed towards the world and its objects. Sartre also differentiates between self-consciousness (reflective sense) and consciousness (pre-reflective). We shouldn’t always think of consciousness as self-consciousness. Consciousness does not contain the “I” or the “self”. We are both being-in-itself and being-for-itself. We are both body and mind. We have two different sets of attributes. Facticity is the sum total of facts that are true about us. (That I was born on a certain date in a certain year.) Facticity is contrasted with transcendence. This is the sense in one overreaches the facts of ones life. This is also a transcendence of the present. We transcend the present into the future all the time. I am what I am not and I am not what I am.

What we all want is to be pure facticity and pure transcendence. What we really desire is to be God. (God as described as complete in himself. Everything that God can be, he is. God can do anything he wants.) On the one hand, we’d like to determine exactly who it is we are. But at the same time, we have a desire for negative freedom - to be free of constraints. But when you put these together, you get a contradiction. You can say, this is my birthday. But you may think it is too early, or too late and not accept it about yourself and replace it with another fact. How the date plays in his life is subject to transcendence.

Bad Faith: Self-deception about oneself. We can live through our hopes or our fears and deny the facts that are true about ourselves, or simply reject them (like pretending to be 29 rather than 39). Freud says there is a psychodynamic - we cannot take certain positions. Sartre says it is really, “we will not” take certain positions. When we are in bad faith, we misperceive and misjudge ourselves and we do this for a purpose. We don’t want to take responsibility.

Sartre says he is not doing ethics. But bad faith is bad. It is something to be avoided. Sarte is after a theory of integrity.

Being-for-others: Has a paranoid ring to it. Heidegger used Being-with-others which is much less paranoid and non-conflicted. When we say “being-for-others” we think of being used by others, being an object for others, or others being there to manipulate. We are only aware of our own consciousness. We cannot be aware of the consciousness of others. Philosophers sometimes suggests that taking people as other people requires a leap of faith because we cannot prove that other consciousnesses exist. What Sartre says, following from Hegel, is that we can know ourselves only with the recognition of other people. Self-knowledge is not captured by Descartes’s “I think therefore I am.” We become conscious only through our confrontation with others. Knowledge comes, not from observation, but from the experience of being looked at. Being for others is being objectified. We are always on trial in the eyes of others. Sartre says we cannot be indifferent to what other people think of us because this is as much a part of our identity as a clear determinant of who we are.

This leads to another dimension of bad faith: to accept what people think of us as the truth and to define ourselves as who we are for others. (What Heidegger talks about in terms of the Das Man self.) You could be in bad faith in the opposite way and say you don’t care what other people think. This isn’t psychology. It’s part of the essence of being human. We are social creatures in the perverse and disturbing sense that we are the objects of other people’s judgments and how we judge ourselves is very much defined by how we are judged by others.

There is a sense in which we are all guilty: for not living up to others expectations of us or living up to the expectations of others but not living up to our own expectations.

For Sartre, our relationship with other people is basically conflict. It’s always about setting aside their judgments of us or trying to get them to have judgments of us that are in line with our judgments of ourselves. Sartre explains this best in No Exist which is one of philosophies greatest contributions to the theater. The main theme of the play is “Hell is other people”. Our conceptions of ourselves are always compromised by and determined by other people,

It’s not enough to look at the facts about ourselves and what I think about myself, but we have to also take into consideration what others think of us. Even relationships like love and friendship are struggles. Love is a struggle for authenticity. We choose our friends on the basis of our conception of ourselves - those who reinforce the conception of ourselves. If we think of ourselves as not very intelligent, we might take up with someone very intelligent, etc. Friendship is a kind of agreement or contract. “I’ll approve of you in your terms if you will approve of me in my terms.” Friendship involves a mutual identity.

But when we talk about lovers, the picture becomes very different. Sartre introduces love as a seductive strategy. It’s an attempt to win someone over - a sort of control. When this love fails, it results in sadism (a desperate attempt to take control). Or, we can also take a submissive role where the other must please me. When this fails, it results in masochism (a manipulative attitude toward the other). Other possibilities of failed love are indifference (profound indifference - the other doesn’t exist) which can lead to hatred (on the part of the person who wants to exist). Love is a dynamic in which a kind of mutual manipulation is essential.

Sex, like love, is a kind of manipulative strategy in which we try to win over the other to our own self-conceptions. Pleasure is not the aim of sex, but rather a kind of vehicle one uses to control the other person. If you take too much pleasure in it yourself, the pleasure gets in the way and you are very likely to eliminate sex as the power you are trying to attain. Sex is about power. It’s a powerplay.

Hegel uses an example of two people fighting it out until one becomes master of the other and the loser becomes slave. But it’s not a stable relationship. Both parties leave quite unhappy. This is the same sort of view Sartre wants to give us. It’s not benign. Sex and love are much more complicated, threatening and dangerous than we tend to think. He’s trying to dig us out of the nonsense about love that has been piled on us for 2000 years.

And example of a traditional myth comes from Plato’s Symposium which is supposed to characterize the true nature of love: Aristophenes tells us love is the product of an ancient history. We were double creatures, two sets of legs, two sets of heads, two sets of arms. Zeus threatened to split us in two and he did. Ever since, we’ve been running around trying to find our other half. The other is a completion.

The idea of completing ourselves with another person is at odds with Sartre’s view. There is no such perfect fit. Even in the best relationship, there is a kind of struggle going on. If you pay any attention to your relationship, what becomes clear is that there is a struggle going on and there is an accommodation over the years that makes it seem like less of a struggle. Sartre says we are trying to maintain our own conception of ourselves in the face of the judgments of the other person.

Solomon corrects Sartre because he says that what he doesn’t take seriously enough is the fact that very often our conceptions of ourselves are not only in the face of the other, but there is a kind of cooperation that takes place on the level of actually trying to think of ourselves in mutual terms. But it is true that the way we think of ourselves is always at risk because of the other person.

Relationships, however stable they may seem, are never truly stable. They are exist in metastability - any situation which appears to be perfectly in balance can fall into disarray from the slightest imbalance. The same is true about our conceptions of ourselves. It may seem stable, but it is metastable. One thing can throw the entire thing into catastrophe.

Solomon says he doesn’t endorse Sartre, but what he does is opens our eyes to all the complexities of relationship. Sartre had a life long relationship with Simone de Beauvoir. Despite a few infidelities on both their parts, they maintained an intimate closeness until Sartre’s death. They were one of the main couples, in fact the premiere philosophical couple, of the 20th century. Contrast this with Bertrand Russell, who despite all of his many words, went through quite a few marriages and found none of them satisfactory.

Sartre claimed that true being with others was something people found together under threat. You only learn to be with others in extreme circumstances.

I watched The Battle of Algiers tonight. It’s one of those synchronistic things. I recently read several works by Sartre and Camus who had an infamous relationship that ended over a political difference regarding Algiers. Camus was for continued French colonization and Sartre was against it. Sartre was for terrorism, Camus was against any killing whatsoever. (Sartre, of course, saw Camus’s idealism as naive.)

I’ve been reading Not On Our Watch about the Darfur genocide and it was mentioned that on the trip to Sudan, the airlines showed The Battle of Algiers which was totally relevant to what was going on in Darfur. I hadn’t consciously connected the two, but isn’t that how things always work? One thing leads to another even when you don’t realize that is what is happening. So of course, I put The Battle of Algiers on my Netflix queue and moved it to the top. I have since added every film on the Sudan, Darfur, and related conflicts Netflix has.

The Battle of Algiers was filmed in 1966 on the streets of Algier and is based on events that occurred in 1954-1962. Algeria had been a French colony from 1830-1962. It was one of France’s longest-held overseas territories and later became the home of thousands of European immigrant who later became known as pieds-noirs. (Camus’s family was among these immigrants.) After Algeirian independence, over 1 million pied-noirs returned to France and were ostracized by the French because it was thought that they had brought about the violence of the Algerian War which was directly associated with the collapse of the French Fourth Republic. The pied-noirs blamed the French for not being able to return to Algiers because it had become so violent.

There was increasing dissatisfaction among the Muslims in Algiers because they were being treated as second rate citizens and lacked political and economic status. The Algerian War began in 1954 and Algeria gained complete independence in 1962. The film focuses on 1954 - 1960 with the beginning of the organization of Muslim cells in the Casbah. This lead to a confrontation with the pied-noirs which further lead to French paratroopers who came to weed out the Muslim National Liberation Front (FLN). They attempt to assassinate or neutralize all of the FLN leaders and in this attempt they could be said to have “won”, but there is further rioting of native Algerians which shows that they merely won the battle but lost the war.

The film is based on Saadi Yacef who was one of the leaders of the FLN. Today he is a Senator in Algeria’s People’s National Assembly. He was captured by French troops on Sept. 24, 1957 and was sentenced to death. But because he told the French army where Ali la Pointe was hiding (with whom the film both begins and ends), he was pardoned by the French government.

The film was banned for five years in France and scenes of torture were cut from both the American and British versions.

It is said that this film continues to be absolutely contemporary in terms of U.S occupation of Iraq and continued troubles in Africa. If you’ve seen it, what do you think?

Just a side note: Sartre is mentioned in the film by Colonel Bigeard. He says he doesn’t like Sartre, but that the Satrean’s are not those you want as foes. (Sartre wrote in favor of terrorism among the native Algierians to free themselves from French Colonial rule.)

OK! So now Sartre makes sense!!! Why do we hear so much about Sartre and so little about Simone de Beauvoir? Sartre said that it was very difficult for him to determine where his philosophy ended and where Simone de Beauvoir’s began. He had her read everything he wrote and she would often have him rewrite 100s of pages at a time. He’d be angry about it but he’d do it. He, likewise, read every book she wrote before it was published. The two had a strange but loving lifelong relationship. (Although it seems to me he treated her horribly, feminist though she was.) Simone de Beauvoir laid by Sartre’s side when he died and she is buried next to him.

Some people claim that Sartre is a third rate philosopher but a top notch novelist and list Simone de Beauvoir as a top notch philosopher and a third rate novelist. But there are also many women who claim she is both a top notch philosopher and top notch novelist. (Extremely interesting discussion on the BBC Women’s Hour.)

Let me see if I can work through a few of the concepts in The Ethics of Ambiguity which is available online here -

Existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity from its very beginnings. Kierkegaard opposed himself to Hegel by affirming the irreducible character of ambiguity. Sartre likewise defined man in ambiguity.

Some claim that existentialism is a philosophy of the absurd or of despair. And it is true that Sartre declares man “a useless passion”. But it is also true that the most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the element of failure involved in the condition of man. If there is no failure, there is no ethics. The failure described in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness is definitive, but it is also ambiguous. Man’s passion is not inflicted upon him from without. He chooses it. Man bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself. It is up to man to make it important to be a man, and he alone can feel his success or failure.

There are two sorts of freedom - moral and natural. We are all naturally free, but must take a moral stance toward our freedom: “To will oneself free is to effect the transition from nature to morality by establishing a genuine freedom on the original upsurge of our existence.” But this does not mean that the individual who knows himself and chooses himself as the creator of his own values will seek to impose them on others because “to will oneself free is also to will others free.” But this creates an ambiguity in terms of ethics.

For instance, an addict is clearly not free and we want for him his freedom. So what do we do if he begs us for money to feed his addiction? We could take a tyrannical approach and absolutely refuse to give him any money for an addiction that denies him his freedom. But then the repression of the addicts ability to choose is repression, not freedom. (Have you seen the law being proposed in Mississippi that will ban fat people from eating in public????) We can point out to him that he is denying himself his freedom. But to repress his ability to choose is not willing him his freedom and may make the addict even more desperate. Lacking drugs, he may commit suicide. And, such imposed repression is always a form of violence. (Authority is always violence.) “It is no more necessary to serve an abstract ethics obstinately than to yield without due consideration to impulses of pity or generosity; violence is justified only if it opens concrete possibilities to the freedom which I am trying to save….What makes the problem complex is that, on the one hand, one must not make himself an accomplice of that flight from freedom that is found in helplessness, caprice, mania, and passion, and that, on the other hand, it is the abortive movement of man toward being which is his very existence, it is through the failure which he has assumed that he asserts himself as a freedom. To want to prohibit a man from error is to forbid him to fulfill his own existence, it is to deprive him of life.”

If it will open up a future for someone, then violence is justified. If it won’t, then it is just violence for violence sake. “…it is not true that the freedom of others limits my own freedom; to be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass the given toward an open future; the existence of others as freedom defines my situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.” It only makes sense to intervene in the lives of others if we have a “concrete bond” with them: nurse, parent, teacher, friend, etc. Love authorizes severities that indifference does not. It is impossible to love humanity as an abstract thing. We love individual humans. Therefore, it does not make sense to intervene according to abstract ethics or for universal man. (Sartre said that it made no sense to say that we love humanity or that we love life - same thing. What we love are individuals and particulars about life.)

“It is true that each is bound to all, but that is precisely the ambiguity of his condition; in his surpassing toward others, each one exists absolutely as for himself; each is interested in the liberation of all, but as a separate existence engaged in his projects. So much so that the terms “useful to Man,” “useful to this man,” do not overlap. Universal, absolute man exists nowhere.” Therefore, the only justification of sacrifice is its utility - not some abstract universal ethic. This is ambiguous: to be at the service of some may mean we are at the disservice to others.

Simone de Beauvoir concludes The Ethics of Ambiguity with an old saying: “Do what you must, come what may.” She writes, “If it came to be that each man did what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death.”

Another interesting documentary: Sartre talking about Sartre with friends. It’s an old film and messed up in parts, but gives a good feel of Sartre’s personality and past influences. I think this is only Part I. It ends abruptly. I’ll see if I can find Part II. It takes about 40 minutes to complete and there are English subtitles.

1 -
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85vEXo7Wntk&hl=en&fs=1]

2-

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6F7xjKNY5U&hl=en&fs=1]

3-

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Y0b6Cdv-SY&hl=en&fs=1]

4 -
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeesUQ-kUSk&hl=en&fs=1]

5 -

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b41nIdmYME&hl=en&fs=1]

6 -
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McmO-K1cQl4&hl=en&fs=1]

View full screen here. (”Human, all too human”, comes from Nietzsche.)

I read almost everything I had intended to read as far as the French Existentialists go. The only books I have left on my list are Sartre, A Life by Annie Cohen-Solal and The Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir. It is very unlikely I’ll get around to reading Sartre, A Life. I was a little iffy about purchasing the book in the first place but got it for only $4.00 so it seemed worth the risk. I do still plan to read The Ethics of Ambiguity.

After having read the early existentialists (Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche) whom I found to be extremely inspiring, I have to say the French existentialists did not seem to “measure up”. They were writing in more difficult times, but then again, Dostoevsky’s life was definitely no picnic! Working through what bothered me about Sisyphus has left me with an understanding that is just bubbling under the surface but I can’t quite put it into words yet. The problem is the idea that humanity is born into guilt - we westerners don’t even realize we carry that thinking with us. My struggles with Camus’s absurd hero helped me have a better appreciating for the Buddhist concept of “Nothingness” but I’ll have to work through this a little more before I can fully verbalize it. (I’m looking forward to Novak’s book on Nietzsche and Buddhism.)

Solomon said that Camus’s idea of The Myth of Sisyphus was humanity at it’s low ebb and I can’t help but agree. If the best we can do is find happiness in our revolt, then does that mean we never get to grow up beyond the adolescent rebellious stage? That we never get to think of ourselves as “at home in the world”? What if we were to let go of that stubborn idea that man doesn’t belong in the world (which came about with the fallen man theory - the Christian God was meant to save us from our fallen state by promising us a world beyond this one) and at last decide that we can be at home in this world? (But more on that at a later date when I can better verbalize it.)

Sartre was a little less depressing than Camus, but it still felt that he didn’t fully believe in what he was proposing. You’d read one book and he’d say one thing. Read another and he would have decided that idea had to be tweaked and sometimes fully rejected. Fair enough - we get older and what seemed important when we were young is no longer important when we are older. And granted, both Camus and Sartre were trying to come to terms with some heavy issues that hadn’t been fully addressed in the west prior to their attempts to do so. They did manage to capture the attitude of their age and Camus claimed that was all he was ever trying to do - that he wasn’t trying to provide an answer to the attitude. Sartre, perhaps, wanted to provide an answer, but his answers kept changing. (Or maybe they were just ambiguous?)

I think mostly what these men were able to do was to put into words what it was everyone was feeling but were having a very difficult time acknowledging. They helped a generation come to terms with their sense of alienation from God and from humanity. And also, according to Solomon, Sartre provided a path to an entirely different way of understanding the emotions even though he didn’t take the path near as far as it needed to go. But he did at least get it started which helped steer the normal discussion of emotions in a different direction.

I’m still very interested in reading a book by a female French existentialist so will read Simone de Beauvoir. But I can’t help it. I’m very glad to close this chapter of my French Existentialist studies. I found it to be far more depressing than inspiring no matter how much Sartre and Camus claimed they loved life. Their love of life just seemed far too forced to me. After all, how difficult is it to love and be loved? Perhaps it is true that “hell is other people”. But then it must be equally true that heaven is other people. It all depends on how we want to look at it.

Just one quote:

I want to suggest that it is the interplay between them [the many levels of self-consciousness] that accounts for much of the complexity of human consciousness.  Fully conscious (articulate and avowed consciousness) may not play the major role that many philosophers seem to presume it does, but prereflective consciousness in the sense that Sartre defines it plays a pretty negligible role, too.  Nevertheless, the constant possibility of reflection in all its variations is what accounts for the most importsant single feature of human existence, certainly according to Sarre, and that is freedom.   Whe, at the end of his career, he softens his early insistence on “absolute freedom” in his oft-quoted statement, “the idea I have never ceased to develop is in the end that a man can always make something out of what is made of him,” the idea remains that we are free to make something of ourselves and responsible for the result.  That is a welcome bit of existential advice for all of us, in this world of victims and martyrs, in which variations of bad faith and cynicism have become something of an art form.  There is a lot of empty and hypocritical talk about “freedom” these days, but much too little appreciation of what freedom really means, namely, responsibility.  For that alone, Sartre (and Camus) remain philosophical beacons, despite their often grim thoughts and dark portraits of human experience.

Dr. Robert C. Solomon (1942-2007)

I went to the bookstore yesterday looking for No Exit but couldn’t find it. I’ve been trying really hard not to buy any more books because I have so many on my bookshelves that I’ve never read - I have no reason to buy any new books for years. But it’s kind of hard to resist sometimes. Thankfully, No Exit was available on line here and was a quick read. (Lots of typos, though.)

It’s short play that Sartre wrote in 1944 with only four characters - the Valet, Garcin, Inez, and Estelle. They are all dead and in Hell where they are surprised to find there are no torture chambers. It’s just the three of them in a room together which leads to doors and passages but nothing else. They come to realize that Hell is other people. We are all reliant upon others whether we like it or not. (Being-for-Others)

Garcin, Inez and Estelle have all died very quick, relatively painless deaths. Although dead, they remain privy to what is going on in the world but the world is no longer aware of them. Solomon says that this provides us with a much more powerful reason to fear death than the typical fears like the pain, the process, the indignities of dying, or even just death itself. What we should truly fear is what others will make of us once we are no longer there to defend ourselves. Our identity is no longer ours - it’s what people want to make of it.

What other people think of us is what they think of us - that ultimately defines them more than it defines us. But it’s very difficult not to be influenced by what others think. Ultimately, what control do we really have over our identities? I grew up in a gossipy family that slaps labels on situations and people with little reflection. I left for college when my brother ans sister were still very young so wasn’t around them very much. My identity was left up to their interpretation which was aided by my mother’s views of me which weren’t typically positive. My sister, to this day, maintains the view she acquired of me while I was still living at home. That was almost 20 years ago. If I were to die, it’s quite likely she’d continue to insist she knows me based on her childhood perceptions. Our identity is in the hands of others. We don’t own it. (From the ACIM perspective - our identity is equated with the ego which does not exist. It’s our attempts to maintain it that keeps us in a perpetual state of fear.)

Solomon says this raises the question: If people are going to maintain our identities for us, is it better to not be remembered at all?

According to Solomon, the dilemma Sartre wants to present to us in No Exit is that we cannot “ever define who we really are”, either with or without help of others. As conscious beings, “We are what we are not, and we are not what we are.” And we are not immune to what it is others think of us. because we are “for-itself-for-others”. But we aren’t what others make of us, either. This is the dilemma of freedom in the face of Being-for-Others. Am I what they think of me, or not? To what extent are “they right” about me?

Solomon says he sees the characters as representing one of Sartre’s three ontological categories (abstractions): Garcin represents Being-for-Itself. Inez is Being-in-Itself. And Estelle is Being-for-Others. Garcin is wholly absorbed in his identity crisis (”A man is what he wills himself to be”), Inez is the most solid and straightforward, and Estell is wholly dependent on male admiration and support.

If what someone thinks about us bothers us, chances are there is some amount of truth in what it is they think of us that we are likely trying to deny in ourselves or it wouldn’t bother us. People are always our mirrors. Whether we can see ourselves in others or not is another matter. (Vampires have no reflection.)

In Camus’s The Fall, Clamence observes, “What’s the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic of vulgar motives to your actions.” If you kill yourself, you are handing yourself over to Being-for-Others and abandoning any effectiveness you have in the world.

We are stuck with each other and the truth is, we need each other for our very existence. Solomon says we care about (although not necessarily for) each other, and we are therefore vulnerable to each other. Solomon says that this shows that Sartre’s idea that “existence precedes essence”, as if each of us is born into the world alone. We are born of and into a world populated by other people. As St. Exupery said, “Man is a network of relationships, and these alone matter to him”. We want, or we think we want, transparency in our relationships. But we have all wondered, at least once, “Who really knows another human being?” Even the people we are closest to can be difficult to decipher.

At one point in the play, Inez offers to be Estelle’s mirror because there are no physical mirrors in Hell. Estelle is forced to see herself through Inez’s eyes who tells in Estelle in detail what it is she sees. At first, Estelle literally tries to see herself in the reflection of Inez’s eyes but can’t see herself properly. The mirror doesn’t just reflect, it interprets. (What does this remind me of???) Inez lies and says, “Is that a pimple”? (The mirror lies outright!) For Estelle who only exists by being reflected by others (Being-for-Others), the only reality is the mirror.

But Solomon also points out that the metaphor of the mirror doesn’t only apply to Being-for-Others, it also applies to Being-for-Itself. It is at the heart of philosophical theories and ordinary talk of self-consciousness. Richard Rorty reflects the idea: “pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, determine most of our philosophical convictions.” Self-consciousness is not mere awareness of oneself (one’s consciousness of consciousness) but a reflection of the self (or ego).

There are two types of reflection going on - when a person reflects on him or herself; and when a person is being reflected in the eyes of other people. There are two ways of viewing the self: the first-person view point and the third-person point of view. The first person point of view is the only one that accounts for experience. The third person point of view - reflection - does not have access to experience. We can only be aware of our own experience as we experience it. Reflection on our experience is not experience. (Although there is the experience of reflecting upon our experience.)

Being-for-Others, however, is about relationships - about what relationships are like from the inside. It’s not just a question of first-person experience. it is the second person experience - the experience of others experiencing oneself.

There is so much more to say about this and maybe I’ll get back to it one of these days. I am still intent on moving on from Camus and Sartre tomorrow and still need to finish the rest of Dark Feelings, Grim Thoughts.

I’m so glad I took the time to read Sartre’s play!!