Reading Sartre

On Phenomenology and Existentialism

Jonathan Webber, Jonathan Webber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136918056
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. The fourteen original essays in this volume focus on the phenomenological and existentialist writings of the first major phase of his published career, arguing with scholarly precision for their continuing importance to philosophical debate.

Aspects of Sartre's philosophy under discussion in this volume include:

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• consciousness and self-consciousness
• imagination and aesthetic experience
• emotions and other feelings
• embodiment
• selfhood and the Other
• freedom, bad faith, and authenticity
• literary fiction as philosophical writing

Reading Sartre: on Phenomenology and Existentialism is an indispensable resource for understanding the nature and importance of Sartre's philosophy. It is essential reading for students of phenomenology, existentialism, ethics, or aesthetics, and for anyone interested in the roots of contemporary thought in twentieth century philosophy.

1
THE ETHICS OF AUTHENTICITY

Christine Daigle

What saith thy conscience? Thou shalt become what thou art.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science §270

One of the most problematic parts of Sartre’s philosophy is certainly his ethics. No ethical treatise followed the famous announcement in the last lines of Being and Nothingness. There are only a few essays, e.g. Existentialism Is a Humanism, Anti-Semite and Jew, and What Is Literature?, that tackle ethical problems of one kind or another. The attempt at writing an ethics was abandoned after filling ten notebooks from 1947 to 1948. The Notebooks for an Ethics, two out of the ten notebooks that were published post-humously in 1983, contain an attempt at an ethics, one that Sartre retrospectively deemed a failure. The abandonment of the project has inevitably led to some speculation as to its cause. In his Sartre, le dernier philosophe, Alain Renaut explains it by pointing to the publication of The Ethics of Ambiguity by Beauvoir in 1947. Since this essay, according to Renaut, responded directly to the call for an ethics that concluded Being and Nothingness, there was no need for Sartre to continue working on his own answer. Because Beauvoir successfully elaborated an ethics on the ontological basis provided by Being and Nothingness the job was done and Sartre could devote himself to something different. I want to challenge this.

I have argued elsewhere that it is possible to reconstruct a Sartrean ethics if one carefully reads his essays of the 1940s along with the Notebooks for an Ethics (see Daigle 2005 and 2007). I think that Sartre is unfair to himself when he judges the content of the Notebooks to represent a failed attempt at an ethics. That he will later turn toward an ethics that emphasizes more the socio-historical location of the individual does not mean that the ethics of the 1940s is to be dismissed. In fact, I think it can be argued that the later ethics is merely an extension and complement of the earlier one, albeit a much needed one. That said, the sorry situation that is made for the individual in Being and Nothingness does not seem to provide much ground for an ethics. If authenticity is the ethical ideal one must aim for, and that is indeed the key of Sartre’s ethics, it is not clear how the for-itself that emerges out of the ontological treatise is in any position to attain it. Sartre needs to revise some of his views for this to happen. I will argue that Beauvoir’s intervention, in ‘Pyrrhus and Cinéas’ and The Ethics of Ambiguity, is crucial in that regard. Her different appropriation of Hegel and Heidegger and her understanding of situation led Sartre to the path of conversion and reciprocity that are key to authenticity and the possibility of an ethical life. I will proceed by first explaining Heidegger’s notion of authenticity as it permeates much of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s thinking on the topic. I will then explain the conundrum of bad faith in Sartre as well as his views on interpersonal relations and authenticity. Following this, I will turn to Beauvoir’s understanding of authenticity. This will reveal that Beauvoir’s contribution was key to Sartre’s development of an ethics of authenticity as we find it in the Notebooks for an Ethics.

The problem of authenticity: the case of Heidegger

What is authenticity and why is it a problem? It is important to clarify the nature of the concept that Beauvoir and Sartre tackle. To do so, it is important to keep in mind that both were interested in Heidegger’s phenomenology. While this is not an essay on Heidegger, I think it is crucial to consider, even if very briefly, what he had to say about authenticity in order to better understand Beauvoir’s and Sartre’s own dealings with the concept.

In Being and Time, Heidegger talked about authentic and inauthentic Dasein. Notably, he refused to give the concept its traditional ethical spin. Authenticity and inauthenticity are modes of being for Dasein as it relates to being and to the world. Inauthenticity is a kind of being-in-the-world for Dasein whereby Dasein is ‘completely fascinated by the “world” and by the Dasein-with of Others in the “they”’ (Heidegger 1962: 220). Authenticity, by contrast, is the kind of being-in-the-world whereby Dasein is self-aware of itself as the being that is a being-there, that is a being that is present to being. Dasein is aware of its relation to the world. Similarly, as we will come to see, the authentic for-itself in Sartre will be the one that will also understand its relation to the world as one that creates the world and the values contained therein. Heidegger explains that ‘authentic existence is not something which floats above falling everydayness; existentially, it is only a modified way in which such everydayness is seized upon’ (Heidegger 1962: 224). Heidegger insists that authenticity and inauthenticity are merely modes of being for Dasein and that no one mode is better or more desirable than the other. Rather, they are tied together and equiprimordial. He thus claims that his views are only descriptive and not prescriptive. Interestingly, however, the structures or modes of being that he identifies as being inauthentic are all the most immediate experiences that Dasein has of its being-in-the-world, namely facticity, fallenness and existentiality. Dasein is inauthentic when it dwells in its own facticity (its being-in-the-world), when it lets itself be fascinated by the they (being thrown into the world, Dasein is a Mitdasein or Dasein-with) and when it is oblivious to its own being-toward-death. The experience of dread, which accompanies the experience of oneself as a being-toward-death – but can also be brought up by other, everyday experiences – is one that uncovers nothingness for Dasein.

Being-toward-death plays a key role with regards to authenticity in Heidegger. Once Dasein makes of his own death something existentially relevant, it is in an authentic mode. That is, it has uncovered its own possibilities and their finite nature. The idea of possibility is the key here: death has to become a genuine possibility for us. It does so in the mode of authenticity and through anticipation. Anticipation or anxiety is a particular mood that leads one to the authentic mode where one is freed from illusions, the illusions of inauthenticity, and where one realizes that one truly is a being-towards-death.¹ The ultimate possibility is the termination of one’s Dasein.

In any case, the two modes of being-in-the-world of Dasein are not equivalent. Although Heidegger is careful in refraining from qualifying authenticity as better or more desirable, the whole gist of these sections of Being and Time is that Dasein has to be authentic. Thus, authenticity is not merely an ontological category but an ought. Dasein may let itself be trapped in inauthentic modes but must aim toward authenticity as a mode of its own being. The ontological yields an ethical demand, that of authenticity.²

Sartre on authenticity

Sartre’s handling of the problem of authenticity is different from Heidegger’s while being informed by it. The point at which he comes closest to Heidegger’s ontologization of the problem is in Being and Nothingness. Indeed, the chapter on bad faith tries to deal with the concepts of bad faith and good faith in strict ontological terms, not introducing an ought the way Heidegger inadvertently did in Being and Time. Using the terms ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’ was bound to put Heidegger in a difficult position, and it did. It is quite conceivable that Sartre uses ‘bad faith’ and ‘good faith’ in order to avoid the ethical pitfall that Heidegger was faced with. The terms ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’ simply carry a heavy ethical baggage. Using ‘bad faith’ and ‘good faith’ is intended to help think about the problem in an ontological manner.³ Sartre warns us at the end of the chapter on bad faith:

If it is indifferent whether one is in good or in bad faith, because bad faith reapprehends good faith and creeps to the very origin of the project of good faith, that does not mean that we can not radically escape bad faith. But this supposes a self-recovery of being which was previously corrupted. This self-recovery we shall call authenticity, the description of which has no place here. (B&N: 94)

Thus authenticity is not good faith and inauthenticity is not bad faith, although it is very tempting to read them as such. The waiter is in bad faith when he pretends to be a waiter. Ought he to realize that this is not how he ought to conceive of himself? Not in this section of Being and Nothingness, where Sartre is describing a mode of being. While I think that Sartre’s linguistic precautions have not been sufficient to rescue him from the ethical pitfall, this is not a matter I wish to pursue at great length here. There is plenty of debate on what exactly Sartre is trying to achieve and whether he achieves it in the chapter on bad faith and other scholars have addressed these issues better than I would.⁴

But let me try this. What is bad faith? One is in bad faith when one denies that one is a being for-itself. The waiter is deemed to be in bad faith because he fancies he is a waiter in the strong ontological sense. Existentially, the woman at the rendezvous is all mind. She experiences herself as divorced from her body. Now, ontologically that is impossible since, as a for-itself, she is an embodied consciousness. No consciousness can be conscious of without the body. She nevertheless experiences herself, at that moment, as pure mind. Her body is then a thing, an object from which she is separated. An ontological impossibility becomes an existential reality. To thus conceive of oneself at odds with one’s ontological being is to be in bad faith. Bad faith is not an ontological concept although it points to the failure of one’s existential being to correspond to one’s ontological being. Bad faith is a phenomenological existential concept that extends into an ethical one. In fact, I want to go so far as to say that it is always ethical since there is an underlying claim operating here, namely: that one ought to be what one is, that is, a being that is what it is not and is not what it is.

It would not be surprising if the chapter on bad faith had an ethical import, as I think it does. After all, this chapter and its supposed strict ontological dealings with bad faith and good faith can almost be seen as an interlude in Sartre’s overall ethical approach to the question of authenticity since it is preceded and followed by inquiries into the concept from an ethical point of view. Already in his literary writings of the 1930s he is investigating the problem. It is a theme in Nausea (1938) with the figure of the salaud and it recurs in ‘The Childhood of a Leader’, one of the short stories published together as The Wall in 1939. In Nausea, Roquentin despises the bourgeois of Bouville whom he calls salauds. The salaud is in bad faith as he, much like the waiter to come in Being and Nothingness, plays at being the bourgeois he is, enacting his predetermined role conscientiously and exercising his rights and duties, themselves also set and fixed. Similarly, in ‘The Childhood of a Leader’, after a little wandering and existential – authentic? – musings, Lucien discovers who he really is. Sartre says ‘And now, indeed, that was exactly what Lucien was: a huge bundle of rights and responsibilities’ (TW: 204). He has a right to exist, his existence takes the form of an in-itself: he is Lucien, he is a Leader. He is in bad faith.

Sartre’s ethical concern with authenticity continues in his War Diaries. It is then as much a personal concern for being authentic as a theoretical concern for understanding the mechanisms by which one may become authentic. At the time, he is reading Heidegger and the language he uses in his diaries is informed by this reading.⁵ Not only is he borrowing Heidegger’s language but clearly also some of his views on authenticity. Thus he says that authenticity is to be obtained only through historicity. He defines it as one way for the individual to be situated, to understand oneself as a situated being. He says: ‘Authenticity is a duty that comes to us both from outside and from inside since our “inside” is an outside. To be authentic, is to fully realize one’s situated being, whatever that situation may be’ (WD: 53–4; my emphasis).⁶ Authenticity will be gained through assuming one’s free situated and historical being. However, this gain will have to be perpetually regained as one persists in one’s free project. If that does not happen, one will relapse in inauthenticity.

The diaries’ sketches on the notion of authenticity find their way into Being and Nothingness but not in the chapter on bad faith. As explained earlier, the chapter on bad faith is dedicated to an ontological exploration of the notion of bad faith. Later in the treatise, in the section ‘Freedom and Responsibility’, he explains what responsibility is, again, from an ontological point of view. What he says there is reminiscent of his definition of authenticity in the War Diaries. He says:

The one who realizes in anguish his condition as being thrown into a responsibility which extends to his very abandonment has no longer either remorse or regret or excuse; he is no longer anything but a freedom which perfectly reveals itself and whose being resides in this very revelation. But as we pointed out at the beginning of this work, most of the time we flee anguish in bad faith.

(B&N: 577)

Thus anguish is equated with authenticity. Authenticity is, as in Heidegger, to be obtained through the anguished discovery of oneself as a free, responsible, situated being. However, contra Heidegger, Sartre does not think that this anguished discovery entails an understanding of oneself as a being-toward-death. Indeed, he rejects this notion vehemently, leading him to assert that Heidegger points to a solution but fails to provide it himself. For Sartre, authenticity is the discovery of oneself as this being that seeks to be God, yet fails to be it. As said earlier in the book, ‘the being toward which human reality surpasses itself is not a transcendent God; it is at the heart of human reality; it is only human reality itself as totality’ (B&N: 114). But this totality is one that is what it is not and is not what it is. It is a project that constantly aims to be one with itself, to be a for-itself–in-itself. The final word of Being and Nothingness is that the for-itself is a being that desires to be God and that flees anguish in bad faith. It seems to make authenticity extremely difficult, if not altogether impossible to attain.

Thomas Anderson has argued that for Sartre’s ethics, in general, and for authenticity, in particular, to be possible, there is a need for a conversion (Anderson 1993). According to him, the for-itself must abandon the desire to be God. ...

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• PREFACE
• 1 THE ETHICS OF AUTHENTICITY
• 2 IMAGINATION IN NON-REPRESENTATIONAL PAINTING
• 3 WHAT IS IT LIKE TO BE FREE?
• 4 THE TRANSCENDENTAL DIMENSION OF SARTRE’S PHILOSOPHY
• 5 BEING COLONIZED
• 6 A SARTREAN CRITIQUE OF INTROSPECTION
• 7 IMAGINATION AND AFFECTIVE RESPONSE
• 8 THE SIGNIFICANCE OF CONTEXT IN ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES
• 9 THE GRACEFUL, THE UNGRACEFUL AND THE DISGRACEFUL
• 10 MAGIC IN SARTRE’S EARLY PHILOSOPHY
• 11 ALIENATION, OBJECTIFICATION, AND THE PRIMACY OF VIRTUE
• 12 BAD FAITH AND THE OTHER
• 13 PRE-REFLECTIVE SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EGO
• 14 SHAME AND THE EXPOSED SELF
• BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SARTRE’S WORKS CITED
• BIBLIOGRAPHY OF OTHER WORKS CITED
• INDEX