At the end of his play No Exit, written directly after Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre famously has the protagonist, Garcin, come to the scandalous conclusion that “hell is other people!” Although as his thinking progressed Sartre was increasingly at pains to distinguish Garcin’s outburst from his own considered opinion on the role other people play in an individual’s life, I want to argue here that in both content and tone the line accurately emblematizes his appropriation in Being and Nothingness of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. For Sartre, the dialectic is to be interpreted as allegorizing the general nature of interaction among human beings, showing it to be structured by narcissism, paranoia, and skepticism, states he takes to be characteristic of genuinely human self-consciousness. The guiding purpose of this demonstration, again, is to fill in a background against which the philosophical originality of Simone de Beauvoir’s appropriations of Hegel and Sartre will stand in relief. What I want to make obvious are certain profound differences from Sartre’s views in her conceptions of, for example, what constitutes a subject, what objectivity is and whether and how it is possible, and how genuinely human self-consciousness is to be achieved. These differences arise precisely within Beauvoir’s appropriation of Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel—within, that is, her own interpretation of Sartre—which is why understanding Beauvoir’s take on Hegel requires knowing something about Sartre’s.
For this purpose, I am going to focus on the well-known section of Being and Nothingness called “The Look,” in which Sartre sets up a scenario around which his appropriation of the master-slave dialectic can be seen to coalesce. The scenario begins with Sartre’s asking us to imagine “that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have just glued my ear to the door and looked through a keyhole” (347). We must imagine, he stresses, that he is not thinking about his crouching at the door; he is simply doing it. In Sartre’s terminology, his consciousness in this moment is to be seen as “non-thetic” or “unreflective” (347). This type of consciousness, Sartre says,
sticks to my acts, it is my acts; and my acts are commanded only by the ends to be attained and by the instruments to be employed. My attitude, for example, has no “outside”; it is a pure process of relating the instrument (the keyhole) to the end to be attained (the spectacle to be seen), a pure mode of losing myself in the world, of causing myself to be drunk in by things as ink is by a blotter. (348)
With the idea of unreflective consciousness, Sartre appropriates Hegel’s primary moment of self-consciousness, a moment characterized in the Phenomenology, as I suggested in chapter 3, by a being’s preoccupation with fulfilling his desires as they stand, by a sense of himself as discrete only insofar as he sees the rest of the world in terms of its potential for filling these desires. For Sartre, then, this moment of consciousness is to be taken not as historical (either for the species or for an individual) but as an ever-available option for human beings: a person’s consciousness counts as non-thetic whenever she is unreflectively doing something, whenever she is “lost in the world.”1 Notice, too, that Sartre implicitly interprets the idea of desires as they stand to include any desires whose ends are sought unreflectively, even if they originated in some previous act or process of reflection. This would imply that what distinguishes a desire-as-it-stands from a transcendent desire is not, as in Hegel, whether the desire is a product of reflection but whether this reflection controls the desire—whether, to put it another way, the desire is acted upon deliberately. This understanding of the early moment of self-consciousness, seeing it as part of the here-and-now and emphasizing the role of deliberation in what is to count as action (and thus as transcendence), is one of Sartre’s contributions to Beauvoir’s way of appropriating the master-slave dialectic.
In elaborating his keyhole example Sartre specifies, almost in passing, that the particular unreflective emotion that we are to imagine moves the peeper to crouch by the door is jealousy.2 This jealousy is to be understood as “nothing except the simple objective fact that there is a sight to be seen behind the door” (348; Sartre’s emphasis). But it turns out that this is not a “simple objective fact” in any conventional understanding of these words. For, as Sartre argues, that there is something identifiable as a sight to be seen behind the door is true only because he is jealous. And yet it is a “simple objective fact” that there is something behind the door and that this something can be seen through the keyhole; in fact, it’s the fantasy of this “something,” this scene behind the door, that, intuitively enough, we are supposed to imagine has spawned the imaginary Sartre’s jealousy. Thus what Sartre wishes to argue is that his non-thetic consciousness in effect transforms what’s going on behind the door into “a sight to be seen,” while at the same time it’s this very sight that gives rise to the particular form his non-thetic consciousness takes—that is, his state of jealousy. This paradoxical constellation of circumstances—in which what’s going on behind the door both spawns and is spawned by the imaginary Sartre’s jealousy—is an example of what Sartre calls a “situation” (348). And by definition a situation (in this special, technical sense) is the situation it is only because of the coincidence of particular “simple objective facts” and some particular state of consciousness of a particular human being. This implies that the “simple objective fact” that something is going on behind the door is in and of itself meaningless and that the “situation” will differ for each person who runs up against any given “simple objective fact,” according to each person’s state of consciousness at the time.
Despite his insistence in this discussion on the central role of simple objective facts, at the heart of Sartre’s concept of situation is the idea, emphasized both in the context of this scenario and throughout Being and Nothingness, that human beings always can control their particular states of consciousness and thus are to be held responsible for the situations they are in. In Sartre’s idiom (again adapted from that of Heidegger), “the ensemble exists only in relation to a free project of my possibilities” (348). What’s going on behind the door spawns Sartre’s jealousy, but only because he does not subject this jealousy to the scrutiny of his own consciousness. It is in principle possible for him not to be jealous under these circumstances. And yet because he acts unreflectively, this possibility is not alive for Sartre. In his lack of deliberation, of deliberateness, he fixes himself in his jealousy. His crouching by the doorway is the result of a frictionless momentum toward the door, produced by the spontaneous admixture of his unreflective (in this case, jealous) consciousness and the simple objective fact that (there are signs that) something is happening on the other side. The only thing that would counteract this momentum would be a change in his consciousness. In principle, Sartre insists, a human being is ontologically capable at any time and under any circumstances of willing such a change in consciousness; that is, such changes can occur without any corresponding change in the “simple objective facts.” But in reality, he suggests, human beings often pretend to themselves that they are the helpless victims of these facts, thereby exhibiting what Sartre famously calls “bad faith.” And the significance of the encounter with the “other,” the significance of Sartre’s appropriation of the meeting of two subjectively self-certain beings in the master-slave dialectic, is that this encounter is defined as that which can perform the service of rendering impossible, at least for a time, the self-serving rationales characteristic of bad faith.
As unreflective consciousness, the Sartre who is crouching by the door is not, of course, thinking about the metaphysics or moral implications of what he is doing. He is just responding, in his jealousy, to his sense that something he must witness is going on behind the door. But let us imagine, Sartre then suggests, that “all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is looking at me!” And so I am “suddenly affected in my being and … essential modifications appear in my structure” (349). Specifically, Sartre says, “I now exist as myself for my unreflective consciousness” (349). In other words, the fact that someone else, someone Sartre wants to call the Other, is looking at him forces upon his unreflective consciousness the fact that he is a self, or, as he sometimes puts it, an Ego.3 To understand the significance of this change in consciousness, we need to remember that the unreflective consciousness is by definition totally absorbed in what the self is doing. It is not watching the self do what it’s doing; if it were, it would be what Sartre calls reflective consciousness. By definition, if unreflective consciousness becomes aware of the self, it can’t be as an object of reflection, per se. Instead, Sartre says, what’s forced upon his unreflective consciousness as a result of the Other’s gaze is that what is being gazed at is an Ego or self for that Other. And what unreflective consciousness also senses—immediately, unreflectively—is that this newly revealed self is expressly not for-itself; rather, it is expressly and exclusively “for-the-Other.”
Yet at the same time, Sartre contends, unreflective consciousness automatically identifies with this self that exists exclusively for the Other. It sees that this self-for-Others belongs to it. Crucially for Sartre (and here is where he is at pains to distinguish himself from Hegel, for reasons that will become clear momentarily) this act of recognition is not, or at least not primarily, epistemological. Before the self knows itself to be for-the-other, it experiences itself as such: specifically, Sartre claims, the Other’s gaze effects an ontological change in the self that is registered in the self’s being instantly—helplessly—suffused with a feeling of shame or pride. In the case of the keyhole example, of course, the form the feeling takes is shame, and it is this shame “which makes me live, not know the situation of being looked at” (350).
In identifying the feeling of shame as an ontologically (and not, or at least not initially, epistemologically) critical moment in the encounter with the Other, Sartre provides an interesting solution to an interpretive puzzle in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. This is the issue of just how each of the two encountering beings recognizes the other as both desirous and capable of recognition. There is something unsatisfying about the way Hegel sidesteps this question, as though human beings can or could just automatically read each other’s psychological demands and capabilities off each other’s appearances. At the very least, Hegel evidently doesn’t find pressing the question of how human beings are capable of this automatic reading. With the idea that the Other’s “Look” automatically induces in a me a sense of pride or shame that reveals to me my self or Ego insofar as it is “for” the Other, Sartre fills in this gap. For him the shame or pride I feel automatically in response to the Look reveals to me not only that I have a self that is for the Other but also that this Other perceives me as being nothing other than this self. And it is the need to alleviate my shame by proving that I am more than just Being-for-Others (to use Sartre’s term) that motivates my subsequent relations with the Other—motivates the Hegelian life-and-death struggle.
I want to flag the fact that Sartre’s filling in of a Hegelian lacuna at this juncture by appealing to the experience of shame is considerably more compelling than his (mostly passing) acknowledgment that the Other’s Look can also produce in me a feeling of pride. This is because his explanation of what gets the fight-to-the-death off the ground turns on the repugnance the looked-at being is supposed to feel for the self revealed to him or her by the Other’s Look, insofar as this self is Being-for-the-Other. If my automatic response to this Look is one of pride, then it’s hard to see why I will be at pains to prove that I am more than the self I imagine the Other sees. Indeed, while Sartre discusses the phenomenon of shame in minute detail, he spends barely any time at all exploring the mechanics of pride. In the one short discussion of pride he offers (386–387), he seems to suggest that, indeed, experiencing it in response to the Other’s Look leads not to a life-and-death struggle with the Other but to a complacent acceptance of oneself as nothing other than Being-for-Others. But because the self that is for-Others is inherently incapable of action—is, as we shall see, nothing other than the fixed object of the Other’s perception—to accept oneself as nothing other than Being-for-Others is to deny the fundamental fact of one’s own subjectivity, of one’s own Being-for-Self. This, for Sartre, is the quintessence of bad faith. It thus turns out that the only “authentic” response to the Other’s Look is shame.4 And this feeling of shame is what propels me to participate in a life-and-death struggle for recognition with the Other.
But why, on Sartre’s interpretation of things, must my proving to the Other that I am more than Being-for-Others—indeed, that I am not, essentially speaking, such a being—take the form of destroying the Other, as Sartre, following Hegel, insists it does? The answer to this question turns on Sartre’s understanding of what it is to be an Other. For starters, of course, the Other is that being, any being, who can induce in me a feeling of shame, and specifically of shame in being the being the Other sees. But what kind of a being is this being the Other sees? It is, my shame reveals to me, my being, or at least part of my being. But it is my being insofar as I am perceived by an Other. That is, it is my being insofar as I am an object of the Other’s perception. “The Other,” Sartre says, “is first the being for whom I am an object; that is, the being through whom I gain my objectness” (361). And because the Other’s perception of me is something I cannot control, Sartre claims, in a turn of phrase that signals his desire to link his analysis of the Other with that of Hegel, “we can consider ourselves as ‘slaves’ insofar as we appear to the Other” (358). As Sartre sometimes puts it, the Look reveals to the looked-at person that he or she has a nature. And this, according to Sartre, using terminology that reveals his interest in construing the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as an interpretation or appropriation of the myth of Adam and Eve, is why “my original fall is the existence of the Other” (352). Sartre writes,
Pure shame is not a feeling of being this or that guilty object but in general of being an object; that is, of recognizing myself in this degraded, fixed, and dependent being which I am for the Other. Shame is the feeling of an original fall, not because of the fact that I may have committed this or that particular fault but simply that I have “fallen” into the world in the midst of things and that I need the mediation of the Other in order to be what I am. (384)5
The Other’s powers to transform the looked-at person, Sartre argues, are not limited to the ability to adduce shame. Rather, the Look brings about “a total metamorphosis of the world” (360): the looked-at person feels himself, in his shame, to be just one among many objects in a world that is all, specifically, for the Other. This means that for the looked-at person the Look is cataclysmic:
Suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me. Everything is in place; everything still exists for me; but everything is traversed by an invisible flight and fixed in the direction of a new object. The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world. (343)
All the objects in the world remain precisely the same. But the looked-at person, in his shame, now experiences these objects, just as he experiences himself, as for the Other. He experiences himself as one among many objects fixed by the Other’s Look. And since the world is now for the Other, “the Other’s look as the necessary condition of my objectivity is the destruction of all objectivity [in any conventional sense of the word] for me” (360). The paradox, in other words, is that my becoming an object (my “objectivity”) is the product of something that also destroys my sense of the objectivity of the world. This fact is nightmarish for me, for it implies that the world I know, this world, with this keyhole, and this door, and even this Other, both is and is not my world, both is and is not the (real) world. Thus, the Other is apprehended by the looked-at person “through uneasiness; through him I am perpetually in danger in a world which is this world and which nevertheless I can only glimpse” (367). What fills the looked-at person with horror, Sartre suggests, is not only the sense that the Other has made him into an object and destroyed his sense of objectivity. It’s also that in making the looked-at person into an object the Other has an epistemological advantage over him. For as unreflective consciousness, the looked-at person is an object for the other but not for himself. Furthermore, the accuracy of the Other’s Look—its epistemological power—is confirmed by the looked-at person’s shameful reaction to it. In other words, the looked-at person feels horror in large part because he feels that the Other in a split second has gained knowledge of who he is, knowledge that he himself lacks. As Sartre puts it,
The Other looks at me and as such he holds the secret of my being, he knows what I am. Thus the profound meaning of my being is outside of me, imprisoned in an absence. The Other has the advantage over me. (473)
The Other merely looks at me, and he “has the advantage over me.” The Look itself is instantly imprisoning.
There is, however, a way out of this prison, a way to escape this sense of being pinned by the Other’s consciousness. What is necessary is that I explicitly stake a claim to being a subject. Now, the Other himself became a subject by employing the Look and thereby turning the entire world into a world of objects for-himself. And since I’m fundamentally no different from the Other, my claiming the mantle of subjectivity (of being-a-subject) turns out to require simply that I Look back at him and thereby reduce him to an object in my world (see, e.g., 387). In so doing, I instantly reduce his subjectivity to “a simple property of the object considered” (384). And “in this way I recover myself, for I can not be an object for an object” (384). So my claiming my own subjectivity, which for Sartre demands my destroying my sense of myself as an object, also necessitates that the Other be reduced in my eyes to an object.
The problem, of course, is that this reduction isn’t stable, since the Look can always in principle be returned, like a tennis ball during a volley. This means that for Sartre the confrontation between self-consciousnesses is not something that happens once and for all, either at the level of history or of a single human life, nor is it something that concerns only presocial beings. To the contrary, Sartre takes the radical view that the scenario he understands Hegel to be laying out in the master-slave dialectic depicts the mode of social relationships among human beings. We are all constantly under siege, constantly at each others’ throats:
My constant concern is to contain the Other within his objectivity, and my relations with the Other-as-object are essentially made up of ruses designed to make him remain an object. But one look on the part of the Other is sufficient to make all these schemes collapse and to make me experience once more the transfiguration of the Other. (394)
The failure of my ruses, the collapse of my schemes, the transfiguration of the Other at my expense—these are the marks and features of what Sartre calls hell. The only way to avoid this hell is ceaselessly to return the Look.
Sartre’s idea that, to put things in Hegel’s terminology, every person is at every instant in every one of his or her relationships with others either a slave or a master seems to suggest that our ordinary conceptions of ourselves as beings capable of reciprocity, if not friendship—if not love—are grossly inaccurate. But how, then, does Sartre account for our ordinary understanding of the possibilities we have for mutually productive relationships? We find an answer to this question in the third chapter of the section of Being and Nothingness entitled “Being-for-Others,” the first chapter of which (“The Existence of Others”) has been the focus of my explication of Sartre’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic thus far. Let us recall that in that first chapter Sartre suggests that there are two possible responses to the Look, shame and pride, and that the response of pride is by definition a manifestation of bad faith. Furthermore, he suggests, there are two possible responses to the shame provoked by the Other’s Look: I can either allow myself to be fixed by the gaze, a caving-in which, in amounting to a denial of my own subjectivity, is also in bad faith; or I can “turn back upon the Other so as to make an object out of him in turn, since the Other’s object-ness destroys my object-ness for him” (473). Now, in chapter 3, Sartre identifies another possible response to the Look, a response that is not, or at least not obviously, a product of bad faith. This response is to attempt to “identify myself” with the Other’s freedom, a freedom I recognize as grounding the self revealed to me by the Other’s gaze (474). For it is in his freedom, his capacity as what Sartre, following Hegel, calls “for-itself”—that is, his capacity as a subject, which for Sartre means his capacity to act—it is in this freedom that the Other has turned me into an object that is for-him.
To “identify” with the Other’s freedom involves, first, acknowledging this object to be myself, acknowledging that I am the “in-itself” the Other’s Look takes me to be. But I can accept myself as this “in-itself” only insofar as the Other, in his freedom, is himself enamored of it, that is, of me, as he sees me. I therefore try to get the Other to devote his freedom to me, to be the epitomizing object in his universe, to be the limit toward which his freedom reaches—to love me, at least in Sartre’s sense of the word. Indeed, Sartre claims that attempting to identify myself with the Other’s freedom is the “ideal of love, its motivation and it end” (477). If the “me” that the Other reveals through his look is a “me” constituted through and through by the Other’s love, a love that he gives freely, then for me to accept that “in-itself’ as myself is effectively for me to identify with the Other’s freedom. And it is thus, says Sartre, that I imagine that
my facticity [that is, my being-an-object, a status that is created and of which I become aware as a result of the Look] is saved. It is no longer this unthinkable and insurmountable given which I am fleeing; it is that for which the Other freely makes himself exist; it is as an end which he has given to himself. I have infected him with my facticity, but as it is in the form of freedom that he has been infected with it, he refers it back to me as a facticity taken up and consented to. He is the foundation of it in order that it may be his end. (483)
And Sartre notes that
up to this point our description would fall into line with Hegel’s famous description of the Master and Slave relation. What the Hegelian Master is for the Slave, the lover wants to be for the beloved. But the analogy stops here, for with Hegel the Master demands the Slave’s freedom only laterally and, so to speak, implicitly, while the lover wants the beloved’s freedom first and foremost. In this sense if I am to be loved by the Other, this means that I am to be freely chosen as beloved. (482).
Here, Sartre figures love as the lover’s desire for the Other to consign his freedom—to dedicate his subjectivity—to the lover. But just as the master’s fantasy of what the slave can give him turns out to be self-contradictory, so, it seems Sartre is suggesting, what the lover desires of the Other is incoherent. The project of making myself loved by the Other is doomed to failure.
The hopelessness of love, at least on Sartre’s construal of the concept, becomes obvious when we try to work out the dialectic between self and Other inaugurated by the lover’s fantasy. Let’s suppose that I desire that you dedicate your freedom to me—that, in Sartre’s argot, you “love” me. What I want is for you to expend all of your freedom as a subject to making the radical, transcendent choice to love me. But if you expend all of your freedom, then you will no longer be a genuine subject and thus, paradoxically, will be unable to love me in the way I want to be loved—namely, as the ultimate object of your adoration.6 Furthermore, by definition your love for me will take the form of your wanting me to make you into my ultimate object. But this requires that I want you to regard me as a subject, in which case, once again, I won’t be an object for you, let alone an ultimate object. The fantasy behind an investment in the idea of love, according to Sartre, thus turns on an impossible wish to forego one’s own subjectivity in favor of identifying with that of an Other: a wish that, alas, requires simultaneously that I own my subjectivity and deny that of the other. It’s the wish that you make me into an object precisely by figuring me as a subject. So the minute you fall in love with me, you disappoint me.7
The failure of love as a project also implies the impossibility of my becoming simultaneously an object and a subject for myself. If I really could identify with the Other’s freedom—if myself-as-object were constituted by it (if the Look were one of pure Sartrean love), then I would in effect become simultaneously both a subject and an object. This would have enormous epistemological consequences, Sartre claims, for if I as for-itself (subject) could regard myself as in-itself (object), then I wouldn’t need the Other to reveal myself (as object) to myself (as subject) or to reveal myself (as subject) through returning the Look. Since from the point of view of the self these revelations are what the self-Other relationship is all about, it follows that if one could succeed in identifying with the Other’s freedom then one would in effect “be other to oneself” (476), thereby obviating the need for a real-life, flesh-and-blood Other. But this, like genuine love (à la Sartre), turns out to be impossible. Regardless of the tenor of my relationships with other people—regardless of whether I love or hate or admire or dislike or am fascinated or repelled by them—on Sartre’s understanding, I am at any given time either a subject or an object but never both. I am a subject when I am acting (including when I am deliberately looking at another being); I am an object under the pressure of the gaze of the Other. Sartre’s picture of the human being turns on the idea that the human being is endlessly capable of finding himself, on an instant’s notice, a stranger to himself. And yet it is absolutely crucial to Sartre’s picture that this becoming a stranger to oneself is never necessary, not in any instant. This is because for Sartre my gazing at the Other is always possible, under any circumstances. Put in another, perhaps more familiarly Sartrean way, my freedom as a subject is never in principle curtailed.
Sartre was willing to take this extreme view to the farthest lengths: writing at a time when Hitler’s abominable treatment of Jews was well known to European intellectuals, even if the extent of the atrocities he was authorizing had yet to be fully revealed, Sartre found himself able to remark,
A Jew is not a Jew first in order to be subsequently ashamed or proud; it is his pride of being a Jew, his shame, or his indifference which will reveal to him his being-a-Jew; and this being-a-Jew is nothing outside the free manner of adopting it. (677)
Sartre wants to say that to be a Jew consists wholly in the way I respond to the Other’s fixing me in his gaze as a Jew. In this sense, I am radically free to decide whether and how I am a Jew—or anything else for that matter. To put the point in more contemporary terms, for Sartre the question of a person’s identity turns wholly, at least at the end of the day, on his construal of that identity. To be sure, in the section of Being and Nothingness on “Bad Faith,” Sartre does suggest that we often succumb to the temptation to construe our identities in bad faith.8 I might refuse (to employ a clichéd but therefore familiar enough example) to admit that my repeated bouts of drunkenness add up to my being an alcoholic; or I might, swinging to the other end of the spectrum of bad faith, claim that my being an alcoholic is a fundamental, unchangeable part of my identity. But in any event my situation is the situation it is not because of any simple fact of the matter (say, my cultural or ethnic heritage) nor because of any other person’s construal of my identity but always because of my own freedom of consciousness. The abdication of this freedom can come only at the hands of my exercising it in the service of allowing an Other to objectify me. And its employment must entail my willingness to make the Other into an object in what we both recognize to be my world. The fantasy that either of us can be subject and object at the same time is the same one that propels Hegel’s proto-master and protoslave to their effete, lopsided relationship.
At the very end of Being and Nothingness, Sartre claims that his ontology “releases to us the ethical meaning of various human projects” (796), which, considered merely in and of themselves, “are equivalent” and “are all on principle doomed to failure” precisely because they all involve human beings’ attempts to be subjects and objects at the same time—or, to put it in Sartre’s idiom, to effect “a synthetic fusion of the in-itself with the for-itself” (797). The only ethically worthy human actions are those done in the spirit of radical freedom. But since Being and Nothingness rests on the idea that everything human beings do is by definition done from radical freedom, it’s not at all clear either what exactly Sartre is exhorting us to do in the final pages of the book or how his exhortations relate to moral philosophy as traditionally understood. Notoriously, the last sentence of Being and Nothingness promises to explore this sort of question “in a future work” (798)—a work that Sartre ultimately considered a failure and did not publish.9
While it is not directly germane to my project to pursue the question of Sartre and ethics very far, it is pertinent to note that what Sartre at the end of Being and Nothingness is vigorously denying is possible—the attempt to become at once subject and object—is precisely the moment of reciprocal recognition in Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. At this moment, which never transpires during the actual Hegelian dialectic but remains a human aspiration at the end of this section of the Phenomenology, I am acknowledged as a subject by another subject. This act of recognition of course necessitates (as Hegel’s master learns only too late) that I acknowledge that the Other, as capable of recognizing me, is, indeed, a subject. Thus my being recognized demands my recognition of the Other; and this mutual recognition consists in our identifying the objects of our perceptions as subjects. In Sartre’s idiom, recognition demands that my Look enable you in your being-for-self, and vice versa. Notice, too, that our confirmation of each other’s subjectivity has to count, at least on Hegel’s understanding of what recognition is, as confirmation of the objectivity of each person’s status as a subject. But all of this is ontologically impossible, on Sartre’s view. To “recognize” another person is to confer the Look on him; and to confer the Look on him is to turn him into an object. In this case, “objectivity” will consist exclusively in my subjectivity. The only way the Other can become a subject for me is if I allow him to turn me, in my shame, into an object, in which case “objectivity” becomes his subjectivity.10 But my living under the shaming gaze of the Other, just one among the many objects of his world, is intolerable. Thus, I am ontologically impelled to fight his Look with mine. Human existence, on Sartre’s view, consists in the fight to the death, all the time, and with everyone with whom I come into contact.
Sartre’s considered view of what human beings can be for one another is exceedingly bleak. Were the present study primarily an exploration of his early work, I would spend far more time adducing evidence to show just how grim his vision is. However, since my primary purpose is to make a case for the idea that there is something worth looking at in Simone de Beauvoir’s appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and that this appropriation takes place in part via (or at least in the wake of) Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel’s text, I want now to spend some time looking at one of the less implausible tenets upon which, I claim, Sartre’s extreme view in Being and Nothingness rests. This is Sartre’s belief that there is something not only ontologically impossible but also morally problematic about the very desire for recognition. On Sartre’s conception, the desire to be recognized by the Other amounts to the wish that the Other be a mirror image of oneself. That is, he sees the desire for recognition as inescapably and hopelessly narcissistic.
This narcissistic dimension of the desire for recognition is right on the surface of his play No Exit (Huis clos), written directly after Being and Nothingness.11 As No Exit opens, a man, the “valet,” is escorting a second man, Garcin, into a drawing room. We are given to understand that Garcin is to reside in this room for an indefinite period of time. After asking the valet some questions about the conditions of his stay—questions revealing that something unusual is going on, since the two discuss the fact that Garcin will not ever sleep again, that the lights will perpetually be on, and so forth—Garcin is left alone in the room, door locked. He panics and tries to resummon the valet, to no success. Moments later, the valet reenters the room, bringing with him another resident, Inès. She is followed shortly thereafter by a second woman, Estelle. For the rest of the play the three are left to one another’s devices behind the locked door. Fairly early on in their colloquy, it becomes clear to us that they are, or at least they think they are, in hell. Each of them confesses to having committed a deed that, in his or her own mind and in the minds of the other two, is heinous: Garcin has brazenly cheated on his wife and has deserted the military; Inès has alienated her cousin’s wife from the cousin and then seduced the wife merely for the fun of it; Estelle, having become pregnant with her lover’s baby, has killed the newborn. And all three are dead as a result of these acts: Garcin has been shot for desertion; Inès has been gassed in a murder-suicide by the cousin’s wife; Estelle dies of pneumonia, presumably caught as she drowned her child in a lake. Slowly the three are given to understand that there is no “torturer” in hell, as they expected there would be; instead, they are each other’s torturers. Although each of them at various moments attempts not to play this role and appeals to the two others to join him or her, it becomes increasingly apparent that these attempts are doomed. Each insight into their condition initially appears to bring some hope of cooperation, of mutual recognition, but this moment inevitably segues into a fresh polarization of two against one or each against each, a renewed, mutually hostile and fixating destabilization of what had looked to be a potentially liberating and transcendent step. The play thus ends as follows:
INÈS: So here we are, forever. [laughs]
ESTELLE [with a peal of laughter]: Forever. My God, how funny! Forever.
GARCIN [looks at the two women, and joins in the laughter]: For ever, and ever, and ever.
[They slump onto their respective sofas. A long silence. Their laughter dies away and they gaze at each other]
GARCIN: Well, well, let’s get on with it (46).12
That Hegel’s master-slave dialectic itself plays a role in this play is not obvious from the plot summary I’ve just given. But there is evidence of the connection in the actual words spoken by Garcin, Inès, and Estelle. Let’s begin with those of Garcin. At the beginning of the play, when he is just beginning to appreciate the hellishness of his predicament, he suggests to Inès and Estelle that the solution to their situation is
easy enough; each of us stays put in his or her corner and takes no notice of the others. You here, you here, and I there. Like soldiers at our posts. Also, we mustn’t speak. Not one word. … And that way we—we’ll work out our salvation. Looking into ourselves, never raising our heads. (17–18)
Although both Inès and Estelle agree to this plan, Estelle quickly, if absentmindedly, thwarts it by asking Garcin if he has a mirror. When he ignores her, Inès fishes through her handbag for her pocket-mirror and then angrily realizes that it has been taken from her “at the entrance.” Momentarily, Estelle begins to look as though she’s about to faint. When Inès asks her what’s wrong, she says, “When I can’t see myself I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. I pat myself just to make sure, but it doesn’t help much.” This, I take it, is a fairly straightforward announcement of her desire for some sort of objective confirmation of herself, of the truth of the existence of “I.” Sartre here uses the mirror, or mirror-gazing, as a synecdoche: it stands for an association, and perhaps even a conflation, of the desire for recognition with a certain species of narcissism. For Sartre the desire for recognition is a wish for another human being to reflect back to you a fixed image of yourself, an image reduced to what you take to be your most flattering aspect (in Estelle’s case, her beauty).
But because one human being never straightforwardly reflects an image of another, because this image is always refracted through the lens of the image-giver’s subjectivity—through, you might say, the image-giver’s own reflection (in the sense of thinking), the quest for recognition is ultimately doomed to failure. This interpretation of the scene under consideration is confirmed in the subsequent exchange between Inès and Estelle. In response to Estelle’s panic at her lack of access to a mirror, Inès says coyly, “Suppose I try to be your glass?” At first, this appears to be nothing other than a figurative suggestion. It soon becomes clear, however, that Inès is feigning to offer Estelle what she wants: she’s literally offering the use of her eyeballs as a looking glass. But just as the rounded surface of the eye distorts those images it reflects—often by making what’s perfectly ordinary look monstrously disfigured—so the eye in its function as an instrument of sight has the power to transfigure the Other, as the following exchange makes clear:
ESTELLE: Oh, I’m there! But so tiny I can’t see myself properly.
INÈS: But I can. Every inch of you. Now ask me questions. I’ll be as candid as any looking-glass (20).
The eye here is both a literal object and a metonymic symbol for the Other: from the point of view of the narcissistic recognition-seeker, the Other’s eye both as an object of reflection (as mirroring) and as an instrument of a subject of reflection (as thinking) is hopelessly distorting. One of the idiosyncrasies of the hell that Sartre has created in this play is that the eyes of the condemned are condemned never to shut, even for blinking. “You can’t imagine how refreshing it is,” Garcin says to the valet of blinking. “Four thousand little rests per hour. Four thousand little evasions!” (5–6, translation modified).13
What’s being evaded, of course, is the Look of the Other. In No Exit the power of the Look to determine and reveal the truth of who you are is dramatized in two climactic speeches of Inès’s, directed at Garcin:
You are a coward, Garcin, a coward because I will it. I will it—do you hear?—I will it! And yet, just look at me, see how weak I am, just a breath; I am nothing but the look that sees you, this formless thought that thinks you. (44, translation modified)
I see you, I see you; by myself I’m a crowd, the crowd. Garcin, do you hear it?—Coward (lâche)! Coward! Coward! Coward! You flee from me in vain; I’ll not let you go (lâcherai). (45, translation modified)
It’s important to understand that on Sartre’s view Garcin is a coward not merely because Inès says he is but because, in his shame, he recognizes himself in her description. Moreover, his response to this sense of shame is simply to rail against it, instead of attempting to do something (something Sartre might call asserting himself as for-itself) that might transform him into a person who does not recognize himself in Inès’s words. These words prove doubly galling to Garcin because they identify his reaction to his own sense of shame as itself shameful, itself cowardly. Garcin insists in the wake of Inès’s Look that he was not cowardly—that, indeed, until the moment of his desertion from the military he had consistently “courted danger.” Inès, speaking here for Sartre, calls Garcin’s rationalizations a “dream.” The following exchange ensues:
GARCIN: I didn’t dream this heroism. I chose it. One is what one wills.
INÈS: Prove it. Prove that it wasn’t a dream. Only acts decide what one has willed (43, translation modified).14
This judgment of Inès’s is all the more devastating because she is shown to know intimately what cowardice is: in both her own eyes and Garcin’s, she, too, is hopelessly craven (42). For the two of them not to be cowards any more would require acts of self-transformation. But they both think of themselves as dead.
In No Exit, then, we find acted out the exceedingly bleak view of “the Other” in Being and Nothingness. The play specifies that it is narcissism, taking the form of a fixated wish for another’s person’s recognition of oneself as one dreams or wishes—or fears—oneself to be, that brings on the conditions of hell. Interestingly, since Sartre in Being and Nothingness describes the phenomenon of love in terms of just such a wish, the implication is that the desire to respond to the Other’s gaze with something other than self-petrifaction or the return of the Look is what makes human life hellish. Later in his life Sartre was explicitly at pains to specify that what’s hellish about our relations with one another has to do with a narcissistic desire for self-confirmation—for, that is, a species of recognition—as we see in his answer to an interviewer’s question about No Exit’s climactic line “Hell is other people”:
“Hell is other people” has always been poorly understood. People have thought that I wanted to say by it that our relationships with others are always poisoned, always hellish. Now, what I want to say is something else entirely. I want to say that if relationships with others are twisted, corrupted, then the other can be nothing but hell. Why? Because others are fundamentally what’s of most importance for us for our own self-consciousness/ self-knowledge [connaissance de nous-mêmes; “connaissance” means both “consciousness” and “knowledge”]. When we think about ourselves, when we try to know/become conscious of ourselves, we resort fundamentally to the knowledge/ consciousness of ourselves that others already have. We judge ourselves with the means that others have given us for judging ourselves. Whatever I say about myself, the judgment of others always bursts in (entre dedans). Whatever I sense in myself, the judgment of others bursts in. In other words, if my relationships are bad, I make myself totally dependent on others. And then, effectively, I’m in hell. And there are a number of people in the world who are in hell because they depend too much on the judgment of others. But that’s to say nothing more than that one can’t have other relationships with others [i.e., relationships in which the judgments of others do not burst in on my own self-consciousness]. It simply marks the prime importance of all others for each of us.
The second thing I should have wanted to say is that these people [in Huis clos] are not similar to us. The three people in Huis clos don’t resemble us in that we are living and they are dead. Correctly understood, “dead” symbolizes something here. What I wanted to indicate is precisely that many people are stuck in their own habits and customs—that they suffer from [others’] judgments but don’t even try to change them. And that these people are like the dead, in the sense that they can’t get beyond their anxieties, their preoccupations, and their habits; and that they therefore often remain victims of judgments that have been brought against them. From this it’s quite evident that they are cowards, for example, or bastards. If they started out as cowards, nothing is going to change the fact that they are cowards. That’s why they’re dead people; it’s a way of saying that being fenced in by perpetual worry about judgments and actions that one doesn’t want to change is a living death. So that actually I wanted to use absurdity to demonstrate the importance for us who are living of freedom [la liberté], that is to say, the importance of changing acts by means of other acts. Whatever the circle of hell in which we live, I think we are free to break it. And if people don’t break it, it’s still freely that they don’t. So that they freely put themselves in hell.15
What Sartre seems to be saying here is that if my relationships with other people are “good,” then their judgments of me are of fundamental but not decisive importance in shaping my consciousness of myself. The things I say or sense about myself are influenced but not determined, per se, by such judgments. But when my relationships with other people are “twisted” or “corrupted,” then their judgments of me are of decisive, determinative importance in shaping my consciousness of myself; I necessarily in this case depend “too much” on them. One could raise a number of questions about Sartre’s comments on these matters, not least of which are the questions of exactly what constitutes a “good” or “corrupt” relationship and exactly why twisted relationships produce overdependence on the judgment of others. But what’s important to emphasize in light of my purposes in looking at this gloss is that what apparently produces twisted relationships are individuals’ “anxieties, preoccupations, and habits.” If I am obsessed with a certain picture of myself, then my relationship with the Other will consist in the sense of confirmation—or lack or variation thereof—I find myself experiencing in the wake of his Look, and I will be unable to exercise my subjectivity in order to act—specifically, that is, to get past or transcend this fixed picture I have of myself.
The form of narcissism that, Sartre suggests, drives a self-defeating response to the encounter with the Other (the response, that is, in which I try to get the Other to confirm my sense of myself as an object) is closely linked with what I’m going to identify as a structure of paranoia inherent in his description of this encounter. The idea that narcissism and paranoia might go together naturally, as it were, finds indirect support in Sigmund Freud’s classic paper “On Narcissism.”16 Freud suggests that all human infants—indeed, in all likelihood, all living creatures—naturally feel a certain love for themselves, a self-love he calls “primary narcissism” (73–74). But just as the encounter with the Other in the master-slave dialectic renders the previously presocial being’s pure subjective self-certainty problematic—just as it shows this self-certainty to be lacking an objective dimension—so in Freud’s text the infant’s inculcation into human society, the society of others, which Freud measures according to his absorption of this society’s rules, renders his primary narcissism untenable. This is because the pure self-love of primary narcissism is a self-love oblivious to others; it is a love that turns on a sense of the self as brute, absolute, necessary, and central. Once the infant, through encounters with others, begins to give up this sense of himself, his primary narcissism cannot remain intact.
Of course, as Freud suggests, the absorption of social rules does not simply rob the infant of a sense of self. Indeed, the infant’s new sense of himself is precisely as of an entity whose mission is to live up to these social standards. Freud identifies the new set of standards as themselves constituting an “ideal ego,” that is, “an ideal by which [the child] measures his actual ego” (93).17 In Freud’s view, the primary narcissism characteristic of infancy, the form of narcissism no longer tenable in the wake of the infant’s absorption of social rules, resurfaces in a secondary form as a love of the ideal ego. He writes:
This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value. As always where the libido is concerned, man has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as this ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal. (94)
Freud goes on to suggest that there is a psychic agency that “constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by that ideal” (95) and that this agency is what we ordinarily call the “conscience.”18 In other words, the narcissistic investment we have in the ideal ego inevitably, on Freud’s view, leads us to, as it were, police ourselves. Taking things back a step, this means that our encounter with others produces a form of narcissism in which we—all human beings—find ourselves split between a part that we are in-ourselves, so to speak, and a part that constantly surveys the extent to which the in-itself falls short of its own ideal.
It is at this juncture in “On Narcissism” that Freud links the development of secondary narcissism with the phenomenon of paranoia:
Recognition of this agency [the conscience] enables us to understand the so-called “delusions of being noticed” or more correctly, of being watched, which are such striking symptoms in the paranoid diseases. … Patients of this sort complain that all their thoughts are known and their actions watched and supervised; they are informed of the functioning of this agency by voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person (“Now she’s thinking of that again,” “now he’s going out”). This complaint is justified; it describes the truth. A power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions, does really exist. Indeed, it exists in every one of us in normal life. … What prompted the subject to form an ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment—his fellow-men—and public opinion. (95–96)19
Notice that far from drawing a sharp line between “normal” people and paranoiacs, Freud says that the paranoiac’s insistence that he or she is being watched is true. What seems to distinguish the paranoiac is that he or she is convinced that the Look, as it were, is coming from the outside. At the risk of overstretching the bounds of Freud’s thought, I want to suggest that the paranoiac’s problem is something like a radical sense of being split, one so extreme that the surveying agency, or consciousness, seems for all the world as if, though “mine” in some sense, it is “not me.” It is mine in the sense that I recognize it as inescapably indicting me. And yet, if I am paranoid, it strikes me at the same time as coming from an entity that is radically Other.
Freud’s understanding of the basic structure of paranoia, in which a certain, inherently human sense of being split becomes radically exaggerated, seems to me to be expressed perfectly in Sartre’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic. What Freud sees as pathological—the feeling that I am continuously threatened by the judgment of the Other—is precisely Sartre’s picture of the normal human predicament. The decisive difference between Freud and Sartre on this point is that Freud identifies the judging agent to be internal, inside the head of the paranoid person (which means that the pathological dimension of paranoia lies precisely in this person’s misidentification of the locus of this agent), whereas for Sartre the judging agent genuinely is external, which means that a person’s sense of being watched is straightforwardly sane. That there is a decisive difference between Freud and Sartre here is not surprising, given Sartre’s early opinion of Freud. Indeed, in his early philosophical work (up to and including Being and Nothingness), Sartre explicitly aspired to develop an analysis of the human mind—a “psychoanalysis,” as he himself called it so as to declare a challenge to the work of Freud—based on the conviction that human beings are in principle capable of achieving perfect transparency of self-consciousness. In other words, Sartre, as a young philosopher writing in the heyday of Freud’s fame, set himself the task of disproving the idea of the Freudian unconscious.20 I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to identify this rejection of the idea of the unconscious as a hallmark of Sartre’s philosophy, in this period and beyond. There is no place in his thinking for the possibility that the sense of being watched characteristic of what he calls the Look might come from some part of my self that is presently not available to me (where this is an inadequate if, I hope, reasonable enough description in this context of Freud’s understanding of the role of the unconscious in paranoia). For Freud paranoia is a pathological response to the ongoing dialectic between internal and external that characterizes the phenomenon of conscience: the paranoiac imagines a sharp split between an external social censor and an internal self. I am arguing that in Being and Nothingness Sartre in effect identifies the paranoiac view as ontologically basic.
It is tempting to suggest that Sartre’s understanding of the Look as genuinely coming from the outside, as it were, is itself a product of paranoia. The text is peppered with strikingly paranoid-sounding passages such as this one: “The original relation of myself to the Other is not only an absent truth aimed at across the concrete presence of an object in my universe; it is also a concrete, daily relation which at each instant I experience. At each instant the Other is looking at me” (345). But to reduce Sartre’s conceptualization of the Look to a mere diagnosis would be, at least, philosophically remiss. For the paranoid structure of the Look—a structure I’ve linked, following Freud, with a certain form of narcissism—can be shown to be a manifestation of a form, albeit an idiosyncratic one, of philosophical skepticism. And it is in fact Sartre’s investment in this form of philosophical skepticism that accounts for the drastic difference between his and Beauvoir’s appropriations of Hegel.
The skepticism that infuses Sartre’s work stems from his understanding of what it is to be a subject and what it is to be an object and thus, of course, what it is to be a human being. For Sartre, to be a subject requires that one view the world as a collection of objects radically separate from oneself. But, more than this, it requires that I see these objects, this world, as the raw material from and in response to which I am to create myself, as it were, as a human being. And yet in what sense do I stand in need of creation, on Sartre’s view? It is pretty much a cliché that at the heart of Sartre’s existentialism is the idea that to be truly human—to create oneself as an authentic human being—is to “transcend” oneself through one’s freely chosen “projects.” But why must I do this, and what exactly does it entail? An answer for Sartre, though perhaps not the only one, is that it is the only way that I free myself from the Other’s Look. In Sartre’s world, I am constantly in danger of being reduced to the status of the in-itself, constantly under siege. The only way to escape from the Other’s fixating gaze is to deliberately undertake to overcome my own sense of shame by asserting myself as being-for-itself—as, that is, a form of being that is, literally, at the center of the universe.
Sartre locates the superiority of his philosophy over that of his predecessors (and particularly that of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger) in the thoroughgoing ontological character of his descriptive phenomenology. The mistake his predecessors make, Sartre argues, is that they figure the encounter with the Other not as the ontological phenomenon it is but as an event whose significance is to be measured in epistemic terms. They focus not on the change in ontological status precipitated for myself and the Other in our encounter but on the question of how I can know of and about the existence of myself and the other and the world. What’s perverse about this focus, Sartre observes, is that to be under the gaze of another is to be overwhelmed with the fact of the existence of that other, not to mention of oneself as an object in his world. The Other’s power over me through his Look, as revealed through what Sartre regards as genuinely ontological investigation, happens to “disclose to me the concrete, indubitable presence of a particular, concrete Other” (338)—that is, it discloses a piece of knowledge the epistemological certainty of which is, paradoxically, precisely that which epistemology-obsessed and ontology-blind philosophers so eagerly seek.
The Other’s Look has an effect on me that is initially ontological and not epistemological, so that I experience my being-for-the-Other not as a piece of knowledge but in the form of a sense of shame. And yet this sense of shame itself induces a radical shift in my epistemic relationship to the world. Now, suddenly, those objects I thought I knew turn out not to be related to me in the way I thought they were. And yet at the same time my sense of shame constitutes something of a proof for me that I exist, albeit as mere being-for-the-Other. Thus for Sartre, I wish to suggest, the encounter with the Other performs for the looked-at person a variation on Descartes’s performance in meditations 1 and 2.21 In meditation 1, Descartes brings his existence, along with that of the world, into question, and in meditation 2 he offers up his famous cogito as proof to himself that he, at least, indeed exists. In Sartre’s version the Look immediately confirms the fact of my existence and yet, at the same time, calls its status, as well as that of the world, severely into question. According to Descartes in meditation 1, to doubt that the ordinary objects around you and that you yourself exist is to court madness, a madness whose threat is extinguished precisely to the extent that the cogito indeed puts your skepticism to rest.22 But the threat of madness is not correspondingly extinguished in Sartre’s version. Here, the looked-at person’s sense of the world’s slipping out of his grasp is not the immediate spur to but, paradoxically, the product of the proof of his existence. The Other’s Look proves that I exist (something I previously had no cause to think about as such, let alone doubt), but the content of this proof—my being-for-the-Other, and my sense of what I previously took to be the world as now exclusively for-the-Other—fills me with horror. I feel entrapped in some deep ontological way by the Other’s Look. This sense that the Other is looking at me and in so doing is somehow opposing me fundamentally, and that there is no obvious way I can permanently extricate myself from this situation, and that I am therefore constantly and indefinitely under siege is, I wish to suggest, the form that Cartesian (i.e., skepticism-induced) madness takes in Sartre’s scenario. In other words, it takes the form of paranoia.
On Sartre’s view, to experience the certainty of the Other’s subjectivity—of, this means for Sartre, the Other’s humanity (at least in his sense of the word)—comes at the high ontological cost of relinquishing one’s own subjectivity. But it also comes at a high epistemological cost: in Sartre’s picture, as I’ve already suggested, there is room neither for “objectivity” in any standard sense of the term nor for the idea that our judgments can be measured in terms of “warrant” or “truth.” My judgments are “true” only in some sort of instrumental sense of the word, insofar, specifically, as they free me from the Other’s Look. And the Other’s judgments are “true” only in the sense and to the extent that they are part of a world the weight of which his Look has placed on my shoulders. By the time I am entrapped by the Look, imprisoned in the world of the Other, it is too late to ask questions about warrant. We can speak of another person’s judgment of me as warranted only to indicate that the judgment has, as it were, hit home: reduced me to a state of shame, pinned me like a butterfly to his picture of me. There is, to put it another way, no epistemic court of appeal in Sartre’s picture.
I have been arguing that Sartre’s appropriation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic turns on the idea that the way human beings relate to one another is suffused with a species of narcissism and of paranoia and that these features of Sartre’s picture have their roots in his investment in philosophical skepticism about the possibility of what is conventionally called “objectivity.” Strictly speaking, one might hesitate to call Sartre’s view “skeptical.” Sartre never claims that I can’t know the “real” world, even though he does deny that there’s anything like a god’s-eye point of view from which we can describe this world, and even though the way the world is, on his view, undergoes a sea change according to whether I see myself as a subject or an object in it. That I can know the world and the certain presence in it (or at its limits) of a being like myself in all relevant respects (e.g., whatever you might mean by a “human” being) is in fact a rock-bottom truth for the early Sartre. What makes his philosophy skeptical, then, is not some garden-variety species of Cartesian doubt. It’s that the only way to be truly human, on his way of figuring things, is to deny the existence of the Other and his (version of the) world. To be a Sartrean subject requires that I overcome what is all too plainly and painfully for me the fact of the Other’s existence. I must will a radical separation between myself and the Other, and I must abandon any investment I have in the idea of our genuinely sharing a world. So it turns out, perversely enough, that to be a Sartrean subject I actually am obliged to will what the traditional skeptic fears.
What prompted Sartre to work up such a severely attenuated view of what human beings can be for each other? No doubt a thorough response to this question would demand attention to Sartre’s own “situation” as a young philosopher, psychologically, socially, and even geopolitically. But here I am interested in exploring the possibility that we can make some headway on this question simply by looking at Sartre’s conception of what philosophy is supposed to be. Let’s start with something that is obvious to anyone who reads Being and Nothingness, which is that one of Sartre’s aims in the book is to carve out a niche for himself in the history of the subject by constructing his own system of philosophy. This aspiration is evident in Sartre’s explicit positioning of himself in relation to two sets of philosophical figures. One set is that of contemporary phenomenologists (or so-called phenomenologists, since Sartre sees all efforts prior to his own to develop an authentic phenomenology to have fallen short), most notably Husserl and Heidegger. The other set of figures in relation to which Sartre positions himself comprises those thinkers he takes to be of most importance in the history of philosophy, including Leibniz and Spinoza but more significantly Descartes, Kant, and Hegel. His positioning in relation to all of these figures characteristically takes the form of announcing where each went astray in his thinking and, specifically, of showing how his system ultimately fails to remain true to the most important insights upon which it is grounded. In discussing Hegel, for example, Sartre praises him for his “brilliant intuition” that I
depend on the Other in my being. I am, he said, a being for-itself which is for-itself only through another. Therefore the Other penetrates me to the heart. I can not doubt him without doubting myself. (321)
What Sartre likes about this intuition is that “Hegel has posed the question of the being of consciousness” and is therefore concerned with “reality” (322; my emphasis) not just with what a human being can know of reality. But Sartre immediately goes on to criticize Hegel for what he sees as an abandonment of this pure concern with “being” and an adherence to an idealist position in which the question of what exists and the question of what a human being can know are conflated. Specifically, Sartre claims that for Hegel knowledge “is still the measure of being,” so that in the master-slave dialectic, for example, to know that the other sees me as an object implies that I am an object and to be an object as such is to know that I am one. For Sartre this conflation between being and knowing eventually produces something he calls “Hegel’s failure” (338).
Sartre’s assessment of Hegel as having failed marks his appropriation of the master-slave dialectic as an explicitly polemical one. His treatment of Hegel is typical of his treatment of the other major philosophers whose work he discusses: he sees himself as resuscitating and remaining faithful to these figures’ most brilliant philosophical intuitions, intuitions that, in his view, they themselves have abandoned to the detriment of their own theories. What Sartre is trying to do, to put the matter in very simple terms, is to get it right. The motivation for doing this is just the conviction that other people have ultimately gotten it wrong. This conception of what philosophy is, with its implications of who and what it is for, far from being peculiar to Sartre, has been widespread for centuries. The view is predicated on the assumption that it is important—in some brute, absolute, uncontextualized sense—for human beings to know the answers to the “big” questions. But of course this very assumption implies that our “failure” to do so is in some unspecified sense terribly problematic. The history of philosophy is thus to be seen as a terribly problematic history of failures.
But let’s look more closely. Why is it terribly problematic? Why, in other words, must we have answers for these “big” questions? Why must we even ask ourselves such questions? The standard answer is that we need the kind of knowledge philosophers such as Sartre seek in order to add to or shore up our knowledge of the world, that without posing and answering questions such as those he explores in Being and Nothingness we are epistemically impoverished. There must be some information that we are lacking about ourselves or our world, information that would ultimately provoke some sort of change in our lives (else gaining it would be unimportant). Thus, to the extent that a philosopher’s work is regarded as marked by “failure,” it serves as a painful reminder that there is something of the first importance about how human beings should live that we in principle could but in fact do not know. We are doing something—what that something is remains to be seen—wrong.
Being and Nothingness suggests that what we are doing wrong is imagining that reciprocal relationships with other human beings—that is, relationships of mutual respect, of genuine friendship, of real love—are possible. That they are not is a fundamental truth that previous philosophers have heretofore failed to make manifest. But what are we to do with this truth? Should we stop trying to forge relationships of reciprocity? Should we revel in being constantly at each other’s throats? Clearly, this is not what Sartre had in mind, despite his memorable definition of hell. I would argue, indeed, that his promise of—and failure to complete—an ethics based on his ontology is a sign of his own ambivalence about the position he develops in Being and Nothingness, a position that seems to leave no room at all for a serious moral stance. And my suggestion is that Sartre was led to appropriate Hegel as he does in Being and Nothingness because he was motivated simply by a desire to get it right and thus gives his writing over to a certain inexorable logic.23 I am not arguing, I hope it is clear, that Sartre has himself failed to do what he set out to do. I am claiming, rather, that Sartre’s attenuated view about what human relationships can be like is at least in part a product of his attenuated view of what philosophy is.
A central goal of mine in the next two chapters is to show not only how Beauvoir’s conception of philosophy differs from that of Sartre but also why this difference is philosophically significant. To the extent that Sartre’s conception is typical, as I have claimed it is, then Beauvoir’s work, to the extent that it’s compelling in its own right, will provide an alternative model for how to write philosophically. In chapter 5 I show how from the beginning Beauvoir was dissatisfied with Sartre’s conclusions in Being and Nothingness even as she struggled to put this dissatisfaction into words. And yet it was not until she came to write The Second Sex that she was able to move away from the standard conception of philosophy and turn from attempting to correct Sartre’s errors, as it were, to finding a way to articulate her own interest in the same Hegelian intuitions that, as I have argued, Sartre saw himself as salvaging from the Phenomenology. This new model for philosophical work, I will argue, results from Beauvoir’s finding herself moved to philosophize from within the context of a specific question—What is a woman?—the addressing of which has specifiable importance to her. In response to her posing of this question, Beauvoir finds herself in the position not of correcting others’ “failures” but of mustering all the resources she knows, including the writings of Hegel. What she produces is therefore not a polemical retheorizing of old problems but instead a constructive recounting, as I call it, of earlier philosophers’ most compelling intuitions.