the human mind deal with the idea of an absurd universe? Sartre believes that only the cowardly mind cannot do so, and he believes that such a mind posits God to relieve the anxiety provoked by the thought of a meaningless universe. But this belief is posited in “bad faith,” according to Sartre.

Sartre’s existentialism tries to reveal to human consciousness its strength and courage to accept the absurdity of existence, and its capacity for creating meaning in a meaningless world. Sartre develops these ideas in his massive work of 1943...
BEING AND NOTHINGNESS.

When I sit on a chair, I am asking, “Will I be supported?” When reality answers “Yes,” it reveals its “being” to us.

When it answers “No,” it reveals its “non-being,” its “nothingness.” (Remember, the title of Sartre’s main work is Being and Nothingness.)

artre explicates this idea by giving us a phenomenological account of arriving late at a café, where he has agreed to meet his friend, Pierre.

He describes the café as he enters:

There is an important distinction in phenomenology between FIGURE and GROUND.

“Figure” is that feature of the field of perception on which you focus your attention.

“Ground” is the backdrop or foreground to “figure.”

Nothing is naturally either figure or ground. You create something (for example, a glass on the table) as “figure” by bestowing your attention upon it, and thereby you create the table as “ground.” Then, as you move your attention from the glass to a napkin, the napkin “leaps forward” as figure, and the glass slips into the ground.

Now, as Sartre scans the café for Pierre, different people and objects offer themselves up as “figure,” but each proves not to be Pierre, so they slide back into the “ground” as Sartre moves his attention to another part of the café.

inally his fear is confirmed: “PIERRE IS NOT HERE.”

Without these discontinuities there would only be universal DETERMINISM (every event would be rigidly caused by an earlier event, in turn caused by an earlier event, and so on to infinity), and no true action could exist, only reflexes, only effects.

eep in mind that for the determinist there is a continuity of strict causality between the past and the present and between the present and the future. The past necessarilly causes the present, which in turn necessarily causes the future. Therefore, for the determinist, freedom is impossible.

For example, for Freud, an event in my childhood, whose memory is locked in my unconscious, can cause my neurotic behavior as an adult. Or for Skinner, all of our present acts are the effects of past conditioning.

Sartre denies all of this. Being-for-itself is separated from its past by a nothingness. It is true that the past has “FACTICITY” That is, there are certain facts in the past that one cannot change. (I, for example, was born in San Jose, California, and I can’t do anything to change that fact—a heavy burden!) But nothing in the past can CAUSE me to do anything now. There is nothing that can be considered a human action (as opposed to reflexes or bodily functions) that follows necessarily from the past.

o understand the sense in which FACTICITY cannot be the cause of any action, consider this Sartrean kind of example: A group of friends on vacation go for a day hike in the Alps. Halfway to the mountain top which is their goal, they turn a bend in the path and find their way blocked by a huge boulder that has fallen in such a manner that it cannot be dislodged and cannot be circumvented. The first hiker’s stomach sinks in disappointment. “That’s it,” he says, “The hike’s over!” From Sartre’s point of view, this person has chosen the facticity of the boulder as an insurmountable obstacle and chosen himself as defeated. A second hiker begins photographing the rock, excited by its sublime power and by the beauty of the landscape framing it. She has chosen the boulder as aesthetic object and chosen herself as a recorder of beauty—that is, as an artist. A third hiker examines the boulder scientifically, noting its mineral composition and the impact of its recent fall on the path. For her, this boulder is a motive for scientific study and is the occasion for her to act as a scientist. The fourth hiker says, “There’s got to be a way around this thing,” and begins a series of experiments to overcome the obstacle.

The determinist argues that there must be something in the past of each of these hikers that determined their response. Sartre denies this. There is nothing in the facticity of the past of any of the hikers, nor in the facticity of the boulder, that necessitates any particular response to the boulder’s presence. For Sartre, the facticity of the rock is undeniable, but each person chooses the MEANING of that facticity for him or herself. Because facticity in itself is meaningless, the source of the meaning is a decision on the part of the individual. There are always alternative interpretations of meaning available; we are never confronted with only one possible choice. There is always the most radical choice of all—the choice of death. A hiker might decide that the boulder’s presence is so depressing that he cannot go on living. This would of course be an ABSURD response to the boulder’s facticity, but its mere possibility shows Sartre that all other responses were chosen as alternatives to death. If you did not kill yourself this morning (and apparently you didn’t) then you chose an alternative to death... and you are responsible for that choice and for its consequences.

et us now return to the human stance regarding the past.

There is, as we said, facticity in our past (as there was in the boulder), but because there is nothingness between us and our past, the past cannot cause the present; we must determine the meaning our past has for us. If I am born with big feet (or born short, or in an Irish Catholic family, or with a stiff knee), it is I who decide the MEANING (of my “vertical challenge,” or of my Irishness, or of my disability).

My big feet may prevent me from becoming a ballerina, and my Irishness may keep me from becoming a Watusi king, but the meaning of these facts, too, derives from me alone.

The self is related to its past somewhat the way nations are related to their past. Certain events (real or fictitious) are chosen as being definitional, are called “HISTORY” and are then incorporated into the present perhaps the way the state of Israel has treated the heroic suicidal stand of the Zealots against the Roman legions at Masada in the year 73 AD, or the way the French trace their nationhood to the Emperor Charlemagne (even though he was a German!). Americans choose the Gettysburg Address as definitional, or, more suspiciously, George Washington’s inability to lie, or his ability to stand up in a rowboat while crossing the Delaware in a battle.

In fact, think of how much history is written in terms of Great River Crossings. (Caesar crossed the Rubicon, Attila crossed the Po, Charlemagne crossed the Ebro, Emperor Charles I crossed the Elbe, Patton crossed the Rhine.)

Then why is it that most people act in such predictable ways?

Why does the hiker who chose himself as defeated always throw in the towel early? Why does the “heroic” hiker see all obstacles as challenges? According to Sartre, most people choose an aspect of their past, then project it into the future as part of themselves, and then claim that because of this feature of their personality, they have no choice but to behave as they do.

(I say to you, “I sure think Suzy is nice.” You say, “Ask her to go to the movies with you.” I say, “Naw, women don’t like me.” You insist. “Go on! Ask her! You’ve got nothing to lose.” I reluctantly agree. “Hi Suzy,” I say in a lackluster monotone, “Ya don’t wanna go out, do ya?” When she declines, I say to you, “See? Women don’t like me.” Sartre calls this “BAD FAITH.”)

Sartre talks of the gambler “who has freely and sincerely decided not to gamble anymore and who, when he approaches the gaming table, suddenly sees all his resolutions melt away.” According to Sartre, it is not the case that this man’s past is forcing him to gamble; to the contrary, the gambler faces a rupture with his past—with the past resolutions he has made and with the self that he was when he made them. A “nothingness” has come between him and his past. He experiences this nothingness as anguish.

The anguish that we can experience facing the future is even more extreme than that which we experience regarding the past—precisely because there is no facticity there. The future is yet to be constructed, and it is I who must construct it. Part of the anxiety derives from the realization that I am not now the self that I will be. As Sartre says, “I await myself in the future, where I make an appointment with myself on the other side of that hour, of that day, or of that month. Anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that appointment, of no longer even wishing to be there.” Sartre’s formula for our relation to the future is this: “I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it.” This formula includes within it the nothingness that separates me from my future self. There is nothing I can do now that guarantees that my future self will obey the resolutions I make today or will hold the values to which I now subscribe. “Good faith” (and existential courage) must somehow involve a recognition that all of this is true, and a willingness to embrace this future and the anguish it entails.

Sartre admits that the actual experience of anguish is rare, and answers this question by explicating a typical early morning activity—that of responding to the ringing of the alarm clock. The ringing is the invitation to begin the day. It announces the possibility of my going to work, says Sartre. But I perceive it not as a possibility, rather as a necessity. I must get up, dress, eat, because I must earn the money to pay for the food I eat at breakfast so I can go to work.[!]

Getting caught up in these “necessities” distracts me from the truth that none of this is really necessary except as relative to goals I choose.

hey allow me to ignore the possibilities of refusal of work, of action, or life itself. Sartre says, “In short, to the extent that I apprehend the meaning of the ringing, I am already up at its summons; this apprehension guarantees me against the anguished intuition that it is I who confer on the alarm its exigency—I and I alone.”

Let us pause to ask ourselves,

Think of the story of the anthropologist who has arranged to travel with a pygmy tribe through the Congolese rainforest. He must travel lightly, but he asks the pygmy chief for permission to take his Polaroid camera with him on the trek.

he chief has never seen a camera, so the anthropologist needs to explain it to him. He decides to demonstrate the camera’s ability by taking the chief’s picture and instructs the chief, “Stand there.” This is a mistake. The chief takes offense. He is the CHIE, after all. A chief may tell others where to stand, but nobody tells the chief where to stand. The anthropologist apologizes, then makes his second mistake. He tells the chief to smile. But pygmies smile when they are happy, or when they find something funny. They do not smile when they are ordered to do so. Certainly pygmy chiefs don’t do so.

Finally, the anthropologist manages to take the picture. Triumphantly he shows it to the chief, but the pygmy seems relatively unimpressed. “What is it?” he asks. “It is you,” says the anthropologist. Once again, the chief takes offense. The chief is not two-dimensional, four inches by four inches, detached from his body, surrounded by a white frame, smelling of chemicals. But the anthropologist persists. “You have two nostrils,” he says, “and this has two nostrils. You have two eyes and this has two eyes. You have a chin; it has a chin.” At last, the chief gets it. He sees the photo as a representation of himself.

he smiles. Then he asks, “What’s it for?” The anthropologist tells us, “For a moment I could not remember.”

And this is true. We are so accustomed to the role of photographs in our culture that we never question them. Most Americans, when asked what they would try to rescue from a fire, say they would salvage their photo albums. In explaining the value of photos to the chief, the anthropologist cannot appeal to passports or to drivers’ licenses, for these do not exist among the pygmies. He says to him, “Photos help you to remember people you love.” The chief is offended again. “I never forget anybody!” he says.—And the end of the story is that the anthropologist decides not to take his camera. He writes, “There are no cameras among the pygmies.”

When you set your alarm clock you are putting into action and sustaining a whole set of middle class values. An alarm clock is what it is by virtue of being a part of a system of values. This system is sustained in being only by our CHOICE to sustain it. Anguish is the realization that there is no necessity in this system. We sustain it in being through our constant choices to do so. Sartre says, “there exist concretely alarm clocks, signs, tax forms, policemen—so many guardrails against anguish. But as soon as the undertaking is held at a distance from me, as soon as I am referred to myself because I must await myself in the future, then I discover myself suddenly as the one who gives its meaning to the alarm clock, ... the one who makes the values exist in order to determine his action by their demands.” At this point, “all the guardrails collapse,” destroyed by the consciousness of my freedom, and I experience the anguish of being the source of my own values.

Plato held the view that Being is valuable in itself. (This is the exact opposite of Sartre, for whom, as we have seen, Being-in-itself has NO meaning, hence no value.) And for Plato, the purer Being is, the more valuable it is.

Plato believed that there is a hierarchy of Being, with that which is most real on the top, and that which is less real on the bottom.

n this religious tradition the human being is created free, then set among values from which he or she must choose. But Sartre’s theory is more radical. For him, there is no value existing prior to freedom. Value derives its reality from the fact that it is chosen rather than being chosen because it has value. If I choose honesty, then honesty has value for me. If my behavior demonstrates that I chose dishonesty (even if I claim to prefer honesty), then I value dishonesty. ALL the values that guide my life exist only insofar as I have freely chosen them. The discovery of this truth provokes anguish. Sartre says, “As a being by whom values exist, I am unjustifiable. My freedom is anguished at being the foundation of values while itself without foundation.”

f course, many people claim to ground their values in some independent authority, such as in a national tradition, in a guru, or in God himself. But for Sartre, the Christian Sren Kierkegaard had already debunked that possibility. According to Kierkegaard, if I have accepted the Bible as the Word of God and as a guide for my life, then it is I in my freedom who authorize the Bible to guide me, and I am responsible for that authorization.

In his enigmatic little book Fear and Trembling (1843), Kierkegaard retells the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. When Abraham hears that terrible voice in the night telling him to take his son Isaac onto Mount Moriah and sacrifice him as a burnt offering, Abraham must decide for himself the meaning of that message. There are many alternatives open to him.

But, according to Kierkegaard, when Abraham chooses to obey God’s order, he is authorizing God to command him. God has not forced Abraham to do anything. (For Sartre, the same is true when we choose to obey a law, a policeman, or a sign.)

According to Kierkegaard and Sartre, when the Western religious tradition (Jews, Christians and Moslems) calls Abraham “the Father of us all,” what that means is that we are all utterly free and totally responsible for our choice of values. For Kierkegaard, this thought provokes the “fear and trembling” of the title of his book, and for Sartre, it provokes anguish.

However, this is impossible, because I can’t hide it from myself if I already possess it. So the project of bad faith is self-defeating. Nevertheless, that project is a central feature of human consciousness, according to Sartre.

Freudian psychoanalysis tries to explain how one can withhold information from oneself by dividing the self into a conscious aspect and an unconscious aspect, sometimes rendered as “ego” (Latin for “I”) and “id” (Latin for “it.”) Then there is supposed to be a censoring device between the two components, which does not allow me to know what is in my unconscious.

ut, Sartre asks, on which side of the border is the censor? It can’t be on the side of the id because it must censor the id. But if it is on the side of the ego, then the ego must know what it is censoring. That is to say, it KNOWS what it claims not to know.

Sartre illustrates the idea of “bad faith” by describing the case of a young woman out on a dinner date with a man she has only recently met. (You’ll have to excuse Sartre if the example is antiquated in terms of the relations between the sexes.)

As the woman sits across the table from her companion, “she knows very well the intentions which [he] cherishes regarding her.” She knows at some point she will have to make a decision concerning them, but she post-pones the decision because she does not want to feel its urgency. She wants to enjoy the moment.

hen he says to her, “I find you so attractive,” she “disarms this phrase of its sexual background.” Sartre says she does this because she doesn’t quite know what she wants.

She knows she inspires desire in her companion and would be disappointed if she didn’t. But the desire “cruel and naked would humiliate and horrify her.” She does not want to be merely the object of his sexual desire, but she does not want NOT to be the object of desire either.

Then her companion takes her hand. (The plot thickens.) Now she must make a decision. If she leaves her hand, that signifies romantic consent. But if she withdraws it, she breaks “the troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm.” Her aim is to delay the decision as long as possible. Sartre says we KNOW what happens next. (Do we?)

She “leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that she is leaving it.” She does not notice because she loses herself in her own spirituality as she hurries into a discussion of Life, her life as a pure personality. Sartre says: “The hand rests inert between the warm hands of her companion—neither consenting not resisting—a thing.” Sartre concludes, “We shall say that this woman is in bad faith.”

Why is she in bad faith? She denies his desire. She denies her desire. She denies her own body. There is a perfect divorce between her body and her “self.” (Feminists want to know from Sartre whether he is willing to admit that the woman’s companion is also in bad faith.) Sartre has a technical term to name this woman’s mode of bad faith. He calls it “being-in-the-midst-of-the-world,” that is, choosing oneself as “inert presence as a passive object among other objects.” She has chosen her body as a THING, just as her companion has done. She does this to escape responsibility for her full self.

nother way we encounter bad faith is in our relationship to the social “roles” we play daily. When two human beings encounter each other they do so in terms of roles, which are formats of interaction that allow people to engage each other in efficient, non-threatening ways. There are professional roles, familial roles, political roles, entertainment and leisure-time roles, among others. There are even criminal roles. Almost any human act of which we can conceive has some rules curcumscribing it which must be learned by the “players” engaging in the act. Because people must interact with other people, there seems to be no alternative to role-playing.

Roles can enhance a certain kind of social freedom because there are rights and responsibilities attending them, but they also limit and disguise our more radical freedom, as they make it easier for us to objectify others and ourselves. Therefore they are unavoidably invitations to bad faith.

n Being and Nothingness Sartre begins his discussion of social roles by studying the movements of the waiter in the café where he is writing. (Pretty good life these existentialists have—always on a park bench or in a café.) Sartre says of him, “His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.” What game is he playing?

All professions have a similar obligation imposed on them. There is the “ceremony” or the “dance” of the grocer, the auctioneer, the tailor. The public demands of them that they undertake this ceremony in order to prove that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive. We don’t want an auctioneer who tells us about the messy divorce he is going through.

his demand is most obvious in the military, where the new soldier is instructed that he is not saluting the man, but the uniform. When the command “Eyes left!” is given when marching past the General’s review stand, woe unto the soldier if his eyes actually make contact with the General’s! (It may be difficult for young conscripts fresh from the farm to kill other young conscripts, but easier to kill other “uniforms.”)

We are in bad faith when we try to turn the other person into a thing with our gaze (into “the waiter,” “the tailor,” “the auctioneer,” “the soldier”), but these individuals can also put themselves in bad faith by trying to be nothing but their roles.

In fact, a waiter cannot BE a waiter in the sense that a rock is a rock, or an ashtray is an ashtray. That is, he cannot be it in the mode of being-in-itself. If I am a waiter, I am so in the mode of not-being-a-waiter. Being-for-itself can never become a THING, even if it wants to.

Sartre illustrates his point with the example of a man who is homosexual. He is confronted by an accuser who demands sincerity and honesty of him.

f the homosexual will declare frankly, “I am a homosexual,” either shamefully or defiantly, the accuser will be satisfied. Sartre asks, “Who is in bad faith? The homosexual or the champion of sincerity?” The homosexual resists making such an assertion. He is well aware of his sexual orientation, but he also knows that he is not a homosexual the way a rock is a rock. Yet that is what the champion of sincerity wants him to admit to being. Therefore this preacher of sincerity is in bad faith. For that reason, the gay man denies his homosexuality, so he, too, is in bad faith. Sartre suggests that the following answer might have been in good faith: “To the extent that a pattern of conduct is defined as the conduct of a homosexual and to the extent that I have adopted this conduct, I am a [homosexual]. But to the extent that human reality cannot be finally defined by patterns of conduct, I am not one.” In this case he acknowledges that he is a homosexual “in the mode of not being it.”

Nor is the self simply the biological unity that is one’s body, as some materialists believe. (For there is no such biological continuity. The cells that constituted you eight years ago are all dead.) The “self“ is not something that you automatically acquire by virtue of having had human parents; rather, the self is an ongoing construction recreated in each moment through our choices.

ut there is another more troubling side to the creation of self-hood, according to Sartre—one that is revealed to us in the confrontation with other people. He explains this feature of selfhood by giving a phenomenological description of such an encounter.

I am sitting on a park bench (again!). I see another person a few yards away. What does it mean to see the other person as a person and not as, for example, a puppet?

To see him as a puppet would be to see him as a thing among things (beside the benches, three yards from the lawn, etc.).

f he were a puppet, his appearance would not change my relation to the other objects around him. But to see him as a human being is to see space and objects organized around him. When the other person comes on the scene, his appearance disintegrates the relationships I had established with my immediate environment. Things group themselves spatially around him, and, says Sartre, his space is made with my space. This person has stolen my world from me.

It is as if “the world has a kind of drain hole in the middle of its being,” and that drain hole is the Other. There is an “internal hemorrhage” as my world is drained into the world of the Other.

henomenologically, the appearance of the Other forces me to reinterpret my world. Before my seeing him, the grass, the paths, the benches were there “for me.” Now they are there “for him.” It is like that sudden reinterpretation that takes place when first you see the figure in a psychology text as a duck, then all at once as a rabbit.

If I have objectified the Other by looking at him, if I have turned him into my object, then why is he so threatening to me? Why does Sartre say,

It is because the Other’s freedom destabilizes mine. I objectify her, but I cannot fully objectify her, because I know that her gaze at me objectifies me—turns me, as it were, into stone—into a THING. To see the Other is to understand the “permanent possibility of being seen by the Other.” I experience the actuality of this possibility as SHAME.

emember the time you were talking to yourself when you thought you were alone, and suddenly you discovered that someone else was there observing you? What did you feel at the moment of this discovery? It was shame. Maybe you faked it, pretending that you were actually humming a tune, and you left, acting as casual as you could, without meeting the gaze of the Other.

In shame we discover an aspect of our being which we would not have known otherwise. We discover ourselves as the object that is created by the Other’s gaze. We discover what Sartre calls our “being-for-others.” We are forced to pass judgment on ourselves as an object.

ll of these common experiences (being slightly startled by the appearance of another person, getting caught talking to oneself or engaging in a slightly vulgar act) are minor versions of more dramatic episodes in which Sartre’s point is perhaps more obvious.

I will imagine that, motivated by curiosity, jealousy or lust, I find myself peering through the keyhole of a hotel room observing the activities inside. The keyhole is both the instrument of my voyeurism and the obstacle that distances me from the action, which exists as the object of my “unreflective consciousness.” My consciousness just is its objects and even though this consciousness is not disinterested and may experience itself indirectly in its jealous lustfulness, there is no selfhood or “ego” involved in my consciousness at all.

Suddenly I sense the presence of someone next to me. I look up and discover that the hotel detective is staring down at me. My self becomes fixed. I am made aware that the foundation of my self is outside myself. “I see myself because somebody sees me.” I discover myself in shame. I am responsible for the self which has been revealed to me by the Other’s gaze, but this self’s grounding is outside me. In the moment of shame my freedom escapes me and the Other’s free dom is revealed to me. I am forced to recognize myself not in my aspect of being-for-itself but in my aspect of being-in-itself.

hame is not the only emotion engendered by the encounter with the Other. I can also experience fear. In fact, fear in its origin just is the discovery of my being-as-object. It shows me that my being-for-itself (where “I am my possibles”) is transcended by possibles that are not my possibles. In fact, these feelings in their most exaggerated form may be the source of religion, according to Sartre. Shame before God is “the recognition of my being-an-object before a subject which can never become an object.”

If I choose myself in my shame, this is masochism, whose source is anxiety before the freedom of the Other. Pride is the opposite of shame; yet structurally pride and shame are similar. In both cases I recognize the Other as the one from whom my objectivity gets its being. When the Other sees me as beautiful, or strong, or intelligent, I accept myself proudly as being only that. Pride, then, is a form of bad faith, as is its close relative, VANITY. When I try to affect the Other with the objectivity she has bestowed upon me, this is ARROGANCE.

owever, even in pride or arrogance, I have not recovered the self that I lost to the Other, for it is still her recognition of me that is the source of the meaning I attribute to myself.

The project of recovering myself as subject—that is, of recovering my freedom from its entrapment by the Other—necessarily puts me in conflict with the Other.

In fact, Sartre asserts, “Conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others.” My project of recovering my own being assimilates the Other’s freedom.

can try to achieve this goal through SADISM. which is an extension of arrogance. In sadism, I use the objective being which the Other has bestowed upon me to make the Other humiliate herself. However, as long as the Sadist’s victim can look at her torturer, the Sadist knows she failed.

A basic way of trying to possess the free subjectivity of the Other is through sexual desire. Desire is an invitation to the Other’s desire. Desire desires the desire of the Other. It is an attempt to reduce the Other to pure body, and to transform her into mere flesh in her own eyes. But desire necessarily fails, for either it literally fails to evoke the desire of the Other, or it succeeds in doing so, and then desire is absorbed in pleasure and loses sight of its original goal.

Rather than my desire transforming the Other into pure flesh, it transforms me into pure flesh. Desire as a project, then, ails to recover the self that was lost to the other.

All of this, of course, will make it extremely difficult to achieve selfhood in good faith, because every attempt seems destined to slip into its opposite—bad faith.

Yet freedom is a burden.

We are, Sartre says, CONDEMNED TO BE FREE. We carry the weight of the whole world on our shoulders because we are responsible for the world and for ourselves in it. Unless we lie to ourselves in bad faith, we are conscious of being the incontestable creators of our actions. And it is through our actions that there is a world—that there is a meaningful whole to experience. It is true that every one of our choices produces a “peculiar coefficient of adversity”—a resistance, an annoyance, a barrier, a problem. Yet we are the authors of this adversity too. Therefore, Sartre observes, “it is senseless to think of complaining since nothing alien has decided what we feel, what we live, or what we are.”

According to Sartre, being-in-itself (reality as it is prior to any human intervention in it) has no meaning and no value. It just is. Meaning and value happen in the space between being-for-itself (conscious experience) and being-in-itself. Therefore, we humans are the creators of our world—of our “situation”, as Sartre calls it. There are no non-human situations. Even the worst imaginable situations, such as war, are humans situations. (Remember, Sartre wrote Being and Nothingness during the Nazi occupation of Paris.) He says:

Even in its most dramatic moments, I have alternatives to it. I could desert, or commit suicide. But because I have not done these things, I have chosen this war.

herefore, declares Sartre, there are no innocent victims in war. (This side of Sartre annoys many. It is as if in Sartre’s world there are no animals, no children, no mentally deficient people. Everyone is a fully conscious, fully responsible adult.) Sartre asserts,

If you had to summarize existentialism in two words, they would be NO EXCUSES!

Some people respond grumpily to this line of reasoning, saying,

Sartre agrees that our birth is part of our facticity. Nevertheless, we have no choice but to take responsibility for the facticity of all of our “situations” (in this case, the facticity of our birth). We always have the option of negating it through self-destruction. Therefore, says Sartre, in a certain sense, we choose being born.

Sartre does not mean that there is a primary drive called “The will- to-be” to which all other drives are reducible (the way Freud has “libido” as a primary drive); rather, the DESIRE TO BE exists only as the many forms of desire we experience (jealousy, greed, love of art, lust, interest in stamp collecting).

ut, as we saw earlier in the case of sexual desire, desire can never be fully gratified. It can never fully achieve its goal. Or, to use Sartre’s language, being-for-itself can never become being-in-itself. In fact, it does not really want to do so, for then it would fail to be itself (that is, fail to be “for-itself,” a FREEDOM). What it really wants is to be BEING-IN-ITSELF-FOR-ITSELF—that is, a freedom that is its own necessary source of being. But this is precisely the definition of God.

Therefore, “man is fundamentally the desire to be God.” In every act we perform, according to Sartre, we are trying to become God.

(This is an ideal that Aristotle had introduced in the fourth century B.C.) The trouble is, nobody can become God, not even God. The idea of God is self-contradictory. (The idea of a being-in-itself- for-itself—that is, of a fullness which is an emptiness.)

Earlier we examined the cases of four hikers who confronted a boulder that blocked their progress. Let’s review the example of the first hiker who threw down his back-pack in defeat and sank into the grass, giving in to his fatigue and his disappointment. It was mentioned that this man probably always chooses himself as defeated. In fact, the determinists would argue that he has no freedom to choose any other option. Due to some traumatic event in his childhood (Freud), or to a history of conditioning (Skinner), he could not do otherwise than he does.

artre believes that the hiker can do otherwise—but doing so would not be a small thing in his case. Sartre poses the question of the man’s freedom in this manner:

In other words, he could have done otherwise but, Sartre asks, “at what price?”

The price would be a “radical conversion of his being-in-the world.” This RADICAL CONVERSION—which is always possible (here is where Sartre differs deeply from the determinists)— would amount to his choosing a new self; it would amount to choosing a new fundamental project, because the choice would manifest itself not only in that moment, but in hundreds of other ways.

or Sartre, the self is not a series of fragmented behaviors, but a TOTALITY. (Here he agrees with Freud.) The “original project” manifests itself in every act, big or small. But the original project is not equated with some event, decision, or fantasy in the past (here Sartre disagrees with Freud); rather, it is recreated at each moment through the choices we make and the actions we perform. And because the possibility of radical conversion always exists, we are responsible for what we are. This is like Nietzsche, who says that after a certain age a man is responsible for his face.

The phenomenological method Sartre devises for studying a person’s “original project” is called “existential psychoanalysis.” Its goal is to “discover the individual person in the initial project which constitutes him,” or, in more detail, it will reveal …

s has been noted, Sartre accepts Freud’s view that the whole self can be manifested in a single gesture, that the self is a TOTALITY. He also accepts Freud’s view that the individual is not in a privileged position to understand herself. However, Sartre’s reason differs greatly from Freud’s.

For Freud, the truth about me lies in my unconscious, which is distanced from me. Furthermore, I have unconscious resistances against this unconscious truth.

ut, as we have seen, in Being and Nothingness, Sartre rejects the hypothesis of the unconscious as being a construction of theoretical bad faith. For him, as for Descartes,

There is no hidden riddle. Everything is in consciousness,
everything is luminous.

Nevertheless there can be a “mystery in broad daylight” because consciousness and knowledge are not necessarily the same thing. Reflected consciousness can provide understanding, but we must come to know what we understand. Following Plato, Sartre believes that experience can become knowledge only if it is correctly conceptualized. I can only understand my “initial project of being” if I can understand it in the light of its relationship to the being of others. (This is why the individual is not necessarily in a privileged position to know her own self.)

his means that existential psychoanalytic knowledge would be an understanding of the radical assimilation of “being-in-itself-for-itself” (that is, the attempt to be Being, or to be God) with “being-for-others.” Existential psychoanalytic self-knowledge, then, involves a recognition of one’s situation as being that of a freedom confronted with the freedom of others, of being in a necessarily conflictive relationship with others, and of recognizing one’s responsibility for that situation, and a recognition of the freedom to “convert radically” from the specifics of that mode of being to another mode.

The individual goal of existential psychoanalysis, then, is not a “cure,” as in Freud, but a grasping of one’s self in all its possibilities. Not a freeing from the past, but an acknowledgment that this freedom always already exists.