Being and Nothingness
As a young professor and aspiring writer in the 1930s, he embarked on the quest for an absolute freedom in a universe where everything is relative and materially conditioned. He yearned to be exempt from all determination by objective real-
ity, natural or social. This hopeless enterprise was embodied in a big book of 724 pages entitled Being and Nothingness. This metaphysical disquisition brought him world fame but it is as obscure and labyrinthine as his novels, plays, and essays can be straightforward. It was a technical treatise, primarily addressed to fellow professional philosophers, that utilized the cate-
gories of Hegel's system filtered through the phenomenological school of the later German thinkers, Husser! and Heidegger, and molded by the traditions of Continental rationalism and idealism.
In this work Sartre set out to show that man is a wholly free subject who by his very nature resists every attempt to transform him into anything objective. To provide an underpinning for this conception of unlimited human liberty he begins by splitting reality into two opposing and irreconcilable parts.
One he calls being-for-itself; the other being-in-itself. The first is exclusively human; it is the pure consciousness of the individual, total negation, absolute freedom. Being-in-itself comprises
everything else; it is "dumb-packed togetherness," rigid non-consciousness, materiality, and objectivity.
Sartre does not explain how these two starkly contradictory realms of being, the in-itself and the for-itself, originated. The non-human and the free subject are simply there, given facts. He thus makes a metaphysical mystery out of the
natural and historical processes through which the human emerged from the animal, consciousness from the preconscious, the subject out of objective preconditions.
Sartre at no time accepted the theory of evolution. We are certain, he held, only of the existence of human life but have no plausible proof of the emergence of the organic from the inorganic. This retrograde position not only defied the conclusion of modern science that evolution is a primordial and proven fact of nature but runs counter to the Marxist view that the development of nature and society constitute sequential stages
and integral parts of a unified historical process.
Sartre's philosophy was literary and academic in inspiration and the spectacular achievements
of the physical sciences and mathematics had no influence upon this thought. Existentialists as a rule recoil from the effects of science, industry, and technology as in themselves threats to the authenticity of the inner self.
The mystification of human origins and the unbridgeable dualism of the subject and the object were required to establish the absolute freedom of the individual. In the subsequent pages Sartre expounds the rationale for the most one-sided conception of individualism in contemporary philosophy.
According to this view, I may be hedged on all sides by what Sartre calls "facticity." My place, my past, my surroundings, my fellows, and my death make up the situation into which I have been flung. But all these facts are accidental and incidental, not necessary and intrinsic elements of my existence.
I do not have to accept them; I can reject and refuse to adapt to them. I assert and forge my authentic self in dissociating myself froth these objective conditions and circumstances. Other things and beings have their essence made for
them or imposed upon them. I alone have the power of fashioning the character and career I prefer. I can be a fully self-made person in a world I never made.
Such unlimited freedom in which every individual is a law unto himself or herself entails unlimited responsibility, not only for oneself but the fate of humankind. Sartre even maintains that every person then alive is co-responsible for the Second World War they could not prevent. (This left the imperialist warmakers off the hook.) Tormented anguish inescapably arises from the awareness that our choice may be wrong and have dreadful, unforeseen, unpremeditated consequences. But since we cannot avoid choosing at our peril in the dark, we must valiantly take our stand and face the music.
Critics have pointed out the logical inconsistencies in Sartre's idea of absolute freedom and the ethics derived from its premises. Its unrealism is obvious. He starts by excluding all concrete necessity from human action; he ends with the categorical imperative to be free. Man is "condemned to be free," even though his dearest projects are foredoomed to fail and his ventures
and aspirations cannot find secure and enduring realization because the "for-itself' can never coincide with the "in-itself." But if I must be free, then I have no real moral choice in the matter. Total freedom thereby turns out to be its opposite: total determination....
_____
The Odyssey of an Existentialist Philosopher: Jean-Paul Sartre, 1905-1980
By George Novack
Intercontinental Press, May 26, 1980
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments