Sartre, Nietzsche and Non-Humanist Existentialism 303043107X, 9783030431075

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Sartre, Nietzsche and Non-Humanist Existentialism David Mitchell

Sartre, Nietzsche and Non-Humanist Existentialism

David Mitchell

Sartre, Nietzsche and Non-Humanist Existentialism

David Mitchell Johannesburg, South Africa

ISBN 978-3-030-43107-5    ISBN 978-3-030-43108-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43108-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Only in the movement of the branches, Did I see the wind

Contents

1 Introduction: Existentialism and Humanism  1 2 Nietzsche’s Non-humanist Existentialism: Perversity and Genealogy 39 3 Nietzsche’s Non-humanist Existentialism: Secondary Perversion and the Slave Revolt 73 4 Sartre, Nothingness and Perversity103 5 Sartre, Perversity and Self-Evasion129 6 Sartre, Perversity and Self-Deception153 Conclusion: Ontology and Ethics183 Index189

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Abbreviations

Nietzsche BG GM TSZ UTM WLN

Beyond Good and Evil On the Genealogy of Morality Thus Spoke Zarathustra Untimely Meditations Writings from the Late Notebooks

Sartre BN TE

Being and Nothingness Transcendence of the Ego

Heidegger LH

Letter on Humanism

Freud CD

Civilization and Its Discontents

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1 Introduction: Existentialism and Humanism

The statue lay in the mud of your contempt: but this precisely is its law, that its life and living beauty grow again out of contempt! —Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, ‘Of great events’ (p. 154. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as TSZ)

Following its post-war heyday, the statue of existentialism was very much thrown into the mud. And there, by and large, it has remained. Once, with Marxism, dominating the intellectual landscape, what became known as ‘existentialism’ is now widely viewed as obsolete. Authenticity, angst, alienation? Existentialist concerns, and the subjective pathos underscoring them, have long since been unfashionable in both philosophy departments, and wider culture.1 Certain figures are still studied of course. But this association is usually seen as a taint, or it is expunged from their identity altogether. The former is true for Sartre. The existentialist connection means his philosophy overall is often held up as  See Golomb, In Search of Authenticity, 145–146, for a discussion of the ‘subjective pathos of authenticity’ underlying existentialism and the threat posed to it by post-modernism. 1

© The Author(s) 2020 D. Mitchell, Sartre, Nietzsche and Non-Humanist Existentialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43108-2_1

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simplistic or passé, even where specific insights are acknowledged or utilised.2 Meanwhile, the latter is true for Nietzsche and Heidegger. In an inversion of the problem facing Sartre, it is assumed that Heidegger and Nietzsche cannot be existentialists. This is, at least according to their supporters, because these two figures possess the sophistication and relevance which existentialism so plainly lacks. At any rate they are not typically read with existentialism in mind. Further, where the term is still considered properly at all its’ purpose is largely curatorial. That is, ‘existentialism’ is used as a sort of historical place holder, a way of categorizing certain figures and themes for the benefit of textbooks and historians. So why is this? Why has existentialism become what Sartre himself called ‘a finished, already outdated mode of culture’?3 At its broadest level this book will argue that this is due to the common conflation of two related but distinct philosophical commitments. The first is to what I will call a ‘return to the human’. As discussed in this chapter, this is the idea that philosophy has lost touch with an essential goal of allowing human beings to comprehend their own existence. And this, with a related conception of philosophy as something lived, and a general theory of the human, I say is constitutive of a possible, radical, mode of existentialism. The second commitment is to a ‘humanist’ idea of the subject. The precise meaning of this will be unpacked in what follows. But, briefly, it involves acceptance of the independent and ‘present’ notion of subjectivity criticised by Heidegger in his Letter on Humanism. As such this introduction makes two central points. First: that the root of existentialism’s dismissal lies in the conflation of these commitments. In other words, it is seen as outmoded because a possible ‘return to the human’, or a vulgarised sense of this, is held to be synonymous with a naïve, humanist view of the subject. The second point involves challenging this association. Consequently, I explain how it is possible to have a return to human existence which is non-humanist. This is attempted first by the development of a specific conception of the ‘return to the human’. I argue that, thought properly as a ‘return to human being’, this allows a  This is done, for instance, by analytic philosophers working on the problem of self-deception.  Sartre, Search for a Method, preface, xxxiii.

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mode of existentialism to escape humanism. I then outline the main problem arising from this escape. And I lastly intimate why the concept of perversion might provide a resolution to this. That is, I suggest why the idea that the human being exists as a perversion of something other than itself, might hold the key to defending a non-humanist existentialism. In this way I aim to recover an existentialism both radical and philosophically credible. I likewise hope to show how existentialist thought is still vital and relevant today.

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The Meaning of Existentialism

A preliminary question though needs to be addressed. Before looking more closely at the meaning of humanism, and how a type of existentialism might avoid it, it is necessary to investigate the concept of existentialism itself. Specifically, I need to ask what has been, and can be, meant by it in the first place. This is for several reasons. First, if I cannot show that the term can signify something substantial then the project of this book does not even get off the ground. Second, I need to provide some justification, in contrast with other accounts, for my own specific description of its meaning. This will allow me to say more about what the ‘return to the human’ entails. Further, this will help explain why a type of existentialism has been mistakenly seen as humanist. And I will also begin to show how my conception of this ‘return’ might point toward an alternative to humanism. So, I begin in this fashion by noting that the very capacity of the term to describe anything meaningful at all has often been questioned. As Cooper observes, ‘It has been denied … that there ever was a distinctive philosophical perspective or tendency shared by those thinkers who have been labelled “existentialists.”’4 And at least part of the reason for this has to be the sheer number and diversity of figures who have been identified under this banner. Kaufmann’s anthology is illustrative. Aside from Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Rilke, Kafka, 4   Cooper, ‘Existentialism as a philosophical movement’, in The Cambridge companion to Existentialism, 27.

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Ortega and Jaspers are all included.5 And in his 2018 work, Rethinking Existentialism, Webber also makes a case for Fanon and De Beauvoir. Some have even argued for the inclusion of the early Marx.6 Nevertheless, diversity alone does not preclude the possibility of a common meaning.7 It could be that there is, as Merleau-Ponty says about phenomenology, likewise here a common ‘manner or style of thinking.’8 Or it could simply be that not all these figures should be classed as existentialist. Or some only partially so. As such, while not as straightforward as categorising, say, empiricism or Marxism9 it is imperative to at least look for such a meaning or ‘style of thinking’. Consequently, some of the most plausible candidates for this will be explored. I will then attempt to forge my own meaning from engagement with these. That said, it should also be stressed that my goal is a specific one. I am not attempting a definitive or exhaustive definition. Nor am I looking for a meaning which necessarily incorporates every putatively existentialist figure. Other accounts which do this better are certainly possible. So too are accounts which give a neater definition of the concept or which accord more closely with definitions given by existentialists themselves. The point here rather is to highlight the most sophisticated possible sense of existentialism. The main other proviso is that it should be one recoverable from engagement with at least some existentialist texts and thinkers.

1.1

Existentialism as ‘Anti-Philosophy’

Starting out then, one of the classical and most well-known possibilities can be understood in terms of a negation. And it uses the very difficulty of defining existentialism as its starting point. On this view, it would be  Albert Camus and Gabriel Marcel are two other figures regularly associated with existentialism.  See Fromm, Marx’s Conception of Man. 7  Gabriel Marcel first used the term in 1945 to describe Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. Nevertheless, most of those associated with ‘existentialism’ rejected the label. See Richard Schacht, ‘Nietzsche: after the death of God’, in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, 112–114. 8  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, preface, viii. 9  Although even with these the issue is not necessarily always clear cut. And certainly other intellectual movements, such as phenomenology, structuralism, and analytic philosophy all have issues regarding the definitions and meanings of the terms. 5 6

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impossible for the figures previously mentioned to be defined in terms of any common programme of what they are for. Rather they must be defined by a common agenda of what they are against. This is Kaufmann’s position when he argues that, ‘Existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy.’10 In this way, one possible understanding of existentialism is that it is not so much a ‘philosophy’ in an obvious sense, but a sort of ‘anti-philosophy’. Conventional or ‘traditional’ philosophy, in terms of what existentialists are thought to oppose on this view, can be defined by three related features. One: it is concerned principally with truth, and for its own sake. What Nietzsche calls ‘the value of truth’,11 when it comes to certain standard philosophical questions, is bracketed out. Why we should care, for instance, about the nature of causation, or whether there is a mind independent reality, is not usually asked. The relevance of such questions to the lives of individuals, or the kinds of individuals these questions help create, not considered. The second feature is stylistic. Conventional philosophy seeks to disclose certain truths or ideas in an impartial, and relatively standardised, manner. The voice, life, and individuality, of the writer is secondary. Likewise, the stylistic goal of the writing is not primarily to inspire or transform the reader, but to gain assent for certain truths or arguments. Lastly, it is systematic. While there is widespread contemporary scepticism toward systematic philosophy taken in a broader Hegelian or Marxist sense, it is systematic in a more limited way. That is, any given philosopher will systematically apply the same, usually well worn, methodologies and theoretical perspectives to arrive at conclusions and truths.12 And those truths will, in turn, be brought together in order to present a coherent and ‘systematic’ understanding of an issue.

 Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 11.  See, for instance, Nietzsche’s criticism in Philosophy in the Tragic of the Greeks, 43, of philosophy ‘rushes headlong, without selectivity, without “taste”, at whatever is knowable, in the blind desire to know all at any cost.’ 12  For instance, this can be seen in the application of the methods of conceptual analysis, phenomenology, or feminism. 10 11

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But why was existentialism, on this view, opposed to all this? Why was it that, as Judaken says, that ‘existentialism defined itself against systems’,13 against systematic thought and conventional philosophy more broadly? Kaufmann does not go into much detail on these points.14 A more sustained and sophisticated potential answer, and articulation of this position, though is presented by Golomb. And the kernel of this is the concept and value of ‘authenticity’. This is the value related to ‘the project of winning, creating, and owning oneself.’15 Authenticity then is about the struggle to reclaim one’s individuality, the ‘single path along which no one can go except you…’16 And it is this reclamation against the forces and institutions of ‘the they’.17 That is, it is the forging of a unique path in opposition to an instrumentalised and conformist world which encourages us to become like everyone else.18 It is the reclaiming of a self from a world which imposes predetermined standards and models about how ‘one’ should act, speak, think and live. Based on what has been said, it is now clearer why conventional philosophy is problematic. If the goal is authenticity, then traditional philosophical enquiry might be seen either as an irrelevant distraction from this project, or as actively opposed to it. Firstly, it is irrelevant because its pursuit of objective, universal truths tells us nothing specific about our own unique self, or how to find it. Being universal in method and conclusion it can only reveal what is true of everyone, and everything. Second it is opposed because of what Golomb calls the ‘experience of “extreme” or “boundary” situations.’19 As he says, In these situations one can no longer be governed by internalized norms. Without this ethical safety net, one is wholly responsible, and thus free to  Judaken, ‘Introduction’, in Situating Existentialism, 1.  Existentialists says Kaufmann, rejected ‘traditional philosophy ‘as superficial, academic, and remote from life’ (12), but does not elaborate on these points. 15  Golomb, 88. 16  Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 129. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as UTM. 17  See Heidegger, Being and Time, 149, Division one, Part one, section IV. 18  A process satirised by Dostoyevsky in ‘The double’, and one of the reasons he is considered an existentialist. 19  Golomb, 144. 13 14

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invent oneself. Without this freedom and personal responsibility—thrown into sharp relief by the dramatic presentation of extreme situations— authenticity cannot be attained. Under the stress of these circumstances, one’s behaviour reveals the inner genuine self behind the masks and disguises that no longer function.20

In other words, authenticity can only properly be achieved through an involvement with types of exceptional experience. And as Nietzsche hints at, ‘only through the widest—perhaps most disturbing and shattering-­ experiences.’21 Only in experiences where the ordinary structures of life, allowing us to rest in the familiar, everyday self of the ‘they’, are stripped away, can our real self be uncovered. Only in such situations can that self which is unique and irreplaceable, and the way to that self, be discovered or created. This can perhaps be said to occur in experiences of great love, loss, or danger. Although various figures have given other suggestions. For Kierkegaard it is the kind of trial of faith endured by Abraham. For Heidegger, it was confrontation with the possibility of one’s death, then what he called ‘profound boredom.’22 For Sartre it is ‘anxiety’, and for Nietzsche, great suffering and solitude.23 At any rate, philosophy, as traditionally conceived, may be seen to discourage such experiences. This is because in its pursuit of objective truth it encourages the philosopher to adopt the role of the impartial, theoretical observer. This is the theoretical comportment Heidegger describes as the attitude of ‘observing and staring at.’24 It is also the attitude of ‘scholars’ Nietzsche criticises when he says that ‘they want to be mere spectators in everything and they take care not to sit where the sun burns upon the steps’ (TSZ, 147). The point, then, is that the traditional philosopher does not engage herself with the world in a way necessary to becoming involved in exceptional situations. For to do so would mean to  Golomb, 13.  Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 132. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as BG. 22  ‘Being towards death’ in Being and Time, and ‘profound boredom’ in the later The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, see Part Two, Chapter One, 169. 23  See Nietzsche’s 1886 prefaces to the works of his middle period in particular for a discussion of the role of suffering and solitude as modes of experience which lead us toward the true self. 24  Heidegger, Being and Time, 104. 20 21

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cease viewing things in a strictly detached, objective, fashion. Relatedly, extreme or boundary experiences are, for them, unnecessary to, or distorting of, the objective truth. This is the case since these experiences are deeply and unavoidably personal, passionate, and subjective. And by its nature such experience also requires the type of action and engagement by us as individuals which the passive theoretical attitude seems to prohibit. Thus, one begins to see the justification for the ‘anti-philosophy’ position. Yet there is a further question, connected to this. If traditional philosophical enquiry and writing cannot lead us to authenticity, what can? Existentialists, on this view, cannot be content simply with highlighting the limitations of standard theoretical philosophy. Nor can they provide straightforward ‘arguments’, or prescriptions, for what authenticity is, or how we would get there. For any such outline would violate the very call to individuality at the heart of this ideal. As Nietzsche says, ‘no one can construct for you the bridge upon which precisely you must cross the stream of life’ (UTM, 129). Any project of authenticity appears to require that, at least in some significant sense, it is something we discover and design for ourselves. And this must be true of exceptional or boundary experiences as well. Even if authenticity involves them, they must be something that is unique to us, and our situation. In this way, even the most authentic individuals cannot legislate them for us in advance. This is why, for Golomb, writers on authenticity eschew the goals and style of standard philosophical writing. Instead, The principle aim of writers on authenticity was to evoke in their readers the pathos of authenticity. They hoped to restore a personal mental power and sense of selfhood that modernity had diminished. Since they could not argue, they had to be satisfied with portraying the sublime and heroic patterns of authentic life.25

In other words, the existentialist writer does not seek to argue for or describe a particular vision of authenticity. Instead they aim to inspire readers to pursue authenticity themselves. And they do this principally by  Golomb, 10.

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portraying characters and exemplars who, in their own distinct ways, have striven towards, or realised, some unique self-hood. There are numerous examples of this. We can think of Sartre’s Roquentin, Camus’ Meursalt, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, De Beauvoir’s Francoise, Kierkegaard’s ‘seducer’.26 All of these characters have a dual role. On the one hand they satirise that which is inauthentic, or disingenuously claims to be authentic. Consider, for instance, Roquentin’s treatment of the self-assured Doctor Roge in Nausea.27 Or consider Zarathustra’s discourses on ‘Priests’ and the people of the market-place in Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In both cases established, and often celebrated, ways of life are exposed as vapid, complacent, or self-deceiving.28 On the other hand, these exemplars also provide some sense of the type of life one might have to lead in order to move away from this. They hint at the kinds of struggles and experiences, and self-creation which might be necessary to become authentic. Critically though they do not encourage mimicry. Since, by virtue of being literary characters, their authenticity is necessarily achieved in a specific time, place and situation it would be impossible simply to imitate them. Further, as characters, and not ‘types’, our view of their lives is inevitably partial. Thus, there is also always a certain silence or absence which affects our understanding of them, as seen in Zarathustra’s repeated departures from his companions. This forces the reader to re-imagine for themselves, and on the basis of their own lives, how authenticity might be achieved, rather than simply being given a template.29

 These characters occur, respectively, in Nausea, The Outsider, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, She Came to Stay, and Either/Or. 27  See Sartre Nausea, 100. 28  See Golomb, 18–33, for a development of this view, and for a reading of Sartre’s Nausea as being concerned with the discovery of authenticity. In a similar vein, Golomb also suggests that Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is also an ‘existential hero’ pursuing and inspiring authenticity. 29  In this respect an interesting comparison is with the ‘character’ of Jesus. As Nietzsche argues in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 98–99, the limitation of Jesus was that he wanted people to follow his example, rather than creating their own. 26

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Authenticity and Understanding

Consequently, a key issue for this interpretation of existentialism has been addressed. The question of how to encourage authenticity, while remaining true to the spirit of individuality at this ideal’s core is not unsurpassable. It also highlights an important virtue of this kind of ‘anti-­ philosophy’ view. That is, it can explain the diversity of thinkers and perspectives associated with the label. If indeed existentialists are characterised by a pursuit of authenticity, and this is the reason they reject conventional philosophy, then it would make sense that they also carry out this rebellion in their own distinct ways. Thus, this view maintains a coherent meaning for existentialism while doing justice to the, often radical, differences between existentialists. However, there are also significant problems with such an interpretation of existentialist thought. To begin with, it runs into the obvious objection that many existentialists were concerned, at least in some sense, with conventional philosophical questions and enquiry. And this interest was often pursued in a systematic way. Being and Time and Being and Nothingness stand out in this respect. There Heidegger and Sartre, respectively, write philosophical treatises that share important similarities, and are in dialogue, with works by Kant, Hegel, and Husserl. They may have very different answers to key questions, and the spectre of authenticity looms for both in a way in which it does not for those others. Nevertheless, they are still, like them, interested in fundamental philosophical issues. That is, they are still concerned with universal questions regarding the nature of experience, consciousness, and reality. And they pursue certain methods rigorously, and in a systematic fashion, in order to address them. Even with Nietzsche and Kierkegaard there is a similar problem. Despite the idiosyncrasy of their relative styles of writing and thinking, and their criticisms of conventional philosophy, both also address traditional philosophical issues at many points. Nietzsche, for instance, dedicates a substantial portion of his work to discussing the nature of truth. And Kierkegaard writes, often in quite dense philosophical language, about the make-up of the self. Of course, Golomb, or defenders of a

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similar account of existentialism,30 could just bite the bullet here. They could simply say that in so far as in style or content these figures revert to conventional philosophy then they are not being existentialist. In fact, Golomb does exactly this with Sartre and Heidegger. He argues that even with regards to their discussion of, and relationship to, authenticity Heidegger and Sartre have ceased to be truly existentialist. As he says, ‘By turning from the informal nineteenth-century notion of authenticity as pathos to its twentieth century version as phenomenological ontology they betrayed the true spirit of this ideal.’31 By ‘systematically ontologizing the idea of authenticity’32 they have lost sight of its real meaning. And one could make a similar point about aspects of Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, or figures like Camus or De Beauvoir. One could say that insofar as they are making forays into conventional philosophical ground or style, and lose track of authenticity, they are not being existentialist. But can it be as simple as that? Such a dualism between the pursuit of authenticity and that of philosophical understanding appears highly problematic, especially if it is said to occur not only across an author’s overall philosophy, but also within specific texts. As such, if there is a means to avoid it one must be attempted. And a potential way toward this, and to reaching a different interpretation of existentialism, is, curiously enough, to start with a literary text. In what Kaufmann calls ‘the best overture for existentialism ever written’33 the protagonist of Notes from the Underground says the following: I’m a sick man … I’m a spiteful man. I’m an unattractive man. I think there’s something wrong with my liver. But I understand damn all about my illness and I can’t say for certain which part of me is affected … I’m educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious.34  Note: Golomb doesn’t explicitly try and define or characterise existentialism, nor is this his only goal. Nevertheless, he does interpret various figures associated with existentialism (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus) in terms of the pursuit of authenticity. As such, a certain understanding of what constitutes existentialism, and the existentialist thinker, is implicit. 31  Golomb, 61. 32  Golomb, 61. 33  Kaufmann, 14. 34  Dostoevsky, ‘Notes from the Underground’ in Notes from the Underground and The Double, Part 1, 3. 30

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What comes across here is that the character’s concern for the self, and for his individuality, goes hand in hand with a brutal honesty regarding the attempt to understand what that self might be. As Kaufmann says, with regards to this man, ‘No prize, however great can justify an ounce of self-­ deception or a small departure from the ugly facts.’35 Indeed, the point goes even deeper than this. It is not simply that one must dispel all, often socially informed, illusions about who and what you are if you want to truly discover a unique self. It is also that, as seen in Notes from the Underground, we must acknowledge the very limitations on our ability to do this. In other words, existential honesty requires being honest about the sheer difficulty of, and limits to, our capacity to be honest. From this, though, two things follow. Firstly, if authenticity requires, at least in some degree, honesty with regards to one’s own life and self, and this honesty is difficult to accomplish, then the pursuit of existential honesty must be a central aspect of any authentic life. In short, to embark on the journey to become oneself you must be able to see what you really are, or have become, in the first place. And this also implies an active project of understanding what an authentic self is not. This implies understanding what Heidegger calls ‘the “who” of everyday Dasein.’36 But if this is true a second point also follows. Namely, that from this an important role is opened again for philosophical understanding in the pursuit of authenticity. This is because, the very social structures which lead us into being self-deceived about our true self, or the potential for our true self, are susceptible to objective philosophical analysis. As such the philosophical methods of, say, phenomenology, or the Frankfurt school, allow us to understand, and thus resist, those objective structures of the social world which blind us to our inauthenticity. They also allow us to see our limits. That is, crucially, such universal analysis allows us to appreciate the objective limitations imposed on, and the severe obstacles to, any project of authenticity. Consequently, the role more conventional philosophical enquiry can play becomes clear. Understanding and applying certain accepted

 Kaufmann, 13.  Heidegger, Being and Time, 150.

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methodologies, using ‘universal ontology’,37 far from being antithetical to a project of authenticity, can be a crucial part of it. For instance, engaging with Sartre’s theory of ‘Being-for-others’, might allow us to better see how a romantic relationship is becoming inauthentic, or how to mitigate this. Of course, there is no necessity here. One can equally utilise philosophy and methodology for inauthentic ends. While, as Merleau-Ponty says, ‘True philosophy consists in relearning to look at the world’,38 theory can also be a way of abdicating responsibility for seeing that world for oneself. Theory can become static and unthinking dogma, in which we live in and through the thoughts of others. But it does not have to be. And importantly I have indicated one way in which the dichotomy between philosophy and personal authenticity can be assuaged. Yet there is a further way this can be done. And a further way one can connect these two projects. Just as philosophy can serve the goal of authenticity, so can the pursuit of authenticity be conducive to the ends of philosophical knowledge. This is especially true of the ‘exceptional experiences’ mentioned earlier. It is also brought out most clearly in the figure of Nietzsche’s ‘free spirit.’39 This archetype embodies both the ideal of authentic individuality, and that of the radical philosopher. Indeed, Nietzsche says of these new, ideal, philosophers that ‘they too will be free, very free spirits, these philosophers of the future’ (BG, 71). Moreover, both their powers of questioning and their authenticity come from a break with the established community. The community is defined by what Nietzsche calls ‘habitual and undiscussable principles.’40 What this means is that the very thing which enforces conformity, and supresses individuality, is equally that which prevents any radical questioning of the values of the community. Thus, it follows that by breaking with those sedimented beliefs and values, and gaining new philosophical capacities, one also establishes, or lays the grounds for, a genuinely  See Pattison, The Philosophy of Kierkegaard, 86, for the distinction between ‘universal ontology’ and ‘the concrete and immediate situation of individual existence.’ 38  Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, preface, xxiii. 39  This figure emerges in Nietzsche’s ‘middle works’, starting with Human, All too Human, and persists through to Beyond Good and Evil. It arguably replaces or displaces the earlier idea, found in Untimely Meditations, of authenticity and individuality for its own sake. 40  Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, 107. 37

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i­ndividual, and authentic path. And vice-versa. This is achieved through the exceptional experience of a ‘great liberation’.41 Such an experience involves a cycle of mutually re-enforcing solitude, suffering, and suspicion. It is a cycle in which the pursuit of our individual self, extreme experiences, and a growing ability to question fundamental values, all play into and deepen one another. And the result is a liberated spirit. That is, the result is one who is both capable of a deeper, radical questioning, and hence philosophical knowledge, and has simultaneously discovered a truly unique self. It is a free spirit capable of asking ‘Can all values not be turned around? And is good perhaps evil? And God only an invention and finesse of the devil? Is everything perhaps in the last resort false?’42 As such, this illustrates another way in which the dualism between philosophical knowledge and authenticity might be undermined. It is also a way in which boundary or exceptional experiences can be integrated into the philosophical enterprise. Furthermore, it reconciles the more explicitly philosophical aspects of existentialist thinkers with their invocations to authenticity. This point can be seen in two later texts of Nietzsche’s. I am here referring to Thus Spoke Zarathustra and On the Genealogy of Morality. In the former Nietzsche outlines Zarathustra’s doctrines of eternal return, will-to-power, and the ubermensch. And in the latter is outlined a fundamental critique of morality. In both cases the doctrines both emerge from authentic questioning and life, and are properly understood through this, but also seek to perpetuate a dialectic and unity of understanding with authenticity. That is, such ideas feed back into the pursuit of authenticity, which in turn allows for a deeper, and dynamic, understanding of these doctrines. This point will be developed in later chapters. Yet it is also apparent how such an interpretation avoids a final danger of the ‘anti-philosophy’ view of existentialism. Specifically, it avoids a phenomenon both Nietzsche and Adorno identify. Although it is not something Golomb falls prey to, the danger is that without a dialectic with philosophical understanding, the ideal of authenticity can become empty, static and even narcissistic. Without the balancing discipline and purpose given by philosophy, the pursuit of authenticity  See Human, All too Human, I: Preface: SS3, 6.  Human, All too Human, 7.

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can degenerate into just being what Solomon calls the ‘existential attitude.’43 This is what Adorno discusses in The Jargon of Authenticity in terms of ‘the aura’. As he says, ‘As words that are sacred without sacred content, as frozen emanations, the terms of the jargon of authenticity are products of the disintegration of the aura.’44 In other words, without a connection to understanding, authenticity can increasingly be devoid of content or a goal and risks becoming just a subjective posture or pose. And this pose is maintained by the use of a certain reified jargon. Such jargon belatedly attempts to conjure and retain a mystique of profundity around its users. Nietzsche criticises a similar tendency in connection to ‘the poets.’ Though this could apply to anyone who believes ‘there were a special entrance to knowledge which is blocked to him who has learned anything’ (TSZ, 150). He says, of them, ‘They have not thought deeply enough: therefore their feeling—has not plumbed the depths’ (TSZ, 151). So they likewise try to establish a certain kind of aura around themselves. They aestheticize and valorise their stasis, and their perpetually relived moment of rebellion, performing it for themselves and others.

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Theoretical Existentialism

At any rate, this phenomenon, and danger, has had another effect. Combined with the other problems of the ‘anti-philosophy’ view, the absence of a clearer link to philosophical understanding here has cleared the way for the re-appropriation of existentialism by more conventional philosophy. In other words, the idea that a concern for authenticity has degenerated into a non-philosophical posture, or fashion, led others to re-assert a ‘theoretical existentialism.’ This has been given expression by a variety of figures. Most notable in this regard are Warnock,45 Cooper, Schacht, and Crowell.46 It has also, most recently, been argued for by Webber. What all these readings have in common is the aim of re-­framing  Solomon, Existentialism, xi.  Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, 6. 45  See Warnock, Existentialism, 1, for the view that existentialist thinkers are defined by ‘the interest in human freedom.’ 46  See, The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism. 43 44

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existentialist thought in terms of a more traditional or straightforward philosophical ‘position’ or theory. Cooper stands as a good example of this. Like the others, he aims to extricate existentialism from the ‘anti-philosophy’ interpretation. As such he composes, what he calls, an ‘existentialist manifesto’.47 This is focused on our estrangement from the world and our freedom, and he suggests this is something to which all existentialists would have subscribed. Meanwhile, Crowell claims that existentialism should be read ‘from the vantage point of contemporary thought.’48 He argues that it can be understood in terms of its contributions to the problems of analytic philosophy. Consequently, existentialism can be distinguished through the types of positions it encourages or supports in current analytic debates. Webber combines elements of both approaches.49 He bases his interpretation of existentialism upon the definition of the term given by Sartre and De Beauvoir in 1945  in ‘Existentialism is A Humanism’, and ‘Existentialism and Popular Wisdom’50 respectively. On this definition existentialism ‘is the theory that existence precedes essence and that we ought to treat this structure of human being as intrinsically valuable and the foundation of other values.’51 Thus existentialist thought is characterised by two elements. The first is an ontological claim the second is an ethical one. The former, that for human beings ‘existence precedes essence’ is, as Webber puts it ‘intended to convey the idea that a human being has no inbuilt essence, no innate or fixed personality, but instead creates their essence, or their character and outlook, through the values and projects they choose to adopt.’52 In other words, it represents a rejection of the idea of any pre-given human nature or essence. In this way one might contrast existentialism, on this view, with naturalism and evolutionary  Cooper, 29–30.  Crowell, The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, 5. Note that Kaufmann, 51, also suggests that a reconciliation between analytic philosophy and existentialism is possible. 49  Webber, Rethinking Existentialism, 1, 18. Webber believes existentialism can be defined as a theoretical position, and that it can be used to support contemporary research in analytic philosophy, as well as other fields. 50  See Webber, 1. 51  Webber, 14. 52  Webber, 3. 47 48

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psychology, traditional Christianity, and a certain Marxian conception of ‘species being’. The second, ethical, claim is held to follow from this. In short, existentialism is also defined by the idea that as human beings are characterised by this freedom to choose themselves, that this freedom, and the value of freedom in general, ought to be respected.

3.1

Problems with Theoretical Existentialism

However, there are several issues with interpreting existentialism in this way. That is, there are several problems with viewing existentialism simply in terms of what Webber calls a ‘substantive philosophical position.’53 Firstly, and this will allow further problems to become apparent, it is mysterious on Webber’s account as to why or how Sartre and De Beauvoir came to this definition in the first place. It appears there, as Sartre says about the motivation for Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, ‘like a miracle.’54 The ‘existence precedes essence’ notion seems like something just chanced upon, arbitrarily, and uniquely. And it is happened upon uniquely, and for no obvious reason, by two specific thinkers at a specific moment in time. Then, almost equally arbitrarily, other thinkers, like Fanon, endorsed it. What motivated and influenced them to adopt or accept this idea, or to talk about a distinctive mode of thought called ‘existentialism’ in the first instance, is not explained. A comparison with phenomenology is useful here. As Merleau-­ Ponty says, The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoative atmosphere which has surrounded it are not to be taken as a sign of failure, they were inevitable because phenomenology’s task was to reveal the mystery of the world and of reason. If phenomenology was a movement before becoming a doctrine or a philosophical system, this was attributable neither to accident nor to fraudulent intent.55  Webber, 1.  Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 49. Sartre criticises Husserl there for failing to explain why one would be motivated to conduct the phenomenological reduction. 55  Merleau-Ponty, xxiii–xxiv. 53 54

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Phenomenology then was first a movement or a spirit of thought. In this sense, a more thorough formulation of it as a philosophy proceeded, rather than preceded, its existence as a movement and a ‘manner and style of thinking.’56 And the same can plausibly be said of existentialism.57 In other words, there was a spirit or ‘movement’ of existentialist thought that pre-existed, and informed, the formulation, then definition, later given by Sartre. This came before rather than after the definition. Such a spirit could be understood in terms of a rebellion against the dehumanizing and levelling features of modern life, and a connected pursuit of authenticity. It was also a rebellion against the way these features of life had infiltrated modern thought and philosophy. I have touched on this in my discussion of authenticity. I will also say more about it later. Nevertheless, there was a historical, philosophical, and existential antecedent first to Sartre’s overall existentialist philosophy, then to his later definition of existentialism. And in so far as existentialism, then that definition, has its roots in these deeper currents it seems strange to focus on the former rather than the latter. It seems strange in these circumstances to take as primary one specific and later effect, rather than the rich and complex processes underscoring it. And this is particularly the case if one is here talking about a two-line definition given in a public lecture.58 Seeking to circumscribe the meaning of all existentialism according to something so specific appears highly problematic. Yet, even all this considered, could Sartre and De Beauvoir’s definition not still be used? Even if I have identified some antecedent, more fundamental, spirit, isn’t it still preferable to have a clear philosophical definition for existentialism, even if it is reductive? Isn’t this preferable to a vaguer sense of existentialism, albeit one which might incorporate figures like Nietzsche and Kierkegaard? There are two key reasons why the answer is negative. And recall that I am seeking here the most radical and sophisticated possible way of understanding existentialism. So firstly, it is  Merleau-Ponty, viii.  Though the question of the cross-over between the goals of existentialism and phenomenology is too broad for the current work. 58  Which was then published as ‘Existentialism is a humanism’. Chapter 4 of this work will discuss in more detail the political and historical context of this lecture, and why Sartre felt compelled to offer a simplified definition of existentialism, and his own existentialist philosophy, there. 56 57

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unclear, without the fundamental ‘spirit’ or ground of existentialism, just using a specific definition, how it remains distinctive. Without the idea that existentialists sought to radically pursue and inspire authenticity, and the related challenge to conventional philosophy, it remains in principle no different to any other philosophical theory. In which case why bother using the term to distinguish it in the first place? Nor is it, on this view, particularly radical. The notion that ‘existence precedes essence’, that ‘human individuals have no fixed natures and their motivations are rooted in projects that they have chosen and can revise’,59 might not be universally accepted. Nevertheless, that the self can be free and self-creating in this way is consistent with, and an elaboration on, a certain everyday sense of freedom and selfhood. Indeed, once the more emphatic gloss on this view is removed, that we are always free to radically change any of our projects,60 then it is compatible with a range of familiar views. It is consistent with a broad liberal view of the subject, with liberal feminism, and, as Webber himself points out, with current empirical social psychology.61 Likewise with the ethical imperative derived from ‘existence precedes essence’. The idea that one should respect human freedom as a result of this, and that ‘The virtue of authenticity is this respect for the structure of human agency’62 is not controversial. It is not radically distinct from the claims of either Kantian morality, virtue ethics, or our everyday moral intuitions. However, there is an even deeper worry which applies to Webber and theoretical existentialism. This is captured well by what Sartre says in Search for a Method:  Webber, 189.  Webber in fact argues that this more radical view of ‘existence precedes essence’ was only held by the early Sartre of Being and Nothingness and Existentialism is a Humanism. De Beauvoir in The Second Sex, Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, and Sartre in Saint Genet, according to Webber, all adopt a more qualified view of freedom, and this phrase, which says that while we can ultimately change all our projects, and hence our nature, this cannot happen all at once. Rather, our values and projects become ‘sedimented’ and can only be fully changed gradually, and over a period of time. Further, this latter interpretation of ‘existence precedes essence’ is according to Webber the mature and ‘canonical’ form of existentialism. 61  See Webber, 193. Webber states that ‘Empirical social psychology is converging on a similar conception of motivation’ to his theory of existentialism. 62  Webber, 11. 59 60

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I do not like to talk about existentialism. It is the nature of an intellectual quest to be undefined. To name it and to define it is to wrap it up and tie the knot. What is left? A finished, already outdated mode of culture, something like a brand of soap—in other words, an idea.63

Even though Sartre had a decade earlier given just such a definition, his point remains prescient. It is not that all efforts to find, or gesture toward, an overall meaning to existentialism are misguided. Rather, it is that reducing existentialism to a specific formula, ‘position’, or two-line definition, makes things too easy. Its purported advantage, that it can be relatively quickly and straightforwardly grasped by anyone, becomes also its weakness. By allowing individuals a ready-made theory of existentialism it closes off the incentive for, and possibility of, them enquiring into what existentialism means for themselves. It closes off a more essential connection and dialogue with their own experience. Yet this spirit of enquiry and seeking, and link to personal experience, is essential to a lived and living existentialism, and to authenticity. It is the search, and struggle, required of the individual both into their own self and into the character of the human being. And it is something that can take a lifetime. Indeed, what Merleau-Ponty says of phenomenology again rings true for existentialism. ‘We shall find in ourselves, and nowhere else, the unity and true meaning of phenomenology.’64 In so far as existentialism is rendered easily, and definitively, for us by another we remain alienated from it. Like any other established theory, we never have, or had to, worry about it ourselves. And if this happens existentialism becomes, as Sartre indicates, merely a piece of cultural history. One can argue about which texts or figures might fall under the definition and attempt to apply the theory in various ways. But in its fundamental meaning, as a movement, existentialism is ‘wrapped up and tied with a knot’. Fundamentally, because it is something already settled, for the individual it is deprived of a future, and of a connection to their lives.

 Sartre, Search for a Method, xxxiii.  Merleau-Ponty, viii.

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21

Return to Existence

So, I have discussed two of the main ways existentialism can be understood. These were the ‘anti-philosophy’ and the ‘theoretical’ views. They were represented in sophisticated form by Golomb and Webber respectively. I have also looked at the limitations of both. Where does this leave me? It was said at the outset that my goal was to craft, and articulate, my own meaning of existentialism from engagement with these other perspectives. And I hoped by doing so to find the philosophically strongest, and most radical, possible sense of existentialism. Some idea of what this involves has already been intimated. But this must be now made explicit. As such, to begin, I must develop an account of existentialism that avoids the pitfalls of both main characterisations of existentialism. That is, if possible, I must avoid reducing existentialist thought to just a philosophical position, while equally avoiding the side-lining of philosophical understanding altogether. In short, my account must escape the dualism between authenticity and philosophic knowledge. Instead I will attempt a synthesis of the previous two interpretations. This will maintain existentialism as substantively philosophical, but also acknowledge its radical critique of conventional philosophical practice. Likewise, it is necessary to give a sense of existentialism’s overall spirit without giving a closed definition. That is, I will aim to provide a coherent meaning, and signpost to its meaning, while allowing space for development and individual enquiry and experience in relation to that meaning. This will be done initially by looking at another commentator in conjunction with my earlier discussion. I will use my critique of the two other positions, alongside comments by Tillich, to move toward my own sense of existentialism. For Tillich argues that existentialists are ‘…those who have regarded man’s “immediate experience” as revealing more completely the nature and traits of Reality than man’s cognitive experience.’65 In other words, they are characterised by the belief that experience of concrete, personal ‘Existence’66 ought to have priority over abstract,

65 66

 Tillich, Theology of Culture, 77.  Tillich, 87.

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objective thought in philosophy.67 And this indicates a way of overcoming the highlighted dualism. It suggests how an overcoming of the notion that existentialism must be either just theory or just anti-theory might be achieved. For it indicates that authentic existence, and philosophical understanding, are not opposites but imply one another. Concomitantly, authenticity is not a static and self-enclosed enterprise. Rather, with a concern for existence, philosophical questioning and understanding are united with this project. If we want to know, and discover, who we really are or could be we need philosophy. We need philosophical method to analyse and understand the experiential structures of inauthenticity surrounding us, that are hindering just such a project. It is for this reason that, as Tillich notes, existentialists ‘try to “think Existence”, to develop its implications, instead of simply living in “Existential” immediate experience.’68 The other side of the dualism is undermined as well though. Just as this focus on existence as revealing truth here implies that an ‘anti-­philosophy’ existentialism is limited, it suggests that a purely theoretical one is also. If philosophical understanding is gained through sensitivity to concrete existence, then one cannot simply pursue philosophy objectively. That is, one cannot like the scientist detach one’s life and being from one’s role as philosopher. Rather, the individual’s life, and the struggle to understand it, the project of authenticity, must be the ground of philosophic knowledge. And how this is done has been indicated in my earlier discussion of Golomb and Webber. It is not achieved merely by allowing experience to inform the content of philosophical analysis. Nor is it achieved simply by reflecting more deeply on the events of our lives. Instead, as discussed, it as well involves the pursuit of, and openness to, exceptional and boundary experiences. It involves a continual awareness of, and resistance to, social and existential structures inhibiting authenticity. It also implies the desire to challenge the habitual, accepted values of a community and established ways of life. And it means finding oneself, and genuine

 See also Schacht, ‘Nietzsche: after the death of God’, for discussion of the priority of ‘Existenz’ in existentialism, 114. 68  Tillich, 87. 67

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understanding, in this challenge. This is why, as Tillich says, ‘The Existential thinker is the interested or passionate thinker.’69 As such, an answer is emerging to the question raised for this section. It can be seen, by combining my critique of the anti-theory and theory views with ideas from Tillich, what my own, philosophically strong and radical, possible sense of existentialism might look like. Moreover, this will be one based in dialectic rather than dualism. It will be based in an attempt to see the pursuit of authenticity and that of philosophic understanding as interrelated rather than opposed. Nevertheless, if an intimation has been given here more must be said. In order to do this, I must build on, and go beyond, Tillich. If, as he claims, ‘the belief that the innermost centre of Nature lies in the heart of man’70 is essential to a mode of existentialism it is necessary to develop this idea. And I do this by proffering my own provisional meaning. This will be to characterise existentialist thought and spirit in terms of a ‘return to human being.’ This follows from the idea of a dialectic between authenticity and understanding. My ‘return to the human’ then, I argue, will be the best way of realising this. Thus, I will briefly say more about why this is so, and about this ‘return.’ While its’ full meaning, and the dialectic it allows, can only be revealed in the discussion of actual figures and texts in the rest of this book, I can still give a few important outlines.

4.1

Return to Human Being

One way of doing this is with Kierkegaard’s criticism of ‘modern philosophy’. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript he attacks such philosophy for ‘having forgotten, in a sort of world-historical absent-mindedness, what it means to be a human being … each one for himself.’71 In other words, Kierkegaard is critiquing the way in which philosophy has lost touch with the goal of allowing us to comprehend our own concrete lives as human beings. I have already said a considerable amount about what this  Tillich, 89.  Tillich, 95. 71  Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Post-script to the Philosophical Crumbs, 100. 69 70

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entails. Particularly, I have looked at what this involves in terms of the pursuit of authenticity, exceptional experiences, and the return to individual existence. One element is missing though. This is highlighted as well by Nietzsche in Human, All Too Human: …what preparations, bypaths, experiments, temptations, disguises the problem had need of before it was allowed to rise up before us, and how we first had to experience the most manifold and contradictory states of joy and distress in soul and body, as adventurers and circumnavigators of that inner world called “man”—penetrating everywhere, almost without fear, disdaining nothing, losing nothing, asking everything, cleansing everything of what is chance and accident in it…72

This suggests another aspect of the return to the human. What is implied, and building on the idea of a dialectic between understanding and authenticity, is the kind of understanding which is connected to authenticity. This is not just, as discussed, an understanding of the structures of everyday in-authenticity, nor a questioning of established, reified, communal values. Though it is connected to both. It is also a fundamental enquiry into what the human being is and should be. Such an overarching enquiry into human being, into ‘that inner world called “man”’, does not stand against individual existence and authenticity. It is rather its continually related, and mutually enriching, concomitant. As Adorno says, ‘thinking has the element of the universal.’73 When we truly understand ourselves, we also uncover and pursue the universal in the human being. Conversely, to fundamentally understand what human existence means in general is to allow for a deeper understanding of ourselves as unique individuals. Consequently, one can see how the previous dualism can be overcome. The idea of a return to the human allows one to appreciate on a deeper level how the pursuit of our unique self and universal philosophic understanding can be reconciled. This is the case if the return to the human is at the same time an enquiry into human being. This is because the fundamental enquiry into our own lives and experience can yield a deeper  Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, Preface SS7, 10.  Adorno, ‘Resignation’ in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, 293.

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meaning of the human in general. And equally, a deeper understanding of human being in its fundamental structures permits a deeper relation to the meaning of our own particular experience. Such universal understanding allows us to grasp more truly who and what we are as individuals. As well, critically, it frees us to grasp who and what we can become. This idea of a return to human being then serves as a signpost. As said, its full meaning will only be disclosed later through engagement with actual texts and figures. Yet it offers the intimation of a meaning for a possible existentialism both radical and philosophically sophisticated. Further, it is clear that such a characterisation also makes it very distinct from the main trends of contemporary thought. So, in the case of analytic philosophy, ‘human being’ in any more concrete sense is side-lined. Instead, modelled on science, it concerns itself with the acquisition of knowledge in a series of atomised and abstract fields. One sees this, for example, in the way it divides philosophy according to the study of epistemology, language, mind, science, psychology, and ethics. Only contingently related to actual experience, or each other, such fields are clearly delineated from the life of the individual addressing them.74 And for similar reasons analytic philosophy is sceptical towards any overarching effort to give a meaning to the human. That is, it is sceptical toward enquires into what the human being is, in a more fundamental or general way. The atomisation of understanding implicit in its method seems to preclude any such holistic or fundamental enquiry. Likewise, post-structuralist thought is explicit in renouncing ‘human existence’ as philosophy’s principle concern. And it has been even more sceptical towards fundamental enquiries into what human being is. Carrying on from the structuralist Levi-Strauss, most of the figures in this tradition75 concur with him in believing ‘…the ultimate goal of the human sciences to be not to constitute, but to dissolve man.’76 Deleuze is symptomatic of this displacement. He declares that instead of a concern for human being, ‘philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and  Concern with ‘human being’ is also often seen as linked to the hubris of past ‘continental philosophy.’ 75  Namely, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Lacan. 76  Levi-Strauss, The Savage Mind, 246. 74

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fabricating concepts.’77 Concern for human being and existence then is not only outmoded. It is also viewed as politically suspect and implicitly authoritarian. Finally, my return to human being is distinguishable from other general and abstract theories of the human. While these are not currently fashionable in philosophy, one can distinguish my idea from general religious, humanist, or scientific accounts of human being.78 Such theories of the human do not derive from the concrete experience and pursuit of self of living individuals. Nor do they stand in a dialectic relation to such a pursuit.

5

The Problem of Humanism

In any case, I have outlined a different possible meaning for existentialism. With the ‘return to human being’, and a synthesis of theoretical and anti-theoretical views, the way toward a fruitful and radical mode of existentialist thought is indicated. Yet does this help with my main problem? Returning to the issue raised at the outset, how does this help explain why the ‘humanist’ charge was brought against existentialism, and why existentialism was dismissed? Further, how might this return to the human suggest the best way to avoid this dismissal and criticism? To address all these questions, it is necessary first to take a step back. That is, it is necessary to look at Heidegger’s initial critique of humanism in his Letter on Humanism. There, by asking what ‘humanism’ is for Heidegger, what is wrong with it, and why he associates it with existentialism, I will be able to answer the previous questions. By looking at what he says there, the narrative of existentialism’s dismissal will become clearer. So too will the means to challenge it. This chapter will look then at what Heidegger means by humanism, and why he sees it as problematic. Addressing both issues, his argument against ‘humanism’ is that it exists as a certain kind of science, in the broad sense of the term, of the human. In other words, the limitation of  Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 2.  Evolutionary psychology, for instance, proposes a theory that current human being is the product of its evolutionary past. 77 78

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humanism comes from what is implied by ‘the humanities’. That is, its limitation is that it exists as a complement to natural science. It does for the human, what natural sciences do for the material world. For, humanism, like science in relation to the physical, assumes that the human being is a theoretically isolatable field. As such it assumes human being is something about which it is possible to conduct a neutral, original enquiry. This is what Heidegger refers to when he says that philosophy in the humanist sense ‘has been in the constant predicament of having to justify its existence before the “sciences”’. And further such philosophy believes ‘…it can do that most effectively by elevating itself to the rank of a science.’79 The problem, however, with such an approach is for Heidegger clear. In assuming it is possible to have an isolated, original, enquiry into the human, humanism already makes an ontological assumption about its object. That is, without realising, humanism makes an assumption about the human place in, what he calls, Being. It assumes something about ‘the relation of Being to the essence of man’ (LH, 153). And it does so in so far as it positions human being as an isolatable object of knowledge. For humanism does not ask whether human being stands in a unique relation to Being which cannot be ‘known’ in this way. Nor does it ask whether it must fundamentally be bound up with Being. It cannot do so since this would mean abandoning the idea of ‘the human’ as an isolatable theoretical field. Rather, it presumes by dint of its method that one should ‘locate man within being as one being among others’ (LH, 154). Human being then, even if possessed of unique qualities, is ontologically equivalent to other beings. And this means as Heidegger argues in Being and Time, that we take ourselves ‘as an instance or special case of some genus of entities as things that are present-at-hand.’80 In other words, no matter how un-­ prejudiced humanism believes its enquiries to be, or how subtle its descriptions, it can never escape the characterisation of human existence  Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Heidegger: Basic writings, 148. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as LH. See also Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, SS204, for a similar point regarding the subordination of philosophy to science. 80  Heidegger, Being and Time, 68. 79

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in terms of ‘presence’. No matter how different to other entities the human is seen to be, humanism because of its method ends up construing it as ‘another entity in the world’. In short, it ends up construing human existence in terms of an ‘is’. This is an ‘is’ then to which it is possible to ascribe certain properties like subjectivity or reason. Thus, addressing my previous question, the problem with humanism in this way is that it fails to, as Heidegger puts it, ‘think the essence of man more primordially’ (LH, 168). In short, it fails to consider how and whether we stand in a different relation to Being than that of an entity. As such, it does not consider whether human being might be ultimately more than a variation on Descartes ‘thing that thinks.’81 Yet why is it that Heidegger also, to look at his second claim, considers existentialism to be the latest mode of such ‘humanism’? The answer lies in a reflection on, again considering Descartes, what one might mean by saying the human is ‘more’ than a thinking subject. For as Heidegger makes clear, though …the essence of man consists in his being more than merely human, if this is represented as ‘being a rational creature’. ‘More’ must not be understood here additively, as if the traditional definition of man were indeed to remain basic, only elaborated by means of an existentiell postscript. (LH, 166)

In other words, Heidegger sees the danger of existentialism being that it simply complements or adds to the humanist understanding of the human without fundamentally challenging it. That is, its focus on human existence simply means emphasising a neglected ‘existentiell’ (LH, 155) aspect of humanism. Or, as Crowell puts it, it means ‘emphasising the contingent psychological and situational factors in human life, in contrast to the life of a purely rational agent.’82 And in this way, for Heidegger, existentialism fails to get beyond the humanist project. Rather, its focus on ‘existence’, with emphasis on immediate experience and the personal dimension to subjectivity, simply radicalizes or completes that project.

 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 19.  Crowell, 9.

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Influence of the Letter

So, I have outlined Heidegger’s argument in the Letter. I have explained what humanism means for him, its’ limitations and its’ association with existentialist thought. It is also clear why my characterisation of existentialism is susceptible to this critique. While all characterisations of existentialism, and the pathos of subjectivity underlying them, face this challenge, my ‘return to the human’ seems especially vulnerable. This is because the thought that philosophy ought to be concerned with human being in both its universal and individual aspects appears to centre human subjectivity in a very pronounced way. And this, on the face of things, looks like the epitome of humanist thinking. I will show however, how this is not the case. In fact, it is argued in this book that by pursuing and thinking the ‘return to human being’ in a sufficiently honest and serious manner, one can avoid the humanist subject. Further, it is precisely the characterisation of existentialism I have outlined, and not the discussed alternatives, that will allow this to be achieved. My ‘return to the human’ then is not merely the strongest possible sense of existentialism. It is also one which helps existentialist thought counter its most powerful objection. Yet before I give some indications of how this is done it is necessary to, briefly, address another question. Namely, why, from a historical point of view, did Heidegger’s critique in the Letter lead to the dismissal of existentialism as a credible way of doing philosophy? And why has this dismissal continued to the present day? In order to answer this, I need to look at several contextual factors. Foremost amongst these was Heidegger’s influence on French philosophical culture. Specifically, his influence on the culture that has dominated ‘continental’ thought for most of the post-­ war period needs to be considered. For as Rockmore has argued, ‘in the period after the Second World War, Heidegger became the master thinker of French philosophy.’83 In this way it is hardly surprising,84 given the content of the Letter, that existentialism’s reputation was to subsequently  Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy Heidegger and French Philosophy, xi.  Combined with other factors, like the desire to topple Sartre as the ‘master thinker’ of French thought, see Rockmore, chaps. 4 and 5. 83 84

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come under attack. In particular, Heidegger was interpreted there as ‘decentring the subject’, prophesising ‘the death of man.’85 That is, he was interpreted as doing something which influenced figures like Derrida,86 and Foucault,87 and their belief that all concern for human being had been rendered suspect. And, with a simplified sense of what the return to existence might mean, and of existentialism’s subjective pathos, they followed Heidegger in seeing this as humanist. Existentialism and humanism became intertwined. I’ll say more about the precise nature and history of this process in Chap. 4. But, in any case, the context was set for existentialism’s demise. Whether Heidegger had in fact intended to dismiss all interest in human being as ‘humanist’, the perception that he had, contributed to a context in which existentialism could be written off on those grounds. This was not helped either by Sartre’s lecture Existentialism is a Humanism.88 A vulgarised sense of existentialism’s return to the human on all sides combined with the criticism in the Letter to mean that existentialism could be dismissed as the last gasp of humanism. In short, it could be dismissed as clinging onto the now discredited notion of an isolated and romantic subject. And it is for this reason that there is the common, current perception of existentialism as philosophically outmoded. For this ‘humanist’ label, and its negative connotations, stuck. Even amongst those, for instance in analytic philosophy, who never read the Letter, or are unaware of the pejorative sense of humanism, this identification still affects perceptions. The sense, derived from the reception of Heidegger’s original critique, that existentialism is a passé philosophy of the subject continues to haunt the way this movement is seen.

 Rockmore, 181, 136: in relation to Foucault.  See Rockmore, 142, footnote138: for an account of Derrida’s attack on Sartre in ‘Les Fins de l’homme’. 87  See Rockmore, 58, 136–137. As Rockmore points out, Foucault argues that the conception of the human being is ‘finished’, footnote 129. 88  Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism. Sartre intended ‘humanism’ there in a different way to the ontological sense meant by Heidegger in the Letter. That is, he intended it in the ‘moral’ sense that for human beings ‘there is no legislator other than himself ’, 53. Nonetheless, combined with the simplification of his thought that necessarily occurred in the attempt to give a generally accessible lecture, the ‘humanist’ label stuck, see 51–53. More will be said about this in Chap. 4. 85 86

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31

Rejection of Interiority

I have now accomplished several things. First, I have given an outline of the narrative of existentialism’s dismissal. As discussed, this originated in Heidegger’s critique of humanism in the Letter, and his identification of existentialism with this type of thought. It was then shown how the context of post-war French philosophy allowed for the acceptance and popularisation of this association. This in turn led to a broader perception of existentialist thought as passé. Further, one can also see why my characterisation of existentialism seems particularly problematic here. This is because the notion of a ‘return to human being’ sounds distinctly humanist. Yet I also said that this idea offers the best way to avoid the humanist charge. That is, thought properly, my notion of a return to the human points toward an existentialism which gets beyond the present subject of humanism. And it does so, or helps to do so, in a way in which other accounts of existentialism do not. How does it accomplish this? Let me here give a broad overview of the approach I will take. I can also outline the problem arising from this approach; the central problem which this book will address, and which other accounts of existentialist thought have missed. This can be done first by recalling what was said about theoretical existentialism. One way I distinguished the return to human being then was by a critique of this. It was argued that viewing existentialism just as a standard philosophical position missed a fundamental ‘spirit’ of existentialism. This was the motivating force and impetus that drove and inspired existentialist writing, and which was not reducible to any theoretical position or set of claims. And I also said that this spirit was characterised by a certain rebellion. That is, this spirit, which my ‘return to human being’ tried to incorporate, was characterised both by a pursuit of authenticity and a connected rebellion against the dehumanising effects of modernity. Specifically, it was a revolt against a narrowly scientific and mechanised world which ignored, levelled out, and objectified human being. Now the connection to Heidegger’s critique of humanism becomes clearer. For one obvious way of understanding the dehumanisation of the world, and of authentically revolting against it, is to say that the problem

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lies with the neglect of the subject. This is close to aspects of the ‘anti-­ philosophy’ position. Put simply, it suggests that to recover a sense of authentic self-hood from a dehumanised, objective world requires returning to subjectivity. That is, if the objective world has this dehumanising effect we need to escape it. We need to return, philosophically and existentially, to an inner domain of personal subjectivity, feeling and experience. We need to recover what Sartre calls the “internal life”.89 And it also clear, how such a return is susceptible to Heidegger’s humanist critique. Since what one has here is the focus on a distinct realm of the subject. However, this is not the only way a return to human being needs to be conceived. Nor is it the only way of responding to the dehumanisation of the world. A more sophisticated approach, following properly from the return to human being, suggests that it is in fact the notion of subjective interiority itself which is part of the problem. As Tillich says, ‘Such a view would still leave the meaning of “subjective” determined by its contrast with “objective.”’90 In other words, the problem with a return to subjectivity is that the domain of subjective interiority is itself the corollary of the objective. That is, it is something which, like free-time in relation to work within capitalism, is the product and shadow of the ‘external’ world it believes it is escaping. Of course, this might still be preferable. It might be preferable to seek interiority over blind acceptance of, or indifference to, a dehumanised, objective world. This is especially true as such a stance at least acknowledges there is a problem. Nevertheless, such an escape into the subjective still leaves the objective world untouched, and still drained of human meaning. As its shadow it also never truly escapes that objectivity. As such, something else is required. What this might be is suggested by Sartre when he says that: …in vain we seek the caresses and fondlings of our intimate selves … like a child who kisses his own shoulder—for everything is finally outside; everything, even ourselves. Outside, in the world, among others. It is not  Sartre, ‘Intentionality: A fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 1 (2): 4–5, 5. 90  Tillich, 92. 89

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in some hiding-place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a human among humans.91

This suggests something important regarding the return to human being. It suggests that a return to the human, and the antidote to the dehumanised world of modernity, emerges not from a retreat into subjective interiority. Rather, what is required is in fact a re-engagement with the world. This would be a reimagining which rediscovers the world, its situations, and its objects, as irreducibly human. We recover that world as not ‘out there’, separate from us, but intimately bound up with, and revealed through, our life and projects. So too the converse is true. Namely, just as the world is given only through ourselves and our experience, so our self, our existence, is revealed only ‘outside, in the world.’ We find our true, unique self, as well as the self more generally, not in some hidden inner domain of the subject. Instead its real existence is found in the midst of the world and worldly situations. We find it in the glance of a woman, the foreboding of the sky, the wistful repose of a cemetery on a summer’s day. And it is apparent how this allows one to escape Heidegger’s critique.

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Perversity and the Human-World Problem

Explaining, this view allows me to avoid Heidegger’s charge of humanism since now there is no longer any distinct realm of subjectivity. The irreducible worldliness of the self, here, undercuts the present, isolatable subject of humanism and the subject-object distinction it rests on. If taken in an ontological rather than merely psychological or metaphorical sense the humanist subject has now been irrevocably lost in the world. So, for instance, as will be shown, one finds this in Sartre’s notion of ‘man-in-­ the-world’92 Likewise it can be seen in the interconnectedness of the human being with natural forces in Nietzsche. Moreover, through this another crucial point has been made. With this I intimated how my idea of a ‘return to human being’ is the best way for existentialism to escape 91 92

 Sartre, ‘Intentionality: a fundamental idea of Husserl’s phenomenology’, 5.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 4.

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humanism. Far from being especially susceptible to the charge, my characterisation of existentialist thought points the way to overcoming humanism. And it does so where other characterisations do not. This is accomplished, as discussed, by seeing the return in a specific way. That is, I accomplish this by elaborating this return not as a return to the human as such. Instead it is achieved by elaborating the return to human being as a return to the world as human. It is done by rediscovering the world in its full depth and richness and sorrow, and discovering our existence as given only in and through that. Yet if I have then made progress there are still several fundamental issues to be addressed. If it has been indicated how my conception of existentialism, as a return to the human being as world, distinctively allows existentialist thought to escape humanism, didn’t I say there was something else. Didn’t I say that a specific problem arose out of this response to the humanist charge? And was it not also said that this book would be concerned with addressing precisely this? That is correct. As such, in this final section of my introduction, I will give an outline of what this problem is, and how I will attempt to address it. For if I have claimed that a type of existentialism can escape humanism by proposing a unity of human being and world, this raises the question of how then the human is distinguished from that ‘world’. In brief, am I not here in danger of avoiding humanism simply by moving towards the structuralist position of denying any distinctive meaning for the human whatsoever?93 The answer I suggest is ‘no’. And the reason for this can be uncovered by looking more closely again at what is meant by talking about human being-in, or with, the world. So, as discussed, the nature of our being in and with the world is that we are always ‘consciousness of something’. As Sartre says, ‘there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object, or if you prefer, that consciousness has no “content.”’94 However, if we are nothing other than the intentional object, and there is no distinct domain in which the self has ‘content’, this does not necessarily mean it is identical with the object, or world, either. This is because, as is also found in  This is the view that all that exists are ‘structures’; for example, of language and power.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, xxvii.

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Nietzsche, consciousness is not passivity. Consciousness does not passively reflect the world, like a clear pool. Rather, consciousness and the world is better imagined as the relation between the wind and the branches of a tree. We never can see the wind except in the movement of the branches. But still the wind has a distinct meaning as an active, transforming relation to the swaying tree. This can also be put in more technical terms. Namely, our positing of transcendent objects and a world already implies an active relation of that positing.95 In other words, the intentionality of being-in-the-world implies that whilst we exist as nothing other than the positing of that world, we nonetheless exist as a distinctive ‘positing relation’ to it. Whilst there is no isolated domain of the human, we can still exist as the content-less relation and action of that positing. And this means it is possible to talk about a unity of ourselves and world that does not imply an absolute dissolving of one into the other. Yet this raises a final question. If I avoid the dissolution of human being here and preserve the possibility of a non-humanist existentialism, by saying that we are nothing other than an active relation to the world, then what is this relation? How is one to understand a ‘relation’, and activity, which is not merely something a human being has or does but something that fundamentally she is? My answer is: with perversity. That is, the answer proposed by this book is that such a relation can be explained by excavating and exploring an idea found in the philosophies of Sartre and Nietzsche. This comes at first from reading these figures through a certain existentialist lens. Specifically, it involves reading these figures in connection with my, outlined, conception of existentialism as a return to human being as world. As such, it means looking at their conceptions of this return that seek to reject subjective interiority but still preserve a distinctive meaning for the human. This will be accomplished in both cases through the concept of perversion. I will develop the idea that, for both, the human being as active relation to the world can be understood in terms of perversion. I look at how the problem arising from the rejection of humanism, of preserving the meaning of the human, can be solved by viewing human  The exact connection between Husserl’s conception of intentionality and Sartre’s interpretation of it will be addressed in more depth in later chapters. 95

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being in this way. That is, this problem can be resolved by viewing the human as the perversion of something other than itself. The rest of this book will elaborate on the meaning of this. And in this way, I hope to show something important. With this I aim to show how with my conception of existentialism as a return to human being, and the concept of perversion, a non-humanist existentialism is possible.

References Adorno, T. The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. by K.  Tarnowskiand (London: Routledge, 2003). ———. ‘Resignation’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by H.W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) Cooper, D. ‘Existentialism as a philosophical movement’, in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, ed. by S.  Crowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 27. Crowell, S. The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, ed. by S.  Crowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. What is Philosophy? trans. by H. Tomlinson and G. Burchill (London: Verso, 1994). Descartes, R. Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. by J.  Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Dostoevsky, F. ‘Notes from the Underground’, in Notes from the Underground and The Double, trans. by R. Wilks (London: Penguin, 2009). Fromm, E. Marx’s Conception of Man, trans. by T.B.  Bottomore (London: Continuum, 2003). Golomb, J. In Search of Authenticity (London: Routledge, 1995). Heidegger, M. Being and Time, trans. by J.  Macquarrie and E.  Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). ———. ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. by D. F. Krell, trans. by F. A. Capuzzi and J. G. Gray (London: Routledge, 1978). ———. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. by W.  McNeill and N. Walker (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1995). Judaken, J. ‘Introduction’, in Situating Existentialism, ed. by J.  Judaken and R. Bernasconi (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012). Kaufmann, W. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Meridian, 1956).

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Kierkegaard, S. Concluding Unscientific Post-script to the Philosophical Crumbs, trans. by A. Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Levi-Strauss, C. The Savage Mind (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1966). Merleau-Ponty, M. Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by D. Landes (London: Routledge, 2002). Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by R.J.  Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1973). ———. Human, All too Human, trans. by R.J.  Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). ———. Philosophy in the Tragic of the Greeks, trans. by M. Cowan (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1998). ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by R.J.  Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961). ———. Untimely Meditations, trans. by R.J.  Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Pattison, G. The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Chesham: Acumen, 2005). Rockmore, T. Heidegger and French Philosophy Heidegger and French Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1995). Sartre, J-P. Being and Nothingness, trans. by H. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1958). ———. Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. by C.  Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). ———. ‘Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology’. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (1970), 1 (2): 4–5. ———. Nausea, trans. by R. Baldick (London: Penguin, 1963). ———. Search for a Method, trans. by H.  Barnes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967). ———. The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. by A.  Brown (London: Routledge, 2004). Schacht, R. ‘Nietzsche: After the Death of God’, in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, ed. S.  Crowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 112–114. Solomon, R.C. Existentialism (New York: Random House, 1974). Tillich, P. Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959). Warnock, M. Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Webber, J. Rethinking Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

2 Nietzsche’s Non-humanist Existentialism: Perversity and Genealogy

The end of the introduction stated that the concept of perversity would be developed, and a non-humanist existentialism given content, by looking at the philosophies of Nietzsche and Sartre. The aim of this engagement then is two-fold. Firstly, to elaborate on, and give justification for, a possible, radical, existentialism sketched in the intro. Second, to show that such an existentialism, and its return to human being, can provide a compelling alternative to humanism. How, specifically, will this be done? Nietzsche says that ‘We must again become good neighbours to the closest things.’1 In both his case and that of Sartre this book will explore how this is achieved. As such, both figures are read in terms of this return to the ‘closest things’, where this means the existentially most vital things.2 This involves viewing them in terms of their related efforts both to understand the possibility of individual authenticity, and their pursuit of fundamental understanding of the human. In short, this means reading them through the lens of the ‘return to human being’. Further, this points towards an  Nietzsche, Human, All too Human, 309.  Where this means something similar to Heidegger’s conception of ‘care’, see Being and Time, 236–243. 1 2

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alternative to humanism. In Sartre and Nietzsche, as will be seen, the return to the human leads toward the unity of self and world. It also leads towards the concept of perversion as a resolution to the problem arising from this. Indeed, this is why Sartre and Nietzsche were chosen for this study. Both give expression to an existentialist rejection of interiority, and in both is present the concept of perversity as a concomitant to it.

1

Nietzsche as Existentialist

Yet, looking first at Nietzsche, an initial question automatically arises. Was he really an existentialist at all? Some commentators have been sympathetic to this idea. For instance, Solomon says that ‘Nietzsche is a powerful defender of what one might call “the existential self ”, the individual who “makes himself ”’.3 And Schacht, Kaufmann and Golomb have also read Nietzsche in light of existentialist concerns. Nevertheless, it is not a fashionable view. This is in part for the reasons, discussed earlier, that existentialism more broadly has been dismissed. In the Anglophone world, scholars have tended rather to focus on rehabilitating Nietzsche as a ‘serious’ philosopher concerned with traditional academic questions. This has meant downplaying his radicalism, and critiques of conventional philosophy and modernity.4 Likewise, it has meant emphasising links between his work and contemporary debates in ethics, meta-ethics, and political philosophy. Meanwhile, scholars of a continental bent are even further away from an existentialist reading. For those like Kofman, Derrida, Foucault, and Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche was a forerunner of the post-structuralist ‘death of the subject.’ Far from seeking an existentialist return to the human then, he heralded the end of a concern for human being altogether. Still, fashion is no argument. And one aim of the next two chapters is to show that a reading of Nietzsche as existentialist is at least possible. Or it is possible if existentialism is understood in the specific sense given in the introduction. As Schacht says, ‘Nietzsche was interested in what and  Solomon, ‘Nietzsche on Fatalism and “Free Will”’, 63.  See for instance Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, for an analytic reading of Nietzsche as a naturalist.

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how we (both as human beings and as human types—and as philosophers too) have come to be.’5 That Nietzsche was concerned about human being, and its’ genesis, is demonstrated in what follows. Further, it will be shown how such a concern is connected to this book’s specific account of existentialism. That is, Nietzsche’s pursuit of the human is linked to two other elements constituting the distinctive ‘return to human being’ developed in the introduction. The first of these was the unity of authenticity and understanding. And it will be shown how the goal of authenticity, for Nietzsche, exists in a dialectic with philosophic knowledge of the human. The second is a rejection of an independent domain of human being. This chapter shows how authentic understanding of the human ultimately discloses a fundamental unity of world and self.

1.1

Experience and Authenticity

A path therefore has been intimated. The way to defending, and giving form to, a non-humanist existentialism lies firstly in investigating how Nietzsche’s thought develops the sketch of existentialism given in the introduction. And this is done by exploring the relation between the pursuit of individual authenticity and that of universal understanding of the human. Then it is achieved by seeing how this in turn allows for a fundamental unity of human being and world. In this way a type of existentialism can overcome the humanist subject. However, before getting started it is worth adding a disclaimer. What follows is, as with the earlier characterisation of existentialism, merely one possible interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy, or elements of it. Time is not spent arguing that this is the only valid or best way of reading Nietzsche. Nor does this book aim to be exhaustive with regards to texts in his corpus or his thought more generally. Certain themes, ideas and texts will be prioritised at the expense of others for the purposes of this book’s goal. Overviews, or more systematic treatments of his thought as a whole, which try to avoid this, are available elsewhere. Of course, it is hoped that the following captures something important and distinctive about Nietzsche’s philosophy. But  Schacht, Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely, 2.

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as to the question of the real or definitive Nietzsche, any contribution here will inevitably remain only suggestive. So, starting off, this chapter needs to investigate the relationship between authenticity and understanding in Nietzsche. In this manner it is necessary to ask what, specifically, the former involves for him. While Nietzsche does not directly use the term, a concern for authenticity occurs throughout his work. This is evidenced in his admonitions that we ‘become ourselves’6; that we discover and create a unique self. As he says in ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’: In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time garner into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is…7

As such, authenticity, or the possibility of authenticity, arises from the fact of our unique situation in the world. The age and the place into which we were born, the forces and relationships, and problems, surrounding us, will never again be repeated in this way. And this allows for something significant. It creates the possibility for us to discover a collection of experiences, and a life, which is unmistakably and irreducibly our own. Yet how is this connected to a fundamental understanding of the human? It is in seeing why the vast majority fall short of this ideal that the answer becomes clearer. As Nietzsche says, ‘There exists in the world a single path along which no one can go except you’ (UTM, 129). The uniqueness of our situation sets up the possibility for us to find a distinct path and way. But this is not something simply given to us. It must be discovered and fought for. And the majority of humans are not willing to do this. Instead they flee towards common, and commonly accepted, ways of life. As Nietzsche describes it, ‘they strut around in a hundred masquerades, as youths, men, greybeards, fathers, citizens, priests, officials, merchants…’ (UTM, 154). Such, often overlapping and multiple, identities provide easy and ready-made templates for how to interpret our  See Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, ‘Why I am so clever’, 9.  Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 127. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as UTM.

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experience and to live. And this is even more insidious when these present themselves as offering something authentic and different. This can be seen in the way the culture industry sells the ideal of youth culture ‘authenticity’, and rebellion.8 It can also be observed in the various stripes of identity politics. These suggest one’s true self can be found through identifying, on the basis of gender, race, or nationality, with the pre-­ existing cause of a particular group. As such, it is clearer how one might evade authenticity. But how is it positively realised? Aside from the uniqueness of our situation Nietzsche also says that ‘Each of us bears a productive uniqueness within him as the core of his being’ (UTM, 143). In this way, the ‘raw material’ of our situation might be transfigured by this creative power to forge a unique self. How does this happen? What Nietzsche says about ‘the genuine philosopher’ here is illustrative, he: …lives ‘unphilosophically’ and ‘unwisely’, above all imprudently, and bears the burden and duty of a hundred attempts and temptations of life—he risks himself constantly, he plays the dangerous game…9

This is in contrast to the ‘Last men’10 and ‘scholars’ for Nietzsche. These types are constantly acting ‘prudently’; always calculating their advantage and avoiding risk. For this reason though they close off the possibility of genuinely new, distinctive, experience. This is because calculating one’s advantage, and the associated level of risk, necessarily involves knowing in advance what there is to be calculated. Thus any unknown experience, or one that hasn’t been mapped before by others, must be deemed imprudent. Further, the kinds of experience which might be genuinely new, or transformative, are by their very nature ‘temptations’ on the boundary of things. They are experiences removed from the established and safe patterns of ordinary life. They often involve forms of love, solitude and suffering which can cripple or destroy the person living through them.  See Adorno, ‘On the fetish character of music and the regression of listening’ for a discussion of this point regarding youth culture and individuality in connection with music. 9  Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 132. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as BG. 10  See Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 41–43. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as TSZ. 8

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Consequently, the forging of a unique self from our situation has several aspects. It involves a rejection of any pre-given models for living. It also means rejecting prudence, calculation, and instrumentalism. Instead, to mould with our creative power, from the raw material of our situation, our true self, it is necessary, first, to discover our own experiences. To do this a spirit must, as Nietzsche says, ‘become a lion’ and ‘create freedom for itself and a sacred No even to duty’ (TSZ, 55). It must through understanding, will, and action, critique and overcome past values, ideals and ways of life. It must even rebel against the things, places and people that it loves. But it must also, at the same time, seek out and be open to extreme experiences. These are types of experience beyond the usual and ordinary. This is what Nietzsche suggests when he talks about setting out on ‘perilous voyages of discovery, for North Pole expeditions of the spirit beneath desolate and dangerous skies’ (BG, 139–140). This can mean discovering depths and strains of emotion, of melancholy, danger, and intoxication, which it takes great strength not to flee from. It involves following Blake’s maxim ‘that one cannot know what is enough, until one knows what is more than enough.’11 And it means having a sensitivity, and courage, to listen honestly to what these experiences are trying to communicate to us about ourselves and the world.

1.2

Understanding and Creation

So, several things have been achieved. A more detailed picture of Nietzschean authenticity has been given. As seen, this involves the discovery of experiences which exist as one’s own; experiences in content and tone which are uniquely ours. And it has been partly indicated how this could be accomplished. Still, more needs to be said. In particular the connection between such, ostensibly, specific and individual, experiences, and a fundamental understanding of the human needs to be established. And through this it then needs to be shown how such an understanding reveals a non-humanist conception of human being.

 Blake, ‘Proverbs of Hell’, plate 9, line 8/9.

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How is this to be done? First of all it is achieved by noting that, while necessary to authenticity, simply having exceptional or boundary experiences is not sufficient. In order both to realise such experiences as truly ours and realising a truly unique self, such initial experience must be subject to a process of interpretation. As already intimated, the unique experience, as opposed to just the exceptional experience, must be interpreted by us. The individual’s attempt to actively, and simultaneously, capture and give meaning to a situation or experience is essential to its’ uniqueness. And this is done by the creative, formative, power mentioned earlier. The interpretation, both an act of creation and understanding, is what allows experience to transcend the habitual and common understandings of it which threaten even exceptional experience. It is this which allows it to become genuinely ours. Conversely, a potentially unique experience, like that of grief, slips into being commonplace in the absence of this process. In the absence of creative and understanding interpretation grief, for example, loses its’ disturbing quality, and is coloured, then absorbed, by the familiar. This also has further consequences. It follows from this idea that our ‘productive uniqueness’, and its process of interpretation, must transcend specific experiences. In other words, interpretation by its nature attempts to form connections between different types and moments of experience. It does this rather than just interpreting individual incidents or situations in isolation. It is then through such connections, and their meanings, that each new experience can be understood. This is why, for Nietzsche, the authentic philosopher does not just seek new and exceptional experiences. She or he should as well ‘desire to experience something himself and to feel evolving within him a coherent living complex of experiences of his own.’12 That is, the authentic philosopher, or any authentic individual, should strive to develop first an interrelated complex of meaningful experiences. This can then evolve into a holistic narrative, and a unifying perspective, which gives meaning to such experience, and to the world as a whole. In this way the true self is found, and created, precisely in and as this unique, and creative, overall interpretation of one’s existence.

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 Nietzsche, Philosophy in the Tragic age of the Greeks, 37 (own emphasis).

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This chapter is thus now in a position to address the two previous questions. Namely, it is able to address the connection between fundamental understanding of the human and authenticity. And it is also in a position to show how such understanding allows for a distinct, non-­ humanist, existentialist, view of human being. How is this so? The answer can be found by saying more about how this unique overall perspective on the world, which is ours, and which is the culmination of authenticity, comes about. And for this we need to say more again about the character of interpretation. As Nietzsche states regarding authentic philosophers ‘Their “knowing” is creating’ (BG, 143). So too is this the case with synthesising interpretation of experience. It is creative. Even in its formative stages it is a creative process by which different elements are brought together, both immanently in the experience and afterwards. And understanding and contemplation, as well as engagement with works of art and philosophy, is central to this. As Nietzsche remarks about ‘every great philosophy’, it: …as a whole always says only: this is the picture of all life, and learn from it the meaning of your own life. And the reverse: only read your own life and comprehend from it the hieroglyphics of universal life. (UTM, 141–142)

In other words, to form the links between and within our experience we need to consider how others have done so. We can create meaning from out of our experiences, by trying to grasp how others have created unifying narratives and perspectives on their lives and experience. It is by allowing for a continual dialogue, and interpenetration, between these perspectives and our own experience that the process of creative interpretation and development can take place. And it is by doing this that we eventually arrive at our own unique, authentic, perspective on the world. As such, the first general question has been answered. If authenticity requires creative interpretation of experience, and this process requires an attempt to understand other’s unifying narratives, then authenticity requires understanding. That is, continuing from the introduction, the pursuit of authenticity must exist in a dialectic with the understanding of different fundamental perspectives on the nature of human existence. Yet what about the second question? How does this lead to a non-humanist

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view of human being? It does so in so far as this link between understanding of other perspectives and authenticity implies something else about the latter. What this is can be shown, to begin with, if the nature of these other perspectives is considered more closely. Such reflection reveals that their authenticity, their unique view, is expressed in great defining works. Consider, for example, Marx’s Capital, Picasso’s Guernica or Kerouac’s On the Road. Reflection, and engagement with these, also reveals that such works do not merely reflect a pre-existing, worked out perspective. Rather such works, in their creation, develop and give birth to a unique perspective. It is in its expression and the attempt to express and communicate the unifying perspective that this perspective becomes truly unified and unique. From this then follows something important regarding authenticity. Namely, the unifying perspective creative interpretation forms from experience, cannot exist ‘internally’ or in subjective isolation. If we want to genuinely forge a unique perspective we must seek to express it, and give concrete expression to it in the world. Or, more exactly, we must develop this viewpoint in the process of, and in dialogue with, the effort to express it to others. This idea is best articulated at the very beginning of Zarathustra. There the protagonist says: Great star! What would your happiness be, if you had not those for whom you shine! … we waited for you every morning, took from you your superfluity and blessed you for it. Behold! I am weary of my wisdom, like a bee that has gathered too much honey; I need hands outstretched to take it. (TSZ, 39)

In other words, if we want to be authentic we must, like the sun, strive to create beyond ourselves. We must discover our true individuality precisely in the effort to communicate our perspective to others, and in making a concrete impact on the world beyond our self. Further, this can be done in numerous ways. As Pericles tell the Athenians, ‘Our daring has forced a path to every land and sea, erecting timeless memorials to itself

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everywhere.’13 In great actions and works we simultaneously form and impose our unique perspective on the world. This might be accomplished, for example, in the struggle to create significant works of art or philosophy. Or it might be realised in the efforts of a great teacher. All that matters is that this action and work represents the genuine culmination of our perspective on human existence. In this way our perspective takes part in the interplay of understanding, experience, and creation which allows other new perspectives to develop and express themselves in turn. Thus, our self-creation becomes procreation. We are united with the purpose of all nature in which ‘All creatures hitherto have created something beyond themselves’ (TSZ, 41). But how is this connected to humanism? How does the fact that an authentic perspective can only ultimately be found through the process of genuine creation show that there is no distinct, humanist, domain of the subject? It does so because of what this process reveals, or rather what it is. As Nietzsche says, …there are moments and as it were bright sparks of the fire of love in whose light we cease to understand the word ‘I’, there lies something beyond our being which at these moments moves across into it, and we are thus possessed of a heartfelt longing for bridges between here and there. (UTM, 161)

In the greatest moments of creation and authenticity we find also the highest unity with the purpose and meaning of nature. This is, as Nietzsche puts it, ‘the will to power, the unexhausted, procreating life-­ will’ (TSZ, 137). This is the will, constituting all organic life, not to self-­ preservation and survival. Rather this is the will of life to express itself, to impose itself on the world, in going beyond itself through the creation of new forms. Moreover, this gets us beyond the humanist subject. This is because in such moments I realise that ‘I have to be struggle and becoming’ (TSZ, 138). It is not that I possess this will-to-power as an aspect or property of  Quoted by Nietzsche in On the Genealogy of Morality, 23. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as GM. 13

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myself. Nor is it that I simply and abstractly understand this will as a possible concept related to creation. It is that in such moments I am this process of creation; I am this will-to-power. As Nietzsche says, ‘This world is the will to power—and nothing besides! And you yourselves too are this will to power—and nothing besides.’14 As such, in this way we find, in finding ourselves, a fundamental unity between self and world. We find ourselves as nothing other than this creative, self-expressing will-to-­ power that defines all nature. We discover that ‘there is no “being” behind the deed’, that there is no present subject; that ‘the doing is everything’ (GM, 26).

2

Authenticity and Will-to-Power

Where is this chapter left, however, in terms of its overall aims? It was said at the outset that substance would be given here to the sketch of a non-­ humanist existentialism outlined in the introduction. This would be done by exploring the relationship between authenticity and understanding. It would then be achieved by seeing how this relation could lead to a unity of world and self. And this unity, in turn, would show how existentialism could escape the humanist subject. It would also through this escape intimate the way toward an alternative non-humanist view of the human. So in this way the preceding has looked at the idea of authenticity in Nietzsche’s thought. This is the project the goal of which is to say, ‘It was myself which I sought and explored.’15 It was found that to pursue authenticity is to develop a unique unifying perspective on, and interpretation of, life. And, rather than being an isolated, subjective affair, that this involved both engagement with, and understanding of, the unique authentic perspectives of others. Finally, this point itself disclosed a connection to the will-to-power. This is because such understanding, and authenticity, is necessarily creative. In order to realise our own unique perspective we had to, like other  Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 39. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as WLN. 15  Attributed by Nietzsche to Heraclitus in ‘Notebooks of the early 1870’s’, from Philosophy and Truth, 64. 14

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authentic individuals, create something ‘beyond ourselves’. We had to discover ourselves, and the nature of life, in the process of creating something which imposed a meaning and a value on the world. And this process, in degrees, opened up an understanding that ‘life is will to power’ (WLN, 96). It allowed, in the process of this individual creation, an understanding of ourselves as will-to-power. That is, it allowed for awareness that the fundamental creative interpretation of life which we were striving toward is what we are. In the pursuit of authenticity then something is revealed. Namely, that this process of creation was simply a more conscious, higher, form of the creative interpretation present in all our existence. In more explicit moments of creation we are able to uncover the creative force present in all that interpretative unification of experience which generates our self. It is for this reason that we grasp ourselves in such moments as the will-to-power, ‘and nothing besides’ (WLN, 39). As such, it is possible to see the unity between understanding and authenticity. It is also possible to see the unity between authenticity, understanding, and what Nietzsche calls ‘Homo natura’ (WLN, 86),16 human being as nature. This is through the will-to-power. This is the case since the pursuit of authenticity allows, in creation, for understanding of the will-to-power. But this understanding, as said, is not an abstract intellectual one. It is not that we simply gain conceptual awareness of a force pre-existing us, of which we are a particular instantiation. It is rather that our understanding through and in creation is the will-to-power. We are will-to-power but will to power is us, is our creation of a unique self. If the will-to-power is the idea that life is ‘that which must overcome itself again and again’ (TSZ, 138) then the will-to-power just is its individual expressions and effects in the world, and nothing else. Or put another way, will-to-power cannot be understood in terms of any present or definitive ‘is’ which can be objectively described. It can only be grasped through and in the process of original creation manifesting it. In this way the will-to-power is encapsulated in the image of daybreak. This is the idea that ‘that which has always been’,17 is at the same time that force of

 ‘Homo natura’ (Man as nature). ‘The will to power.’  Heidegger, What is called thinking, 65.

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perpetual fecundity that exists as the potentiality for what has ‘not yet been’. Here is the paradox of eternally recurring new possibility. Further, we can now also see the link to humanism. As Nietzsche describes it, the common view of human being and action, which is effectively the humanist view, says that there is a ‘Subject, object, a doer for every doing, the doing separated from what does it’ (WLN, 246). This represents, as he says in a later note, ‘our inventing a subject which was made responsible for something having happened’ (WLN, 251). Yet it is apparent how the Nietzschean existentialism outlined, and its concomitant view of human being, overcomes this. This is because the pursuit of authenticity, in Nietzsche’s thought, reveals an existentialist will-to-­ power. That is, the pursuit of a unique self revealed at the same time a unity of ourselves with nature as a perpetual creative flow. This is the revelation of ourselves as united with ‘the great tide’ (TSZ, 41) of nature. But then authentic creation also discloses that this is all we are. It discloses that we, and all life, exist only as form imposing creative activity, as ‘doing’. If all we are is will-to-power, as creation, then there is no ‘is’ which can be ascribed to the human being, and no doer behind the deed. Rather we exist as the doing, in the pursuit and activity of realising our unique authentic perspective. And in this sense a Nietzschean existentialism escapes the independent, present subject of humanism.

2.1

The Problem of Human Being as Will-to-Power

So, an existentialist reading of Nietzsche, and of the will-to-power, is possible which is non-humanist. And this has thus given to our sketch in the introduction some justification and concrete form. Yet if an understanding of Nietzschean existentialism avoids humanism by positing the unity of human being and the creative force of will-to-power several questions remain. Namely, if ‘this world is will-to-power’, or at least organic life is, and we too ‘are this will to power—and nothing besides’ (WLN, 39), how do we maintain a distinct meaning for the human? Doesn’t this chapter risk avoiding humanism at the cost of eliding the distinction between the human and other organic life entirely? Further, this is especially pressing given the importance afforded both to authenticity and a

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related understanding of human being here. In this way, why it is that the human possesses the potential for such authenticity or inauthenticity, in a way that no other creature does, must be accounted for. So too must the unique mode of human creation. In short, this chapter must explain how the human is able to create, and have a creative interpretation of life, for instance through philosophy and art, in a way distinct from other animals. Relatedly, it is necessary to address why we are for the most part oblivious to all this. If all we are is will-to-power, as unique creative expression, why does this seem so alien to our ordinary self-understanding? Why is it instead that ‘we distinguish ourselves, the doers, from the doing, and make use of this schema everywhere’ (WLN, 251)? As such, it is necessary also to ask why the humanist view of human being has come to predominate. It is necessary to ask why the view that there is a present subject behind, and separate from, activity is our primary mode of self-understanding. And, further, it must be explained why this is something which requires a special existential project and effort to overcome. How can this be accomplished? It is to address both sets of questions that the remainder of the current, and the following, chapter explores Nietzsche’s account of the genesis and genealogy of the human being. As Schacht says, this is the story of ‘the historical transformation of our initial merely natural existence into our present humanity.’18 And this allows this book to address the preceding questions. This is because, first, with an account of how the human emerges from the more basic will-to-power of the organic an answer to a problem stemming from the rejection of humanism is given. That is, with this is explained something important. Namely, explained is how there can be no distinct present subject, how we are nothing other than will-to-power, yet how a distinct meaning for the human can be maintained. Specifically, this is done through the concept of perversion. If it can be shown how a perversion of a basic animal will-to-power is what constitutes the human being then humanism can be rejected without rejecting a concern for the human. In this way a type of non-humanist, Nietzschean, existentialism can be elaborated.  Schacht, Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely, 206.

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This is done, further, by looking at the account of ‘bad conscience’ in the second essay of The Genealogy. This process, born out of a perversion of the will-to-power, allows for a capacity, uniquely constitutive of human beings, to create values and systems of value. And this opens up the distinctly human possibility for authenticity and inauthenticity. This is discussed in Chap. 3 in connection with slave ressentiment in The Genealogy’s first essay. Here this book departs from many readings of this text. These suggest as Metzger says, paraphrasing, that, ‘what Nietzsche describes in the Second Essay as the bad conscience is, in its essence, another manifestation of ressentiment.’19 Rather, it is argued these are two distinct processes. The slave revolt in values is made possible by bad conscience, but it is not necessary to it, nor is it, like the latter, necessarily constitutive of the human being. Instead, slave ressentiment can be understood as a contingent secondary perversion of the primary constituting perversion of the will-to-power. Or, more precisely, the slave revolt in values can be seen as the perversion of an original authentic relation to value creation and will-to-power allowed for by bad conscience. This will then permit this book to address the final two questions here. It will show why and how human beings have been able to evade the fact that they just are an expression of creative will-to-­ power and nothing else. In sum, it shows how the present subject of humanism was ‘invented’ (WLN, 251). It also shows why this inauthentic, and self-deceiving, relationship to the self has been able to hold such sway over human beings.

 Metzger, ‘How deep are the roots of nihilism’, in Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, 135. We see this view of bad-conscience, ressentiment, and the unity of the two essays more generally in a number of commentators. For instance, Leiter, 135, argues that the different essays represent progressively ‘deeper’ levels of ressentiment. And most take Nietzsche’s critique of morality to be of a single unified phenomenon incorporating both bad conscience and the slave revolt. In this respect Deleuze in Nietzsche and Philosophy, is also symptomatic. He argues, in relation to bad conscience, that ‘Being interiorised, being turned back against itself-this is the way in which active force becomes truly reactive’, 119. Thus he conflates the ‘interiorisation’ of bad conscience with the re-active process of the slave revolt. And again, when Ridley, 41, says that ‘The slave’s instincts have all been turned inward, repressed’, he again runs together internalisation, which give rise to bad conscience, with the slave and his ressentiment against the nobles. 19

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 rigins of Bad Conscience: The State O of Nature

So, in order to address the questions raised, it is necessary to begin with ‘bad conscience’. To see how a non-humanist Nietzschean existentialism can be developed, and avoids the objection that it reduces human being to world, this chapter must first look at this process. Specifically, it must show how the emergence of bad conscience represents a ‘primary perversion’ of initial will-to-power, allowing for the human being’s unique constituting capacity to create values. How is this done? To start it can be observed that for Nietzsche like Freud and Rousseau, it was integration into organised, non-familial, social structures which helped distinguish the human from the animal.20 That is, as Maurice Cranston has noted, paraphrasing Rousseau, for the human ‘it is only by coming into a political society that he becomes an intelligent being and a man.’21,22 This view is likewise mirrored in The Genealogy. There Nietzsche talks about the human prior to its existence in the early state as a ‘semi-animal’. He describes ‘that change whereby he finally found himself imprisoned within the confines of society and peace’ as ‘the most fundamental of all changes he experienced’ (GM, 56). Yet, what is the connection to bad conscience? Why would subjection to a social existence transcending the family clan create some new power and process which is constitutive of the human? And how can this process be understood as a perversion of will-to-power? It is to address these questions that an examination is next made of the nature of human existence prior to its confinement within this structure. What then was this initial state? Following Freud, it can be imagined that it was one of ‘instinctual freedom’, a situation for the human of

 Perhaps the most significant aspect of ‘organised social structures’ was the existence of an abstract law regulating behaviour between human beings outside the bonds of genetics, that is, outside the family or clan. As such, the abstract demand to ‘love thy neighbour’, can be seen, as Freud observes, as the defining command of civilization. 21  Cranston, ‘Introduction’, in Rousseau, The Social Contract, 28. 22  See also Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall, 41–42. 20

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‘knowing no restrictions of instinct.’23 This state was one of the unrestrained expression of desire, especially where this concerned other human beings. And it is this last point, which led Freud to also conclude, along with others in the history of philosophy, that in the state of nature ‘man is a wolf to man’ (CD, 111).24 In brief, it led him to conclude that there our freedom of instinct will lead us to attack and abuse other human beings. But why would instinctual freedom necessarily lead to such a state of social antagonism? One obvious answer would be that humans were driven to it by their ‘natural’ instincts of self-interest and preservation. That is, as Hobbes argues in Leviathan,25 in a view partially shared by Rousseau, it is our desire for personal gain and safety which causes us to wage war against fellow humans. In the pre-political situation we would pursue aggression against others to defend ourselves and what we have from attack, and then to actively seize what we, or our clan, lack.26 Nietzsche however has a more disturbing explanation for this state of affairs. This is one that allows for an understanding of human integration into the state as perverse. For him, our rapaciousness towards other humans in the state of nature is not the contingent by-product of scarcity and insecurity. Rather it is the expression of a fundamental instinct of aggression within nature itself. And for Nietzsche this stems from an early stage and expression of will-to-power. As he says, criticising the notion of life as self-interested adaptation, ‘“adaptation” … is a second-rate activity, just a re-activity, indeed, life itself has been defined as an increasingly efficient adaptation to external circumstances (Herbert Spencer)’ (GM, 52). This is to interpret life in terms of passivity. As he goes on to say, …this is to misunderstand the essence of life, its will to power, we overlook the prime importance that the spontaneous, aggressive, expansive, re-­ interpreting, re-directing and formative forces have, which “adaptation” follows only when they have had their effect. (GM, 52)  Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XXI, 115. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as CD. 24  ‘Homo homini lupus’, ‘Man is a wolf to man.’ Derived from Plautus, Asinaria II, iv, 88. 25  Hobbes, Leviathan, Part I: ‘Of man’. 26  See also Rousseau, The Social Contract, 50: ‘Man’s first law is to watch over his own preservation; his first care he owes to himself.’ 23

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For Nietzsche, then, aggression in the state of nature was primary. It could not have been the adaptive or evolutionary consequence of an underlying instinct of self-preservation. On the contrary, rather, life itself is inherently ‘aggressive’, seeking on an essential level to impose itself on the world, to ‘leave its mark’, by conquering, and transforming, other resisting forces. As discussed earlier, and as will be seen, the will-to-power is also fundamentally creative, dynamic, and form giving. It is in this respect different from the independent ‘aggressive’ instinct that is found in the later Freud. Yet, at least in the early manifestations of will-to-power, in the pre-political life of the human, as with all animals, its primary expression is still violence and aggression. In any case, it is the will-to-power’s nature which explains why prior to the state ‘man is a wolf to man’. It also explains what it is then which might be perverted by the state. For, expressed initially in the human, this will-to-power manifests itself in ‘Animosity, cruelty, the pleasure of pursuing, raiding, changing and destroying…’ (GM, 57). We find an even more explicit expression of this idea in Freud. As he says, this aggression manifests in the desire in relation to one’s neighbour ‘…to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him’ (CD, 111). And it is this which explains more precisely the nature of human existence in the pre-­ political state. How though is this related to the idea of perversity? If the human in the state of nature is like this then how is such a creature perverted by its transition to life outside of that? How is ‘the wild, free, roving man’ (GM, 57) perverted by its movement to life inside the state? It is to answer these questions that a further process must be examined. This chapter must now explore the process by which this ‘most fundamental of all changes’ for human beings first took place. For, if it cannot be shown how, on Nietzsche’s account, a transition to the state occurred, a perverse view of the human here is not tenable. Without explaining how, given his view of the state of nature, this change was possible my account of this development as ‘perverting’ cannot progress. It is to explore this point then that the standard view of this transition will first be examined.

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 rigins of Bad Conscience: Transition O to the State

To start, it can be observed that on the standard view an account of this transition is non-problematic. For this view, already touched on, is based on the assumption that our primary instinct is one of self-interest and preservation. And this does not present any intractable difficulties regarding the state’s origins. If one believes, following Hobbes, that social antagonism in the state of nature is merely the result of conflictual self-­ interest then it is possible that self-interest may also dictate the state’s creation. How so? Because if human beings are fundamentally driven by self-interest, it follows that this may also lead them to sacrifice freedom of instinct for protection from others. Hence we have the idea of a ‘social contract’. This is as Nietzsche says, the ‘fantasy’ in relation to the state ‘which has it begin with a “contract”’ (GM, 58). In short, we have a situation where the state, a set-up where we submit to a law transcending immediate self-interest, emerges out of an instinct of enlightened self-interest. The situation though is different if the primary instinct is not self-­ interest but will-to-power. If the starting point is that, as Freud had it for his own theory of instincts, ‘the inclination to aggression is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition’ (CD, 122)27 then the transition to the state is not so straightforward. For the will to dominate and overcome in this way seems fundamentally incompatible with it. Unlike self-­interest which can be continued within the state, the external, uninhibited, expression of aggression seems necessarily rendered impossible there. And this draws attention to two important points. Firstly, if the state of nature is defined by will-to-power then this implies something more interesting about what happens to human being upon entering the state. Denied external expression altogether, but still inescapable, something strange and significant must happen to their will-to-power in the state. Secondly, the process by which this movement to organised social life could happen  Note that Nietzsche and Freud held different views on why this aggressive instinct independent of survival existed. For Nietzsche this was an expression of the will-to-power, whereas for the later Freud it was an externalisation of the ‘Death drive’. 27

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at all becomes opaque. This is because if nature is circumscribed by an aggressive will-to-power, then the question of how such a fundamental instinct could ever contrive a situation whereby, with the state, it wilfully denied itself is raised. It is this second point that will be addressed first. This will in turn help shed light on what happens to the will-to-power when confined in the early state. Starting off then, it can be noted that Nietzsche’s solution to this problem on one level mirrors that adopted by social contract theorists. This is since, just as for them, it was an enlightened form of self-interest that overcame conflictual self-interest, likewise for Nietzsche it is a higher quantity of power-will that instigates its own overcoming. And this manifests itself first of all, controversially, in what he calls ‘the blond beasts’ (GM, 58). For, as he says, the state originated initially in ‘…some pack of blond beasts of prey, a conqueror and master race, which, organised on a war footing, and with the power to organise, unscrupulously lays its dreadful paws on a populace’ (Ibid.). In other words, it was groups of humans invested with great will-to-power who were responsible for the early state. It was humans with an exceptional ability to mould to their will fellow humans which led to the outward restriction of the will-to-­ power in others. And it is Nietzsche’s description of the blonde beasts in this way then which begins to explain how he can account for the state’s origins. However, more must be said about the blonde beasts if this process is to be properly understood. For some commentators have argued, like Owen, that here ‘Nietzsche has boxed himself into something of a corner.’28 That is, they question how the ‘beasts of prey’ could have imposed organisation on other human beings without themselves having been subject to the internalisation and organising force of the state they are supposed to explain. And it is to address these concerns that we must now look more closely at the nature of the former’s ‘higher’ will-to-power. This is because in the case of the will-to-power, as Metzger points out ‘the active force Nietzsche is describing is form giving and artistic, not merely violent.’29 In other words, contra Janaway for whom we have ‘a  Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, 104.  Metzger, ‘How deep are the roots of nihilism’, 138.

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f­undamental need to inflict cruelty’,30 the will-to-power is not reducible to the desire to inflict external violence on another. Rather, in higher forms its’ ‘violence’ is more fundamental, subtle and creative than simple destruction. This is significant because it offers a key to understanding how the higher will-to-power of the blonde beasts was able to create the state. For as Nietzsche says, ‘the oldest “state” emerged as a terrible tyranny, as a repressive and ruthless machinery, and continued working until the raw material of people and semi-animals had been finally not just kneaded and made compliant, but shaped’ (GM, 58). In other words, whilst physical violence was part of what was imposed, there was a more fundamental ‘violence’ at work. This involved not merely killing or enslaving the subject populations but unconsciously trying to organise and transform them. And this is a point again made clear in Nietzsche’s description of the blonde beast’s activity. This is because, as he says, ‘What they do is to create and imprint forms instinctively, they are the most involuntary, unconscious artists there are:— where they appear, soon something new arises’ (GM, 58–59). In this way, it can be seen how the state is formed by the higher will-to-power of the blonde beasts. That is, if the power-will is ‘artistic’ in its violence, aiming to imprint organisation on unformed matter, then its higher expressions could aim at the moulding of the other that occurs with the state. If these ‘beasts’ sought to inflict upon humans ‘the pressure of their hammer blows and artists’ violence’ (GM, 58), then what more brutal way would there be than to force restrictions on their essential instincts? What better expression of their will-to-power would there be than this attempted transformation of the others essential conditions of existence? Consequently, in this way a ‘higher’ mode of violence could give rise to the state. At the same time concerns raised regarding Nietzsche’s account of the state’s origins have been resolved. By exploring the blonde beast’s greater power-will it has been shown how the will-to-power could create something which seemed to restrict that very instinct. How is this? If the aggression of will-to-power is ultimately the desire to mould others then this power could find highest expression in the radical alteration of other human’s conditions of existence. It could find greatest satisfaction 30

 Janaway, Beyond Selflessness, 124.

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in the forcible suspension in the human of ‘all the old instincts on which, up till then, his strength, pleasure and formidableness had been based’ (GM, 57). Thus it is the power-will’s own nature which explains how it can turn against itself. For the will-to-power’s striving to overcome resistance paradoxically leads it to overcome and transform its own unrestrained expression that exists in the state of nature. And this addresses the previous question. That is, this point explains how a transition to the state based on the premise of will-to-power is possible. It also explains how an account of human phylogenesis based on perversion can be meaningfully continued. However, if the state’s inception from the will-to-power is now clear it is necessary to look at the other key, following, question for this part of the discussion.31 Namely, this is the issue of how the human animal is thus perverted by its transition to organised society. For it was said that by looking at human pre-political existence, then the process of movement away from this, that the nature of such a change as perverting could be better understood. This was linked to the general concerns outlined earlier. Because it was necessary to understand this process in order see how the human’s confinement in the state might create a primary perversion constituting the human. This could then help with the broad aim of the chapter. That is, it could show how with this a Nietzschean existentialism could escape humanism while still maintaining a distinct meaning for the human. It has then been seen how, with the creation of the state, something potentially perverse was inflicted on the previously ‘free’ animals of the pre-political state. Further, it has been shown how this is linked to the nature of the will-to-power itself. For as witnessed by the actions of the blonde beasts, in attempting to mould subject populations the power-­ will turns against and transforms itself. In short, it perversely turns against its own unrestrained expression existing in the state of nature. Yet the effect of this perverse effort by these ‘artists of violence’ (GM, 59) has not yet been discussed. The impact of this act on its victims, and how their  Note criticisms of the ‘blonde beast’ narrative by Metzger. He claims that Nietzsche’s argument is circular because the blonde beasts required ‘organisation’ in order to organise others. Note also, Freud’s explanation for the origins of the state linked to patricide, in the primal horde, see ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, 131–132. 31

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previously unrestrained will-to-power was affected, has still to be explored. It is to this question then, that this chapter now turns. In doing this it will be seen how the meaning of the human as a perversion of will-to-power will become clearer.

4

Effect of the State: Internalisation

But what was that effect? What was the effect for the human animal of ‘that change whereby he finally found himself imprisoned within the confines of society and peace’ (GM, 56); its old instincts restricted? The first thing to note would be that the principal effect here was not the re-­ direction of these instincts against the creators of the state. This is because, as Nietzsche argues, the extremity of their actions was simply too momentous to allow for this. That is, since ‘the alteration was not gradual and voluntary … but was a breach, a leap, a compulsion, an inescapable fate that nothing could ward off…’ then it ‘occasioned no struggle, not even any ressentiment’ (GM, 58). And this meant no hatred was possible. For hate requires some understanding of what the other did. Yet this action is so unprecedented and ‘other’, that it and its perpetrators cannot be comprehended, and thus not hated. However, whilst the instincts of the human being were thereby not turned into externally directed hatred, at the same time, as Nietzsche observes, ‘the old instincts had not suddenly ceased to make their demands!’ (GM, 57). In other words, the aggressive instincts did not vanish either. This would occur only if aggression was a function of scarcity or insecurity in the state of nature and hence could be eliminated with the latter. But this would make no difference if it was, as for Nietzsche, the expression of a fundamental drive. So then, what did happen to these instincts which now could no longer express themselves externally, in the old way? Nietzsche’s answer is both radical and simple.32 As he says, ‘Those terrible bulwarks with which state organisations protected themselves against the old instincts of freedom … had the result that all those instincts of the wild, free, roving man were turned backwards, against man himself’ (GM, 57). In other words, 32

 See also Freud, ‘Civilization and its Discontents’, 123.

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as Freud’s related account puts it, deprived of external expression, ‘His aggressiveness is introjected, internalised; it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from’ (CD, 123). And it is this perverse process, turning to a central issue of this chapter, which is responsible for the creation of ‘bad conscience’. In short, it is what Nietzsche calls ‘the internalisation of man’ (GM, 57), which represents the primary perversion responsible for constituting the human’s distinctive being. Further, such a process will help answer one of this chapter’s core questions. Namely, it will help address the problem of how we can be nothing other than will-to-power yet still possess a meaning distinct from the rest of organic life. For there could be a distinct human being, without positing any substance beyond the natural, if it existed as the kind of perverse relation to will-to-power found with internalisation. That is, there could be a non-humanist meaning for the human as this perverse turning against itself of will-to-power. To realise this properly, though, several more steps are needed. First, it must be asked why, what Nietzsche calls, ‘bad conscience’, and this perversion, is fundamentally constitutive of the human as fully human. And second it is necessary to ask how exactly this constituting phenomenon emerges from the process of internalisation. It will then be possible to understand more fully the human as constituted by the perversion of will-to-power. As such, this is done firstly by suggesting that bad conscience, which emerges from perversion, is constitutive of our being because of value. That is, conscience is significant because it is bound up with the human’s distinct capacity to create values. Although this link becomes clearer in what follows, it is thus the question of how internalisation is connected to this which is key. And this link can be understood in turn by recalling the nature of the instinct to be introjected. For will-to-power is above all, as Nietzsche says, ‘aggressive, expansive, re-interpreting, re-directing and formative’ (GM, 52). In short, it is the creative drive of the organism to exist in and by transforming the world around it. Further it does so, as witnessed with the blonde beasts, through destruction and negation. It exists through the power of ‘Animosity, cruelty, the pleasure of pursuing, raiding, changing and destroying…’ (GM, 57). In other words, the organism finds its existence, and creates itself, precisely in the forcible destruction of what existed before. And this was exactly what was seen

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‘on a grand scale in those artists of violence and organisers’ (GM, 59). For their creation of the state was essentially the violent destruction of the old ways of life, and the violent suppression of the subject people’s existing instincts. So if the will-to-power is as described, then turned inward it must also seek to impose itself on existence, and transform its object, through a negating destruction. But what precisely is it imposing this negation on? Who or what were the humans for whom this aggressive manifestation of will-to-power was internalised? This has been touched on. But it is necessary to address this question more precisely to explain how value creation emerges with internalisation. It is also necessary to do this to show how the creation of values is constitutive of the human’s distinct meaning. And this is addressed first by looking at Nietzsche’s comments on the topic. For he refers to the pre-societal humans as: ‘semi-animals, happily adapted to the wilderness, war, the wandering life and adventure’ (GM, 56). As already discussed, their lives then are ones of instinctual freedom, based in part on a nomadic way of life. But they are also not simply ‘animals’ either. Instead they are described as ‘semi-animals’. What does this mean? The Genealogy is frustratingly opaque on this point. Still it can be imagined that like all higher animals these ‘semi-animals’ had developed a level of consciousness. They were also social, existing in family clans and groups, and possessing intelligence. Yet they were able to develop this consciousness, forging a proto-self, the raw material for a coherent self, through the radical extension of something certain animals possess in rudimentary form as well. Namely, they were able to become semi-­ animals, rather than just animals, through the extension of memory. And this was accomplished, in turn, by similar methods to those by which an animal might be trained. As Nietzsche says, A thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory. When man decided he had to make a memory for himself, it never happened without blood, torments and sacrifices: the most horrifying sacrifices and forfeits (the sacrifice of the first born belongs here), the most disgusting mutilations. (GM, 38)

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In other words, the pre-societal humans developed an expanded memory through the brutal rituals and customs of proto-human clans. And it was this that separated the ‘semi-animal’ human from the actual ‘animal.’ That is, the desire and ability to create painful rituals, within the pre-­ societal clan, as a consequence of a more developed will-to-power amongst them, allowed for an expanded memory. This was different only in extent, rather than kind, to animal memory, but it was significant. For it gave, with the imprinting of certain past experiences in consciousness, an embryonic self. In short, this process created the raw material for that transformation which, as will be shown, qualitatively creates and distinguishes the human.

4.1

Effect of the State: Negation and Conscience

Consequently, it is now possible to better explain the process of internalisation. The link with the constituting power of value creation can be explained through this also. For the will-to-power which is internalised, as mentioned, manifests at this stage as an attempt at a negating destruction. And it is redirected against the proto-self of the pre-societal human. Yet it should also be apparent that in the case of this consciousness now stretched back over time it cannot straightforwardly, or in a real way, do this. It cannot express itself on this proto-self in terms of a physical negation or destruction. This is the case because such a ‘self ’ is not a physical object. Therefore, since it cannot enforce a physical negation in this case, it creates a psychic one. And this psychic negation, the power-will’s imaginative destruction applied to the proto-self, takes the form of imagined self-negation. What this means is that it takes the form of a sense of absence or lack in relation to past consciousness. As Nietzsche says, explaining, ‘this artist’s cruelty, this desire to give form to oneself as a piece of difficult, resisting, suffering matter…’ means ‘…to brand it with a will, a critique, a contradiction, a contempt, a “no”’ (GM, 59). In other words, the turning of the negating power-will against the ‘whole animal old self ’ (Ibid.), meant the birth of an imaginative ‘no’. This attack on consciousness means the birth of negativity and of a self, from a sense that what existed

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as consciousness was somehow inadequate or lacking. As such, this introduction of a negation implied the creation of ‘a soul voluntarily split within itself ’ (Ibid.). The internalisation of will-to-power meant an essential division, on the ground of our relation to past experience, between what is and a sense now of what is not. It meant the creation from an established past, and connection to memory, of the awareness of an imaginative future.

4.2

Effect of the State: Concrete Value Creation

Our previous questions have then in part been answered. It is now apparent how the internalisation of will-to-power as a transformative negating force leads to bad conscience and value creation. This is because directed ‘inwards’ this negating power introduces an imaginary ‘no’ within the raw material of consciousness given by memory. Hence it opens up an essential division between what we are and what we might be. Or, more precisely, it creates the self, an awareness of what we are, in the very contrast with awareness of what we are not. And this is ‘conscience’. With this division between a negative, non-present, ‘ideal’ self and the sense of an existing one, we thus have that persecuted feeling of inadequacy before an ideal. That is, we have the phenomenon, if defined in Freudian terms, of ‘The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is subjected to it’ (CD, 123).33 It can also now be seen with this see how bad conscience is bound up with the human being’s distinctive capacity to create values. For whether we agree with Freud’s formulation, it is clear that conscience is irrevocably tied to the imagining of, and anxiety before, a value beyond what is given. And it is this imaginative capacity, this creative awareness of our self-surpassing toward the future, which is uniquely human. It is this which is the human. That said, understanding on this point is still incomplete. For this chapter has been dealing with the emergence of bad conscience from internalisation in only its most embryonic and abstract form. It has only dealt with the first ‘spark’ of conscience as it were. As 33

 See also Bergson, The two sources of Morality and Religion, 9.

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such, in order to understand this process more completely this chapter must look at how conscience and value creation develops fully from the original ‘no’. In short, this chapter must look at how internalisation leads to a more concrete and specific kind of ideal. How is this done? First by noting that for Nietzsche, ‘The whole inner world, originally stretched thinly as though between two layers of skin, was expanded and extended … in proportion to the degree that the external discharge of man’s instincts was obstructed’ (GM, 57). In other words, our imaginative value creating world-relation grew to the extent that internalisation was increased. And although Nietzsche is not entirely clear on how this process occurs an argument can be constructed. That is, by following the logic from earlier it is possible to construct an answer. For with conscience in its embryonic state, it was seen that internalised will-to-power had created a negation within consciousness. It had done this by causing a sense of deficiency with regards to what was already given, through memory, in consciousness. At first though such anxiety, it can be imagined, is vague and objectless. Thus angst looks for an object. And it latches onto the fact that despite the prohibitions on external expression of aggression the intention to express it still exists in consciousness. In other words, the basis for the feeling of inadequacy becomes a ‘moral’ sense that the intentions and nature of the self is flawed. The intentions of the self are flawed since they exist in contradiction with what is demanded by external authorities. Further, this is the basis of the feeling that, as Freud puts it, ‘even when a person has not actually done the bad thing but has only recognised in himself an intention to do it, he may regard himself as guilty’ (CD, 124). Therefore, what our initially objectless bad conscience latches onto is that the self still wants to express the power-will externally.34 The self still wants to do something in contradiction to what seems demanded. And this allows one to see how from the initial abstract negation a concrete ideal and conscience develop. In short, it can be seen how the internalised will-to-power now creates the specific outline of our capacity for value  See Janaway, chapter 8: he tries identifying when a distinctive sense of guilt takes place. That is, guilt is held to differ from bad conscience in so far as it represents a universal sense of wrong-doing. See also Clark ‘Nietzsche’s immoralism and the concept of morality’: it is this ‘moralization’ which is viewed as the essential problem with bad conscience. 34

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creation. For, from the conflict between my aggressive intentions and what is expected of my action, is set up a clear possibility which I am failing to live up to. That is, set up here is the outline for an ideal of concrete self-overcoming: the possibility of transforming and moulding my existing instincts and self. This is ‘will-to-power as self-heightening and strengthening’ (WLN, 115). And it is in this way then that bad conscience can be, as Nietzsche says, the ‘true womb of ideal and imaginative events’ (GM, 60). Does this then answer our earlier questions? Does this address the question of how bad conscience and the human being as a creator of values emerges from the internalisation of will-to-power? In a sense the answer is ‘yes’. For, this internalisation leads to a negation in consciousness, and a sense of absence or lack, which is the first spark of conscience and the self. And next it was shown how this first abstract ‘spark’ finds concrete form and can give birth to specific values. That is, through the conflict between the intention to express instincts externally and the demand that they are repressed concrete form is given to conscience and value creation. Moreover, through this the second major question of the section is also settled. This is the issue of why Nietzsche considers the perversion of animal will-to-power which is ‘the internalisation of man’ (GM, 57), to be fundamentally constitutive of the human. This is, as seen, due to the role of values. It is because this process of perverse internalisation at the same time constitutes us as the creators of values. And it is this which allows for a distinctly human relation to the world. This is one based in thought, value and imagination. It is a relation transcending the immediately given moment of experience and instinct. Further, this implies in turn that we are capable of something distinctive. It means we are uniquely capable of giving holistic meaning and interpretation to experience, and the world. And this means we are capable of a unique human mode of conscious creation; expressing, and being, the will-to-power in a radically new way.

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Conclusion: Primary Perversion

Consequently a distinct meaning can be given to the human. The idea that the ‘will-to-power interprets’ (WLN, 90), and gives meaning, finds new expression in the human being. Through the creative ‘no’, which emerges with the internalisation of will-to-power, the human is capable of consciously creating future orientated values. The human can express its will-to-power in these life interpreting ideals and values which ‘plant the seed of his highest hope’ (TSZ, 46). That is, it can uniquely express its will-to-power through a relation to imagined future ideals. And these both express the individuality of each human being, and transform the relations that other future humans can then have to the world. Yet where does this leave the argument of this chapter overall? Where does this leave the idea of the human as a perverse relation, and a non-­ humanist Nietzschean existentialism? Recall the original purpose of this chapter. This was to give concrete form, and justification for, the sketch of a possible, radical existentialism given in the introduction. In particular, the aim was to show how a return to the human, to the ‘closest things’, in Nietzsche’s philosophy would accomplish this. And this was done, first, by exploring the connection between authenticity and understanding of the human there. It was seen how authenticity depended upon creating a unifying overall perspective on one’s experience and life. Further, it was also seen how this could only be properly developed through an understanding of the unique authentic perspectives of others. In turn, though, such an engagement revealed something important. Namely, this engagement revealed that in order to develop an authentic perspective of our own it is necessary to strive to concretely express this perspective. In other words, to truly find ourselves, it is necessary to actually to make a concrete impact on the world by ‘creating beyond ourselves’ (TSZ, 41). And this experience puts the creator in touch with the ‘great tide’ (Ibid.) of nature. That is, the experience of authentic expression discloses our existence as the continuation of the creative will-to-­ power. The creative experience reveals that our authenticity is at the same time the expression of the same force, which seeks to create and impose new forms, running throughout all nature. This is the kind of experience

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alluded to in Zarathustra. There, Nietzsche says that ‘Zarathustra gazed into the forest and the stillness, in surprise he gazed into himself ’ (TSZ, 51). And with this it was seen how a Nietzschean pursuit of authenticity leads to the rejection of humanism. This is because with this unity with will-to-power, uncovered in individual creative expression, is also revealed the absence of a ‘doer behind the doing’. In short, revealed with this is that there is no separate, present subjectivity distinct from the act itself. All that there is rather, and all that we are, is, like the rest of nature, the self-expressing activity of will-to-power. Thus a Nietzschean existentialism escapes humanism. It ‘takes the doer back into doing’ (WLN, 217), and uncovers a fundamental unity of self and world. Yet it does so by provoking a series of further questions. These need to be addressed if a non-humanist existentialism is to be fully defended. First amongst these, as discussed, was how to preserve a distinct meaning for the human. For if we reject the present subject of humanism by saying that we are just will-to-power ‘and nothing besides’, then doesn’t this risk dissolving the human into organic nature altogether? Isn’t there a risk of escaping humanism at the price of losing touch with the very thing which should be existentialism’s principal concern? And how does this chapter account for unique modes of human creativity and expression? How can our uniquely human creative interpretation of life, which is the hallmark of authenticity for Nietzsche, be explained? As witnessed in the second half of this chapter these initial questions were addressed by discussion of ‘bad conscience’. For the human could possess a distinct being, yet still be nothing other than will-to-power, if it existed as the perversion of will-to-power brought about with this phenomenon. This occurred when, forcibly trapped in the early state, the pre-societal humans were now compelled to turn their aggressive will-to-­ power on their nascent selves. This created a fissure within the proto-self of the early humans whereby a psychic negation, between what is and what could be was born. And this gave birth to the self proper. This was a self able to conceive of a future as well as a past, and hence one that was able to construct the imaginative, unifying, perspective and valuation of life discussed earlier. Further, for this reason, the human being was not just formed by perversion. The human being is the continual perversion of will-to-power; it is the uniquely conscious, and perpetual, integration

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of experience into an ideal. This is the unique, non-humanist, ontology of the human being. Nevertheless, several key questions remain. If a non-humanist existentialism can be maintained via the human as a perverse relation to will-to-­ power how is this connected to the issue that began this discussion? How does this conception of the human account for the distinction between authentic and inauthentic modes of living? Such a distinction is, of course, a distinctly human problem. But it is something that any existentialist account of human being must account for. Further, a non-humanist Nietzschean existentialism must also account for another problem. Namely, it must explain why, if we are perversion of the will-to-power, we ordinarily have so little awareness of this. A non-humanist existentialism must thus account for the existence and dominance of humanist self-­ understanding. It is to these questions that the next chapter then looks. And it will be shown how the two issues are in fact connected. That is, the question of authenticity and that of humanism are bound up to the same process which will be described presently. This is the slave revolt in values from out of noble value creation. It is the story of how our modern self-­ conception came to be formed. It is the story of a profound self-forgetting.

References Adorno, T. ‘On the fetish character in music and the regression of listening’, in The Culture Industry, ed. by J.M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991). Ansell-Pearson, K. Viroid Life (London: Routledge, 1997). Bergson, H. The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. by R. Audra and C. Brereton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977). Blake, W. ‘Proverbs of Hell’, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975). Clark, M. ‘Nietzsche’s Immoralism and the Concept of Morality’, in Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality, ed. by R.  Schacht (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). Cranston, M. ‘Introduction’, in J.  Rousseau, The Social Contract, trans. by M. Cranston (London: Penguin, 1968).

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Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2006). Freud, S. ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud: Volume XXI, trans. by J. Strachey (London: Vintage, 1964). Heidegger, M. Being and Time, trans. by J.  Macquarrie and E.  Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). ———. What is Called Thinking?, trans. by J. Glenngray (New York: Harper and Row, 1968). Hobbes, T. Leviathan, trans. by J.C.  Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Janaway, C. Beyond Selflessness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Leiter, B. Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002). Metzger, J. ‘How deep are the roots of nihilism’, in Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, ed. by Jeffrey Metzger (London: Continuum, 2009). Mulhall, S. Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by R.J.  Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1973). ———. Ecce Homo, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1979a). ———. Human, All Too Human, trans. by R.J.  Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). ———. On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. by C.  Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ———. ‘Notebooks of the Early 1870’s’, in Philosophy and Truth, ed. and trans. by D.  Breazeale (New York: Humanity Books, 1979b), ‘On the Pathos of Truth’. ———. Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks, trans. M. Cowan (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 1998). ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by R.J.  Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961). ———. Untimely Meditations, trans. by R.J.  Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ———. Writings from the Late Notebooks, trans. by K.  Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Owen, D. Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007). Ridley, A. Nietzsche’s Conscience (London: Cornell University Press, 1998).

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Rousseau, J-J. The Social Contract, trans. by M.  Cranston (London: Penguin, 1968). Schacht, R. Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995). Solomon, R. ‘Nietzsche on Fatalism and “Free Will”’, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Issue No. 23 (Spring 2002): 63–87.

3 Nietzsche’s Non-humanist Existentialism: Secondary Perversion and the Slave Revolt

It was seen in the previous chapter how concrete form could be given to a non-humanist existentialism. This was done via the philosophy of Nietzsche. Specifically, I argued that the pursuit of a Nietzschean ideal of authenticity led to the rejection of humanism. This was because the development of a truly authentic perspective revealed that we are nothing other than will-to-power. It revealed that there was no present subject behind our activity; that all we are is the creative, interpretive relation to world also manifest in the rest of nature. However, if this allowed for a certain non-humanist existentialism it also generated several problems. First, how could this view avoid reducing human being to world? How could it avoid denying any distinct meaning for the human, and human creation, altogether? This question was addressed in the last chapter through the concept of perversion. For if the human is the perversion of animal will-to-power then there can be a distinct ontology of the human, without positing anything beyond the natural. That is, we can have a distinct being, without humanism’s separate, present subject, if we exist as the perversion of nature. And it was shown how this perversion was brought about by bad conscience and our confinement in the state.

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Yet there was also a second set of problems. Namely, how is it possible here to maintain a meaning for authenticity and inauthenticity? If on this view we are will-to-power, ‘and nothing besides’, how can a distinction be drawn between more or less authentic ways of living? And, relatedly, given this all this, why is it that ‘we distinguish ourselves, the doers, from the doing, and make use of this schema everywhere.’1 In short, why given our actual ontological status, is the erroneous humanist view so deeply entrenched in self-understanding? It is to answer these questions that this chapter explores the ‘slaves’ revolt in morality.’2 This is what Nietzsche refers to as ‘the great danger to mankind’ (GM, 7). And it represents the process by which an original life affirming morality, created by the nobles, is perverted by a group conversely unable to affirm life or create original morality. Moreover, it will be shown how this follows from the discussion of bad conscience. That is, the primary perversion constituting our being creates the conditions both for noble morality and the slaves’ later perversion of it. In turn this shows how slave morality, as a response to bad conscience and noble values, creates the humanist subject, and inauthentic relations to will-to-power.

1

Human Being as ‘Risk’

How precisely does it do this though? How does this chapter connect these different elements of human genealogy and show how the present subject of humanism emerges with the ‘slave revolt’? A way toward an answer can be achieved by recalling what was created with bad conscience. As Nietzsche says, it is because of this development that ‘…man has been included among the most unexpected and exciting throws of dice played by Heraclitus’ “great child”, call him Zeus or fate’ (GM, 58). In other words, both distinct risk and potential emerged here. With the internalisation of will-to-power, constituting the human, was born the great chance for a unique development of will-to-power. The potential  Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 251. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as WLN. 2  Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 18. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as GM. 1

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was created for there to be brought ‘a wealth of novel, disconcerting beauty and affirmation to light’ (GM, 60). But equally there emerged the risk that the opposite would happen. Far from continuing and elevating the will-to-power to new heights, the human instead could distort the will-to-power in a unique way, becoming ‘the ebb of this great tide.’3 Why is this the case? This point, as with the ideal of authenticity, rests for Nietzsche on the distinction between two different kinds of morality: noble and slave. And it is by looking at these that the great potential and risk of human being can be understood. In particular, it will be shown how the potential for the creation of moralities, or systems of ideals, is what allows for the two divergent possibilities outlined. One, the noble, gives an indication of how an authentic relation to will-to-power is possible. The other, the slave, suggests how an inauthentic and self-deceiving relation comes about, and with it the humanist subject. Further, this chapter argues that the difference between these two moralities arises because of a relationship with two time-related consequences of bad conscience. These are, firstly, the ability or potential to create future orientated values. The second is the unique human suffering arising from awareness of that future. This is the suffering from the sense that ‘everything passes’ (TSZ, 162). It is argued that it is the nobles’ and slaves’ differing responses to these effects of bad conscience that determines their different moralities, and their degrees of authenticity. The former is able to create an original, active morality because they can affirm the suffering of becoming. Meanwhile, the latter cannot. It is this that means only the nobles can originally create a morality, and that slave morality must come about through a parasitical perversion of the former. By describing the reasons for this the chapter will be able to explain why inauthenticity as a codified way of life comes into the world. That is, by exploring these reasons it shows how such inauthenticity emerges with slave morality. Similarly it will be seen how the invention of the humanist subject is integral to this process.

 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 41. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as TSZ.

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Types of Creation, and Morality

Before more can be said about these processes, though, it is necessary to make some clarifications. These concern the different meanings of ‘creation’. As discussed in Chap. 2, the will-to-power in all nature is inherently creative. As Nietzsche says, The whole of the organic world is the threading together of beings with little fabricated worlds around them … The capacity to create (fashion, fabricate, invent) is their fundamental capacity. (WLN, 14–15)

In other words, all life seeks to impose itself on the world. And it does this through the creative organization, destruction and assimilation of the life around it. However, as discussed, when the human is trapped in the state, and has this animal will-to-power ‘internalized’ then the character of creation is radically changed. This process critically involves a new kind of negation. Namely, a creative negation applied, for the first time, to past consciousness yields a unique ability to consciously and sub-­ consciously create future orientated values. This is the emergence of the human with an awareness of time and future. It is the human as ‘the still-­ unconquered eternal futurist who finds no rest from the pressure of his own strength, so that his future mercilessly digs into the flesh of every present like a spur’ (GM, 88). As such, all human beings, due to internalisation, possess this capacity. Or more accurately, they are this creative, time-orientated capacity or power. That is, they exist as the continual interpretation of, and orientation towards, the present and the past in terms of what is not; in terms of the future. Yet while necessary for a third mode of creation, it is not sufficient. This is the creation of a unifying perspective. And it is what is referred to by Nietzsche when he says that, ‘I taught them all my art and aims: to compose into one and bring together what is fragment and riddle and dreadful chance in man’ (TSZ, 216). This, as discussed earlier, is the conscious and explicit creation of a uniquely individual unifying perspective on life, and the meaning of the human, of one’s own. It is the

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kind of perspective which finds highest expression in great works of art and philosophy. It is also the kind of authentic perspective that requires great effort, struggle, and understanding to attain, and which very few of us ever truly reach. Returning to the point, though, it is important to draw a distinction here with what is meant in the case of a fourth kind of creation. This is the creation of a morality, or a system of values. It is a process dependent on, and subsequent to, value creation in the second sense. But it is prior to, and necessary for, creation in the third sense, that of the individual’s authentic perspective. In fact this is why such a process is so critical for the possibility of authenticity in the world. In simple terms, the creation of a morality is the creation of a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ for a culture. It is the codification of what is valued, of what should rule and what should be obeyed. This is what is alluded to by Nietzsche when he says, ‘A table of values hangs over every people. Behold it is the table of its overcomings; behold it is the voice of its will to power’ (TSZ, 84). Moreover, in this way it is unlike the third type of creation. Just as it is for a people, rather than for specific groups aspiring to authenticity, it emerges also from a people or culture, rather than from specific individuals within it. As Nietzsche argues, ‘People were the creators at first; only later were individuals creators. Indeed the individual himself is still the latest creation’ (TSZ, 85). This point will be discussed in greater detail in what follows. But the creation of morality then can be seen as the creation of the unifying perspective of a people. And it can also be seen as the expression of their collective will-to-power. This is why the authentic perspective, as highest expression of an individual’s will-to-power, is made possible by this prior event. That is, a continuation of fidelity to active will-to-power in noble moralities, both creates the individual in the existentialist sense, and allows for the fidelity to will-to-power found in later pursuits of authenticity.

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 ow Morality Is Originally H Created: Affirmation

In any case, this chapter can now progress. Having given this clarification regarding what is meant by ‘the creation of a morality’, as opposed to other modes of creation, it is possible to ask the central questions of this discussion. That is, why are only the nobles capable of creating a morality? And thus why are the slaves compelled to parasitically pervert the former? To explain this it is necessary to first look at what Nietzsche says about the origin of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. It is necessary, also, to rule out some common ideas about this process. So, as he says, …it has been ‘the good’ themselves, meaning the noble, the mighty, the high placed, and the high minded, who saw and judged themselves and their actions as good … It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values and give these values names: usefulness was none of their concern! The standpoint of usefulness is as alien and inappropriate as it can be to such a heated eruption of the highest rank-­ ordering and rank-defining value judgements…. (GM, 11–12)

As such, to begin with, two essential things can be said about original morality creation for Nietzsche. The first is that moral value, what is considered ‘good’, does not, contra widespread belief, ‘emanate from those to whom goodness is shown’. Rather such values come ‘from the good themselves’. That is, it arises not from the recipients, or beneficiaries of actions or traits, but from the very people who commit the actions, and who possess these traits. And what this means, is that moral values are not created out of considerations of usefulness. They are not created from the prudential praising of certain actions that may be beneficial or useful. Instead, and this is the second point, such values are created from an original existential impulse to affirm a type existence or mode of being in the world. In other words, moral value creation is a more sophisticated and higher mode of the will-to-power present in all life. It is a new, and profound, way through which human being can impose itself on the world.

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 oble Affirmation: Privilege N and Freedom of Instinct

Yet this creates a further obvious question. If the creation of a morality, and moral values, is tied to the affirmation of oneself and one’s group as ‘good’ why is this something of which only the nobles are capable? Why is it that only noble, ‘higher’ types, and not the slaves, are capable of affirming their mode of existence through the creation of moral values? To develop an answer to this question it is necessary first to, again, rule out some obvious responses to this problem. Only then, through a critique of these, will a more sophisticated position emerge. As such, looking at these views, it can be said that this connection has typically been interpreted in a ‘passive’ sense. That is, for these views, only the nobles are capable of moral value-creating self-affirmation as it is only they, rather than the slaves, whose position allows them to actually enjoy life. It is the politically and economically privileged conditions of their lives then which uniquely allow them to affirm themselves. As Conway says, ‘The designation good … originated with the nobles’ selfish or egoistic assertion of their own incomparable self-worth and unrivalled social station.’4 Put another way, it is the noble’s sense of self-worth, based on privilege and social superiority, which allows them to affirm themselves and their lives as ‘good’. Conversely, the opposite is true for the downtrodden. For those whose lives are characterised by misery and subordination it is their unhappiness which, equally, prevents them stamping on their mode of existence any positive value. However, such an interpretation is also limited. For, whilst this view explains why moral value creation remains a ‘seigniorial privilege’, it faces several problems. Not least, the noble’s strength of motivation for affirming themselves through morality here remains weak. If in order to create moral values through self-affirmation the nobles must already just have a life worth affirming, then whatever extra validation gained from calling this life ‘good’ cannot really be that significant. In short, since from birth their life is already essentially affirmed, what great desire can there be to  Conway, Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, 30–31.

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affirm it further through a morality? And, relatedly, in what would such a morality consist? Could it really be that much more than an ideological justification of social privilege? Or would it simply constitute an imperative to enjoy one’s wealth and power? At any rate, this view seems to deprive moral value-creation of real import. Summed up in Owen’s claim that ‘the nobles power over others is interpreted by him as a virtue, as a signification of his own goodness’,5 their values would be merely a reflection of existing social power. And if this is the case it is hard to see how moralities derived from this could lay the ground for authentic ways of life. It is hard to see the connection between something so superficial and authenticity. Conversely, it is difficult to see why the overthrowing of such a morality would be the basis for any kind of inauthenticity. It is for this reason therefore that there must be something more to the relationship between moral value creation and affirmation. There must be more than this idea of passive reflection allows in the creation of noble morality if it is to occupy a central place in the discussion of humanism and authenticity. Further, there must be another reason why self-affirming moral value creation remains a privilege of the nobles alone. Yet, equally, this reason cannot lie in another prevalent view. This is the idea that ‘the nobles… are able to take a self-affirming attitude toward themselves and thus toward life or the world’6 because they are unrepressed. That is, they can affirm life because they enjoy, what Mulhall calls, a ‘wholly spontaneous instinctual life’7,8 where ‘there is no hiatus between conceiving a desire and acting to satisfy it.’9 Such a view imagines the nobles as defined by total instinctual freedom, in contrast to the slaves, who are repressed. And this has been given more or less positive glosses. Ridley, for instance, talks about ‘the unfathomably shallow stupidity of the original noble.’10 More extremely Thomas Mann says the  Owen, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, 77.  Metzger, ‘How deep are the roots of nihilism’, 133. 7  Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall, 41–42. 8  Metzger similarly criticises the noble as ‘one dimensional and stagnant’, 133. 9  Mulhall, 41–42. 10  Ridley, Nietzsche’s Conscience, 133. See also Conway, for a similar view of the slave revolt as ambivalent or positive. 5 6

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nobles represent, ‘a clinical picture of infantile sadism, before which our souls writhe in embarrassment.’11 Meanwhile Mulhall views this state more positively, in pre-lapsarian terms.12 Either way, though, this view is again limited. It is unclear how or why such ‘affirmation’ derived from unrestrained desire satisfaction could create a morality. Ostensibly free from the internalisation of instinct, and thus without a sense of lack or deficiency in the self, it is unclear how they could create the future orientated ideals needed for this. Likewise, since they affirm themselves in totally free action, it is unclear what form a ‘morality’ based on this could take. That is, could it offer any other imperative than ‘do as you please’? Nor is there is any obvious reason why they would want or need to create such a morality in the first place.

3.1

Noble Affirmation: Suffering and Becoming

As such, it is necessary to understand both the nobles and their self-­ affirmation differently. Or rather, it is if this chapter is to explain why the nobles uniquely can create moralities. And this can be done, firstly, by recalling what was created with bad conscience and the internalisation of will-to-power. For by looking at this a different kind of understanding of noble affirmation will emerge. So, it can be noted that with internalisation and bad conscience a fissure was opened up in the proto-self of the early human. This, critically, with a distinction between what is and what is not yet, allowed for both an awareness of our existence in time and a relationship toward future orientated values. However, it also allowed for something else. Namely, it created for the human being a unique form of suffering. This is the suffering of time. Or more precisely it is the suffering, uniquely arising for a creature with awareness of a future, both of its own transience and the transience of the world around it. This is expressed by  Thomas Mann (From Janaway, Beyond Selflessness 95–96) (Mann 1959: 165). See also M. Nordau, Conway, 156, who claims ‘the real Nietzsche gang consists of born imbecile criminals.’ 12  See Mulhall, 43. Metzger give more ‘positive’ spins on this idea of the nobles as unrepressed: Metzger: 133, ‘The nobles … are able to take a self-affirming attitude toward themselves and thus toward life or the world.’ 11

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the sense, as Nietzsche says, that ‘Everything dies, everything blossoms, everything breaks’ (TSZ, 234). And in this way the human was faced with the problem of its own futility, and, worse, the futility of its struggle to survive and exist. As Nietzsche puts it ‘there was an immense lacuna around man—he himself could think of no justification or explanation or affirmation, he suffered from the problem of what he meant’ (GM, 120). Yet the noble is distinguished precisely by the ability to confront this. That is, the noble is able to deal with this suffering of becoming, not by fleeing it, as do the slaves. Instead they actively and honestly struggle with this problem, and are ultimately able to affirm themselves in overcoming it. They cultivate the attitude and understanding expressed in Nietzsche’s poem or ‘dance song’. There he says, ‘The world is deep/ Deeper than day can comprehend/Deep is its woe/Joy deeper than heart’s agony/Woe says: Fade! Go!/But all joy wants eternity’ (TSZ, 244). But how is this affirmative relation to the problem of meaning and becoming developed by the nobles? At first it finds initial and crude form in ‘a thirst for enemies, resistance and triumphs’ (GM, 26). The nobles respond to the suffering of transience by attempting to master themselves, and this suffering, in the practice of martial values and warfare. They attempt to affirm becoming through the joy of self-discipline and destruction. And they thereby take pride in confronting suffering and death. This is what Nietzsche alludes to when he talks about, The discipline of suffering, of great suffering … That tension of the soul in misfortune which cultivates its strength, its terror at the sight of great destruction, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting misfortune…13

In this way, war and conquest serve as a means to an end. They exist as a means by which the noble can confront suffering and death, and thereby the suffering of time, with self-discipline, courage, and honour. Further, in this sense, the noble valorisation of war is not ‘infantile sadism’. Nor is it an expression of un-sublimated aggressive instincts. Rather, it is itself, in its practice, a form of discipline and self-control that could only have  Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, 155. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as BG.

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come about after the internalisation of aggressive instincts with bad conscience. For example, it is the discipline required for an exhausting and dangerous voyage to besiege a foreign city. Or it is the self-mastery needed for a defiant stand against a horde of enemies. This is why, as Nietzsche says, the noble human being honours in himself …the man who has power over himself, who understands how to speak and how to keep silent, who enjoys practicing severity and harshness upon himself and feels reverence for all that is severe and harsh. (BG, 196)

Does this then allow for an understanding of how the nobles uniquely can create moralities? It does so once it is seen how this initial, crude, self-­discipline, mastery, and courage becomes refined and spiritual. This is the process described by Nietzsche wherein the idea of nobility evolves into ‘a term for spiritual noblesse, and, as it were, ripens and sweetens’ (GM, 14). This is also the process at work where the ‘spiritualization and intensification of cruelty’ occurs (BG, 159). Over time, as the opportunities for war diminish, the martial virtues and their capacity for affirmation in confronting suffering and death are transferred ever more to a spiritual and philosophic level. And this leads the noble soul to seek out new types of battle. It leads them to seek out a confrontation with, to test themselves against, and distinguish themselves by, a spiritual suffering; one even deeper than found in overt war. They likewise seek to be “‘at home” in many, distant, terrible worlds’ (BG, 209) which the majority could not endure. Moreover, such ‘worlds’ are formed in part by ‘a proper mastery and subtlety in conducting a war against oneself ’ (BG, 122). They consist in using oneself, and one’s weaknesses, as both the object of vivisection and a means for overcoming. They also, relatedly, involve understanding. That is, such worlds also consist in an attempt experientially and philosophically to grasp the suffering at the heart of existence and time. This is what Nietzsche means when he says that ‘as deeply as man looks into life, so deeply does he look also into suffering’ (TSZ, 177). This is a confrontation with a pain, in awareness of transience, both universal and unique to the individual pursuing it. Yet, from out of this confrontation they also achieve something distinct. From out of this depth they gain a sense of

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affirmation, and grasp a deeper beauty, in both themselves and the world. In short, they learn to affirm life, and themselves, precisely in its suffering, and transience. This is because it is this suffering which has allowed for the expression both of beauty, and of their strength. And this is a sentiment summed up in a haiku by Issa: Ours is a world of suffering, Even if cherry-flowers bloom.14

3.2

Noble Moralities

In any case, with this the earlier question has been answered. A different sense in which the nobles can uniquely affirm themselves has been outlined. This was not about either social privilege or instinctual freedom. Instead it was rooted in the evolution of martial values. It originated in the evolution of those values, of confronting and overcoming hardship through self-mastery, into an overcoming of spiritual suffering. And it was shown how this was ultimately a confrontation with the problem of time and meaning itself. For, it is in the very struggle with the apparent futility of life and suffering, since everything passes, that there arises the meaning and joy in self and world. That is, it is through the power to say ‘into all abysses I carry my consecrating “Yes”’ (TSZ, 186) that we affirm ourselves. It is in the strength to affirm even the most terrible and questionable experience, that we can affirm our own strength. And this is precisely a strength most triumphantly affirmed by overcoming the greatest existential problem facing the human: that of time. However, does this then provide an answer regarding moral creation? Does what has been said about noble affirmation account for the noble’s unique ability to create moralities? It does if it is recalled how Nietzsche describes the original moralities, or table of values, of peoples. As he says, ‘it is the table of its overcomings … it is the voice of its will to power’ (TSZ, 84). In other words, the noble life affirmation described is  Issa, in The Classic Tradition of Haiku, 68.

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necessary to the creation of a morality because a morality must express the struggle with, and overcoming of, the predicament of a people. In this way, the affirmation which is both product of and means towards these overcomings is necessary. Because of its link to overcoming, this affirmation is required so that the story of a people and its triumph over the adversity of its situation can be expressed. And this is a story that can be told only because this struggle, adventure, and victory had in fact been experienced. Otherwise, there would be nothing to express, no story to tell. This is why then, as Nietzsche says, ‘a sacred Yes is needed for the sport of creation’ (TSZ, 54). In turn this is why the nobles, with their affirmative relation to life, can create ‘tables of values’, and moralities.15 Furthermore, this point can be understood better if the content of these moralities is observed. Consider for instance Beowulf and The Iliad. Both reflect, and are made possible by, cultures rooted in the noble overcoming of adversity. And both give expression to the kind of affirmative world-relation found there. But they also express and articulate the sort of ethic that is required for further overcoming and affirmation, and for new noble moralities. Put broadly they express through themselves the imperative that one should act so that ‘poets will now have something to sing about and celebrate’ (GM, 23). This is the invocation that, through struggle and joy, one might affirm life, as well as help lay the grounds for future moralities of overcoming. And this imperative has two aspects. On the one hand it acknowledges, like Nietzsche, that the way toward each culture’s overcoming will be different.16 This is because the precise kind of adversity which must be confronted, and hence the means to overcoming it, differs from culture to culture. But at the same time, noble moralities provide guidelines regarding how to live affirmatively which may be helpful across cultures. For instance, a Viking might say that ‘A hard heart Wotan has set in my breast’ (BG, 196). And this reflects the reverence for severity and harshness with oneself necessary to a warrior life of struggle. Similarly, an imperative of Greek noble morality is that one ‘must not separate happiness from action’ (GM, 21). This, in its turn,  For a conception of ‘affirmation’ more explicitly linked to the individual see Reginster, The Affirmation of Life. 16  See TSZ, 84–86. 15

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urges joy in creation and adventure, rather than rest and peace. Likewise, for Nietzsche, nobility is associated with the cultivation of the virtues of ‘courage, insight, sympathy, (and) solitude’ (BG, 214).17

4

The Slave’s Inability to Affirm Existence

In this way, a sketch of noble morality, or moralities, has thus now been given. And, as such, two things are apparent. First, it is clear how such moralities are made possible by the overcoming and affirmation of the suffering of transience that was a consequence of bad conscience. Second, it is apparent why a certain group of spiritualised warrior-nobles might be capable of the kind of self-mastery, courage, and honesty required for that confrontation and affirmation. However, even though this has been established more still needs to be said. If it has been shown why the nobles can originally create moralities further enquiry is needed into why the slaves cannot. More needs to be said about why they are unable to affirm and overcome the suffering of temporality in the way necessary for the creation of morals. Only then can the final questions of this chapter be answered. That is, it is only once the nature of the slave has been fully explicated that the necessity for him of perverting noble morality will become apparent. And it is only in turn with the explication of this process that the origins of both inauthenticity and the humanist subject will be uncovered. So, addressing this, who or what then are the slaves? And why, in contrast to the nobles, are they incapable of affirming existence and becoming in the way described? The answer lies, as it did with the nobles, in understanding their response to the problem of transience. This is the problem, outlined, of suffering from awareness that everything will pass, and hence that all human endeavour is futile. For their reaction is the opposite to that of the one described earlier. Far from confronting and understanding this suffering, and this problem, they seek to flee it. As Nietzsche says of the slave,  See also GM, 23 for a description of the noble virtues of ‘loyalty, pride, friendship, self-control, delicacy’. 17

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…his fundamental desire is that the war which he is should come to an end; happiness appears to him in accord with a sedative … pre-eminently as the happiness of repose, of tranquillity, of satiety, of unity at last attained, as a “Sabbath of Sabbaths”. (BG, 121)

In other words, their response to this existential suffering is essentially passive. They wish simply that the pain could be stopped. They lack the strength of will found with the noble Dionysian pessimism, wherein ‘he who is richest in fullness of life … can allow himself the sight of what is terrible and questionable.’18 They do not embrace the challenge presented by human existence. Rather, for them, this challenge is simply a sentence which must be either evaded or anaesthetised. This is why they are prone to self-deception and dishonesty. They seek to lie themselves out of a situation or invent future fictions which will redeem suffering. This is also why the ascetic mentality will later take root strongest in the slaves. For they want to say, ‘My kingdom is not of this world’ (GM, 105). The slave wants to escape the wheel of life, and its’ struggles, by imagining a world of permanence beyond the experience of the real one. Furthermore, this response is rooted in a fundamental attitude of cowardice. As Nietzsche says, What distinguishes the common nature is that it unflinchingly keeps sight of its advantage, and that this thought … is even stronger than its strongest drives; not to allow these drives to lead it astray to perform inexpeditious acts…19

What characterises the common or ‘slavish’ nature then is a kind of prudence. Whereas the noble is instinctively willing to ‘scorn safety, body, and life’ (GM, 23) to confront and overcome obstacles, the plebeian nature does the opposite. That is, it keeps site of its’ own advantage and survival at all times, avoiding anything which may threaten these. And it is precisely this trait which explains their evasive response to the human predicament outlined. It is this which explains their attempt to flee the  Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 234.  Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 31. Indeed, as Nietzsche suggests, the term ‘common man’, or slave, is etymologically identified with ‘cowardice’ and with ‘dishonesty’ in Greek (GM, 14). 18 19

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suffering of transience, often by illusions and self-deception, rather than directly confronting and overcoming it. This is because, as seen with the nobles, the situations in which one can test one’s strength and self-­mastery are inevitably dangerous. Whether this is physical danger, in war, or psychical danger, in brutal self-honesty or solitude, the objects of resistance to be overcome present a real risk. They represent obstacles and enemies that threaten the destruction of who and what we are. And this is the very thing the slave, perpetually concerned with her survival, cannot countenance.

4.1

 he Slave’s Dilemma and Response: T Initial Ressentiment

It is also now clear why the slaves cannot create a morality. It is clear why, as Nietzsche says, ‘the common man is in no way accustomed to positing values’ (BG, 251). If, as discussed, confrontation with, and overcoming of, the suffering of transience is necessary for this then the slave rules himself out. This is since in order to accomplish this one must be capable of ‘the daring charge at danger or at the enemy’ (GM, 21). That is, in order to overcome the suffering of becoming by affirming oneself one must be willing to risk safety, sanity, and life. And this is just what the slaves cannot do. With their psychical weakness and their cowardice they cannot find affirmative joy in the overcoming of life’s challenge.20 Nor, for this reason, can they create the affirmative tale of their overcoming, and the system of values that arises with it. Yet, does this then get this chapter closer to the main goal? Does this help explain how the slaves pervert noble morality, and hence how inauthenticity and the humanist subject came into the world? The answer is in a sense ‘yes’. For, with this it is now apparent that the slave faces a dilemma.21 This is because, as Ridley puts it, the slave exists in a situation  See, BG, 192, ‘The noble caste was in the beginning always the barbarian caste: their superiority lay, not in their physical strength but primarily in their psychical—they were more complete human beings.’ 21  Note the similarity to the problem raised by Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality, regarding slave revolt: how if the slaves are by nature weak, are they able to overthrow the, by definition, stronger nobles, 20

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where, ‘Triumphant self-affirmation isn’t possible for him … But he longs for it nonetheless.’22 In other words, the slave cannot affirm their self through the creation of a morality. But they still have a need for an interpretation of life, and a narrative, which would somehow validate their mode of existence.23 The slave still suffers from awareness of human transience. They may not confront this problem as openly as the noble, and therefore do not suffer as much from it. Still though, they suffer from the problem of meaning given with it, whilst not having the strength to overcome it and affirm themselves. And this is why for the slave ‘something was missing’. As Nietzsche says, ‘…he himself could think of no justification or explanation or affirmation, he suffered from the problem of what he meant’ (GM, 120). However, such suffering also holds the key to a resolution of the slaves’ dilemma. For, while for the noble existential suffering serves as a spur to self-mastery and overcoming, and is ultimately affirmed, it does not for the slave. Instead this problem remains, and festers. And so it serves to provoke a different kind of reaction. As Nietzsche explains, in this situation the slave, …instinctively looks for a cause of his distress; more exactly for a culprit, even more precisely for a guilty culprit …—in short, for a living being upon whom he can release his emotions, actually or in effigy, on some pretext or other. (GM, 93)24

The slave’s unresolved suffering sparks a desire to find someone to blame for his distress. It provokes a desire to find a person or group upon whom he can vent his rancour.25 This is important because of the identity of who is blamed. For, as Poellner has observed, such ressentiment needs without qualifying them as no longer being ‘weak’. Leiter’s solution involves an appeal to the figure of the priest. 22  Ridley, 17. 23  Nietzsche says that the slave still has an ‘instinct of self-affirmation’ even if he cannot truly satisfy it, GM, 27. He, ‘has an instinct of self-preservation and self-affirmation in which every lie is sanctified.’ 24  ‘…In my judgement we find here the actual physiological causation of ressentiment’ (GM, 93). 25  Ressentiment is not, as has been argued (see Ridley and Owen, 78) a result of suffering or frustration in general, but only emerges when one is able and willing to blame others for one’s suffering.

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another who can be apprehended ‘as in some respects superior and as dislikeable or hateful.’26 And the noble fits that bill perfectly. With their ability to affirm life, their superiority in strength and joy, it makes sense to the slaves that noble happiness has been won at the expense of their own. Their jealousy of the nobles, and the sense that the noble is a living rebuke to their way of life, that they are ‘objects of disdain’,27 thus makes them blame this group. And this provides a first step toward resolving the slave’s dilemma. How does it do so? First, by being able to direct hatred and blame towards another, the slaves are now given a sense of meaning and affirmation negatively, as victims, as the persecuted.28 Their existence is afforded, derivatively, the significance lacking previously, and which had existed only for the noble. They are afforded some sense of being ‘the one who is, who has reality, who really exists and is true’ (GM, 14). And this provides an intimation of how they might derivatively create a morality via the nobles. However, they still need more. For a feeling for the slave that they are ‘the persecuted’ still only partially affirms their mode of being. While a start, such an identity as ‘the noble’s victim’ does not amount to an interpretation of existence wholly validating their lives.

4.2

The Intensification of Ressentiment

In order to gain this rather, the derivative affirmation afforded by ressentiment in its initial state must undergo a further development.29 And this occurs only when it ‘swells into something huge and uncanny to a most intellectual and poisonous level’ (GM, 17). In other words, the slaves fully find their illusive self-affirmation, and can pervert noble values, only when ressentiment is allowed to grow to an extreme extent. This is when That is, ressentiment is essentially other directed, and typically exists when the other is not really responsible. 26  Poellner, ‘Ressentiment and morality’, 130. 27  Owen, 78: ‘the slaves experience themselves as objects of disdain.’ 28  It is also alleged that ressentiment alleviates the sufferer’s pain in other ways, see GM: III: SS15, and SS20. 29  See Ridley, 26, for a discussion of difference between ‘uncreative’ ressentiment, and ‘creative’ ressentiment.

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ressentiment gains such intensity that it ‘turns creative’ (GM, 20). But before addressing why intensified ressentiment is able to give the slaves full self-affirmation in this way, it is necessary to ask a prior question. Namely, why does it have to ‘swell’ and build up in the first place? Why for the slaves, is ressentiment not something that can be controlled or ‘consumed and exhausted in an immediate reaction’ (GM, 20–22)?30 An obvious answer would be that the desire for ‘revenge’, often viewed as the goal of ressentiment, cannot be satisfied because of the slave’s political position. In brief, politically oppressed and physically weak, the slave cannot gain external or ‘real’ revenge against the nobles. And this is what causes the build-up and intensification of ressentiment. Yet such a view, based on what has been said about the nature of ressentiment and the slaves, seems overly simplistic.31 For it appears not to be just a straightforward pursuit of revenge. Indeed, as Nietzsche argues, the aim of ressentiment is not ‘the defensive return of a blow, a purely protective reaction … such as that performed by a headless frog to ward off corrosive acid’ (GM, 93). That is, it is not to be identified with the purpose of revenge, which is simply returning the ‘blow inflicted’ and preventing further suffering. Instead, there is something essentially more complex and warped in this phenomenon. And this is because the men and women of ressentiment, …enjoy being mistrustful and dwelling on wrongs and imagined slights: they rummage through the bowels of their past and present for obscure, questionable stories that will allow them to wallow in tortured suspicion, and intoxicate themselves… (GM, 94)

What this suggests is something curious. It is that with ressentiment, as opposed to simple revenge, there is not a straightforward aim of discharging the emotion, say of anger or frustration, in question. Instead with it there comes a perverse enjoyment in uncovering new pretexts for hatred,  GM, 20–22. Nietzsche seems to suggest that ressentiment could be neutralised by ‘activity’, in my sense, i.e. it is not the actual gaining of revenge which neutralises ressentiment, since this could not really resolve the basic problem from which it stems, but another mode of non-reactive activity altogether. That is, one which is able to affirm life and hence eliminate the underlying cause of ressentiment, lack of self-affirmation. 31  As well as contradicting what has been argued here: that the first essay of the Genealogy cannot simply be about the internalisation of revenge, and that the essence of slavery, here, is not political. 30

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and in dwelling upon and exaggerating those that already exist. There is a desire to extend and deepen the sources of hatred, rather than seeking to pay back or eliminate them. Further, it is precisely this point which chimes with what has been said about the origins of slave ressentiment. For if the slave’s hatred of the noble is really a way of evading a more fundamental, self-imposed, problem, ‘their weakness with regards to themselves’,32 and of gaining meaning, then their ressentiment never truly seeks satisfaction. That is to say, ressentiment toward the nobles is inherently self-deceiving regarding its aims. This is because what it really seeks, but cannot admit, is the perpetuation of the pretext for blame, since this gives them meaning, not its actual removal as an alleged source of suffering. This implies, in turn, that the emotion by its very nature can never properly be satisfied. It also means that it has an innate tendency to intensify, and develop into a ‘cauldron of unassuaged hatred’ (GM, 22).

5

Creation of the ‘Evil Enemy’

Consequently, ressentiment because of its own warped, physiologically obstructed, nature has a tendency to self-intensification. The slave actively wants his hatred of the nobles to deepen and intensify, and seeks any pretext possible for accomplishing this. And it is this point which then answers the earlier question as to why ressentiment grows and ‘swells into something huge and uncanny to a most intellectual and poisonous level’ (GM, 17). However, what follows on from this must now be explained. For it is necessary to ask how this intensification develops the partial, derivative, affirmation afforded by initial ressentiment, into something that can wholly affirm the slave’s mode of being. In other words, it is necessary to ask how ressentiment’s intensification comes to solve the dilemma of the slave’s existence. This is the dilemma of how to gain a self-affirming morality when they do not possess the affirmative relation necessary for creating it themselves. And with this answer it will also be shown how both an inauthentic code of values, and the humanist subject, is created.  Metzger, 137.

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But how is this done? How does ressentiment’s growth allow the slave to fully affirm their existence, and provide a basis for slave morality? Begin by recalling that ressentiment initially gave the slaves a limited sense of affirmation through the being of another. By hating the noble, as responsible for his suffering, the slave derivatively gains identity as ‘the noble’s victim’. And thus it is the intensification of this parasitical, other focused, logic which explains how a more fully fledged system of slave affirmation came to be. For, as Nietzsche says, ‘Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying “yes” to itself, slave morality says “no” on principle to everything that is “outside”, “other”, “non-self ”: and this “no” is its creative deed’ (GM, 20). In other words, the intensification of ressentiment permits the slave to wholly affirm herself by allowing for an ultimate act of other negation. This act is the creation of the absolute object of hate. Through the festering and swelling of hatred, the slave ‘conceived of the “evil enemy”, “the evil one” as a basic idea to which he now thinks up a copy and counterpart, “the good one” himself!’ (GM, 22). It is this concept of the ‘evil enemy’ then which is key. For if the noble as merely hated gives the slave partial affirmation, as the ‘noble’s victim’, then the noble as something even worse, may provide the slave with full affirmation. In short, this ultimate negation of the other may provide an answer as to how in ‘not being this’, the slave can fully affirm himself as ‘good’.33 To explain why exactly this is the case, though, the idea of ‘evil’ needs to be examined more closely. To show how this idea allows for slave values it is necessary to ask how ‘the evil one’, in contrast to one who is just hated, is created. In short, it must be asked how the slave’s initial attitude toward the noble changes so that someone can be regarded in this way. It has already been observed that this initial attitude is characterised by hatred and develops when the slave finds a way to identify the noble as a ‘guilty culprit’ (GM, 93). But what is it then that distinguishes someone who is merely blamed, and hated, for one’s suffering into the ‘evil enemy’? For Nietzsche the answer seems to rest upon the development and  See also Wallace ‘Ressentiment, Value, and Self-Vindication: Making sense of Nietzsche’s Slave Revolt’. Wallace discusses the problem of how we move from ressentiment to new values, and criticises Nietzsche for not being clear enough about this process. 33

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utilisation of a certain idea of agency. And it is to understand this point that it is necessary to see how he views this conception. For Nietzsche argues that the slave ‘separates strength from the manifestations of strength, as though there were an indifferent substratum behind the strong person which had the freedom to manifest strength or not’ (GM, 26).34 In other words, the slave formulates the idea that there is a substantial subject ‘behind’ action, or the manifestation of power, which as a result has freedom of choice over its actions. This is the invention of the present subject of humanism. It is the creation of the idea of a ‘Subject, object, a doer for every doing, the doing separated from what does it’ (WLN, 246). And it is a denial of the noble idea that we just are our activity in relation to the world. It is a refusal of the idea, framed in my terms, that we just are perversion of will-to-power. Further, it can now be seen how and why this is created. This is because it is necessary both for the construction of the ‘evil enemy’ and, as will be shown, the slave affirmation and morality that follows from this. For as Nietzsche explains, …the entrenched, secretly smouldering emotions of revenge and hatred put this belief to their own use and, in fact, do not defend any belief more passionately than that the strong are free to be weak, and the birds of prey are free to be lambs:—in this way, they gain the right to make the birds of prey responsible for being birds of prey. (GM, 26)

What this means is that it is belief in the present subject, and its possession of a distinct will which it can choose to exercise, which allows the slave to see the noble in a new way. This is the case since he can now attribute to the latter a new depth of responsibility. Previously the suffering that the noble allegedly inflicted on the slave was seen as an arbitrary consequence of the former’s nature. It appears now though to be the deliberate and malicious action of one who could do otherwise. And it is thus in this sense, with the humanist subject, that the noble can be viewed as ‘evil’. Regarding the noble’s self-affirming activity, which provokes  This can usefully be contrasted with Sartre’s criticism of the subject ‘behind’ activity in Transcendence of the Ego. See chapter four of the current work for more on this. 34

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jealousy and resentment in the slave, as a choice to be ‘bad’, they can see the noble as uniquely despicable. In short, they can move from a view of the nobles as figures of fear and hate, to figures that are low, abhorrent and immoral.

5.1

Slave Morality and the ‘Good Man’

Yet if this explains what is meant here by ‘evil’ how does this account for the creation of slave morality? If the origins of the humanist subject have now been intimated, how does this allow for the perversion of original noble values, and a morality of inauthenticity? The answer centres on the universalisation that such a notion of evil permits. This is because it is by applying the designation of ‘evil’ to the nobles, in terms of freely chosen ‘bad acts’, that the slave can universalise his negative relation to them. In other words, the slaves are able, as Nietzsche says, to believe through this that ‘what they hate is not their enemy, oh no! They hate “injustice”, “godlessness”’ (GM, 28). As a consequence the slaves can moralise their hatred of the nobles. That is, they can suggest that the actions of the nobles are not simply bad for them but represent a universal category of what is bad per se, a mode of ‘immorality’. And in turn it is this point, the universalising of the noble’s action as ‘immoral’, which paves the way for slave values. By now conceiving of the noble not as a noble, but as one who is immoral, the slave moves from being derivatively ‘not noble’ to derivatively ‘not immoral’. Hence they can view themselves not as slaves, or the oppressed, but as the moral, the good. Nonetheless more must be said about this process. This is because the slaves are only able to affirm themselves as truly ‘good’ in this way by a further move. This is linked to another change in how they view the noble. For just as the slaves suppress the particularity of their hatred in designating as ‘evil’ noble actions, denying its’ relation to their own position, then so do they suppress the particularity of the noble’s activity. That is, in calling that activity ‘evil’ they imagine it is no longer the exclusive expression of strength of a particular group. Rather, instead of being something of which slaves are innately incapable, due to their psychical weakness, it is now a universal possibility which any subject could

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‘choose’. And it is this idea that the slave too could have chosen to be evil, which becomes critical in the creation of their ‘good’. For it is precisely this notion of ‘evil’ as a universal possibility which allows the slaves to think something remarkable. It allows them to say, according to Nietzsche, “Let us be different from evil people, let us be good!” And a good person is anyone who does not rape, does not harm anyone, who does not attack, does not retaliate, who leaves the taking of revenge to God, who keeps hidden as we do, avoids all evil… (GM, 26–27)

This idea then that evil action is a universal possibility allows the slave to think that the ‘good’ can consist in choosing not to be ‘evil’. It is, as such, this idea which allows the slave to construe his weakness, his inability to act, as something essentially positive. Of course, as Nietzsche says, ‘this means if heard coolly and impartially, nothing more than: “We weak people are just weak; it is good to do nothing for which we are not strong enough’” (GM, 27). However, viewed from the self-deceiving perspective of the slave, it is also what allows him to affirm his mode of existence, and to solve his dilemma. For, as Nietzsche argues, it has ‘facilitated that sublime self-deception whereby the majority of the dying, the weak and the oppressed. … could construe weakness itself as freedom, and their particular mode of existence as an accomplishment’ (GM, 27). The notion that weakness is a choice allows the slave for the first time then to properly affirm that she is good. By construing ‘not being evil’ as an accomplishment she uncovers her own self-affirming slave values. And she does so without having first to create them through actual activity and overcoming herself. It is also clear how this process represents a secondary perversion. For the slaves’ ‘creation’ of values is here based not on original self-affirming activity. Instead it comes from the negation of a prior noble affirmative world-relation, and value system. In short, the birth of slave morality, from the idea of evil, is based on the parasitical inversion of a morality grounded in an authentic relation to will-to-­ power. The latter emerges as the authentic utilisation of human creative potential born of the original perversion of will-to-power which grounds our being. The slave appropriates this creative morality, turning it on its head, and against itself.

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Conclusion: Authenticity and Morality

In any case, it has been shown how slave morality is born. Out of the intensification of ressentiment and the universalisation of the ‘evil enemy’ concept, the slave’s dilemma has been solved. How they can affirm their existence despite lacking the strength to overcome the problem of transience has been demonstrated. But with this have the wider questions of this chapter, and this book’s discussion of Nietzsche, been answered? Recall that the aim was to provide concrete form and justification for the sketch given in the introduction. This was the sketch for a possible radical non-humanist existentialism based on the concept of human being as a perversion of something other than itself. This was to be accomplished first by looking at the philosophy of Nietzsche. Reading him through an existentialist lens, it was seen in Chap. 2 that a proper pursuit of authenticity led to the rejection of the humanist subject. This was because in seeking to develop our own individual perspective, we were also led to awareness of ourselves as nothing other than the expression of the procreative force forging such unique perspectives. That is, we were led to awareness of ourselves as the creative, interpretative, activity of will-to-power. However, as seen, this created several problems. While allowing for an existentialism that escaped humanism it raised the issue of how to maintain any distinct meaning for the human. It also brought up the question of why, given that we are will to power, and there is no independent present subject, such a humanist self-conception nevertheless has become dominant. Relatedly, this idea of a unity between the human and will-to-power raised the issue of authenticity itself. For what sense does it make to talk about authentic and inauthentic ways of life if we reject the humanist subject in this fashion? The answer to the first question was given in Chap. 2. It was seen that a distinct meaning for the human could be maintained if it was understood as the perversion of animal will-to-power brought about by internalisation and bad conscience. Yet this still left the second and third questions. And it was to address these that the present chapter looked at the slave revolt in values. Specifically, understanding slave morality as a perversion of a prior noble form of morality was a means to this. By

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explaining this process I would uncover the origins of an authentic relation to the initial perversion of will-to-power that grounds our being. And it would also show, via the perversion of this in turn, how inauthentic relations to will-to-power became possible. So, this chapter first looked at noble morality. It was asked why moral value creation was not a ‘general privilege of mankind’ (GM, 11), and only noble types, not slaves, were originally capable of it. Affirmation was part of the answer. As Nietzsche says, ‘where there is great love of oneself, then it is a sign of pregnancy’ (TSZ, 181). In order to create a morality a group must be able to affirm itself and its mode of being. The reason the nobles were able to do this though was neither because they enjoyed massive social privilege nor unfettered satisfaction of desire. They were not able to affirm themselves merely because they could behave as a ‘savage cruel beast’ (BG, 159). Rather, this ability arose from a response to a unique problem of the human situation. This problem originated in bad conscience, when the fissure in the self it produced led to awareness of temporality and a possible future. It was the concern that ‘everything passes’, including human life, and hence that all of our projects are haunted by an ostensible futility. Rather than fleeing this problem, and the suffering it causes, though the nobles confront it head on. First through martial values, and the struggles of actual war, then more spiritualised forms of warfare, they battle the suffering and transience of human existence. In proving their strength in this they can affirm life precisely in and through the challenges and resistances it presents. And because of this they are able to express the triumphant story of these overcomings in the form of a morality. In contrast, the slave cannot originally affirm themselves in this way. Due to ‘their weakness with regards to themselves’,35 their psychical weakness and cowardice, they attempt to evade the challenge of transience. Overly concerned with their own survival, they are unwilling to take the risk of confronting objects of resistance, and hence they never experience true overcoming. The problem of time and meaning, and of themselves, remains thus unresolved in their case.  Metzger, 137.

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As a result they are they are unable to create moral values through self-­ affirmation. However, as discussed, the slave still ‘suffered from the problem of what he meant’ (GM, 120). They faced a dilemma of wanting a morality which could give their lives meaning, while lacking the strength necessary to create one through affirmation of their way of being. And this dilemma was resolved, as seen, via ressentiment. The slave gained, at first, a derivative identity and affirmation, by blaming the nobles for their predicament, and seeing themselves as ‘the noble’s victims.’ When this attitude intensifies ressentiment then ‘turns creative’, ‘and gives birth to values’ (GM, 20).36 This occurs with the creation of the evil enemy based upon the invention of the humanist subject. This idea separates the ‘doer from the doing’. And it allows the slave to affirm themselves as one who chooses to be ‘not evil’. Thus it allows the slave to see themselves via this negation now as ‘good’, and to base a moral system around this evaluation. Yet has this then resolved the outstanding question regarding Nietzsche? Has this account of noble and slave moralities explained how an ideal of authenticity makes sense if we reject humanism? Has it explained how to draw an evaluative distinction between authentic and inauthentic ways of living if both by necessity are expressions of will-to-power? The answer is ‘yes’. This is because this analysis allows for a further distinction between active and re-active forms of will-to-power. As Nietzsche says, the human being is ‘a bridge, a great promise’ (GM, 58). The human is distinguished as being a primary perversion of will-to-power. This allowed, through our awareness of time, unique ways and potentialities for the will-to-power to express itself in the creation of values. And an active continuation of this promise was found with the nobles. Their ways of life and moralities gave expression to new human ways the will-to-power could be developed and expressed. In the self-discipline and mastery of the nobles ever more sophisticated and deeper ways were found in which life could overcome and understand itself. And in their morals they also lay the ground for new ‘perilous voyages of the soul’ and modes of living. Indeed, the

 Note the contrast here with other commentators, principally Ridley, who argues that the ‘turning creative’ of ressentiment is a result of ‘internalisation’, and hence that it is the internalisation of ressentiment that allows the slaves to create values, 26. 36

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authentic individual themselves, their defiant solitude, individuality, and insight, is a late heir to the courage, and warrior spirit, of these types. In contrast, the slave revolt represents a re-active relation to will-to-­ power. As discussed, this is rooted in the fact that rather than continuing the active will-to-power allowed for by bad conscience and value creation, it appropriates and perverts it.37 And this secondary perversion is re-active, and lays the ground for inauthenticity, in the sense that it utilises the active-creative will-to-power discussed to an opposite end. Namely, it utilises a creative force, in noble morals, to forge a morality encouraging passivity and stasis. It leaches the very soil from which it sprang in order to ensure that ‘no longer will a high tree be able to grow from it’ (TSZ, 46). This is why Nietzsche describes slave morality as ‘the great danger to mankind’ (GM, 7). Finally, it is inauthentic in the sense that it is, with this, self-deceiving. With its morality, and its present subject, it denies the very thing, as perverse relation to will-to-power, that we are, and which gave it being. Encouraging us instead to become part of the herd, it supresses awareness of that force which can lead us back to our unique individuality. It is a wilful forgetting of will-to-power. But it is one which must be understood if we are to reclaim our true selves.

References Conway, D. Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (London: Continuum, 2008). Deleuze, G. Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson (London: Continuum, 2006). Issa, ‘ku no shaba ya’, in The Classic Tradition of Haiku: An Anthology, ed. by Faubion Bowers (New York: Dover Thrift, 1996), 68. Janaway, C. Beyond Selflessness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Kaufmann, W. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974). Leiter, B. Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002).  This is contra Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, for whom bad conscience is re-active. Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 252–255, and Schacht, ‘Nietzsche: after the death of God’, 218–224, are closer to my position regarding bad conscience in one sense, in so far as both suggest that ‘repression’ and bad conscience may be positive. 37

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Thomas Mann [From Janaway, C. Beyond Selflessness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 95–96] (Mann 1959: 165). Metzger, J. ‘How deep are the roots of nihilism’, in Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Philosophy of the Future, ed. by Jeffrey Metzger (London: Continuum, 2009). Mulhall, S. Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Nietzsche, F. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by R.J.  Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1973). ———. On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. by C.  Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ———. The Gay Science, trans. by J.  Nauckhoff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustrai, trans. by R.J.  Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1961). ———. Writings from the Late Notebooks, trans. by K.  Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Owen, D. Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2007). Poellner, P. ‘Ressentiment and Morality’, in Nietzsche’s on the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide, ed. by S. May (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). Reginster, B. The Affirmation of Life (London: Harvard University Press, 2008). Ridley, A. Nietzsche’s Conscience (London: Cornell University Press, 1998). Sartre, Transcendence of the Ego, trans. by A. Brown (London: Routledge, 2004). Schacht, R. ‘Nietzsche: After the Death of God’, in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, ed. by S. Crowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012): 111–136. Wallace, R. ‘Ressentiment, Value, and Self-Vindication: Making sense of Nietzsche’s Slave Revolt’, in Nietzsche and Morality, ed. by Leiter and Sinhababu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

4 Sartre, Nothingness and Perversity

Following from the introduction, the previous two chapters of this book sought to give form to, and justification for, the sketch for a possible radical existentialism. At first this was done via Nietzsche. Reading his philosophy through the lens of a ‘return to human being’, it was seen that a pursuit of authenticity and understanding of the human suggested an alternative to humanism. This was because of will-to-power. In attempting to understand ourselves, and human being in general, a fundamental unity of the self with tshe creative force of nature was discovered. And it was seen, in this way, how a form of existentialism could avoid the present, independent subject of humanism. However, I also argued that a concept of perversion in Nietzsche could address the questions that arise from this. First, in Chap. 2, a distinct meaning for the human could be maintained, despite rejecting the humanist subject, if human being was conceptualised as the perversion of will-to-power. Specifically, this view could avoid reducing human being to world, if the human existed as this perversion, brought about by our confinement in the state. Further, a An early version of this chapter was published as ‘Existentialism is not a Humanism: Nothingness and the Non-humanist Philosophy of the Early Sartre’, in Symposium: Journal of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Fall, 2017). © The Author(s) 2020 D. Mitchell, Sartre, Nietzsche and Non-Humanist Existentialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43108-2_4

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concept of perversion could also be used to address a second set of questions. Namely, through the secondary perversion of slave morality, it was seen how the possibility of inauthenticity could make sense without humanism. It was also seen how this secondary perversion could explain the origins, and predominance, of the humanist subject. Yet is this sufficient? Does this discussion of Nietzsche suffice for the development and defence of the existentialism outlined in the introduction? The answer is clearly ‘no’. For, first, if this idea of a possible, radical, non-humanist existentialism is to have wider applicability then it cannot just be true for a single figure. If it is only shown to be possible in Nietzsche’s case, there is no reason to believe that either the rejection of humanism or the concept of perversion has any broader import for existentialism as a movement. Second, it seems more substance can be given to both concepts. That is, given the different approaches to Nietzsche’s of other existentialists, it is likely that exploration of the latter could lend greater depth to my ‘return to the human’, and to the human as perverse. Thus, exploration of other figures is necessary to lend further meaning to a possible non-humanist existentialism. For these reasons then the remaining chapters will explore the philosophy of Sartre. I ask whether Sartre’s phenomenological existentialism can, like Nietzsche, avoid the humanist charge, and develop an existentialist alternative to humanism. Likewise, I explore how the concept of perversity is integral to achieving this. In this way a non-humanist existentialism is shown to be possible not just with Nietzsche’s, but other putatively existentialist modes of thought. And, thus, greater justification is given to the idea of a radical ‘return to the human’. Further, more substance is also given to this conception. That is, by looking at Sartrean existentialism more concrete form is given to the meaning of non-humanist existentialism and to perversion. This will also provide opportunity for contrast and comparison. Similarity and common ground found will shed new light on both figures, as will difference. And finally, Sartre is chosen, as opposed to other figures, because of this. He is chosen not only because he is the existentialist most closely associated with the humanist critique, but because his existentialism is ostensibly so different to Nietzsche’s.

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How will all this be achieved? How, specifically, will greater form and justification be given to the idea of a non-humanist existentialism, and to human being as perverse? First this is done by exploring Sartre’s notion of the pre-reflective. For when one looks to this domain of experience, prior to reflective theorisation, no independent inner domain of subjectivity is revealed. Instead, I argue that, for Sartre, what is disclosed is the human as in the world, as never given except as a relation to world. The rest of this chapter then elaborates on the nature of this. It is seen, when properly investigated, that this relation is defined by negation and real non-­ being. And this non-being can, in turn be understood by viewing it as a perverse modification of being. Thus, I show that, for Sartre, the human as relation to world implies the human as perversion of the world. As such, with this, I give a new, Sartrean, sense of the human being as perverse. And in this way further sense is given to the meaning of a possible non-humanist existentialism.

1

Introduction

Before looking at Sartre’s philosophy in more detail though it is important to give some context. And a good place to start is with Levi-Strauss claim that Sartre’s existentialism is “Métaphysique pour midinette.” That is, it is “metaphysics for shop-girls.”1 For while most would demur from the extremity of such a remark, it nonetheless captures something about the way Sartrean existentialism is, and has been, perceived within the history of twentieth-century thought. In short, it reflects a sense that this type of philosophy is somehow naïve or romantic, lacking in philosophical depth. It reflects the sense that with talk of things like angst and alienation, it should be of more interest to dilettantes and students than to serious philosophers. Further, Sartre himself is also seen, as Fox observes, as a “philosopher of a world that has passed.”2 Thus, even if Sartre’s existentialism was popular or relevant in his own time, its concerns and overall project are now outmoded or passé. And the kernel of this claim,  Morris, Sartre, 54, n. 18.  Fox, The New Sartre, 1.

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from a philosophic perspective, can be summed up with the term ‘humanism.’ Underscoring the perception that Sartrean existentialism is outmoded, especially for post-structuralists, is the idea that it is synonymous with an isolatable, and present “humanist” conception of the subject. But is this a fair claim? This chapter presents an argument that despite the deeply ingrained nature of this assumption, the identification of Sartre’s existentialism with humanism, and the subsequent dismissal of this philosophy, is not justified. In fact, not only is Sartre’s thought not humanist, it helps clarify, and provide an answer to, a problem facing all efforts to overcome humanism. That is, Sartrean existentialism helps address the problem of maintaining a distinct conception of the human while rejecting the humanist subject. Moreover, I make two key assumptions which link this argument about Sartre to the broader project of this book. First, I work with the idea that Sartre’s early philosophy, particularly as expressed in Being and Nothingness, is a form of existentialism as outlined in my introduction. This is because his philosophy is based upon a concern to, as he says, “…have immersed man back in the world.”3 In other words, his philosophy seeks a return to human “being-in-the-world”. This means a return to human existence as it is concretely engaged in worldly situations, projects, and possibilities. Secondly, I will take Sartre’s philosophy to be a paradigmatic instance of phenomenological existentialism. What precisely this involves will become clearer in what follows, and it differs from Nietzschean existentialism. But it derives from the phenomenological method developed by Husserl. The difference is that it is here applied more concretely to human existence and engagement in the world, and is linked to the ideal of authenticity. Sartre’s philosophy will be taken as the main representative of this mode of thought. This is both because it is the most systematically worked out project of this kind, and because it was Sartre who became the explicit target of Heidegger and others critiques of existentialism for being “humanist”.4  Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, 51. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as TE.  Heidegger’s Being and Time might be considered as another central text representative of what we are calling “phenomenological existentialism”. However, given Heidegger’s explicit rejection of the existentialist label, and the fact that he is the originator of the ‘humanist’ critique of existentialism, it is more productive and straightforward to focus on the main target of this criticism: Sartre. 3 4

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In any case, given these assumptions, I will be able to draw broader provisional conclusions about existentialism from what is established. That is, given what has been said, the conclusions drawn regarding Sartre’s philosophy can be applied to phenomenological existentialism more broadly. And if the “humanism” objection then can be refuted in the former case it can also potentially be refuted with regards to any proper effort to construct a phenomenological existentialism.5 However, before looking at how this is accomplished, it is necessary to give further historical context. Before seeing how Sartre overcomes humanism, and how a phenomenological existentialism can be non-humanist, I must first ask in more detail why he has been characterised as humanist to begin with. And it must also be asked why this perception of his thought has become so entrenched. In so doing, motivation is then provided for my reassessment of Sartre’s relation to humanism.

2

Sartre and Humanism

So, starting with the first question: where did the perception of Sartre’s philosophy as humanist come from? And why then has the significance of his thought, and of existentialism, been so routinely dismissed? This was touched on the introduction, but it is now necessary to look at the issue in more depth. For the answer from a historical perspective centres on the confluence of two factors. That is, the answer to this relates to Sartre’s 1945 lecture Existentialism is a Humanism, and Heidegger’s interpretation of Sartre, based on this in the Letter. This is because, to start Further, whether Being and Time is in fact, contrary to Heidegger’s own remarks regarding it, existentialist is a question that lies beyond the scope of the current work. 5  As discussed in the introduction, though, these conclusions will not necessarily apply to all figures or movements with which the “existentialist” label has been associated. The question, for instance, of whether the thought of Camus or Jaspers, or ‘Christian existentialism’, can still be considered humanist is beyond the scope of the present work. On the other hand, these conclusions might apply, for example, to Gabriel Marcel and Edith Stein in so far as they can be said to develop a similar phenomenological existentialism. This point will remain on one level provisional, and suggestive, though, rather than definitive, until further research is done. As explained in the introduction, the purpose of the current work is to provide a preliminary step towards addressing a certain question regarding a possible, radical type of existentialism, rather than a final and exhaustive answer to it.

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with, the lecture, aimed at a non-academic audience, necessarily presented a simplified version of Sartrean existentialism. Thus, making his philosophy accessible, Sartre reduces the complex phenomenological ontology of Being and Nothingness to slogans such as “existence precedes essence.”6 And it was unsurprising that Heidegger would want to dissociate his own philosophy from this.7 Connected to this point, Sartre gave the lecture in response to the criticism he and existentialism received in post-war France. Particularly, existentialism was, as Sartre says, “blamed for encouraging people to remain in a state of quietism and despair.”8 And it did so because of its allegedly nihilistic implications. Accordingly, he responded by attempting to present this mode of thought as potentially affirmative and “humanist.” He attempted to present existentialism as humanist in the sense of finding, and celebrating, the value in human life. However, this emphasis did the philosophical aspect of his discussion few favours. This was not just because it encouraged confusion regarding the difference between a more specific philosophical sense of humanism, and a more general “ethical” meaning as Sartre was employing it.9 But it also led Sartre to unduly stress his existentialism as a “philosophy of the human”, in a certain simplified sense, and downplay the import of our relation to the world, or being. This was a problem because it was upon this text that Heidegger based his analysis of Sartre in the Letter.10 It is also there that Heidegger ­identifies  Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 20.  Sartre attempts to identify Heidegger with existentialism in Existentialism is a Humanism (Ibid.). 8  Ibid., 17. 9  This meaning is that human life is valuable and that for the human “there is no legislator other than himself ” (Existentialism is a Humanism, 53). Note, however, that this meaning does not rule out the first philosophical sense of “humanism” having an ethical dimension or ethical implications. Rather, I just intend to suggest that there exists a predominantly “ethical” sense of humanism, which is how the term is more commonly used, and to which Sartre was appealing in Existentialism is a Humanism. I will return to the connection between the “philosophical” sense and ethics when I look in more detail at the Letter on Humanism. 10  Sartre in fact discusses a more commonly understood ethical sense of ‘humanism’ in a number of other places in his work; in an early passage in The War Diaries; in the third essay of The Communists and Peace, where Sartre talks about the relationship between the French working class and humanism; and in The Family Idiot. The issue of humanism is also touched on in Nausea, when Roquentin criticises the Autodidact’s professed “humanism”. However, Sartre’s overall relationship towards humanism, in its more general sense, not the specific sense in which Heidegger uses it in the Letter, 6 7

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Sartre, and existentialism more broadly, with a pejorative sense of humanism. For, given the emphasis on “the human,” and the lack of clear distinction between two different senses of humanism, it was easy, based solely on this lecture, to view Sartre as limited for being humanist. And this meant not asking after “the relation of Being to the essence of man”.11 Rather, “humanism” in this sense meant being only concerned with an isolatable field of the human, and a present human subject. However, if it is apparent why Heidegger associated Sartre with humanism, it might seem more puzzling how this view, and the dismissal of Sartre’s existentialism, became so widely accepted. After all, could subsequent philosophers not simply have read Being and Nothingness, which Heidegger had not,12 thereby correcting the oversight in which this view is rooted? Theoretically the answer to this is “yes.” But there are a number of contextual reasons why Heidegger’s view prevailed. The most general of these was Heidegger’s influence on post-war French philosophical culture. For, as Rockmore has pointed out, “in the period after the Second World War, Heidegger became the master thinker of French philosophy.”13 As such, even amongst those who knew that Heidegger’s criticisms in the Letter were based solely upon Existentialism is a Humanism, there remained a sense that he must still be right about Sartre. Moreover, there was little desire to address this oversight. On the contrary, as Martinot has suggested, “It has been an unspoken goal of the post-structuralist project to render Sartre history.”14 There was an emerging group of thinkers who sought to replace the predominance of Sartrean existentialism with their own non-phenomenological types of

is a question which lies beyond the scope of the present work. Further, the Heideggerian critique of Sartre, and existentialism, concerns only the more narrow, latter, sense of humanism. 11  Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Heidegger: Basic Writings, 153. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as LH. 12  Bernasconi claims that Heidegger had read Being and Nothingness the year before writing the Letter, in 1946. (See Bernasconi, “Heidegger and Sartre: Historicity, Destiny and Politics,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, 369). Yet, whether or not this is correct, Heidegger simply does not engage with that text in the Letter. In fact, there are only three actual citations from Sartre in the Letter and all are from Existentialism is a Humanism. 13  Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy, xi. 14  Martinot, “Sartre’s Being for Heidegger; Heidegger’s Being for Sartre,” Man and World, 63.

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philosophy.15 And this movement was given both expression and impetus by Derrida’s 1968 talk “The Ends of Man.” Picking up on the fact that Sartre used Corbin’s translation of Dasein, from Being and Time, as “human-reality,” Derrida asserted that this indicates Sartre’s commitment to an isolatable domain of the human.16 For, as he says, “To the extent that it describes the structures of human-reality, phenomenological ontology is a philosophical anthropology.”17 In short, allowing them to assert and distinguish their own positions at the time, post-structuralist thinkers had little motivation to challenge the problematic assumptions behind Heidegger’s dismissal of Sartre in the Letter. Yet where does this leave the argument overall? If I have addressed how the perception of Sartrean existentialism as humanist originated, and became established, can I now say a re-assessment of Sartre’s relationship to humanism has been shown to be necessary? The answer is “no.” For, I must still ask whether the current literature regarding this issue has rectified the discussed oversight, and whether Heidegger’s critique of Sartre is accurate. Looking at the first issue, it can be said that significant portion of the literature on the Letter takes for granted both what exactly Heidegger’s critique of humanism is and that Sartre is tied to it. Bernasconi is symptomatic of this attitude. This is because he says that “Sartre was still using the terms existence and essence according to their metaphysical meaning and that by merely reversing the terms he remained within Western metaphysics.”18 This is indeed what Heidegger claims. But Bernasconi does not really elaborate on why Sartre is bound to using the terms in their “metaphysical” sense or what it would mean to use existence and essence “non-metaphysically.” Likewise, Mitchell states that “To address (the) question concerning humanism thus requires thinking further into the essence of the human, that is, ek-sistence.”19 Yet again, it is not made clear why humanism, let alone Sartre, is unable to conceive  See Fox, The New Sartre, for a discussion of the relationship between Sartre’s philosophy and poststructuralism. 16  Derrida, “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, 115. 17  Ibid., 115–16. 18  Bernasconi, “Heidegger and Sartre,” 369–70. 19  Mitchell, “The ‘Letter on Humanism’: Ek-sistence, Being and Language,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, 238. 15

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human being in relation to this ecstatic “standing out” that Heidegger says characterises the human essence.20 In short then, it is assumed that the meaning of humanism and what is wrong with it is self-evident. This assumption prevents a serious assessment of whether the Sartre of Being and Nothingness is really humanist, making it possible to pass too quickly onto other themes. So, for instance, Bernasconi and Hodge move swiftly from humanism itself onto discussing the role of politics and history in the Letter. Similarly, for Mitchell it is language, and its objectifying tendencies,21 that takes precedence.22 Moreover, even where this is not quite the case, the literature on this issue still contains important lacunas. Even where commentators do engage more substantively with the philosophical problem of humanism, they accept Heidegger’s assumptions regarding it. In particular, they do not acknowledge the problem that follows from a critique of humanism and overlook its possible solution by Sartre. Rae and Dastur are more typical in this regard.23 Rae suggests that the problem with humanism is  There is a similar problem with Hodge. She alludes to “the anthropological assumptions, sometimes referred to as ‘humanism’, at work in the European philosophical tradition.” (Hodge, “Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Critique of Humanism,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 76). Yet, once more, she is unable to articulate what is so problematic about these ‘assumptions’. 21  Mitchell, “The ‘Letter on Humanism’,” 241. 22  Meanwhile for Kakkori (Kakkori and Huttunen, “The Sartre-Heidegger Controversy on Humanism and the Concept of Man in Education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, 351–356) it is educational theory that takes precedence, and for Kacerauskas (Kacerauskas, “Existential Humanism as Human Creativeness,” Phainomena: Journal of the Phenomenological Society of Ljubljana, 50–61). Sartre and Heidegger’s connection to literature. 23  Exceptions to this might be found in the case of Krell (Krell “Introduction,” Heidegger: Basic Writings) and Skocz (Dennis Skocz, “Postscripts to the ‘Letter on Humanism’: Heidegger, Sartre, and Being-Human,” French Interpretations of Heidegger) though neither directly addresses the question with which this chapter is concerned. Krell is more critical of Heidegger in his short introduction to the Letter, though he nonetheless does not question the latter’s identification of Sartrean existentialism with humanism. Skocz meanwhile claims that both Sartre and Heidegger still remain within humanism because of their respective approaches to history. Mention can also be made here of Martinot (“Sartre’s Being”), who shows a certain degree of sympathy for Sartre, and claims the idea of the Sartre-Heidegger debate is a fabrication. He does not show, however, how Sartre develops a clear alternative to humanism. Likewise, Gardner is also relatively unique, in connection to this debate, in arguing that Sartre’s ontology has been overlooked and should be taken seriously. That said, his discussion of this topic does not engage with the question of humanism in the Letter or Heidegger’s critique of humanism there. See Gardner, “Sartre, Schelling and Onto-Theology,” Religious Studies, 247–71. 20

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that it is “underpinned by a binary logic that forestalls any thinking of being.”24 Elaborating, he states this means that while “humanism tends to think of the human’s essence as ‘something’ that resides within the human,” for Heidegger, “the essence of the human being lies in its unique relation to being.”25 And indeed this is a deeper analysis of what Heidegger sees as humanism’s limitation. However, Rae does not dwell upon what remains problematic here. He does not acknowledge what is problematic about such a destruction of the human as a distinct “something.” Nor does he consider why Sartre’s thought could prove productive in this light. Rather, like Dastur, who says that “One can wonder if Sartre really succeeds in getting out from the traditional opposition of subject and object”,26 Rae follows Heidegger in uncritically assuming that Sartre “simply re-instantiates the logic of binary oppositions.”27 That is to say, he ignores Sartre’s efforts to avoid precisely this opposition of consciousness and world. And he ignores, as well, Sartre’s efforts to think through the consequences of abandoning this opposition. To sum up, the secondary literature on the Letter, mostly sympathetic to Heidegger, perpetuates the assumption that Sartre’s interest in human being and “consciousness” makes his philosophy humanist. And it does so by overlooking the question of whether Heidegger’s criticism of Sartre in the Letter is accurate. Furthermore, Sartre commentators have not, up to this point, explicitly addressed this issue. That is, despite presenting a much more sophisticated picture of Sartre than the Heideggerian or post-­structuralist characterisations, they have not directly engaged with the Letter. Nor have they explicitly dealt with the charge against Sartre of “humanism” that follows from it.28 As such, it is to do just that that this chapter must now look at Sartre’s  Rae, “Re-Thinking the Human: Heidegger, Fundamental Ontology, and Humanism,” Human Studies, 23. 25  Rae, “Re-Thinking the Huamn,” 33. 26  Dastur, “The Question of Transcendence in Heidegger and Sartre,” Phainomena: Journal of the Phenomenological Society of Ljubljana, 36. 27  Rae, “Re-Thinking the Human,” 33. 28  For example, in studies by Murdoch (1953) Warnock (1970), Catalano (1974), Dobson (1993), McCulloch (1994), Levy (2002), Morris (2008), Webber (2009), and Daigle (2010) there is no mention of the Letter, or of Heidegger’s critique. 24

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existentialist philosophy outside of Existentialism is a Humanism. And based on this it will assess whether the Heideggerian critique of Sartre’s existentialism is fair.

3

Absence of the Substantial Self

Starting out then, it can be noted, against Heidegger, that Sartrean existentialism is concerned with being and ontology. Its goal is not, as sometimes imagined, simply to describe various aspects of human life. As Sartre says toward the end of Being and Nothingness, “My ultimate and initial project … is … always the outline of a solution of the problem of being.”29 However, remaining true to its existentialist commitments, such an ontology does not proceed by an abstraction from human existence. It avoids, in other words, Pattison’s distinction between “universal ontology” and “the concrete and immediate situation of individual existence.”30 Rather Sartre proceeds, using an existentialist phenomenological method, by deriving an ontology precisely from our concrete experience. But how does it do this? And isn’t an “ontology” beginning with human experience a contradiction that returns Sartre to the very humanism he was trying to escape? Addressing the second question, the answer is “no.” And this is because what he starts with is not “the human” as an object of knowledge, but with the first-person phenomenological experience of living individuals. In fact, it is the very conflation of these two terms which prevents a proper appreciation of the latter. That is, as Levy points out, “we misunderstand our own being in the world and take ourselves for disinterested spectators.”31 Furthermore, an authentic recovery of our experience as it is actually lived is ontological insofar as, unlike humanism, it precedes any assumptions about what being or human being is. For, as Heidegger himself says, “the term ‘phenomenology’ expresses a maxim which can be formulated as ‘To the things themselves!’ It is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings” (BT, 50). And this means that true phenomenological existentialism can open  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 463. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as BN.  Pattison, The Philosophy of Kierkegaard, 86. 31  Levy, Sartre, 16. 29 30

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the way for a genuine inquiry into being. That is, because existentialist phenomenology recovers an experience prior to existing ontological assumptions, it can serve as the basis for an unprejudiced exploration of the human being’s “relation to being.” However, that is not of course to say that recovering such an experience is necessarily easy. Nor is it something we ordinarily do when we believe we are recalling or describing some episode. This is because, as Husserl had pointed out, awareness of our own experience is systematically distorted by ingrained commonsensical assumptions about the way the world is. And this has at its heart the problem that we project the nature of reflective experience onto all experience. That is, since explicit recalling involves reflection, we usually interpret any experience through the lens of the subject-object paradigm of the reflective mode. Nevertheless, this difficulty is not intractable. And how one can overcome it is indicated by Sartre, in Transcendence of the Ego: Obviously, we need to resort to concrete experience, and this may seem impossible, since an experience of this kind is by definition reflective, in other words endowed with an I. But all unreflected consciousness, being a non-thetic consciousness of itself, leaves behind it a non-thetic memory that can be consulted. All that is required for this is to try to reconstitute the complete moment in which this unreflected consciousness appeared (and this is, by definition, always possible). For instance, I was just now absorbed in my reading… (TE, 11)

In other words, there is a domain of pre-reflective experience, “unreflected consciousness,” that is prior to reflective “stepping back” from the world and the theory it gives rise to. This mode of experience is free from prior ontological assumptions, and it can thus serve as the basis for unbiased phenomenological ontology. Sartre suggests that it is possible to recover the nature of such experience without this necessarily being distorted by reflection. For it is as if originary experience leaves behind a trace, “a non-thetic memory,” which lingers in subsequent consciousness like ripples on water. And this means that with sufficient effort, and by holding in check our tendency to interpret the experience in terms of what ‘aught’ to be the case, we can discern its contours. In short, with

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developed sensitivity to certain moments of present consciousness, we can recover the pre-reflective without a reflective re-constructive “leap” into a past consciousness. Furthermore, an analysis of the pre-reflective shows how Sartre’s existentialist phenomenology is incompatible with humanism. And it also discloses the problem created when this mode of thinking is rejected. This is because Sartre discovers in that new domain, when we look closely enough, that a substantial self or “I” is absent. He writes: “When I run after a tram, when I look at the time, when I become absorbed in the contemplation of a portrait, there is no I” (TE, 13). In other words, when we look with sufficient honesty to pre-reflective experience we find there is no independent subject present.32 Whilst our attachment to the reassuring present self of the reflective mode makes us want to avoid seeing this, we do not find, as Gardner puts it, “something substantial lying behind and supporting the stream of our consciousness.”33 Rather, all we uncover is “consciousness of the tram-needing-to-be-caught” (TE, 13). In short, all we find is the consciousness of transcendent objects and situations, consciousness of the world. And it is thus clear what implications this has for the humanist idea of the subject. For if, as Sartre says, “there is no consciousness which is not a positing of a transcendent object” (BN, xxvii), then there is on a fundamental level no distinct or substantial domain of the subject either. If pre-reflective experience of our “self ” reveals only this relation to the world, then the subject-entity of humanism no longer holds. And this means that, since it reveals such a reality, Sartre’s phenomenological existentialism cannot be humanist. Nevertheless, as was seen in the case of Nietzsche, it is also clear that this generates a new concern. Specifically, if, by appealing to the pre-­ reflective, humanism’s conception of the human is called into question, one is faced with a problem of what “the human” can mean at all. For if Sartre’s existentialist phenomenology has revealed that there is only  It is also possible to frame this point about Sartre’s method, and how we are able to effectively access or describe our experience, in terms of the distinction between “pure” and “impure” reflection made in TE, 23–24. Pure reflection only attends to what is given in “instantaneous” consciousness, and hence can be seen as “honest.” In contrast, impure reflection makes assumptions that go beyond what is immediately given and hence can be regarded as dishonest or self-deceiving. 33  Gardner, Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness”, 15. 32

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intentional consciousness of objects then how do we distinguish any meaning for consciousness? In other words, if there is nothing other than intentional positing of the world then isn’t there the risk of simply reducing human being to “world”? I will begin to address this question by focusing on the character of intentional positing. The description of pre-­ reflective experience reveals that this is not merely a passive reflection of the world but an activity, or “bringing forth,” in relation to it. As Barnes has observed, “consciousness is real as activity.”34 This means that even if, as Sartre says, “consciousness has no ‘content’” (BN, xxvii), it is distinguished by this active relation. In other words, even if we exist as nothing other than positing of the world, we nonetheless are distinguished by our very “positing relation” to it. While there is no isolated domain of the human, we still “stand out” as the activity of that positing. And this means that it is possible to talk about human being as exclusively worldly without dissolving it into that world altogether.

4

 he Meaning of the Human T as Relation: Negation

Yet there remains a further difficulty. If this notion of “active relation” intimates a solution to the problem of a non-humanist conception of the human, it also raises questions regarding its own intelligibility. That is, if saying “consciousness is a relation”35 might get us beyond humanism, this still leaves the question of what it means to say that the human is a relation to the world, rather than just having one. For, if Sartre cannot explain how the human as relation can be rendered explicable, he cannot meaningfully provide an alternative to humanism’s subject-entity. And, if he cannot do this, then I cannot say that he or phenomenological existentialism have properly overcome humanism or escaped from Heidegger’s critique.

 Barnes, “Sartre’s ontology: The revealing and making of being,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, 17. 35  Gardner, Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” 45. 34

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We can though make sense of this notion of the human as not merely having a relation to the world, but of being that relation, through the idea of “negation.” In our practical, absorbed, dealings with the world, we find that it is the activity of negating that marks out a distinction from the world as its ground. Here we find the experiential manifestation of human being as both nothing other than world yet standing out from it. This is if we again look honestly and authentically to experience, and suspend naturalist ideas about what can or must be the case. However, it is also apparent that this can represent only the beginning of my enquiry on this point. For if an account of real negation might show how the human as relation is theoretically intelligible, it can point the way toward a non-­ humanist conception of human being only once it itself has been rendered intelligible. And this can be achieved only by first addressing some theoretical criticisms of the notion. These ideas convince us that non-­ being can’t be real, and therefore need to be addressed and overcome. The most fundamental of these is the idea that non-being does not refer to anything “real.” This objection, and notion, can be summed up in the idea that “negation is only a quality of judgement” (BN, 7). On this view, non-being, as when we discover a door to be not locked, is merely the subjective projection of a certain concept. As Sartre notes, this means that “Negation, the result of concrete psychic operations, is supported in existence by these very operations and is incapable of existing by itself ” (BN, 6). So, for instance, when we look in our wallets expecting to find twenty pounds and find only ten, we do not really discover the non-being of the twenty. Instead we just discover there the being of the ten. And this means that where negation comes into being it is merely as a post-hoc judgement. That is, negation merely exists by the contrast between what was expected and what was found, and thus has no real basis in the world. On this view, negation, like the Stoics’ “lecton” or Husserl’s noema (BN, 7), has only a purely nominal or conceptual existence; it exists solely as a way of organizing or assessing our ideas. If true, this would then mean that “negation” could not serve as the basis for understanding the human as a relation to world. In short, being only a concept, it could not exist in any real relation to that world. For Sartre, the answer to this objection is twofold. First, he rejects the idea that “ordinary experience reduced to itself does not seem to disclose

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to us any non-being” (BN, 7). Put another way, Sartre seeks to show that we do in fact encounter real non-being in pre-reflective experience; that it is not merely a concept projected onto it. Second, Sartre uses this description of a concrete encounter with objective non-being to demonstrate how even though “non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation” (BN, 7), it is still in one sense part of the objective world. In sum, he attempts to overcome this objection by showing both that non-being is real and how such real existence is possible. To demonstrate both these points, Sartre turns to a concrete situation where, if described properly, we encounter real non-being: the experience of “absence.” Specifically, he describes the situation whereby a friend we had agreed to meet in a café at a particular time, Pierre, does not show. Entering the café, and looking around, investigating the bar, the chairs, the side-booths, we realise he is not there. The question is: how does one interpret Pierre’s absence? For common-sense would indicate that I do not really “experience” any non-being, or indeed any actual absence, at all. In other words, despite Sartre’s hopes about uncovering real non-­ being, common sense would say there is no discernible “absence” actually seen anywhere. Rather, as Sartre himself acknowledges, even with Pierre’s non-appearance at the allotted time, “we seem to have found fullness everywhere” (BN, 9). For I never encounter a Pierre shaped “nothing” anywhere in the café, or in the places where he might have been, but only the full, positive, being of tables, other customers, or of empty space. That is, as Daigle puts it, “in-itself, there is only a fullness of being to be found in the café.”36 And it follows from this that Pierre’s so-called “absence” can only be a manner of speaking. To say “Pierre is absent,” as such, can really just be shorthand for the conceptual inference, “Pierre is somewhere else.” And further, anything else one might be tempted to associate with “absence” refers merely to entirely subjective, emotional responses. So, for instance, claims like “I was keenly aware of his absence that day” refer simply to a subsequent subjective feeling.37 To understand Sartre’s own interpretation of this situation, it is necessary first to explore the nature of what he calls “figure and ground”  Daigle, Jean-Paul Sartre, 34.  See Warnock, Existentialism, 93, for the idea of non-being as an “emotional response.”

36 37

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(BN, 9). For Sartre, we never straightforwardly just see a series of clearly differentiated, static, “objects” in their fullness. Rather, what we “see” in the café initially is in fact an undifferentiated totality. We see a sort of amorphous backdrop organised in relation to the potential emergence of Pierre as “figure.” Instead of distinct cups, chairs, and people, what we apprehend is an indistinct “ground” organised as not being the figure, as “the object of a purely marginal attention” (BN, 10). Furthermore, the nature of the “ground” is dependent on the status of “the figure” in relation to which it is marginal. What I mean is that how the ground is given to us will depend on whether the figure, the focus of our attention, is still being searched for, found as present, or found to be absent. So we see that when searching for Pierre we find the figure-ground relation given in a particular way. And this relation can be defined in terms of “indeterminacy” and “movement.” As Sartre explains: “Each element of the setting, a person, a table, a chair, attempts to isolate itself, to lift itself upon the ground constituted by the totality of the other objects, only to fall back once more into the undifferentiation of this ground” (BN, 9–10). Insofar as I am searching for Pierre, what is figure and what is ground is indeterminate. That is, because the figure has not yet emerged, aspects of the potential “ground” fleetingly raise themselves as potentially being Pierre before returning to the marginal totality of the ground. So, when I spot a figure near the bar, he becomes a possible distinct focus of attention only to collapse again into the undifferentiated ground. Nevertheless, this figure-ground relation, defined in its indeterminacy by a “movement” towards a still indeterminate figure, would be transformed if I was then to discover Pierre. As Sartre says, “if I should finally discover Pierre my intuition would be filled by a solid element, I should be suddenly arrested by his face and the whole café would organise itself around him as a discrete presence” (BN, 10). In other words, in terms of figure and ground, both movement and indeterminacy would disappear. This is because the ground, losing its dynamic, self-collapsing quality, would be organised as a definite and static, albeit marginal, presence now standing in clear relation to Pierre as figure. So how is the figure-ground relation transformed when Pierre is not found? Just as Pierre’s presence as figure organises the rest of the café as a fixed, present, ground, his absence fixes the rest of the café on the basis of

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that absence. As Sartre says, “his absence fixes the café in its evanescence” (BN, 10). What this means is that the café is indeed “fixed,” it is no longer in the flow of indeterminacy, but it is fixed in relation to a figure which is not there. As Gardner puts it, “Pierre’s absence … ‘fixes the café’, which ‘carries’ and ‘presents’ the demanded figure of Pierre.”38 And this means that the ground which is fixed now carries with it everywhere reference to the “evanescent” collapse between figure and ground. As Sartre emphasises, “this figure which slips constantly between my look and the solid real objects of the café is precisely a perpetual disappearance” (Ibid.). In other words, the disintegration that determined something as “not Pierre” is now fixed and given in relation to the entire café. As such, “what is offered to intuition is a flickering of nothingness” (Ibid.). The collapse only fleetingly perceived when searching for Pierre is now clearly intuited in the shimmering un-fullness, incompletion, of the café. With an understanding of figure and ground, Sartre’s phenomenological description of the cafe undermines the naive assumption that “the café is a fullness of being” (BN, 10). More importantly, it undermines the idea that all we ever apprehend there are a series of fully present objects. Admittedly, that is not to say that I straightforwardly “see” Pierre’s absence either, if by this it is meant “that I discover his absence in some precise spot in the establishment” (Ibid.). But what Sartre shows is that absence is nonetheless given. In other words, against the common-sense interpretation, this analysis has shown that absence is real, and is uncovered in the café as a whole.

5

 erverting Modification as a Means P to Understanding Non-Being

Where does all this leave my argument? How does this help one understand how real non-being is intelligible and hence how the human as relation, with non-being as the basis of that relation, can be rendered explicable? To answer this question, I must show how the experience of non-being is not merely subjective but is part of “the structure of the real”  Gardner, Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” 64.

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(BN, 7). I must show, against McCulloch, that our experience of non-­ being refers to more than just “the way things seem to be”.39 And it will be shown that the concept of perversion, and the human being as a perverse relation to the world, plays a key role in understanding how this is possible. I will start by reconsidering Pierre in the café. For it is apparent that the non-being experienced with his absence is not experienced by simply anyone. As Sartre says, “Pierre’s absence supposes an original relation between me and this café; there is an infinity of people who are without any relation with this café for want of a real expectation which establishes their absence” (BN, 10). In other words, I only experience Pierre’s absence as “real” here because I was initially expecting him. In contrast, for someone without this expectation, no particular non-being in the café would be intuited.40 However, for Sartre at least, this fact is not as problematic as it might appear. That is, the “individual” nature of this experience does not mean that the non-being disclosed lacks a certain type of objectivity. Nor does its dependence on a contingent expectation mean that it is “reduced to pure subjectivity” (BN, 7). To understand why, it is necessary to consider the purpose of Sartre’s account of the experienced absence. For the purpose of Sartre’s account here is to show how, as a significant existentiell state, this experience points towards a more fundamental ontological or “existential” condition of being-in-the-world. As such, when Sartre says that “Pierre absent haunts this café and is the condition of its self-nihilating organisation as ground” (Ibid.), his point is not that Pierre’s specific absence is a condition for any experience of the café. On the contrary, he is saying that non-being in general, linked to human expectation, is a condition for that experience. Likewise, non-being in general is a condition for the possibility of negation. In other words, as Sartre puts it, “the necessary condition for our saying not is that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunt being” (BN, 11). Although based on an individual experience, this description reveals then a necessary condition of  McCulloch, Using Sartre, 7. McCulloch interprets Sartre as suggesting that non-being is only “real” in the sense that it figures in experience as a psychological or subjective reality. 40  See also Warnock, Existentialism, 95, for a discussion of the difference between “real” and “arbitrary” absence. 39

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experience in general. That is, while non-being is only explicitly revealed to human beings in instances like absence, these states disclose a more general feature of any being-in-the-world. However, is there not still a problem? If “non-being always appears within the limits of a human expectation” (BN, 7), and could not exist independently of the human, isn’t it still ultimately just subjective? Sartre answers in the negative. What is important in this example is that we do not merely passively experience being. Rather we transform and “pervert” it. And what we modify and pervert is precisely what would otherwise be the inert and undifferentiated in-itself. For, as Sartre says of being, “in order for it to parcel itself into differentiated complexes which refer to one another and can be used it is necessary that negation rise up” (BN, 24). In other words, it is necessary that negation is imposed by human being on being so that it can be differentiated and recognisable as a world. This answers the question regarding objectivity. For if non-being is a “limiting cutting into Being by a being” (BN, 8), then it can both be dependent on the human and a real part of the world. That is, if this transforming perversion which is non-being is a real change “carved into” the structure of being itself, rather than projected onto it, then we need not see it as strictly subjective. Moreover, it is possible to understand this process in more concrete terms. For this “modification” is created by human beings standing in a perpetual relationship of questioning to being. As Sartre says, “in posing a question a certain negative element is introduced into the world. We see nothingness making the world iridescent, casting a shimmer over things” (BN, 23). Put another way, it is our questioning comportment, as the ground of our having possibilities, which allows this transformation of being to take place. What this means is that it is the possibility of questioning the meaning of being, through realising our own possibilities and projects, which brings this transforming nothingness into the world. And this is a process Sartre calls “nihilation.” This is because in order to effectuate this relation of implicit possibility and questioning, the human being enacts a break in being. That is, it enacts a break whereby it is not bound to any definite meaning of being. As Sartre says, “insofar as the questioner must be able to effect in relation to the questioned a kind of

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nihilating withdrawal, he is not subject to the causal order of the world; he detaches himself from Being” (Ibid.). Further, we can accomplish this break, or nihilation, only on another condition. As Sartre explains, “human reality can detach itself from the world—in questioning … only if by nature it has the possibility of self-­ detachment” (BN, 25). By this, Sartre means that in order to modify being through this break, the human itself must be a flight from anything which gives it substantial being. As such, it is only through a movement away from its past self that the for-itself realises itself as possibility. And it is only by doing this that it is capable of bringing meaningful indeterminacy to things. Accordingly, it can be said that the transformation of being, which is the nihilation of world, then is our flight from past self. And the flight from self which we are is the modification of being. It is this process therefore which allows us to see how the human being just is this modifying relation brought to being. It is, in short, as Sartre says, “the rise of man in the midst of the being which ‘invests’ him (which) causes a world to be discovered” (BN, 24). This reality, it can be said, is for the most part concealed by the notion of world as independent of us. Nevertheless the world, in any meaningful sense, is constituted and discovered by human projects, questioning and possibilities, and by our own specific transformative relation to it. Yet this notion can, in turn, be understood only in terms of “perversion”. That is, the modification which the human brings to the world, and which it is, can only be grasped as the perverse turning against itself of being. For if that modification just discussed is merely a “variation” on full being then one ends up with human being as a mode of world. In other words, if this modification is conceived in terms of an ordinary development or change, then we once more become an independent entity outside, “on”, the world. And thus, in the same way as when the human is envisaged as a special “modification” of the animal,41 one risks returning again to the distinct “presence” of humanism. Consequently, the modification of non-being must be conceived not as a variation on being. Rather this transformation must be conceived as a destabilising  See LH, 154, for a discussion of this common, and deeply ingrained, idea that the human is a “special type of ”, or modification on, the animal. 41

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subversion of being. That is, as Sartre says, “Nothingness must be given at the heart of Being” (BN, 22), as that which haunts being. And, this is possible only if this transformation is a perversion. This is because the modification can remain “coiled in the heart of being—like a worm” (BN, 21), only if the modification is necessarily always bound up with the original in its very act of changing it. It can remain at the heart of being only by existing, to use Mulhall’s definition of perversity, “as essentially turned against itself.”42 For it can exist this way only by being a perversion which evokes the thing it tries to deny in the very act of attempting to escape it.

6

Conclusion: Non-humanist Phenomenological Existentialism

With this then has the main concern of this chapter been addressed? I started by arguing that Sartre’s existentialism, and by extension phenomenological existentialism, has been unduly dismissed by post-structuralist critics and later commentators. And I argued that underpinning this dismissal was the notion of Sartrean existentialism as synonymous with the humanist subject. As such this chapter attempted to show that this latter identification was wrong. On the contrary, Sartre’s philosophy, through a proper understanding of pre-reflective experience, was committed to the rejection of any such present or isolatable human subject. That is, Sartre’s account of the pre-reflective revealed, as Gardner put it, that “we do not as a matter of phenomenological fact, encounter an ‘I’ in ‘first order’ or ‘unreflective consciousness’”.43 However, the problem was then how, if all that we encountered there was intentional awareness of a world, one could avoid reducing the human to that world. And it was argued that Sartre’s existentialism  Mulhall, Philosophical Myths of the Fall, 119. Mulhall’s use of the concept of “perversity” though, it should be noted, differs significantly from its application in this book. In particular, it is not used there in the ontological sense in which it is here being applied to the philosophy of Nietzsche and Sartre, but rather is used in an ethical sense. Nor in Mulhall is perversity used in connection with, or as a solution to, the problem of humanism. 43  Gardner, Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” 12. 42

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provides a solution to this problem, and also to any attempt to overcome humanism. For it conceptualises the human being not as having a relation to the world but of being that relation. In this way the human being could still be fundamentally worldly, and avoid the humanist subject-­ entity, yet still have a meaning distinct from world. And underpinning this idea of the human as a relation for Sartre was non-being as something real. For if negation was real then it could be a relation that was part of the world, yet, as its contradiction, a non-substantial standing out from it. In short, if there was non-being existing “parasitically” on the world, we could have the being of a relation that did not require anything existing “behind”, “on the other side of ”, that relation. Consequently, the remainder of this chapter was spent showing how such real non-being is possible. That is, the rest of the discussion focused on how, by looking at Sartre, we can understand non-being as objective, even if it is dependent on human expectation. And this is where the discussion of perverting modification comes in. For if non-being is a real perversion of being by the human, actually destabilising undifferentiated full being, then this apparent contradiction can be resolved. That is to say, if “Man’s relation with being is that he can modify it” (BN, 24) then non-­ being can be both part of the world and dependent on us. And if this is the case then one can see how this answers the question regarding a non-­ humanist conception of the human. This is because with this idea of perverse modification I will then have shown how real non-being is intelligible. Hence I will have also shown how the human as relation to the world can be understood. In other words, I will have demonstrated how if we are the perversion of being that is non-being then we can both possess no substance distinct from the world and yet not be reducible to it. And in this way I will in turn have answered Heidegger’s charge against Sartre. For it has been indicated how a conception of human being can be developed from Sartre’s philosophy that is not humanist. In short, it has been shown, against familiar criticisms, how Sartrean existentialism’s concern for the human does not entail commitment to a “humanist” conception of the subject. What’s more, I will have also shown how this is then possible for phenomenological existentialism in general.

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This is of course not to say that all the questions related to this have been resolved. With this chapter I have neither resolved all the issues surrounding Sartre’s non-humanist conception of human being, nor its implications for existentialist philosophy more broadly. For one thing, my account so far has only given a particularly abstract answer to what the human is. I said that the human being is the being who perverts being; that the human is a perverse, modifying relation to being. And this means it can have a distinct existence without becoming the present subject of humanism. I also argued that this is possible because “human consciousness (is) a sort of escape from the self ” (BN, 25). But what this means more concretely in our existence has not been addressed. I have not said how our status as that which perverts being, and which exists “in the perpetual mode of detachment from what is” (BN, 35), manifests in our actual experience of self and world. As such, it is to this question, and that of “angst” as that manifestation, that the next chapter will turn. Further, it will be seen that as this is something which ought to be permanently part of our affectivity it also raises problematic questions of self-­ evasion, deception and authenticity. By addressing these I next hope to present a more nuanced sense of human being as perverse. And with this I aim to give a more complete sense of a possible non-humanist phenomenological existentialism, and to give greater meaning to the idea of a non-humanist existentialism as a whole.

References Barnes, H. “Sartre’s Ontology: The Revealing and Making of Being,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. by C. Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1992). Bernasconi, R. “Heidegger and Sartre: Historicity, Destiny and Politics,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, ed. by F. Raffoul and E. S. Nelson (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). Catalano, J. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974).

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Crowell, S. “Existentialism and Its Legacy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, ed. by S.  Crowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Daigle, C. Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Routledge, 2010). Dastur, F. “The Question of Transcendence in Heidegger and Sartre,” Phainomena: Journal of the Phenomenological Society of Ljubljana, vol. 59, no. 15 (2006): 23–42. Descartes, R. Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. by J.  Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Derrida, J. “The Ends of Man,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. by A.  Bass (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1982). Dobson, A. Jean-Paul Sartre and the Politics of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Fox, N.F. The New Sartre (New York: Continuum, 2003). Gardner, S. Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness” (New York: Continuum, 2009). ———. “Sartre, Schelling and Onto-Theology,” Religious Studies, vol. 42, no. 3 (2006): 247–71. Heidegger, M. Being and Time, trans. by J.  Macquarrie and E.  Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962). ———. “Letter on Humanism,” in Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. by D. F. Krell, trans. by F. A. Capuzzi and J. G. Gray (London: Routledge, 1978). Hodge, J. “Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the Critique of Humanism,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, vol. 22, no. 1 (1991) 75–79. Kakkori, L and Huttunen, R. “The Sartre-Heidegger Controversy on Humanism and the Concept of Man in Education,” Educational Philosophy and Theory, vol. 44, no. 4 (2012): 351–356. Kacerauskas, T. “Existential Humanism as Human Creativeness,” Phainomena: Journal of the Phenomenological Society of Ljubljana, vol. 59, no. 15 (2006): 50–61. Krell, D.F. “Introduction,” in Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. by D. F. Krell, trans. by F. A. Capuzzi and J. G. Gray (London: Routledge, 1978). Levy, N. Sartre (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2002). Martinot, S. “Sartre’s Being for Heidegger; Heidegger’s Being for Sartre,” Man and World, vol. 24 (1991): 63–74. McCulloch, G. Using Sartre (London: Routledge, 1994). Mitchell, A.J. “The ‘Letter on Humanism’: Ek-sistence, Being and Language,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Heidegger, ed. by F. Raffoul and E. S. Nelson (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013).

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Morris, K. Sartre (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). Mulhall, S. Philosophical Myths of the Fall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). Murdoch, I. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Vintage, 1953). Pattison, G. The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Chesham: Acumen, 2005). Rae, G. “Re-Thinking the Human: Heidegger, Fundamental Ontology, and Humanism,” Human Studies, vol. 33, no. 1 (2010): 23–39. Skocz, D. “Postscripts to the ‘Letter on Humanism’: Heidegger, Sartre, and Being-Human,” in French Interpretations of Heidegger (New York: State University of New York, 2008): 73–89. Rockmore, T. Heidegger and French Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1995). Sartre, J-P. Being and Nothingness, trans. by H. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1958). ———. The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. by A.  Brown (London: Routledge, 2004). ———. Existentialism is a Humanism, trans. by C.  Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). ———. Nausea, trans. by R. Baldick (London: Penguin, 1963). Warnock, M. Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). Webber, J. The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Routledge, 2009).

5 Sartre, Perversity and Self-Evasion

I said in the previous chapter that to demonstrate the main contention of this book it was necessary to look at phenomenological existentialism. That is, to demonstrate that a possible broader type of existentialism, and not just a Nietzschean version of it, can be non-humanist I had to show how Sartre’s existentialism escapes humanism’s present subject. And this was done by looking toward pre-reflective experience. It was seen that prior to reflective assumptions about what the human is, we experience ourselves not as an independent, substantial self. Instead we only experience a relation to world. In short, looking to this mode of experience we see that there is no humanist subject. However, for this intuition to serve as the basis for a non-humanist phenomenological existentialism it had to make sense theoretically. The idea of human being as relation to the world had to be rendered intelligible. And this was done first by understanding the human as the perverting modification of world that is non-being. Because if we are the perversion of being then we can, as that transformation brought to the world, be nothing but the world, yet still possess a being distinct from it. And, more concretely, this is at the same time our flight from past self. The perversion which we are is at the same time the

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creation of a world from the projection of our possibilities which frees us from any definitive, or given, being.

1

Angst as Consciousness of Non-being

Yet, this cannot represent a terminus of enquiry. For whilst the idea that, as Gardner puts it, the human must ‘detach itself from all that it is’1 makes our initial formulation more concrete a major question still remains. Namely, why do we ordinarily have so little awareness of this? Why given that we are this break with self, which is the perverse modification of being, does awareness of this fact seem almost entirely absent from consciousness and self-understanding? And this is particularly a problem because of the nature of this break. For the break and perversion, cannot passively exist ‘in’ us, like the operations of our liver; happening behind our awareness. Rather our being, which is the activity of perverting self and world, forms the very fabric of our experience and existence. Which is why, as Sartre says, we ‘must necessarily be conscious of this cleavage in being.’2 Yet Sartre does have an answer to this, insofar as he claims this absence of awareness is only apparent. This is because, for Sartre, we do in fact have pre-theoretical awareness of ourselves as perverting modification of being, and as possibility, in a specific type of state. This is in what he calls ‘angst’. For, angst is a conscious existentiell state wherein, as Heidegger has observed, we have an intimation of our own nothingness.3 This can incorporate many different specific forms and degrees of intensity.4 But it is nonetheless generally characterised by a profound awareness of, and  Gardner, 149.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 28. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as BN. 3  See BN, 29, see also Being and Time, 228. 4  Anguish ‘before the past’ can occur when a resolution is tested by reality, e.g. when a man who has resolved not to gamble is suddenly confronted by the gambling table, and the tenuousness of his resolution, see BN, 32. Likewise Kierkegaard, appeals to Frithiof ’s Saga, and the moment when Ingeborg looks across the sea to the point on the horizon over which Frithiof ’s boat has disappeared as a case of angst. See G. Pattison, The Philosophy of Kierkegaard, 73–74: ‘As something sounded, an outburst of feeling on her part, a sigh, a word, would already have more of the attributes of time in itself, and is present more in the manner of something vanishing…’ 1 2

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intimacy with, one’s own possibilities. So for instance, Sartre gives a description of a man walking on a precipice who is confronted with the real possibility of suicide. There, he says, ‘suicide … becomes a possibility possible for me…’ (BN, 32). What this means is that suicide becomes not as before, merely an abstract potentiality, something ‘one’ could hypothetically do but mine, something at that moment just as real or possible as safe conduct. Furthermore, it is in becoming genuinely aware of these possibilities counter to our own familiar and expected courses of action that we are given an apprehension of our true being. This is because in encountering those possibilities as just as real as the desired possibility, we apprehend our being as possibility. We are given an apprehension that ‘I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it’ (BN, 32). For we apprehend, with these counter-possibles, that our possibilities are no longer ‘outside’ us, exercised intermittently as a capacity. Rather they are always there, and always constitutive of our being. And it is this point which is significant. For awareness of self as possibility leads to awareness that it is my possibilities which bring meaning to the radical contingency of self and world. In short, it leads to awareness that ‘…the rise of man in the midst of the being which ‘invests’ him causes a world to be discovered’ (BN, 24). For if I am aware of myself as possibility I must be aware of myself as a relation to world, since possibility is always bound to an activity on that world. And, further, possibility also implies this relation is one of a transformation founded on perverting non-being. If the relation we bring to bear in our being is possibility then this implies that a relation of indeterminate transformation is brought to the world. In brief, it implies that we are the perverse modification of being that is non-being. Consequently with angst there is a recognisable state in which we apprehend our being as a perverting relation to self and world. More radical than Catalano’s gloss that this is apprehension that ‘the possibility of change always exists’,5 it implies awareness of world as not yet settled. It means angst is an apprehension of the world and my being as at that moment still fundamentally ‘caught in the balance’, ‘at stake.’ And it is  Catalano, ‘Successfully lying to oneself: A Sartrean Perspective’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 678.

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this which represents my consciousness of my being as perverting modification of world. Consider, for instance, a situation where one is leaving a continent, and a life, forever. In melancholic angst, the contours of a world you had created, the relationships, perceptions, and possibilities, suddenly become apparent as they start to vanish. We apprehend, in that moment, the way in which we had formed our world. And we are aware, simultaneously, of ourselves now being formed by the shore of a new indeterminate future, suddenly drawing toward us.

2

Outline of the Problem: Rarity of Angst

However does this then mean the previous question has been successfully answered? This is not quite the case. For, whilst this account of angst explains how awareness of ourselves as the perversion of being is manifest in consciousness it creates another problem. And what this is can be understood by reflecting again on why a description of angst was required in the first place. It was needed because if we are the activity of perverting self and world then we must necessarily have a consciousness of this. That is, if our being is a bringing forth of a specific perversion then we cannot do this without active awareness. But it is also clear that this cannot be only an occasional awareness. For, as Sartre says, ‘the original necessity of being its own nothingness does not belong to consciousness intermittently and on the occasion of particular negations’ (BN, 28). In short, Webber is wrong to suggest that ‘For consciousness to be translucent … is for there to be some awareness of one’s own consciousness.’6 Rather, the translucency of consciousness implies that we must be constantly aware of our being. Thus it is obvious what problem this presents for our account of angst. Stated simply, it is that if anguish represents awareness of my being as perverse relation to world and self then why aren’t we in anguish permanently? In other words, if anguish is consciousness of our being, and we must necessarily always have this consciousness, then why isn’t angst ‘a  Webber, ‘Motivated aversion: non-thetic awareness in bad faith’, Sartre Studies International, 8, emphasis added. 6

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permanent state of my affectivity’? (BN, 35). Consequently it is this question which represents the next step in my argument. For if I wish to render my non-humanist conception of the human fully intelligible and concrete this must be explained. That is, to properly make sense of the human as perverting modification of self and world this chapter must explain why the conscious manifestation of this is so rare. Unless this can be done this conception of human being will remain obscure. And it is this for this reason that this chapter will now looks at the evasion of angst. This chapter must look at the ‘processes by which we try to hide anguish from ourselves’ (BN, 43). Only in doing this, and showing how our being-in-the-world allows for such evasion, can a non-humanist conception of the human be made fully plausible. It is only in showing that such methods do in fact exist, and how they can be successful, that the plausibility of a non-humanist phenomenological existentialism can be defended.

3

F leeing from Angst: Absorption in the World

So what are these processes through which we attempt to disguise our conscious experience of anguish? Unfortunately, the secondary literature, for the most part, is of little assistance on this issue. Because most interpretations do not engage with initial problem of humanism for Sartre, stemming from engagement with the Letter, they also ignore the ontological significance of angst. Namely, they ignore the role angst plays in Sartre’s broader defence of a non-humanist conception of the human, and therefore do not consider it important. Hartmann is symptomatic of this problem when he discusses the first chapter of Being and Nothingness. For, he says that, ‘Sartre goes on to discuss freedom … including its reflective mode of awareness, anguish’, then adds that ‘For our purposes we can ignore this side issue.’7 In other words, the question of how we evade our being, manifest in angst, has not been taken seriously because the significance of angst has been  Hartmann, Sartre’s Ontology, 52.

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o­ verlooked. And this means that the question of how everyday consciousness involves an evasion of this is ignored likewise. Rather for these interpretations any evasion of angst is often simply run into Sartre’s discussion of bad faith and self-deception. Moreover, in so far as ‘evasion of angst’ does get mentioned separately, it is viewed, as seen in Morris, Catalano, Salvan, and McCulloch, as an essentially psychological phenomenon. That is, present in all these discussions is an idea that we evade angst through a variety of contingent psychological ‘strategies’.8 So, for instance, we might evade awareness of our possibilities by adopting a belief in determinism, or specific patterns of bad faith. In contrast I argue that evasion of angst is not a particular psychological ruse we might employ from time to time. Instead, it is bound up with our very being in the world. And this is linked to Sartre’s claim that, ‘the most common situations of our life … do not manifest themselves to us through anguish because their very structure excludes anguished apprehension’ (BN, 35). In other words, there is something about the structure of the ‘common situations of our lives’, which necessitates evasion of angst. There is something about the predominant structure of our relation to the world which necessitates that consciousness deludes itself about its actual nature. It is with this point that I will begin. But what, to address this question, is it about our being-in-the-world that ‘excludes anguished apprehension’, excludes ‘the recognition of a possibility as my possibility’? (BN, 35). One can begin by noting that human beings for the most part, do in fact believe they are constantly aware of their possibilities. When reflecting on our everyday existence, we tell ourselves that we meaningfully ‘choose’ between various possibilities, and that we are ‘free’. And it is this pre-critical interpretation of everyday  Note, following on from this, that the Sartre literature on this point can be divided into four categories: (1) Those, like Hartmann, and the contributions in the The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, edited by Howells which ignore the issue altogether. (2) Those, like Morris, and Grene, Sartre, who conflate the evasion of angst with Sartre’s discussion of bad faith, or assume that bad faith is the central ‘means’ of evading angst. (3) Caws, Sartre, Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’, and Desan, The Tragic Finale, which dedicate only a couple of paragraphs to the issue. And (4), finally, those like Salvan, To Be and Not To Be, and McCulloch, Using Sartre, who spend a little more time with the issue, but still provide only a ‘list’ of potential psychological means of evasion without coherently linking these to man’s being-in-the-world. Moreover, each of these individual ‘means’ of evasion usually receives no more than a few sentences attention. 8

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existence which will then serve as the point of contrast with Sartre’s view. For, on closer phenomenological inspection, our actual existence in the world is more problematic. As McCulloch has observed, ‘much of the time we are absorbed in activity … we often do not realise what our possibilities are until we find ourselves acting them out.’9 In other words, we are not most of the time free agents rationally aware of possibilities before us, but beings absorbed in certain kinds of activity. So for instance, when we are engaged in our morning routine, getting up, showering, dressing, walking to catch the train, we are not continually ‘making a choice’ to carry on these activities. Instead we are simply ‘caught up’ in doing them.10 This is not all however. For Sartre’s point in relation to this idea of absorption is not merely that much human activity is conducted in a mechanical or habitual way which excludes awareness of our possibilities at that moment. Rather, there is also something about the nature of absorbing activity, as a mode of our being-in-the-world, which goes beyond this. There is something about the nature of activity which means that we are also caught up in a world beyond the specific immediacy of any act itself. It is this which Sartre goes on to discuss in relation to writing a book. As he says, In the act of tracing the letters which I am writing, the whole sentence, still unachieved, is revealed as a passive exigency to be written. It is the very meaning of the letters which I form, and its appeal is not put into question, precisely because I cannot write the words without transcending them toward the sentence and because I discover it as the necessary condition for the meaning of the words which I am writing. (BN, 36)

In other words, we can only meaningfully write, or perform any action, because we are aware of doing it ‘for the sake of ’ something else beyond the immediacy of the act. In this way writing only makes sense precisely  McCulloch, 47.  Gardner, 152, very briefly touches upon ‘world absorption’ as a means of evading angst. He briefly mentions how, ‘In the most common situations of life our consciousness is “in action”, meaning that we apprehend our possibilities only in so far as we are actively realising them.’ Yet he does not develop this point. Rather, like other accounts of angst-evasion, such as Webber’s, The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, 74, his principal focus is on our belief in psychological determinism. 9

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because there is a transcendent, the sentence, toward which the act is directed, and which the action implies. Yet it is precisely this point which sets in train a deeper absorption in the world wherein we do not seem to have any awareness of our possibilities. For, if a specific act implies a form beyond itself it can seem like the rest of the ‘action’ in the broader sense ‘is revealed as a passive exigency’ (BN, 36). That is, that by writing and being absorbed in writing, we are already pulled towards the demand of the completed sentence which seems to possess a pseudo-objective character. As Sartre says, ‘…the action which discovers itself to me through my act tends to crystallize as a transcendent, relatively independent form’ (Ibid.). And it is this pseudo-objective demand of the completed action which then distorts the fact that we alone are responsible for pursuing that activity. For this pseudo-objective demand seems to ‘exist’ in the world relatively independent of us.

3.1

The Instrumental Complex

Yet, of course, one might here raise an objection. It might be said that even if our specific acts seem to create the force of a demand existing semi-independently of us, allowing us to evade our sense of radical possibility and to see the world as ‘given’, then such evasion can still only be a limited one. In other words, even if we are to some extent absorbed in entire chains of activity, and not just limited acts, then surely activities, like writing a sentence, cooking a meal, or getting ready for work, end? And surely, by the same token, are we not nonetheless the originators of whichever activities are pursued in the first place? The Sartrean answer to this question is two-fold. And the first point to make would be to say that no activity exists in isolation. As Sartre says, ‘the sentence which I write is the meaning of the letters which I trace, but the whole work which I wish to produce is the meaning of the sentence’ (BN, 36). The transcendence which exists in the relation between the specific act and a broader activity then also exists between the activity and a broader set of activities and purposes. So, for instance, the letters I write make sense only because they refer to a sentence beyond that specific act. However, at the same time, the sentence only makes sense because it refers to the book to be

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written beyond that. And likewise, in turn, the writing of a book only is itself meaningful in relation to a broader life in which book writing may play some part. For example, it could be part of a project linked to ideas of financial or academic obligation, or to proving oneself in the eyes of others. Either way, to address the initial concern, we never really ‘stop’ or step outside the world of demands. If one activity has the appearance of an end, as when I stop writing for the day, my day’s writing has already created a series of pseudo-objective exigencies for the evening and the day after. And this point can be made clearer if we consider what Sartre calls ‘relations of instrumentality’ (Ibid.) or, in Heidegger’s terms, the instrumental complex.11 For as Sartre says, At the same time in the very framework of the act an indicative complex of instruments reveals itself and organizes itself (pen-ink-paper-lines-margin, etc.), a complex which cannot be apprehended for itself but which rises in the heart of the transcendence which discloses to me as a passive exigency the sentence to be written. Thus in the quasi-generality of everyday acts, I am engaged, I have ventured, and I discover my possibilities by realizing them and in the very act of realizing them as exigencies, urgencies, instrumentalities. (BN, 36)

What this means is that my actions bring to life a ‘complex’ which transcends me as an individual, and over which I have no control. The transcendent which is given a pseudo-objective reality by my specific act, say of tracing letters, also causes to arise at the same time an entire complex of instruments standing in relation to that transcendent. In this way an entire ‘world’ is brought to be my successive engagement in activity. And what is critical for my argument is that such a world transcends me as an individual. For the relations of instrumentality that are disclosed by my acts are just as much free of my volition as the transcendent task which the specific act, say of hammering, implies. In other words, the other tools needed, the people I need to talk to so as to transport the finished table, are just as much revealed by my hammering as constituting 11

 See Being and Time, sections 15–16.

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pseudo-independent exigencies, as is the task of ‘making a table’. And, as a consequence of this, we find ourselves absorbed in a world populated by a series of pseudo-objective demands. The nature of the instrumental complex means that I experience the possibilities I am realizing as somehow bound up with, and emanating from, the world. This means therefore that I experience them as not really being ‘mine’. Moreover, what we’re talking about here is not simply instrumentalism. The point is not merely that if one wishes to do ‘x’ then one must do ‘y’. Rather, the nature of our absorption is such that not only are we discussing a relation that precedes reflective instrumental reason, but that the ‘end’ itself within this complex is itself obscured. As Sartre says, So long as I remain on the plane of action, the book to be written is only the distant and presupposed meaning of the act which reveals my possibilities to me. The book is only the implication of the action; it is not made an object and posited for itself … It is only the permanent, remote meaning in terms of which I can understand what I am writing in the present… (BN, 37)

In other words, the meaning of the book within the world of activity and the instrumental complex is never really posited and brought fully to consciousness. Instead, it appears as a hazy transcendent horizon around which our world organises itself. And this means that being caught up in the world also obscures whatever ‘end’ is being pursued. For, absorbed in a world of pseudo-objective demands presenting continual ‘things to be done’, the overall purpose gets lost. The end, that is, paradoxically, is obscured by the very activity and instrumental network that ostensibly seeks to bring it about. Does all this then, however, answer the objections raised earlier? Does this answer the objection to the idea of absorption as a means of evading angst, that we are only ever temporarily engaged in activity? The answer in a sense is ‘yes’. For, in so far as I have argued that the nature of absorption, as based around a transcendent aspect of action, extends beyond any particular activity, then I avoid the objection stated. That is, by arguing that an entire transcendent world of activities and demands is created by our emersion in specific acts then it is possible to see how we might be

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‘absorbed’ in a much more ubiquitous sense. And in this way then one can see how we might be able to consistently evade a true awareness of possibilities as ‘ours’; as possibility being something that we uniquely bring into being. Still, isn’t there a further outstanding question? Namely, even if we were caught up in the slip-stream of a ‘world’, which within its confines appears to be independent of us, real and unquestionable, would we not still be the ones who had entered into it? I am here talking about what Sartre calls the ‘original projection of myself which stands as my choice of myself in the world’ (BN, 39). And the question is, if it is this choice ‘…which causes the existence of values, appeals, expectations, and in general a world…’ (Ibid.), then wouldn’t we be, at least at some point, aware of having made it? In short, wouldn’t we still have initially chosen that? And would not this still be the case even if our absorption in ‘our’ world meant that the original choice ceased to be questioned?

3.2

Throwness in the World

Sartre’s answer here is ‘no’. And this is because, he argues, of another aspect of our being-in-the-world which can be termed ‘thrownness’. As he explains, in our being-in-the world, ‘…we do not first appear to ourselves, to be thrown subsequently into enterprises’ (Ibid.). In other words, there never really appears a moment ‘before’ we are engaged in the world of activity, an original position where we choose ourselves. Rather, as Sartre says, ‘Our being is immediately “in situation”; that is, it arises in enterprises and knows itself first in so far as it is reflected in those enterprises’ (BN, 39). We just find ourselves then in a world where we are already acting and compelled to act. We already find ourselves absorbed in a network of values, activities and expectations prior to any original ‘choice’ about our fundamental projects. Consequently, addressing the previous question, I do not to begin with choose which ‘world’ to be caught up in. Rather as Sartre says, ‘We discover ourselves … in a world peopled with demands, in the heart of projects “in the course of realization”’ (BN, 39). And this means that we already just find ourselves caught in the slip-stream of a world. In other

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words, if I already just find myself in the midst of activity, then the suggestion that I may at least have chosen the set of demands in which I am enmeshed carries no weight. If we already find ourselves, from the very first moment of self-awareness, engaged in activity then there can be no original choice which precedes our absorption. If the self is originally discovered amidst activity which creates for us pseudo-objective demands and a world of ‘things to be done’, then there is, initially, no sense in which that world was chosen. On the contrary, exploration of this question merely reveals that our absorption in the world, and the evasion of possibilities there, is even more all encompassing than expected. For this point about our ‘thrownness’ merely completes the picture of ourselves as lost within the world. It completes a picture of the human being as finding itself already acting and compelled to act according to purposes that transcend its choice and comprehension. And this is an idea that finds literary and mythical expression in Kafka’s The Castle, in the trials of the land surveyor. In any case, here more form is given to the picture of a world where we feel that what we call our ‘choice’ there is somehow lacking. This is because with this point is confirmed the vague yet inescapable apprehension that this life I appear to have chosen is not really mine. I confirm the sense that whilst I appear to have ‘chosen’ the course of my life, that nonetheless my world and my possibilities do not, on some essential level, belong to me. In short, uncovered is the sense that ‘my’ possibilities have always existed in the mode of an abstract and impersonal generality.

4

Evasion of Angst in Exceptional Situations

Nevertheless, our absorption in the world, and our evasion of our possibilities as a result, cannot be absolute. If this were the case the state of angst described earlier could never be experienced, and indeed we would be permanently debarred from comprehending ourselves. As such, it must be possible, that as Sartre says, ‘I disengage myself from the world where I had been engaged…’ (Ibid.). There must be situations in which

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we can genuinely ‘step back’ from our absorption in the world, and comprehend its pseudo-objective appeals as really coming from us. There must be the possibility of calling our particular world and its instrumental complex into question, and of recovering from its apparent objective fixity a sense of it as being still ‘at stake’. Yet, frustratingly, Sartre is vague about how exactly such situations come about. He says that, in order to truly call that existent world into question, ‘I must place myself on the plane of reflection’ (BN, 37), and contrasts this with the ‘plane of action’ (Ibid.). However, based on what has been said already, he cannot mean simply ‘reflection’ in the more general sense of the term. For general everyday reflection, by which is meant, say, ‘reflecting’ on which train to catch, or what course to take, is simply part of an extended conception of world absorption and activity. Rather, ‘the plane of reflection’ to which Sartre alludes must resemble something more akin to the ‘pure reflection’ he discusses in Transcendence of the Ego.12 That is, what he calls ‘the reflective apprehension of freedom by itself ’ (BN, 39), must be a more rarefied phenomenon than everyday reflection. And how one might be put onto such a rarefied plane of reflection, therefore, may be linked to what can be thought of as exceptional situations or acts. So, as Sartre says, …at each instant we are thrust into the world and engaged there. This means that we act before positing our possibilities and that these possibilities which are disclosed as realized or in process of being realized refer to meanings which necessitate special acts in order to be put into question. (BN, 37)

Now, what exactly constitutes these ‘special acts’ or how they come about, for Sartre is in turn not made explicit. Nevertheless, looking back to his original discussion of angst, and particularly the examples of anguish he uses, a suggestion can be made. In other words, based on Sartre’s prior discussion, I suggest that there are certain exceptional situations where ‘special acts’ become possible and where the possibility of disengaging from our absorption in the world arises. And these special situations are 12

 See The Transcendence of the Ego, 12–13.

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those where, as in Sartre’s example of the man on the precipice, the ordinary organisation of our world is temporarily disrupted. Put another way then, there are certain situations where the absorbing and unquestionably ‘real’ character of our world is suspended and confrontation with our genuine possibilities becomes unavoidable. So for instance, to take Sartre’s examples: ‘The man who has just received a hard blow—for example, losing a great part of his wealth in a crash-’ (BN, 29), or someone who finds themselves on a narrow path before a precipice. Both experience a destabilisation of their ordinary, familiar, worlds. In the former case, one literally says that ‘his world has come crashing down’, and that he is now separated from the ordinary flow of life. The value and meaning of his mortgage, his family, his job, are now raised as a question, and the possibility of a new, darker, world suddenly rears up before him. Likewise, in the latter case, something similar occurs. My ordinary sense of ‘getting on with life’, the sense of its reality, its implicit value and its obligations, is abruptly challenged by the sudden and unavoidable confrontation with the possibility of death. What is seen then in both cases is the possibility of a disengagement from our ordinary world-absorption and concomitantly a direct confrontation with a possibility as ‘my possibility’ (BN, 35). That is, we see with this disengagement a genuine sense of our being and the world as now open, ‘at stake’. And with this I apprehend my being as the perverting modification which brings meaning to that world. Yet returning to the central question, how does all this relate to the evasion of angst, and thus to the intelligibility of Sartre’s non-humanist conception of the human? It does so in so far as these ‘exceptional situations’ where I am confronted with a fundamental sense of possibility, do not, for all that has been said, typically lead to authentic anguish. In other words, as Sartre makes clear, ‘We should not conclude that being brought on to the reflective plane and envisaging one’s distant or immediate possibilities suffice to apprehend oneself in pure anguish’ (BN, 40). In short, experiencing situations where we are disengaged from the world does not suffice for true anguished recognition of my being. For, despite these being a facet of human life, albeit one that is rare relative to the ordinary flow of our lives, we do not in most cases experience authentic angst there. Despite these situations which disrupt world-absorption

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compelling us to confront a real possibility, we nonetheless mostly remain unawares there of our being as possibility. That is, we mostly still remain, intuitively, unawares of our being as that non-being which is a perverting modification of world. As such, this implies that there must be another form of structural self-evasion other than world-absorption allowing us to evade consciousness of our true being.

4.1

Objectifying Our Possibilities

What though is this other form of evasion? What is this evasion protecting us from angst even in those situations when our ordinary world is disrupted and recognition of our fundamental possibilities seems unavoidable? To answer this question it is necessary to look more closely at those situations where this occurs, and in particular at Sartre’s example of the man on the precipice. For there, as seen in the previous chapter, the man was confronted by what Sartre refers to as ‘counter-possibles’. In other words, in order that he was able to pursue the possibility of safe conduct there he had at the same time to bring to awareness the contradictory possibility of suicide. And this is what Sartre refers to when he says, in relation to these counter-possibles, that, ‘In truth I cannot avoid positing their existence by the same movement which generates the chosen possibility as mine. I cannot help constituting them as living possibilities that is, as having the possibility of becoming my possibilities’ (BN, 41). In such situations then we are obliged to bring to awareness the contradictory possibilities. That is, as a condition of envisaging a particular ‘positive’ possibility we must become aware of those counter-possibles which then become just as real as the former. And this awareness is precisely what, as discussed earlier, is constitutive of authentic angst. For, in being aware of the counter-possibles as just as possible for me as safe conduct I become aware of the radical indeterminacy of my being. In this way, I become aware of my being as ‘at stake’; as constituted by perverting non-being. Consequently, when placed in these situations where recognition of our possibilities seems unavoidable, the strategy of evasion focuses on the nature of these ‘counter-possibles.’ For if they could be avoided somehow

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then the anguished apprehension of my non-being could likewise be forestalled. Yet, as discussed, the nature of the situation, unlike that of ‘the most common “absorbed” situations of our life’ (BN, 35) does not permit us to simply ignore them altogether. This is because the nature of the situation here is such that an awareness of these counter-possibles as existing, as ‘there’, is unavoidable. As such, the strategy of evasion must operate by attempting not to deny their being, but to transform the way I perceive it. So how does it do this? It achieves this, to begin with, by imputing to the counter-possibles which are mine a certain kind of objectivity. That is, as Sartre says, ‘I force myself to see them as endowed with a transcendent, purely logical being, in short, as things’ (BN, 41). But how does this work, and how does this neutralise the angst inducing nature of the counter-possible? Taking the former question first, Sartre’s argument is that we constitute our counter-possibles as objective by conceiving them in relation to a hypothetical and abstract ‘otherness.’13 What this means is that we attempt to see them in a given situation as, ‘…fundamentally conceivable by another or as possibles of another who might find himself in the same situation’ (BN, 41). However we do not do this, to be clear, by conceiving of an actually existing other who has the counter-possible as a real concrete possibility. Rather, the ‘otherness’ which constitutes the objectivity of the situation is that of abstract human possibility in general. That is, the otherness utilised here is that of a general human potentiality, of what any human, based on their objective physical capabilities ‘could do in that situation.’ So, for instance, in the case of the man on the precipice the counter-possible of suicide is construed not as a real despairing possibility for a concrete other. Instead it is conceived as something that is logically conceivable given the depth of the ravine and a man’s capacity to jump. And it is this empty otherness then, through which we perceive our counter-­possibles as objective.  See Caws, 71: ‘The chief strategy of this refusal (our refusal of our own freedom) is our tendency to look at ourselves as though we were other people, and to view our freedom as though it were the freedom of another.’ And Angst ordinarily ‘is concealed from us by our engagement in a social world in which values are prescribed’ (Ibid.). Note however that Caws views the role of the ‘other’ here in essentially psychological not ontological terms, linking it to ‘social pressure’ and ‘conformity’, rather than the structures of our being-in-the-world. 13

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As a consequence, we are able to create the illusion that our counter-­ possibles, as Sartre puts it, ‘…belong to the objective situation as a transcendent structure…’ (Ibid.). For in conceiving of them via this generic human relation to the situation, they become simply ‘there’. That is, by conceiving of them in this way they appear to inhere objectively in the world as possibilities just as much as the unevenness of the path or the hardness of the rock. At the same time it is thus clear why such a process then allows us to neutralise the angst inducing character of our counter-possibles. For if we can render our counter-possibles as ‘objective’ in this way, as Sartre says, they would exist as ‘…an external possibility in relation to me, like movement in relation to the motionless billiard ball’ (Ibid.). In other words, the counter possible, seeming to inhere independently in the world, would be put at a distance from my being. And in this way the counter-possible of suicide would not be felt as a real possibility for me determining my being. It would not be felt as something genuinely still to be decided, or as actually concerning me, but merely as a feature of the precipice I might happen to notice.14 Rather, externalising my relation to the counter-possible, I would evade the anguished awareness of myself as genuinely being constituted by this possibility. In brief, I would avoid awareness of my being as possibility, and hence of my being as the rise of meaning in the world. Instead, I would be able to continue with a sense of myself, and my chosen possibility, as ‘solid’ and ‘given.’ As Sartre says, ‘the chosen possibility would appear—due to its selection—as my only concrete possible, and consequently the nothingness which separates me from it and which actually confers on it its possibility would collapse’ (BN, 42). My ‘possibility’, here of safe conduct, would cease to be troubled. I will carry on along my given, expected path; I will not doubt seriously that I will continue sensibly to safety. Yet the force of this strategy of evasion also lies in the fact that it does not thereby destroy altogether the sense of a certain kind of freedom. As Sartre explains, in relation to the counter-possible, ‘They would preserve  See also McCulloch’s distinction between ‘mere logical possibilities’ and ‘live ones’, 48. However McCulloch does not elaborate on the nature or origins of this distinction.

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just enough being to preserve for my possible its character as gratuitous, as a free possibility for a free being, but they would be disarmed of their threatening character’(BN, 41–42). In placing our counter-possibles outside us in the world, but in still noting their existence, I can maintain a sense that hypothetically I ‘could have’ chosen suicide. That is, I can still entertain the counter-possibile as a ‘possibility’ that it was within my power to pursue. But it is an empty and abstract entertaining. For, I do not take seriously the idea of jumping from the cliff or ceasing to write the book. And it is for this reason that we are able to imagine that we meaningfully chose our concrete possible, yet evade angst. In short, I can due to this believe I am ‘free’ in those situations, whilst also evading any sense that the ordinary course of our lives is thereby called into question or put at stake.

5

 onclusions Regarding the Evasion C of Angst

Consequently the questions with which I began this section have been answered. I started by saying there are certain situations within life where ‘world absorption’, which obscures our awareness of possibility and hence our true being, is disrupted. In these situations the ordinary flow of life is suspended and we are confronted with a sense of our being as at stake again, of a genuine and unavoidable sense of possibility. Yet how was it that despite the occurrence of such situations intermittently within our lives, that we do not typically experience angst there? How is it that despite the occurrence of these situations we have little awareness of our being as perverse relation revealed in that state? An answer has now been furnished. For we evade angst in these situations where we cannot avoid recognition of our possibilities, by transforming the way we perceive, what Sartre calls, ‘counter-possibles’. That is, we evade angst there by transforming our perception of those possibilities counter to our own, like suicide, which arise with and become just as real as our positive possibility.

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Furthermore, this is done on the basis of a certain kind of exorcism. I evade angst by exorcising the haunting non-being of the counter-possible and rendering it as something objective. It thus becomes something safely inhering in the world itself. That is, I take the ambivalent threat of the counter-possible and its uncanny reference to my being, and turn it into something banal, everyday, fixed and given. And this is done, moreover, by conceiving of our contradictory possibilities in terms of ‘…the possibles of an undifferentiated Other’ (BN, 43). I render the counter-possible objective and safe, by conceiving of it in terms of a generic human potential in relation to the situation. I conceive of it as something ‘one’ could do, but not as essentially concerning me. Thus in this way I can both maintain an awareness of these counter-­ possibles in exceptional situations, and yet not be challenged by them with regards to my being. As Sartre says, explaining, ‘We should like to preserve from the original intuition what it reveals to us as our independence and our responsibility but we tone done all the original nihiliation in it…’ (Ibid.). In this manner we exorcise the truly threatening character of the counter-possibles and of our freedom. We still believe the counter-­ possible existed ‘there’, that we could have chosen it, but such comprehension is now part of the furniture of the everyday. It is no longer something that threatens us. As such, even where ordinary world absorption is threatened, we can evade the angst that might stem from that disruption. For if, when I am temporarily detached from my world, I can both maintain that I am free and yet take my concrete possibility as effectively given, then such detachment need not worry me. In short, if we can avoid the threat to our habitual possibility even when recognition of a counter-possible is unavoidable, then no exceptional situation need concern us. But where does this leave the argument as a whole? Where does awareness of this second form of evasion leave the intelligibility of a non-­ humanist, Sartrean, conception of human being? I began by arguing that one could comprehend our pre-reflective, non-humanist, intuition of the human by seeing it in terms of perverse modification. That is, our intuition of the human as relation could be rendered intelligible by viewing human being as the perversion of world that is non-being. Yet I also said, in turn, that for this account of our being to properly make sense it had

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to be manifest in concrete awareness. And thus I was led to describe angst as a conscious state where, through intimacy with our possibilities, we apprehend our being as the perverting modification of world and self. However, this chapter began by observing that there was a problem with angst in this role. For if our being as perverting activity entails that we are always necessarily aware of our being, and angst is this awareness, then ‘anguish ought to be a permanent state of my affectivity’ (BN, 35). Yet it is in fact in concrete life ‘completely exceptional’ (Ibid.). And it is for this reason that if one wished to maintain the plausibility of angst and hence of my non-humanist conception of the human this problem had to be resolved. To ensure that the conception of human being as relation was fully intelligible I had to show how we are able to evade anguished awareness of our being. This was first done by suggesting that angst-evasion was not the result of contingent psychological strategies such as belief in determinism. And nor was it the result of the fact that, as Webber puts it, ‘people find their freedom disconcerting.’15 Instead, it was a necessary product of our being-in-the-world. In this way I first of all identified a mode of evasion that occurs within ‘the most common situations of our life’ (BN, 35). This could be understood as ‘world absorption’. For these common situations are defined to begin with by absorption in activity. Such activity obscures our sense of possibility because it creates by our acts, the meaning of which is contained outside themselves, pseudo-objective demands in the world, ‘things to be completed’. Further, because each particular activity is bound by ‘relations of instrumentality’ (BN, 36), our engagement in a particular act implied being bound up with an instrumental complex. That is, engagement in a particular activity implies engagement in a ‘world’ of pseudo-objective exigencies. Thus, we were in this way absorbed in the slip-stream of a world. And this situation is summed up well by what Sartre calls the ‘serious mood’. This is a mood which most of us inhabit for the greater part of our lives. As he says, ‘In the serious mood I define myself in terms of  Webber, ‘Bad Faith and Other’, in Reading Sartre: On phenomenology and existentialism, 185. See also Morris, 81–82, for suggestion that we evade angst because we find it psychologically ‘disconcerting’ or unpleasant, rather than because of the fundamental structures of the world.

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the object by pushing aside a priori as impossible all enterprises in which I am not engaged at the moment…’ This means, as he says, that ‘…the meaning which my freedom has given to the world, I apprehend as coming from the world and constituting my obligations’ (BN, 39–40). In other words, in the ‘serious mood’ I feel that there are just ‘things to be done’. I am absorbed in a world that sets before me tasks to be completed and I do not seriously question this. Nor is this a ‘world’ which we originally choose. We do not prior to activity choose the fundamental values or ends which create that world. Rather, we are just ‘fallen’ in it; we always already find ourselves acting and compelled to act there. Consequently, in combination with the method by which we exorcise our counter-possibles by conceiving of them as objective aspects of the world, we have accounted for ‘the totality of processes by which we try to hide anguish from ourselves’ (BN, 43). I have described how we evade anguish both in the common situations of our lives and in more exceptional situations where ordinary absorption in the world is suspended. However have I thereby answered the question concerning the intelligibility of angst, and hence of Sartre’s non-humanist conception of the human? Have I addressed sufficiently the question of how we are able to systematically evade anguished awareness of our true being? In one sense the answer is ‘yes’. For demonstrated with the account of these two modes of evasion is that angst-evasion has a basis in phenomenological reality. In short, I have shown with this that the ‘rarity of the phenomenon of anguish’ (BN, 35) is not simply inexplicable. Nevertheless, it would be inaccurate to suggest that this chapter has thus fully answered the question concerning the intelligibility of angst. This is the question concerning concrete awareness of our being as perverse relation. For, whilst I have shown that the evasion of angst is a phenomenon that exists it has not yet been entirely shown how such a phenomenon is itself theoretically explicable. In other words, I have still yet to show how it is that these evasions which circumscribe our existence can be truly effective. This is a problem that becomes especially clear if one considers the second means of evading angst by objectifying my alternate possibilities. It becomes clear if one looks again at the mode of evasion whereby these possibilities are rendered as banal aspects of the world. For there the exorcising of the threat of these possibilities, and

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what they imply about my being, can take place only because their threatening character is acknowledged in the first place. As Sartre says, ‘I can in fact wish “not to see” a certain aspect of my being only if I am acquainted with the aspect which I do not wish to see.’ And ‘…this means that in my being I must indicate this aspect in order to be able to turn myself away from it…’ (Ibid.). In other words, to evade true awareness of my possibilities I must at the same time bring to awareness those possibilities as the very thing I’m trying to evade. This is the problem of efficacy alluded to. For if awareness of angst must, ‘…be given in the unity of the same consciousness’ (BN, 35) as the evasion, then it is unclear how we can ever successfully be convinced by this disguise. In short, it is unclear how the methods of evasion, given their inherent nature, can ever truly be successful. For this reason, the next chapter will address this issue. If one wishes to properly show how this account of angst, and hence the human as perversion of world, is plausible this must be addressed. Only by doing so can a non-humanist phenomenological existentialism then be fully defended, and the meaning of non-humanist existentialism be further developed.

References Catalano, J. A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness’ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). ———. ‘Successfully Lying to Oneself: A Sartrean Perspective’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 50, No. 4 (1990): 673–693. Caws, P. Sartre (London: Routledge, 1979). Desan, W. The Tragic Finale (New York: Harper and Row, 1960). Gardner, S. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (New York: Continuum, 2009). Gordon, J. ‘Bad Faith: A Dilemma’, Philosophy, Vol. 60, No. 232 (1985): 258–262. Grene, M. Sartre (New York: New Viewpoints, 1973). Hartmann, K. Sartre’s Ontology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966). Heidegger, M. Being and Time, trans. by J.  Macquarrie and E.  Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1962) McCulloch, G. Using Sartre (London: Routledge, 1994). Morris, K. Sartre (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). Pattison, G. The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Chesham: Acumen, 2005).

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Salvan, J. To Be and Not To Be (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962). Sartre, J-P. Being and Nothingness, trans. by H. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1958). ———. The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. by A.  Brown (London: Routledge, 2004). Webber, J. ‘Bad Faith and Other’, in Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. by J. Webber (London: Routledge, 2011). ———. ‘Motivated Aversion: Non-Thetic Awareness in Bad Faith’, Sartre Studies International, Vol. 8, No. 1 (2002). ———. The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Routledge, 2009).

6 Sartre, Perversity and Self-Deception

1

Introduction

Nietzsche’s claim that ‘We remain strange to ourselves out of necessity’,1 is a sentiment shared by many in the existentialist tradition. That we deceive ourselves not merely ‘from time to time’2 and on certain issues, but systematically, and about our very being, runs to the core of the existentialist Weltanschauung.3 Moreover, this is a theme developed in my discussion of perversity. How we remain wedded to a humanist conception of the subject, despite existing as a perverting relation to the world, is an issue I tackled from a variety of angles. This was done first through the philosophy of Nietzsche. As shown for Nietzsche, in Chap. 3, it is our An early version of this chapter was published as ‘What does self-deception tell us about the self? A Sartrean perspective,’ in Identity and Difference: Contemporary Debates on the Self, ed. Rafael Winkler (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).  Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 3.  As Morris, Sartre, says, representing that view, ‘From time to time people “lie to themselves”, 76. 3  The theme of structural self-deception plays an important role, for example, in the thought of Dostoyevsky and Kierkegaard, in particular in Notes from the Underground and Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair in Sickness Unto Death. 1 2

© The Author(s) 2020 D. Mitchell, Sartre, Nietzsche and Non-Humanist Existentialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43108-2_6

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being as a perversion of natural forces which allows for this. Specifically, the slave revolt in values serves as a ‘secondary perversion’ exploiting, and subverting awareness of, the primary perversion which founds our being as a relation to active forces. Likewise, as discussed in Chap. 5, the problem for Sartre was how we evade awareness of angst. That is, given angst represents consciousness of self ‘as it exists in the perpetual mode of detachment from what is’,4 as the perverting non-being which we are, we asked why is it so rarely experienced. And it was said that there were two core methods by which this was accomplished. The first was based on our absorption in the world. Firstly then a primary world-absorption prevents recognition of alternate possibilities as mine, a recognition necessary for angst, in most common situations. Secondly, viewing possibilities as given for an anonymous ‘other’ allows angst evasion even when this world-absorption is disrupted. However, this cannot represent an end to the discussion. While we accounted for ‘the totality of processes by which we try to hide anguish from ourselves’ (BN, 43) a further problem remains for Sartre’s non-­ humanist existentialism. And what this is becomes clear if one reconsiders the second means of evading angst, and the example of the man on the precipice. Tweaking Sartre’s example,5 we can imagine a husband and wife hiking who suddenly find themselves passing along a high and precarious ledge overlooking a precipice. Out of nowhere the possibility of pushing one’s partner over the edge, to their death, announces itself. The ordinary sense of ‘getting on with life’, its fixed ‘reality’ and course, its implicit values and obligations, is at that moment put at stake. Disengaged now from our usual sense of world and self we are thus confronted with a sense of our being and world as suddenly open and ‘in the balance’. And with this we can become aware that it is my being now as such possibility which brings meaning and structure to the world. Concomitantly with this I can become aware of myself as nothing other than the perverting

 Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 35. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as BN.  Sartre’s example from Being and Nothingness is that of an individual on a dangerous ledge before a precipice. 4 5

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relation bringing that meaningfulness into being. Here we have the potential for anguished awareness of self. In most cases, though, such angst never actually takes place. Instead we typically neutralise or ‘exorcise’ the unsettling threat posed by this possibility. And we do so by setting it outside ourselves. I acknowledge that the possibility of mariticide6 exists, but ‘as endowed with a transcendent, purely logical being’ (BN, 41). In other words, the opportunity to kill here is viewed simply as an objective part of the world, like the hardness of the rock or the narrowness of the path. And this is accomplished by viewing the situation in terms of ‘the possibles of an undifferentiated Other’ (BN, 43). That is, the potentially disturbing possibility is neutralised by seeing it as merely something ‘one’ could do, given the precipice, the ledge, and the proximity of another person. But it is a possibility that need not really concern me. Yet how is this connected to the problem that was mentioned? It concerns how such a strategy could ever possibly be effective. For this method of exorcising the threat of what this possibility implies about my being can take place only because I am aware of its threatening character in the first place. As Sartre says, ‘I can in fact wish “not to see” a certain aspect of my being only if I am acquainted with the aspect which I do not wish to see’ (BN, 43). Here the problem becomes clear. The strategy of evasion seems to necessitate awareness that I am fleeing from something. Worse, transforming the threat posed by the possibility of murder into something benign requires awareness of what it is I want to transform. And it requires this precisely in order that I can successfully transform it into a specific ‘objectified’, and thereby non-threatening, version of itself. Consequently it is apparent what the difficulty is for Sartre. For, even if this method of angst evasion in exceptional situations does in fact exist, and is an accurate phenomenological description of reality, it remains obscure regarding its efficacy. In other words, I must explain how it is that we can be convinced by such methods of evasion. This is so given that they seem to involve a clear contradiction in thought. Specifically, they involve the contradictory awareness of both the intention and the object of the  Or uxoricide if it is the wife, rather than the husband, being killed.

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evasion ‘…in the unity of the same consciousness’ (BN, 43) as the desired non-awareness of these things. This, in more general terms, is the problem of self-deception, or the ‘lie to oneself ’. And it is this which must be resolved if I want to make Sartre’s account of angst and this type of angst evasion fully intelligible. That is, I must make the means of angst evasion in exceptional situations, as seen with the example of the precipice, plausible. Further, by doing this I look to make the broader argument of this book more compelling. In particular, by explaining how we can successfully evade awareness of our being as perverse relation to world, we can show how a non-humanist phenomenological existentialism can be properly defended.

2

Other Theories of Self-Deception

Yet how are we to go about this? How can this problem of self-deception be resolved and my overall argument advanced? A good starting point is to look at the other core, non-Sartrean, responses to this problem. By doing this, and seeing how they are limited, it will be easier to understand Sartre’s own position, and why it is needed. I will also be able to show how Sartre’s solution is rooted in the very perversity which characterises our being. So let me begin by restating the problem in more general terms. This is for the sake of clarity. In addition the self-deception literature does not use examples directly associated with angst evasion.7 As Sartre says then, contrasting self-deception with ordinary deception: …the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived. Better yet I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully—and this not at two different moments…—but in the unitary structure of a single project. (BN, 49)

 Although, as Gardner notes, Sartre’s statement of the general problem is, due to its clarity, often cited in the literature on self-deception. Gardner, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, 174. 7

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In other words, a ‘lie’ in general involves a deceiver who knows the lie told is untrue, and a deceived who does not know, or believes the lie to be true. And it is apparent why this is a problem if the deceiver and the deceived are the same person. This is because, as Mele says, then, ‘self-­ deceivers intentionally deceive themselves into believing something, p, and there is a time at which they believe that p is false while also believing that p is true.’8 That is to say, in the case of a lie to oneself we must ostensibly both believe the lie, and be aware of it as a lie. And this it seems, as Mele argues, ‘is not a possible state of mind.’9 In short, it is not clear how a lie in this sense could possibly succeed. Nevertheless, a variety of solutions to this problem have been suggested. And the Freudian one is perhaps the most familiar. According to Freud, self-deception, which is a ubiquitous part of psychic life, can be explained by appeal to the difference between the conscious and the unconscious. As Sartre explains, Freud solves the problem of self-­ deception by replacing ‘the duality of the deceiver and the deceived, the essential condition of the lie, by that of the “id” and the “ego”’ (BN, 51). And this works since the unconscious can then ‘lie’ to the conscious mind, or withhold secrets from it, without the conscious mind being aware of the subterfuge. All that is apparently required for this is that the truths to be withheld are subject to a process of ‘repression’. For, as Freud has stated, ‘the essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting and keeping something out of consciousness.’10 Unfortunately, though, it is the detail of this process which is problematic. In order that repression can occur there must be something intentionally determining which drives from the id are to be repressed and which permitted into consciousness. And, as Sartre says, ‘we are compelled to admit that the censor must choose…’ (BN, 52). Yet it is also apparent that if this entity is choosing ‘It must be the consciousness (of ) being conscious of the drive to be repressed, but precisely in order not to be conscious of it’ (Ibid.). And this puts the Freudian solution on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand if the censor is genuinely part of  Mele, ‘Emotion and Desire in Self-Deception,’ Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 163.  Mele, ‘Real self-deception’, Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 92. 10  Freud, ‘Repression,’ quoted in Goleman, Vital Lies, Simple Truths, 112. 8 9

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consciousness then it simply lands us back with the initial puzzle of self-­ deception. For in order that the censor can intentionally choose between what is permitted and what is not, it must be aware of that which it is repressing. But then this censor which is part of our consciousness must have awareness of the repression while also being ignorant of it. And we again have a contradiction. On the other hand, the censor could be conceived as not being directly part of our consciousness, or as a distinct consciousness. Yet in that case how such an entity could possibly control repression in our consciousness remains entirely obscure. Little wonder then that some theorists have suggested that the problem can have no resolution. Rather they contend, as Mele says, ‘that the attempt to understand self-deception on the model of paradigmatic interpersonal deception is fundamentally misguided.’11 As such, puzzles of ‘self-deception’ are really only pseudo-problems. That is, they are problems that only emerge when one mistakenly frames the phenomenon in terms of the deceiver-deceived relation of the ordinary lie. And Canfield and Gustafson are typical in this regard. They argue that ‘All that happens in self-deception … is that the person believes or forgets something in (belief adverse) circumstances.’12 In other words, when we say we are ‘self-­ deceived’ we are really just adopting an erroneous belief which it is unreasonable to have given the evidence. Mele likewise develops such a point. He says that ‘Beliefs that we are self-deceived in acquiring or retaining are a species of biased belief.’13 In short, self-deceiving beliefs are beliefs we acquire due to a strong emotional desire for something to be true, and in which evidence is twisted to suit this end. Thus it is clear with this how the ‘problem’ is resolved. If we simply come to hold a questionable belief, due to persistently selective relation to evidence, then we can be ‘self-deceived’ in this new sense. At the same, though, this can be the case without our having to be simultaneously aware and not aware of a lie. Yet it is also clear that this approach is unsatisfying. Whilst getting round the puzzles of self-deception, the ‘deflationary’ strategy also seems to miss something essential about the phenomenon.  Mele, ‘Real Self-deception,’ 91.  Canfield and Gustafson, cited in Herbert Fingarette, Self-Deception, 22. 13  Mele, ‘Real Self-deception,’ 93. 11 12

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Pedrini touches on this when he talks about ‘a distinction between self-­ deception and motivationally biased beliefs.’14 But it is Bach who most succinctly captures what it is missing when he points out that such a view ‘does not reckon with the fact that in self-deception the truth is dangerously close at hand and must be repeatedly suppressed.’15 In other words, there is a key difference here. There is a crucial difference between avoiding a certain truth which immanently threatens consciousness, as in the case of angst evasion on the precipice, and gradually coming to affirm an error. For, whilst the latter may be called self-deception, it clearly differs from instances where we turn immediately from disturbing thoughts that come to mind. In one case we have a spurious belief accrued and cemented potentially over many years, with the other an immediate act of distraction from something that is all too present. And in this sense it is evident here that something essential has not been dealt with. In sum, it is apparent that the deflationary accounts have resolved the problem only by ignoring a significant part of the meaning of self-deception. So is there another possibility? Is there an alternative beyond the Freudian or deflationary answers to the puzzle of self-deception? And thus is there another way of showing how the second mode of angst evasion can be effective? Before discussing Sartre’s attempted answer to this question, it is worth looking at what Fingarette has to say. For like Sartre, and unlike the deflationary accounts, he does try to engage more properly with the experiential reality of self-deception. Further, he does this by first arguing that we can understand the lie to oneself by distinguishing between two modes of consciousness. Corresponding to Sartre’s notion of the reflective and pre-reflective, this can be framed as the difference between conscious or explicit ‘attention’ and absorbed or non-focused awareness. And Fingarette uses the example of writing to clarify this point. As he says, ‘when I am writing as I normally do, I take account of the complex and varying physical and orthographical requirements for putting my thoughts on paper, but I do not focus my attention on these things.’16 In other words, we can be aware of different aspects of an  Pedrini, ‘Self-Deception: What is To Blame After All,’ Annali del Dipartimento di Filosofia, 151.  Bach, ‘Thinking and believing in self-deception,’ Behavioural and Brain Sciences, 105. 16  Fingarette, ‘Self-deception needs no explaining,’ in Self-Deception, 163. 14 15

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a­ ctivity, and its surrounding context, without necessarily making either a reflective ‘theme’ for consciousness. And, critically, we can do all this whilst being potentially still able at any moment to explicitly thematise a salient object in our environment. But how does this then help solve the problem of self-deception? Part of the answer lies in that very point just stated, that we exercise a certain pre-reflective control over what we make reflectively explicit. In different words, as Fingarette says, ‘we actively and selectively direct our attention on the basis of reasons provided by our appraisal of our situation.’17 And this is significant if we consider that explicitly focusing on certain things can be painful. Say I feel shame for something I did the previous evening. On a pre-reflective level we can avoid thematising this. This is because, as Fingarette argues, ‘I can take account of my situation and detect a condition which is relevant to my interests, but which would gravely disrupt my mental equilibrium if my attention were to focus on it.’18 And what this means is that on a pre-reflective level we can have an embryonic sense of something as being potentially distressing if it were brought to focused awareness. Thus this sense in turn allows us pre-reflectively to withhold attention from the potentially painful object. Consequently, on this basis we can then deceive ourselves without being entangled in paradox. For if we can withhold attention from an intentional object in pre-reflective awareness that is of obvious potential reflective interest to us, we are self-­ deceiving. Yet as this occurs without our being reflectively aware of the thing we are avoiding then there is also no obvious contradiction. In short, there is no problem as we can ‘turn away’ from the potentially distressing object without having to be explicitly aware of the strategy and intention of that avoidance.

 Fingarette, Self-Deception, 168.  Fingarette, Self-Deception, 169.

17 18

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161

Sartre and the Coquette

Returning to my argument therefore it seems that Fingarette has indeed answered the questions raised. This is the case since he has indicated how the puzzle of self-deception might be solved. However, his explanation still remains only partial. Whilst Fingarette takes us further than the Freudian or deflationary accounts, he still leaves the problem of a certain kind of self-deceiving relatively untouched. In other words, whilst explaining how self-deception is possible in certain everyday dealings with the world, he does not adequately do this regarding a mode of more exceptional self-deception. This is the kind of self-deception found in the second type of angst evasion. In this way his account seems more applicable to a general self-deceiving evasion of truth, rather than specific and immediate acts of self-deception. And it is for this reason then that, as Sartre says, ‘If we wish to get out of this difficulty, we should examine more closely the patterns of bad faith and attempt a description of them’ (BN, 55). It is for this reason, that a more thorough, phenomenological, account of such an act must be given. Or, to elaborate, I must give an account of that self-deception Sartre calls ‘bad faith’; the state of a consciousness contradicting itself within a specific moment.19 For one limitation of previous theories is that they have taken the phenomenon of self-deception for granted. That is, they have overlooked the descriptive specificities and subtleties of what actually happens in such an act. And it is because of this that they have struggled to resolve the problem of the lie to oneself. Consequently, it is to properly resolve this, and show how effective angst evasion in turn is possible, that I must instead look to do what they have not. In sum, it is for this reason that this chapter must return to a concrete case of immediate self-deception, to effectively draw out what is going on there. Yet where does one begin in this enterprise? Following Sartre, one can start with a description of what Stevenson calls a ‘charming little cafe  Strictly speaking bad faith, for Sartre, is the ‘attitude’ that allows us to maintain an immediate lie to ourselves (BN, 44). For our purposes then an analysis of bad faith is equivalent to an analysis of how self-deception within an immediate moment is possible. 19

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scene’.20 And this involves a coquette ‘who has consented to go out with a particular man for the first time’ (BN, 55). Furthermore the general context in which she falls into self-deception is that ‘she does not quite know what she wants’ (Ibid.). That is to say, she is aware of the man’s sexual interest in her and of the decision she will be compelled to make regarding it but, because of her ambivalence, wants to pretend that nothing is being asked of her.21,22 The critical question for our account is how she accomplishes this. And the answer, first of all, is that she suppresses the temporal, transcendent, aspect implicit in the situation. Or, put another way, she ignores that which is constitutively part of the situation but not explicitly seen or ‘immanent’. What this means concretely is that she ignores the way the man’s conduct is leading up towards what Sartre calls ‘the first approach’ (Ibid.), the initiation of physical intimacy. And she achieves this by making totally immanent those aspects of his behaviour which allude to possibilities beyond their immediate signification. As Sartre says then ‘She restricts this behaviour to what is in the present; she does not wish to read in the phrases which he addresses to her anything other than their explicit meaning’ (Ibid.). So, for instance, when he says to her ‘you have beautiful hair’ she interprets this as just referring to a statement of fact and to the man’s charm. Thus, in this way the woman disarms the situation of its worrying, transcendent, aspect. And she evades the decision which this transcendence implies. Yet at the same time she does not want to deny the sexual element in the situation altogether. As Sartre says, ‘she would find no charm in a respect which would be only respect’ (BN, 55). And it is this that distinguishes her as a coquette. For whilst ‘desire cruel and naked  Stevenson, ‘Sartre on Bad faith’ Philosophy, 256.  Webber, in ‘Bad Faith and the Other,’ in Reading Sartre: On phenomenology and existentialism, 181, is right to challenge the feminist claim that this example is a ‘patriarchal fantasy’ (Moi 1994, 127–33; Doeuff 1991, 72–3.) As Webber points out, people in general, not just the coquette, are seen by Sartre as being in bad faith. That is, like the claim that Sartre’s waiter example is ‘unfair to waiters’ (Ibid.). Phillips, ‘Bad Faith and Sartre’s Waiter,’ Philosophy, 23–31, such criticism misinterprets Sartre on this point. For it sees him as ‘singling out’ these characters, when they are in fact merely examples of more general human patterns of bad faith. More importantly, such criticisms stem from interpreting bad faith in an essentially ‘ethical’ way which overlooks the ontological significance of the phenomenon. 22  Desan misinterprets the specific example of the coquette by saying that it is about the fact that ‘her partner desires more than her love.’ Desan, The Tragic Finale, 24. 20 21

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would humiliate and horrify her’ (BN, 55), she also enjoys the excitement which his desire and the related sense of sexual possibility lends to the scene. Consequently, the coquette again engages in a move with which to maintain these contradictory wishes. As Sartre explains, ‘This time then she refuses to apprehend the desire for what it is; she does not even give it a name; she recognises it only to the extent that it transcends itself toward admiration, esteem, respect’ (BN, 55). In other words, her response now is the inverse of what it was in relation to transcendence. It is the inverse of what her response was to the transcendent possibilities latent in the man’s conduct. So just as there the coquette stripped the man’s conduct of all transcendence, at this moment she strips his desire of all immanence. For what she does then, in relation to this desire, is to transform it into a pure transcendent. In other words, she purges it of its bodily aspect, seeing in it only a lofty ‘concern’ for her. In this fashion she succeeds in enjoying the sexual tension of the moment whilst avoiding the brute fact of sexuality and the choice it necessitates. Nevertheless, her artful dancing around the situation and the choice it demands in this way does not end there. For, ‘suppose he takes her hand’ (Ibid.). Such an action now threatens her carefully constructed evasions. This is so as it seems to demand an immediate choice on her part. In other words, if she leaves her hand there she is implicitly consenting to his advance. Conversely though, if she removes it, as Sartre points out, she would ‘break the troubled and unstable harmony which gives the hour its charm’ (Ibid.). Consequently she engages in a final procedure of evasion. In order both to postpone a decision, and to maintain the élan of the moment constituted by sexual possibility, she employs a final strategy. What is this? As Sartre describes it, ‘the young woman leaves her hand there, but she does not notice that she is leaving it’ (BN, 55–56). And she achieves this by applying to her own being a similar strategy that she used for the man’s desire. That is, she strips her being of all immanence and imagines she is pure transcendence. Engaging in ‘sentimental speculation’ (BN, 56) about the nature of life, she enacts a separation from her body and discloses herself as being, essentially, only a consciousness. Thus, by doing this she abdicates responsibility for her hand. The hand, now not being truly part of her, becomes merely a passive object in relation to which the man’s touch carries no significance.

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Concluding then, the coquette succeeds here, in addition to the other two devices, in evading the decision which the situation seemed to demand of her. In this way she succeeds in enjoying the peculiar tension the man’s desire lends to the scene whilst also avoiding confronting that desire and the choice it implies. And Sartre says, as such ‘We shall say that this woman is in bad faith’ (BN, 56). But why, to clarify, is this the case? Or, rather, why is she self-deceived? And what, to return to the general concern of the discussion, has been gleaned about the nature of this phenomenon from such a description? To take the former questions first, one can say that the woman is in a state of immediate self-deception because she hides something from herself at the very moment that she brings it to attention. So, for instance, in her view of the man’s conduct, she reduces it to being only its immanent meaning precisely because she is aware of its threatening transcendence. That is, she reduces the intimation of future physical contact in his conduct to a purely immediate meaning. And she does this precisely because she is aware of what his behaviour signifies. Likewise, it is because when the man touches her hand that she senses ‘profoundly the presence of her own body…’ that ‘…she realizes herself as not being her own body’ (BN, 56). In short, the woman is in bad faith because she not only attempts to deceive herself, but because she does so at the very moment when awareness of the thing to be avoided seems inescapable. However, one may now wonder how much progress has been made regarding the intelligibility of this phenomenon. How much further have we advanced in terms of the main concern? If a description of immediate self-deception was supposed to show how the puzzles of self-­deception could be resolved is this chapter not still left with a central problem? Namely, the issue of how such a contradictory state of self-evading consciousness can be maintained. In one sense ‘yes’. This is true in so far as this description has not by itself yielded all the necessary answers. Nonetheless, in another sense, some progress has also been made. This is the case since, considered properly, this phenomenological description points the way to a possible answer to our problem. Further, as will be shown, what is revealed is connected to the nature of our being as perverting non-being.

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More specifically, what this is, and that which can be taken up as a guiding thread for the moment, is the nature and relation of facticity and transcendence.23 For, as Sartre says, ‘The basic concept which is thus engendered, utilizes the double property of the human being, who is at once a facticity and a transcendence’ (BN, 56). What this means is that the woman somehow succeeds in her self-deception because she can exploit something about this relation. To explain, she is able to deny the nature of the situation just as she is aware of it, because she can exploit the fact that we are neither entirely facticity nor transcendence. So, for example, her strategy of separating herself from her body, when her hand is touched, works because in one sense it is true that she is not her body. Or, put differently, her strategy works because on one level human reality always transcends its facticity. Conversely, she succeeds in denying the temporal, transcendent, aspect of the man’s behaviour because it is also true that his conduct, in a sense, is what it is. It is true that in one sense we are not our future, transcendent, possibilities. As such, the aspect of the transcendence-­ facticity relation which she is able to exploit is that the human, as Sartre argues, ‘is not what he is, and is what he is not’ (BN, 67). If we were straightforwardly self-identical, and just were either our bodies or disembodied consciousness, such strategies would not be possible. And in this way, it is the human being’s ‘double property’, its non-coincidence with itself, which must serve as the guiding thread in understanding self-deception. Nevertheless, it is worth pausing to consider whether the literature on the topic has pursued this line of enquiry effectively. That is, one can ask whether the literature has pursued Sartre’s own suggestion here regarding the problem of self-deception. And the answer unfortunately is, in most cases, ‘no’. While the coquette example has been widely discussed the dislocation of this example from the question of humanism, and Sartre’s broader ontology, has meant its connection with non-being being either ignored or openly dismissed. Feldman and Hazlett are quite explicit in this regard. They claim that an understanding of self-deception and bad faith ‘does not require that one accept any obscure metaphysical view (for  Stevenson, ‘Sartre on Bad faith,’ 256–257, attempts in contrast to understand bad faith in terms of Sartre’s reflective, pre-reflective distinction. 23

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example the ontology of Being and Nothingness)’.24 Likewise, Stevenson, in discussing Sartre and self-deception, argues that the idea of the human ‘being what it is not’ is meaningless.25 Further, even when the connection between non-being and the coquette example is acknowledged it is glossed in an essentially humanist way. That is, it is interpreted in a way that does not fully engage with Sartre’s ontology or our connection to being. For example, Morris takes our non-self-coincidence to refer simply to the ‘ambiguity of human life’,26 and meaning that human being is ‘not only’ what it is.27 And this is based upon the idea that human beings, being free to pursue certain courses of action, are not fixed to a specific character or situation.28 Consequently, to get beyond these account focus must be paid to the connection with Sartre’s ontology. To understand how self-deception is possible I must relate what is said by Sartre to the non-humanist account of human being already developed. But how is this done? How is the problem of self-deception going to be linked to the conception of the human as perverse non-being? Sartre argues that ‘A quick examination of the idea of sincerity, the antithesis of bad faith will be very instructive in this connection’ (BN, 58). Why sincerity? Sincerity, the ideal that ‘a man be for himself only what he is’ (Ibid.) seems essentially connected to the relation between self-deception and our non-self-coincidence. As such, although the ‘concept of transcendence-facticity’ (BN, 57) discloses something about our non-self-identity, it remains only a particular mode  Feldman and Hazlett, ‘What’s Bad About Bad Faith,’ European Journal of Philosophy, 62. They are typical of the literature on bad faith in this respect. For they claim that the purpose of bad faith for Sartre should be simply to describe and critique a certain ethical notion of inauthenticity, 51. Likewise, Webber in ‘Bad faith and the Other’ interprets bad faith as an ethical and ‘cultural’ problem rather than as an ontological one, 180–181. 25  Stevenson, ‘Sartre on bad faith,’ 253, claims that the idea of ‘consciousness being what it is not’ is unintelligible. Similarly Phillips, ‘Bad Faith and Sartre’s Waiter,’ criticises Sartre’s idea of the human as non-being, saying that, ‘From the fact that I am not simply in one action or attitude, it does not follow that I am not in that action or attitude at all,’ 30. 26  Morris, Sartre, 81. 27  Morris, Sartre, 80–81. 28  A similar idea can be found in Webber, The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. Specifically, this is the idea that at the root of the coquette’s evasions is a belief in the fact that we have fixed and unchangeable characters or natures, 74, 85. As Webber says: ‘We can make better sense of this example if we understand this woman to be identifying herself with the intellectual and sentimental aspects of her character, taking these to make up her fixed nature,’ 85. 24

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of this. Being only a particular mode of our non-being it cannot reveal its whole truth. And this means to explore this more general relation of non-­ self-­identity to self-deception, one has to look beyond that specific case. I have, in brief, to look to the more universal aspiration of sincerity. Moreover, by doing this I hope to show how the character of our perverse non-being affects a broader consciousness and experience of the world. Particularly I hope to show, via this analysis, how a residual awareness of non-being haunts consciousness even when angst has been successfully evaded. And with this I then aim to solve the related problems of self-­ deception and angst evasion.

4

Sincerity, the Waiter, and the Impossible Ideal

So, to continue our exploration of self-deception it is necessary to look more closely at the general aspiration of sincerity. How is this accomplished? Sartre begins by noting that sincerity is ‘not merely an ideal of knowing but an ideal of being’ (BN, 59). In other words, sincerity is not, as much of the literature on self-deception suggests, purely a matter of what we say or believe, but a pursuit. Sincerity is a project we actively try to realise in our lives. And it is for this reason again, that Sartre turns to a concrete description of such a pursuit. He turns to a concrete case to explore what ‘sincerity’ means in this instance. Specifically, he looks to the case of the waiter in the cafe. For such a waiter is evidently trying to ‘become what he is.’ As Sartre indicates, 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. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium… (BN, 59)

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In other words, the waiter is attempting a project of sincerity. As Sartre says, ‘he is playing at being a waiter in a cafe’, and he ‘plays with his condition in order to realize it’ (BN, 59).29 Occupying nominally the position of a waiter, he is acting in such a way as to somehow make this constitute what he is in a more fundamental sense. But what exactly is the nature of this attempt to be a waiter in this way? And what does it reveal about our awareness of non-being and the project of sincerity? One can begin by saying that the waiter’s attempted ‘sincerity’, his efforts to coincide with the being of a waiter, does not mean he seeks to make of himself in a straightforward sense a thing in-itself. That is, he does not seek to make himself exist literally like an object or automaton. As such, I reject the claim of Hartmann, that ‘Sincerity is simply the project of making my whole self an in-itself.’30 For, to attempt to be a waiter here does not mean, as Phillips also suggests, ‘To say “My life is to wait at table.”’31 Even at the moment I am involved in this act, to make this effort does not mean attempting to believe I am ‘nothing other’ than this waiter. It does not mean to subsume my entire existence in that role. Indeed, attempting to be this waiter I could still also be aware of my existence as a husband, father, or an aspiring actor. I could even be aware of my time off afterwards. Likewise, my efforts to live up to a certain role do not, as McCulloch argues, ‘represent attempts to become absorbed in the role, and so to enjoy a thing-like, choiceless existence.’32 This is because, in employing the ‘dance’ of the waiter, I do not thereby assert that I am determined solely to be a waiter, or that this is all that I could ever do. In fact, even in attempting to be a waiter I could still be aware of a potential future choice to change profession. So, what does the waiter’s attempt to be a waiter mean? What does it mean if one rejects these alternatives, which centre on him becoming  Cumming, ‘Role Playing: Sartre’s Transformation of Husserl’s phenomenology,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, for a discussion of the nature of role playing in Sartre’s philosophy as a whole, especially as it is connected to the imagination and Sartre’s movement away from Husserl. However, Cumming’s discussion of bad faith and role playing is not grounded in Sartre’s ontology and analysis of non-being, 47–48. 30  Hartmann, Sartre’s Ontology, 56. 31  Phillips, ‘Bad Faith and Sartre’s Waiter,’ 27. 32  McCulloch, Using Sartre, 58. 29

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simplistically a thing in-itself? One can begin to answer this question by observing that although this is a particularly explicit case of the project of sincerity it is by no means exceptional. Not only, as Phillips has observed, is the behaviour described the norm amongst waiters,33 but, as Sartre says, ‘This obligation is not different from that which is imposed on all tradesmen’ (BN, 59). And what this means is that one can begin to understand the waiter in terms of a more ubiquitous, if unacknowledged, phenomenon. For, what is found in all these cases and in all jobs is a more subtle effort which is about ‘being’ that thing in a more familiar and everyday sense. And what is meant here is indicated by Sartre when he says, regarding the waiter, that ‘He knows well what it “means”: the obligation of getting up at five o’clock, of sweeping the floor of the shop before the restaurant opens, of starting the coffee pot going etc.’ (BN, 59–60). In different words, it is not that the waiter is enacting some elaborate deceit or ‘act’ in his efforts here. Rather, he does indeed perform all these duties, and exists as a waiter in an ordinary human way. And this takes up part of his life. He seeks to be a waiter in the same way that I might say ordinarily ‘I am a student’, or ‘I am a teacher.’ As such the waiter’s attempt to be a waiter is just a variation of what we all do. In short, what the waiter is doing here is a variation of what we all do when we believe a particular role somehow gives content to, or is a ‘real’ part of, our lives. Yet the critical point is that it is precisely this everyday sense of ‘being’ which necessarily eludes us. For, as Sartre argues, such being is only ever a form or ideal perpetually escaping our grasp. As he says, ‘It is a “representation” for others and for myself, which means that I can be he only in representation’ (BN, 60). In other words, there is some kind of real or ‘solid’ life of a waiter which I can never quite be. Like the waiter in Sartre’s example, I can make more of an effort to adopt that role, to ‘represent’ that being, but I thereby just confirm that this is precisely what I am not. Further, this non-being is not just a void or empty abstraction. For, as Sartre says, ‘there is no doubt that I am in a sense a cafe waiter—otherwise could I not just as well call myself a diplomat or reporter?’ (BN, 60). And thus there is a residual awareness of non-being defined precisely by 33

 Phillips, ‘Bad Faith and Sartre’s Waiter,’ 24–25, 27.

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a certain reality and ‘closeness’, but also elusiveness, of that ideal. It is like a form perpetually on the periphery of my vision. It is something I feel like I am always almost apprehending and touching, but which nonetheless always just succeeds in evading my gaze. Moreover, as Sartre points out here, ‘we are dealing with more than mere social positions; I am never any one of my attitudes, any one of my actions’ (BN, 60). What we are absent from in this way is not merely the ‘ideals’ of particular public roles or positions. Instead what is affected by this absence is everything which can be said to give substance to our lives. As Sartre says then, ‘Perpetually absent to my body, to my acts, I am despite myself that “divine absence” of which Valéry speaks’ (Ibid.). And our body acts as a particularly relevant example of the point here. For, as a phenomenological account of embodiment reveals, we can never actually fully grasp the character of our own physical appearance.34 Even though I ought to be better acquainted with this than anyone, and might spend hours each day in the mirror, what I actually look like, for myself, can never quite be fixed. Likewise, in another example, Sartre argues this strange absence from the ‘ideal’ of being applies to our emotions. As he says, citing melancholy here, ‘sadness perpetually haunts my consciousness (of ) being sad, but it as a value which I cannot realize; it stands as a regulative meaning of my sadness…’ (BN, 61). In other words, as seen with the waiter, it is not a case of saying that in a straightforward sense I am not sad. My sadness is on one level real, and I feel it, as opposed to feeling happy or bored; it ‘haunts my consciousness.’ However, as with the ‘ideal’ of the waiter, my sadness is something which nonetheless is always just outside my grasp. Like my sense of joy or regret it is something which I can never really feel in myself; something which always seems to be given under the auspices of a certain pretence. Further, this sense of non-being is connected to anguished awareness of non-being without being identical to it. Which is to say it is not the full-blooded awareness of my being as nothing other than the perverting non-being which brings a meaningful world into existence. The precise contours of this anguished awareness, and its manifestation in  See BN, Part III, chap. 2.

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experience, were explained in Chap. 5. Nevertheless, these two modes of consciousness of non-being stand in a relationship to one another. As Sartre explains, To flee anguish and to be anguish can not be exactly the same thing. If I am my anguish in order to flee it, that presupposes that I can decenter myself in relation to what I am, that I can be anguish in the form of ‘not-being it’, that I can dispose of a nihilating power at the heart of anguish itself. (BN, 44)

As such, while it is always true in a sense that ‘we are angst’ (BN, 43) there is a definite distinction here. That is, there is a clear distinction between full awareness of angst and ordinary consciousness where I have successfully ‘decentred’ myself in connection to it. Nonetheless, as indicated by this passage, angst evasion can in a strict sense never be absolutely successful. There is always a sense in which ordinary awareness of our being, when absorption in the world allows us to evade angst, ‘implies the nothingness which it supresses’ (BN, 44). A certain kind of more limited awareness of non-being therefore necessarily still survives the process of angst evasion in the common situations of our lives.35 This is why the metaphor of a ‘residue’ can be used. Although, one might equally call it a ‘shadow’ of angst to explain the sense of unease at our being that survives in ordinary consciousness. And this residual sense of non-being is not for the most part brought to explicit awareness or articulation. In this way, our earlier analysis of the human as perverting relation plays a critical role in our becoming fully cognizant of this. That is, our prior analysis of non-being, angst, and angst evasion provides this chapter with the context to fully grasp this mode of awareness and its significance.  Note: as the survival of residual awareness of non-being occurs in relation to the first mode of angst evasion our argument here is not circular. This would only be the case if residual awareness of non-being only emerged from the second form of evasion, which is required in exceptional situations. For this second method of angst evasion, unlike the first, requires an explanation of how immediate self-deception is possible. Hence we would be using a product of that second process of evasion to explain how such a process took place to begin with. However, our claim is instead that residual awareness of angst emerges initially from the first mode of angst evasion, absorption in the world. As such there is not a problem. Since, as argued in Chap. 5, such a means of evasion in the common situations of our lives, as an absorbed form of awareness, does not require an explanation of how immediate self-deception is possible. 35

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 he Impossibility of the Ideal Applied T to Belief

But where does this leave my argument? Where does this leave the discussion of self-deception given this account of sincerity and residual consciousness of non-being? One can say that an elaboration of the former, from the waiter example, has shown sincerity is ‘…a task impossible to achieve, of which the very meaning is in contradiction with the structure of my consciousness’ (BN, 62). In different words, and against McCulloch who argues sincerity is possible in certain cases,36 the attempt to be what one is is universally impossible. Further this impossibility is part of the structure of our being. As Sartre states, ‘this impossibility is not hidden from consciousness; on the contrary, it is the very stuff of consciousness; it is the embarrassing constraint which we constantly experience; it is our incapacity to recognise ourselves, to constitute ourselves as being what we are’ (BN, 62). Consequently, one can say that an investigation of sincerity has disclosed something new. It has disclosed in a new way the nature of a broader, everyday awareness of our ‘non-being’. That is, it has revealed the nature of that phenomenon to which the first concrete example of the coquette had led us. For sincerity has revealed my strange absence from myself as fundamentally linked to our most basic project. In short, we can see that an impossible attempt to be what we are not, in trying to coincide with the elusive ‘ideals’ of our being, is what characterises the very effort of our existence. Yet if this ‘incapacity to recognise ourselves’ has been revealed where does this leave the discussion of self-deception overall? Where does this leave the attempt to understand how a contradictory state of consciousness can be maintained and thus how effective angst evasion is possible? The answer is that it provides a crucial part of the solution. For if consciousness, as seen with sincerity, is characterised by a continual failure entirely to coincide with an ideal of being then this must too apply to belief. In short, our beliefs, and our ability to believe, must be afflicted too with this failure, with ‘the divine absence’, inherent in our entire  McCulloch, Using Sartre, 62, argues both that sincerity is possible and that sincerity is not in bad faith. 36

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existence. And this is what Sartre describes in the final section of his chapter on bad faith. As he says there, ‘Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes’ (BN, 69). In other words, when we consider our beliefs closely we realise there is an absence at their heart. We realise, when we look carefully enough, that I cannot be genuinely sincere about any of my beliefs. For we apprehend that behind even the most ‘heart felt’ belief is a strange failure or incongruity. And belief in this way resembles every other aspect of our existence. That is, we can imagine ourselves ‘believing’ in the manner that a character in a novel might, but fundamentally I sense that such belief does not really apply to me. So, to elaborate, a character in a novel might seem to be defined by their belief. Like Sabina’s belief in The Unbearable Lightness of Being that she is compelled to betray anything or anyone to whom she grows attached. That is to say, the sincerity of their belief seems to consist in the way it is a real, substantial, and defining part of who they are. Indeed, this is the common-sense view of the matter. In other words, the ordinarily accepted view is that beliefs adhere to, define, and stem from, us like our height or the colour of our hair. In this way we are said to ‘hold’ beliefs, and carry them with us. However, on the Sartrean picture, belief is always afflicted by a strange elusiveness. As such, just as we cannot quite be a waiter, a husband, or any other ideal of being, then we can never wholly identify with any particular belief. The moment we attempt to lay claim to, and thematise, belief, rather we are put at a distance from it. It is then, as with the waiter, as if on a certain level it is an act, as if the person holding or asserting the belief is not really oneself. It is as if, on the level of an existential relation, we try to play the role of ‘believing’, but always find ourselves as already, imperceptibly, having surpassed it. Moreover, this seems to be something it is possible to intuit in experience. For, especially once we are aware of our perverse non-being, and the idea of a residual non-being in relation to this, it is something a sensitive phenomenology of belief is able to discern. It is something we are able to observe in ourselves. In other words, if we set aside ingrained assumptions about the necessity or importance of genuinely holding beliefs we find belief is indeed menaced by this kind of failure. And we begin to see how this then ties into a non-humanist view of the self as ‘a sort of escape

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from the self…’ (BN, 25). Put differently, with this we begin to discern a further sense in which, for Sartre, the self is a perpetual flight from anything which gives self-hood any definite substance or form. Although, it should be noted, this sense exists, as with a more general awareness of non-being, on the level of a residual consciousness. That is, it does not represent full awareness of our perverse non-being. Instead it is a more implicit and limited sense of the impossibility of attempts to identify our being with something definite. In any case, this last conclusion about the elusive nature of belief helps to address our problem only when combined with another point. And this point, which gets one to the heart of self-deception, is that we are necessarily aware of this failure of belief. That is, as Sartre says, ‘To believe is to know that one believes, and to know that one believes is no longer to believe’ (BN, 69). Just as, then, the impossibility of sincerity in general ‘is the very stuff of consciousness’ (BN, 62), so too is this failure of belief something of which we are always implicitly aware. And the reason why these two points combined help us here goes back to the example of the coquette. In particular, the reason they direct us to a solution goes back to a ‘strategy’ we saw adopted by her. This was the strategy used to disguise awareness of her body from herself. For just as there she did this by ‘playing’ with awareness of the two different kinds of non-being, we see the same ‘game’ at play with regards to two different senses of belief. This is because, as Sartre explains, Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes. Consequently the primitive project of bad faith is only the utilization of this self-destruction of the fact of consciousness. If every belief in good faith is an impossible belief, then there is a place for every impossible belief. My inability to believe that I am courageous will not discourage me since every belief involves not quite believing. I shall define this impossible belief as my belief. (BN, 69)

In other words, to start, what we have as with the coquette is two different senses of ‘non-belief ’, or ‘impossible belief.’ First of all, there is the ordinary sense of impossible belief, something I know in the more mundane sense not to be the case. That is, there is that sense of non-belief

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applying to particular beliefs such as “Daniel can run a marathon’, when we know this is impossible. Then there is the second sense of ‘impossibility’. This is the sense of non-belief which has just been revealed in the discussion, applying to all belief, and the impossibility of ever truly believing anything. And what the consciousness in self-deception does, given its implicit awareness of this second mode of ‘non-belief ’, is to conflate the two senses. That, it uses the impossibility of true belief in the second, ‘existential’ sense to dismiss as impossible both kinds of belief. As Sartre says, It has disarmed all beliefs in advance—those which it would like to take hold of and, by the same stroke, the others, those which it wishes to flee. In willing this self-destruction of belief … it ruins the beliefs which are opposed to it, which reveal themselves as being only belief. (BN, 70)

What it does then is to destroy all true beliefs in the first, ‘mundane’ sense. And it does this by judging them according to the ideal of sincere belief. All particular beliefs thus now become equally impossible. However, having undermined all ordinary beliefs by judging them according to this high standard it now moves back to determining which beliefs are true in the everyday sense. In short, it now wants to re-instate the truth of whichever beliefs it chooses, but now in the ordinary sense of belief. And it can do this since all such ordinary belief has been reduced to the same level of impossibility. This is like the born-again Christian’s relationship to sin. The belief of bad faith reduces all belief to nought, so that it can resurrect, with awareness of the futility of all belief, whatever it chooses. Bad faith thus exploits the fact that we already essentially feel ourselves playing a game ‘of mirror and reflection’ (BN, 66) regarding belief. And it does so in order to believe whatever is convenient. Further, in this way, one can see the connection to our central question. That is, one can understand with this how the impossibility of genuine belief, and our implicit awareness of it, allows for self-deception. For if we sense that all belief somehow ‘falls short’ then my adoption of a contradictory belief can be maintained. If we sense somehow that all belief is a ‘game’ anyway I can believe even that which appears impossible. Furthermore, it does not matter that this strategy of

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sliding between the two senses of belief is itself in bad faith. It makes no difference, as Sartre says, that ‘I shall not be able to hide from myself that I believe in order not to believe and that I do not believe in order to believe’ (BN, 69–70). Or put another way, it does not matter that an assertion of belief, my actually believing a contradictory idea, is justified precisely by first saying that nothing can be believed or asserted. For, as Sartre makes clear, bad faith is in bad faith right down to its very roots. As he says, ‘bad faith must be itself in bad faith’ (BN, 68). And there is then no underlying ‘reason’ therefore to be appealed to; our refusal to be honest in our relation to belief runs to the very core of our being. Moreover, this point can be expanded when one consider again what the nature of consciousness is for Sartre. For, returning to a claim made by Fingarette, immediate self-deception occurs on the basis of ‘the spontaneity of the non-reflective cogito’ (BN, xl). That is, I am not here talking about a reflective ‘choice’ regarding how or what to deceive oneself about. Our intentions, or what is desirable to believe in a given moment, and the strategy for accomplishing this, rather takes place on a level prior to ordinary reflective awareness. And, as well as what we desire, say avoiding a decision, what we are pre-reflectively aware of is also a kind of indeterminacy in our being. This awareness differs from the proper apprehension of our being as a perverting relation which brings meaning to the world. It differs from that awareness found in angst. Such awareness is a clearly apprehended intuition that we are nothing other than the strange dissonance brought to the world by our possibilities and projects. In contrast, the pre-reflective awareness utilised by bad faith is the more limited, ‘residual’, sense that our being is haunted by a certain ambiguity and instability. In this way bad faith exploits a bastardised sense of the self as ‘a way of not being his own coincidence, of escaping identity’ (BN, 77). But it does this without ever grasping the deeper ontological or experiential underpinnings of this sense. In any case, it can be seen now how this expands on our previous point. That is, one can see how it clarifies my argument regarding the possibility of self-deception. This is because if we are implicitly aware of a certain ambiguity and instability in our being we can utilise this to maintain contradictions. If we are aware of existing as caught between definite modes of being, and that any certainty regarding our self is

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inherently unstable, then we are also aware of the difficulty of properly apprehending anything. And this difficulty, pre-reflectively intuited, opens the space for adopting beliefs which intentionally resist consistent meaning. As such, it is this difficulty, derived from our being, which helps us see how self-deception is possible. For it is the difficulty of being honest regarding the elusiveness of self and its connection to the world, that makes contradictory belief in relation to self, and hence self-­ deception, so achievable.

6

Self-Deception and Existentialism

Where does this put us regarding the main aim of our chapter? I began by saying that my account of non-humanist phenomenological existentialism was incomplete in so far as it had not managed to explain the ‘rarity of the phenomenon of anguish’ (BN, 35). That is, I had not fully accounted for why angst, as conscious awareness of our being as perverse non-being, was so rarely experienced. For while I explained how angst could be successfully evaded in ‘the most common situations of our life’ (Ibid.), due to absorption in activity, I had not done so with regards to more exceptional situations. Specifically, how angst evasion could succeed even when that world absorption was disrupted remained obscure. This was because even though a method for evading angst there was identified it was unclear how it could be effective. This led us to the problem of self-deception. Since, as seen with the couple on the precipice, if in order to supress a troubling possibility we have to transform and objectify it, then we must at the same time be aware of the specific way it is troubling. As Sartre says, in this case, ‘I must aim at the object of my flight in order to flee it’ (BN, 43). But this seems to involve a contradiction. Namely, how can we achieve non-awareness of the source of angst there if the strategy for doing so simultaneously requires awareness of that source?37  Thus Catalano’s attempt in ‘Successfully lying to oneself: A Sartrean Perspective,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 681, to explain self-deception by utilising the temporal divide between reflective and pre-reflective awareness is not applicable here. For, whilst this explains a mode of self-misrepresentation, reflective misrepresentations of pre-reflective experience, it does not address 37

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As such, to complete this discussion I had to look at the problem of self-deception. That is, to properly explain the nature of angst, and hence non-humanist existentialism, it was necessary to answer in general terms how self-deception could be effective. And I began in this enterprise by looking at some familiar responses to the problem. In this way I encountered, and rejected, the Freudian and deflationary accounts respectively. Likewise, Fingarette’s approach, based on the idea that ‘we can take account of something without necessarily focusing our attention on it’38 was itself seen as limited. This was because it still conceived self-deception passively. In different words, it still ignored the fact that regarding self-­ deception ‘one is not infected with it … but consciousness affects itself ’ (BN, 49). To grasp this active and immediate self-deceiving then I tried to more thoroughly describe an example where this occurred. I looked to give a phenomenological description of a situation where self-deception was experienced. And I sought to account for what was happening there. Specifically, I looked to Sartre’s example of the coquette on a date. And it was found that it was ‘the double property of the human being’ (BN, 56) that was key. It was the fact the human both is and is not its facticity and transcendence, that allowed her to deceive herself there. In short, I showed that it was something about our non-identity with ourselves that allowed self-deception to take place. Assuming therefore that ‘non-­ identity’ might hold the key to grasping self-deception, I thus next looked at sincerity. As Sartre said, ‘examination of the idea of sincerity, the antithesis of bad faith, will be very instructive in this connection’ (BN, 58). So to explore self-deception further, I looked at this paradigmatic and broader project of trying to deny one’s non-self-identity, and achieve identity with oneself. In particular, the case of sincerity where a waiter is ‘playing at being a waiter in a cafe’ (BN, 59) was examined. However, I disagreed with the familiar interpretations of what the waiter’s attempt to be a waiter represented. I disagreed with the idea that he was trying simplistically to become an object or a ‘thing in-itself.’ Instead, it was argued, what the waiter was Sartre’s main problem. This is because angst evasion refers to a mode of self-deception whose processes all occur in the same moment, without any temporal division between the awareness of the object and the ‘lie’. 38  Fingarette, Self-Deception, 164.

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attempting to live up to was a more everyday ‘ideal’ of being that people have in relation to all aspects of their lives. And it is this which the waiter could never quite be. Further, awareness of this failure of sincerity could be understood as a residual consciousness of non-being. Different from the full consciousness of our non-being found in angst this residual sense of unease at our self survived even in everyday situations. That is, this awareness persisted even where full awareness of our being had been supressed by absorption in the world. And it was my previous analysis which allowed me to see this. It was my earlier analysis of the human as perverting relation to world, which is non-being, and of angst, which allowed me to make this residual sense of non-being an explicit object of investigation. Finally, it was this in turn which provided an answer to my central problem. It was an interrogation of this sense of non-being, of residual awareness of ‘…our incapacity to recognise ourselves, to constitute ourselves as being what we are’ (BN, 62) which allowed self-deception to be understood. For this sense of not truly ever being able to realise an ideal, can apply to belief as well. In different words, we saw that due to this sense of non-being we can never quite believe. Hence, as Sartre says, ‘Every belief is a belief that falls short’ (BN, 69). And this last point, as seen, provides a solution to the initial problem of self-deception posed. For by conflating the impossibility of belief in this ‘ideal’ sense with such impossibility in an ordinary sense, we can maintain self-deception. In sum, by applying the former mode of impossibility to the latter we can destroy all ordinary belief, and then resurrect in a mode of pseudo-belief whatever is convenient. As such, a solution to the puzzle of self-deception was indicated. For, I have shown how it was possible, by utilising awareness of the failure and instability of belief, to maintain even contradictory beliefs and states of consciousness. And in this sense I showed how it was possible to believe the ‘lie’ we were telling, even at the moment we were telling it. Moreover, this is significant for our broader discussion. For if with this account of residual awareness of non-being, and how it affects belief, I have shown how contradictory states of self-deception can be maintained, this also applies to angst. In other words, we have resolved the original problem of how angst evasion in exceptional situations could be effective. This is

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because it is now apparent how we can be convinced by the strategy of evasion used there. It is apparent how we can be convinced by such a strategy even though it involves, in objectifying the locus of potential angst, awareness of the very thing to be evaded. And I have thereby fully explained the evasion of angst. I have explained how in all the circumstances of our lives we can successfully evade true awareness of our being. At the same time, I have made my philosophical perspective that has been developed more compelling. I have made my account of a non-humanist, phenomenological existentialism stronger. This is the case since it has not only been indicated why we are so rarely given a glimpse of our being as something different from the humanist subject; namely as a perverse relation to being. But I have also brought this account closer to our actual experience. That is, this discussion has again ‘immersed man back in the world.’39 For by explaining with angst evasion the most familiar modes of concrete existence, it has rooted Sartre’s non-humanist conception back in our world, and discovered its shadow in the most unlikely of places.

References Bach, K. ‘Thinking and Believing in Self-Deception,’ Behavioural and Brain Sciences, Vol. 20 (1997), 91–136. Catalano, J. ‘Successfully Lying to Oneself: A Sartrean Perspective,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 50, No. 4 (1990), 673–693. Cumming, R.D. ‘Role Playing: Sartre’s Transformation of Husserl’s Phenomenology,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. by C. Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Desan, W. The Tragic Finale (New York: Harper and Row, 1960). Feldman, S.D. and Hazlett, A. ‘What’s Bad About Bad Faith,’ European Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 21, No. 1 (2010), 50–7. Fingarette, H. Self-Deception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000a). ———. ‘Self-Deception Needs No Explaining,’ in Self-Deception (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000b). Gardner, S. Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (New York: Continuum, 2009)  Jean-Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, (tr.) A. Brown (London: Routledge, 2004), 51.

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Goleman, D. Vital Lies, Simple Truths (London: Bloomsbury, 1997) Hartmann, K. Sartre’s Ontology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966) McCulloch, G. Using Sartre (London: Routledge, 1994) Mele, A.R. ‘Emotion and Desire in Self-Deception,’ Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 52 (2003), 163–179. ———. ‘Real Self-Deception,’ Behavioural and Brain Sciences, Vol. 20, (1997), 91–136. Morris, K. Sartre (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008). Nietzsche, F. On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. by C.  Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Pedrini, P. ‘Self-Deception: What Is to Blame After All,’ Annali del Dipartimento di Filosofia (Firenze) Vol. 11, Nos. 1–34 (2005), 151. Phillips, D.Z. ‘Bad Faith and Sartre’s Waiter,’ Philosophy, Vol. 56, No. 215 (1981), 23–31. Sartre, J-P. Being and Nothingness, trans. by H. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1958). ———. The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. by A.  Brown (London: Routledge, 2004). Stevenson, L. ‘Sartre on Bad Faith,’ Philosophy, Vol. 58, No. 224 (1983), 253–258. Webber, J. ‘Bad Faith and the Other,’ in Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. by J. Webber (London: Routledge, 2011). ———. The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Routledge, 2009).



Conclusion: Ontology and Ethics

So, where does this leave the argument then? Where does the discussion of angst evasion and self-deception in the last two chapters leave my project overall? To address this it is necessary to recall what was accomplished there. For one can start by noting that it was successfully shown how we evade anguish. It was demonstrated, first, that for Sartre the human for the most part avoids anguished awareness of its being because of the ‘absorbing’ structures of the everyday world. And it was also shown how we evade awareness of ourselves as a perverse relation to being, even in exceptional states where world absorption breaks down. Further, with Chap. 6 it was shown how such self-evasion can be successful. That is, with an explanation of bad faith I indicated how we could evade awareness of ourselves even in situations where such awareness seemed inescapable. This was made possible by the human being utilising the very non-being it is trying to escape, so to believe that which is impossible. Consequently, with this was addressed the localised problem of the last two chapters. In showing how we systematically evade angst I also made my initial account of non-humanist phenomenological existentialism both more intelligible and concrete. I revealed the meaning of the human as © The Author(s) 2020 D. Mitchell, Sartre, Nietzsche and Non-Humanist Existentialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43108-2

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perverting relation in conscious awareness, with angst, and in the most general mode of our existence. For it was shown with the account of angst-­evasion that human being is defined in that state, not merely by not-being-what-­it-is but by ‘not-being-what-it-is-not.’1 In other words, in the generality of concrete existence we are distinguished as the perverse flight from that initial perversion which constitutes our being. And it was in this respect that the main question underpinning the previous chapters on Sartre was answered. However, I have with this as well addressed the broader question for this book as a whole. Namely, by showing how angst evasion is possible I have also given greater concrete form to, and a defence of, Sartre’s non-­ humanist phenomenological existentialism. And in so doing I thereby showed something important. That is, it was shown how a broader possible type of existentialism, and not merely a Nietzschean version of it, could escape the present subject of humanism. Through an exploration of perversity then, form and justification was given to the sketch for a radical non-humanist existentialism outlined in the introduction. In Nietzsche this took the form of the human being as a perversion of will-­ to-­power. Meanwhile, in Sartre the human being existed as the perverse modification of world, or being. In both cases though it has been indicated how there can be a return to human being that escapes the present or isolatable humanist subject. As such, it was indicated how it was possible to have a distinct meaning for human existence that nonetheless avoided humanism. This could be achieved if the human being was understood as a perversion of something other than itself. And this idea was instantiated and developed by engagement with these two key existentialist thinkers. Furthermore, I have addressed two crucial questions arising from this. First how, given this, it is possible to distinguish between authentic and inauthentic ways of living. And second, why, given our being as perverse, the humanist view of the subject is so predominant. Or, why, as Nietzsche says, ‘we distinguish ourselves, the doers, from the doing, and make use of this schema everywhere.’2 In Nietzsche the answer to both questions is based  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 70. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as BN.  Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, 251.

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upon the slave revolt in values, which perverts original noble creation, setting up a present subject to justify this. For Sartre, the answer is rooted in the structures of the world, which allow us to evade our true being and see ourselves as separated from the world we in fact constitute. In this way concrete form has been given to a non-humanist existentialism. And it has been indicated not only how a possible existentialism might avoid humanism, but how it could provide a compelling and substantive alternative to it.

An Existentialist Imperative? Yet questions still remain. For it might be argued that I have reached this point only by neglecting an essential aspect of the ‘return to human being’ and existence. I have reached this point by ignoring the sense in which a true, ‘recovery’ of human being, and of existentialism, also means recovering the vital significance of philosophy for the human. As such, this book has neglected the way in which such a philosophy must impact upon the lives of actually existing people. This is the objection that existentialism as outlined here remains merely a ‘contemplative philosophy.’3 Whilst an interest in ‘concrete existence’ is professed, what in fact I have created, it could be said, is ultimately just another theory of the human. That is, I have in the end as Heidegger puts it ‘only a theoretical representation of Being and of man’4 with no practical bearing on existence. This is the problem then raised when Heidegger wonders ‘can we obtain from such knowledge directives that can be readily applied to our active lives?’ (LH, 177). It is argued in the rest of my conclusion that, in terms of this book, Heidegger’s question can be answered in the affirmative. In short, I can, at least in one sense, respond to the objection that this discussion has no possible influence upon concrete existence. And the basis for doing so goes back to what was said about the last chapters, and authenticity. For it was seen both there and in the discussion of slave  Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism, 17. Specifically, this was the criticism levelled at Sartre after world war two by the French communists. 4  Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism,’ in Heidegger: Basic Writings, 177. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as LH. 3

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morality, that our being exhibits a two-fold perversity. It is defined not just by being the perversion of a prior being, but by being a ‘secondary perversion’ of that. In other words, it was shown that our concrete being is distinguished in both cases also by being a flight from the initial perversion which grounds our being. And it is this ‘secondary perversion’ then in concrete existence which holds the key to explaining what sort of real imperative emerges from an existentialist ontology. But what is this imperative? And why does ‘secondary perversion’ hold the key to it? The first thing to say is that the claims here are not simplistically based upon the ordinary pejorative, or what Freud calls, ‘accusatory sense’5 of perversion. That is, I do not straightforwardly appeal to the idea that perversion as a ‘non-normal’ or ‘non-healthy’ state is prima facie bad. As discussed, perversity in the ‘primary’ sense just is the constituting reality of human life. It is therefore impossible to avoid, and absurd to condemn. Rather, I criticise secondary perversion on the grounds of, as Sartre puts it, that ‘self-recovery we shall call authenticity’ (BN, 70, fn. 9). In other words, I criticise that second mode of perversity because it represents a denial of our true state precisely as perversion. This is because whether in ressentiment or angst-evasion, we betray what on one level we have experienced as the truth of our being. Criticised is the sense that there we are living a consoling ‘error’,6 and that we lie about ourselves and the world. And, returning to the original point, this means that my analysis of secondary perversion intimates a possible imperative in this discussion. For secondary perversity, it seems, is something that we ought to struggle against. Still, it might also look like this itself is not sufficient. It is not immediately clear that this interpretation of existentialism, and analysis of secondary perversion, can have a concrete ethical, or transformative, impact on our lives. This is because of a problem with the nature of secondary perversion. For whilst I have indicated that which we ought to overcome, it is not automatically obvious on my analysis that we are in fact able to do so. For it was said that our evasion of ourselves was rooted in the very structure of the world and our genealogy. In other words, wasn’t it said that ‘we must  Freud, ‘Three Essays on Sexual Theory,’ in The Psychology of Love, 136.  Existentialism is a Humanism, 47–48. Sartre’s specific claim is that we may object to bad faith because it represents a logical error. 5 6

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confusedly mistake who we are’?7 And wasn’t the self-­evasion I called secondary perversion revealed as more than a contingent individual or even social problem?8 It was. However, as Sartre says, ‘that does not mean that we cannot radically escape bad faith’ (BN, 70, fn. 9). Since, as also seen, our ordinary absorption in the world can at times be disrupted. There are exceptional states such as angst, sickness, or grief,9 in which those structures rooting us in self-evasion loosen their grip. And this suggests that there is always at least the hope that secondary perversion might be challenged. That self-evasion is structural rather than contingent does not mean we are denied all capacity to resist. Alongside boundary experiences, understanding, and a philosophical relation to such experience, we might at least begin to see through the fog surrounding our selves. Of course, it is not easy. Any more straightforward articulation of precisely how to go about this is not really possible. Further, the very kind of understanding and experiences which might help us here are always menaced. The world of the everyday, and of idle chatter, perpetually presses such things back into common currency, and sense. It is an ongoing struggle. Still, there is an imperative, and a possibility of something that emerges here. Even if it is only awareness of the very difficulty and limits to a project of authenticity. Or awareness of the very limits to seeing those limits. Further, there are other questions which can play a part in such a task still to be asked. Namely, how do we approach our being-for-others, if this is the very source of the structures of inauthenticity? Is an authentic relation to others even possible? And will the other reveal or distort any attempt at understanding the self or world? These are the questions which any non-­ humanist existentialism must now try to address. They are also the ones which will help illuminate the imperative discussed.

 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, 3.  Webber, ‘Bad Faith and Other,’ in Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. J. Webber, 180–181, for idea that bad faith is rooted in our social and cultural circumstances. 9  See, in particular, Nietzsche’s discussion of sickness in his prefaces to his works of the free-spirit trilogy. Boredom and being-toward-death occupy a similar disruptive role for Heidegger. 7 8

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References Freud, S. ‘Three Essays on Sexual Theory,’ in The Psychology of Love, trans. by S. Whiteside (London: Penguin, 2006). Heidegger, M. ‘Letter on Humanism,’ in Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. by D.F. Krell (London: Routledge, 1978). Nietzsche, F. On the Genealogy of Morality, trans. by C.  Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ———. Writings from the Late Notebooks, trans. by K.  Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Sartre, J-P. Being and Nothingness, trans. by H. Barnes (London: Routledge, 1958). ———. Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. by C. Macomber (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). Webber, J. ‘Bad Faith and Other,’ in Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. by J. Webber (London: Routledge, 2011).

Index1

A

B

Absence, 9, 15, 45, 64, 67, 69, 113–116, 118–122, 130, 170, 172, 173 Adorno, T., 14, 15, 24 Analytic philosophy, 4n9, 16, 16n48, 16n49, 25, 30 Angst, 1, 66, 105, 126, 130–150, 134n8, 135n10, 154–156, 167, 171, 171n35, 176–180, 183, 184, 187 Angst evasion, 135n10, 148, 155, 156, 159, 161, 167, 171, 171n35, 172, 177, 178n37, 179, 180, 183, 184, 186 Authenticity, 1, 6–15, 9n28, 18–24, 31, 39, 41–53, 68–70, 73–75, 77, 80, 97–100, 103, 106, 126, 185–187

Bad conscience, 53–62, 53n19, 65–67, 66n34, 69, 73–75, 81, 83, 86, 97, 98, 100, 100n37 Bad faith, 132n6, 134, 134n8, 161, 161n19, 162n21, 164–166, 166n24, 168n29, 172n36, 173–176, 178, 183, 186n6, 187, 187n8 Becoming, 7, 13, 15, 17, 48, 75, 81–84, 86, 88, 126, 131, 143, 168, 171 Being, 6, 42, 73, 105, 129, 153, 183 Belief, 13, 21, 23, 30, 78, 94, 134, 135n10, 148, 158, 159, 166n28, 172–177, 179

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2020 D. Mitchell, Sartre, Nietzsche and Non-Humanist Existentialism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43108-2

189

190 Index C

I

Consciousness, 10, 34, 35, 63–67, 76, 112, 114–116, 115n32, 124, 126, 130–132, 134, 135n10, 138, 143, 150, 154, 156–161, 163–165, 166n25, 167, 170–172, 174–176, 178, 179 Creation, 44–53, 57, 60, 62–67, 70, 73, 75–80, 84–86, 89, 92–96, 98–100, 130, 185

Inauthenticity, 12, 22, 52, 53, 74, 75, 80, 86, 88, 95, 100, 104, 166n24, 187 Instinct, 53n19, 55–63, 57n27, 66, 67, 79–86, 89n23 Intentionality, 35, 35n95 Internalisation, 53n19, 58, 61–68, 74, 76, 81, 83, 91n31, 97, 99n36 L

D

Derrida, J., 30, 40, 110

Levi-Strauss, C., 25, 105 Life affirmation, 84 M

E

Ethics, 19, 25, 40, 85, 108n9, 183–187 Evil, 14, 92–97, 99 F

Facticity, 165, 166, 178 Freud, S., 54–57, 54n20, 57n27, 60n31, 62, 65, 66, 157, 186 H

Heidegger, M., 2, 3, 7, 10–12, 11n30, 26–33, 27n79, 30n88, 39n2, 106–113, 106–107n4, 108n7, 108n10, 109n11, 109n12, 111n22, 111n23, 116, 125, 130, 137, 185, 187n9 Hobbes, T., 55, 57

Marxism, 1, 4 Meaning, 2–11, 18, 20, 21, 23, 25, 26, 32, 34–36, 45, 46, 48, 50–52, 60–63, 67–69, 73, 74, 76, 78, 82, 84, 89, 90, 92, 97–99, 103–105, 108, 108n9, 110, 111, 116–120, 122, 125, 126, 131, 135, 135n10, 136, 138, 141, 142, 145, 148–150, 154, 159, 162, 164, 166, 170, 172, 176, 177, 183, 184 Merleau-Ponty, M., 4, 13, 17, 20 Morality, 14, 19, 53n19, 66n34, 74–81, 85, 86, 88–90, 92–100, 104, 186 N

Negation, 4, 62–67, 69, 76, 93, 96, 99, 105, 116–122, 125, 132 Noble morality, 74, 80, 85, 86, 88, 93, 98

 Index 

Nobles, 53n19, 70, 74, 75, 77–100, 88n20, 88n21, 185 Non-being, 105, 117, 118, 120–125, 129–132, 143, 144, 147, 154, 164–174, 168n29, 171n35, 177, 179, 183 Nothingness, 103–126, 130, 132, 145, 171 O

Ontology, 11, 13, 70, 73, 108, 110, 111n23, 113, 114, 165, 166, 168n29, 183–187

191

S

Secondary perversion, 53, 73–100, 104, 154, 186, 187 Self-deception, 2n2, 12, 87, 88, 96, 134, 153–180, 183 Self-mastery, 84, 86, 88, 89 Sincerity, 166–174, 172n36, 178, 179 Slave morality, 74, 75, 93, 95–97, 100, 104, 185 Slave revolt, 53, 53n19, 70, 73–100, 154, 185 Slaves, 53, 53n19, 70, 104, 154, 185 Structuralism, 4n9 Suffering, 7, 7n23, 14, 43, 64, 75, 81–84, 86–89, 89n25, 91–94, 98

P

Phenomenology, 4, 4n9, 5n12, 12, 17, 18, 18n57, 20, 113–115, 168n29, 173 Possibility, 4, 7, 20, 35, 39, 42, 43, 51, 53, 67, 77, 95, 96, 104, 121–123, 130, 131, 134, 136, 139, 141–148, 154, 155, 159, 163, 176, 177, 187 Poststructuralism, 110n15 Pre-reflective, 105, 114–116, 118, 124, 129, 147, 159, 160, 165n23, 176, 177, 177n37

T

Time, 9, 17, 19n60, 24, 32, 41, 42, 44, 50, 51, 59, 61, 64, 67, 68, 75, 76, 81–85, 87, 96, 98, 99, 105, 110, 115, 118, 129, 130n4, 134–137, 134n8, 143, 145, 150, 153, 157, 162, 163, 168, 177, 180, 187 Transcendence, 136, 137, 162–166, 178 V

R

Reflective, 105, 114, 115, 129, 133, 138, 141, 142, 159, 160, 165n23, 176, 177n37 Ressentiment, 53, 53n19, 61, 88–93, 89n24, 89–90n25, 90n28, 90n29, 91n30, 93n33, 97, 99, 99n36, 186

Value, 5, 6, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19n60, 22, 24, 44, 50, 53, 54, 62, 63, 65–68, 70, 74–82, 84, 85, 88, 90, 92, 93, 93n33, 95–99, 99n36, 108, 139, 142, 144n13, 149, 154, 170, 185 Value creation, 53, 63–67, 70, 77–80, 98, 100

192 Index W

Warfare, 82, 98 Warriors, 85, 86, 100

Will-to-power, 14, 49–70, 57n27, 73–78, 81, 96–100, 103, 184 World absorption, 135n10, 141, 142, 146–148, 154, 177, 183