MAVE Dissertation,
Lancaster University 1995

Being and Everythingness?
Aspects of Freedom and Identity in the Thought of Sartre and Others, with Reference to 'Environmental Ethics'.

Nick Hunt

MA Values and the Environment: Dissertation.
 
.
 
Submitted: 30.9.95.
 
Introduction: Towards 'Environmental Ethics'.
'I am the being by whom 'there is' 'being''. - Jean-Paul Sartre .
It might be asked what exactly Jean-Paul Sartre has to do with environmental philosophy. My response is indirect - what isn't to do with 'environmental philosophy'? Is this discipline something concerned only with that which 'environs' us? Is it only to do with thinking about the value of that which is 'beyond' the human? I think not. In an era in which we are evermore aware of the ecological interconnectedness of all 'things', approaches which leave humans out of the picture are I think fatally short-sighted - to me it seems evident that the 'environmental problem' must begin with that particular species responsible for the destruction, for power over the other of 'nature' (I include humans and their own bodies in this term). On this account, humans and their beliefs about the self-other relation should be at the centre of our attention: a quintessentially Sartrean theme. I will argue that Sartre's analyses enable a clearer understanding of why the west has such an instrumental and exploitative attitude to 'the natural' ). Questions like - what is it about the way we live and think that seems so threatening to life? - become answerable. And of course, such a question would seem to be a profoundly existential one.
However, one has to beware of the power of words - 'existential' may not evoke such academic scorn as 'mystic' or 'goddess', but its use-value is surely compromised in the eyes of many 'rationalist' thinkers about 'environmental matters' (how difficult it is to avoid labelling). But I wonder if such scepticism is wise, if this is not a case of dogma effecting the closure of inquiry, especially when those who judge have most probably never practised 'mysticism' or 'worship of the goddess', still presuming to know without doing (as I will argue, such arrogance is quintessentially western). Perhaps such Gnostics might tell us what 'environmental philosophy' is really about, but I somehow doubt it.
Some bitterness might be detected here. Perhaps it has something to do with the discrete disdain for the 'unorthodox' which I have encountered in academia, with the fact that those writers and thinkers who to me seemed most wise in my years of reading and thinking (prior to re-entering academia) do not feature on reading lists, are not given serious attention (although things seem to be loosening up slightly). Having digressed thus, I should hasten to reassure: cafes and black clothes will not be discussed here. Nonetheless, Being and Nothingness will be central to my argument - its effect on me was so profound because I encountered in it just about every theme which, according to what I had learnt in the years beforehand, was precisely what was to blame for our current predicament. These themes can be summed up in one word - dualism. I am convinced that Sartre expressed with utmost sincerity and accuracy the full implications of the western world-view, that he followed through to their logical end mistaken presuppositions regarding what it is to be human. Understanding him is to understand a culture that is profoundly unwell.
So, no discussion of the intrinsic value of ecosystems. Instead, I shall try to show how (Sartrean) dualism must ultimately lead to hate, nihilism and the denial of life, how it may underlie a great deal of mainstream philosophical thinking which should therefore be treated with great scepticism or even abandoned by greens, and finally, briefly and inadequately, how other thinkers in the continental tradition do in fact offer a way beyond dualism. There will of course be holes in such an ambitious task: I can only hope to begin developing a critique on this occasion.
1. Analysis: The World of Being and Nothingness.
The mark of a moderate man is freedom from his own ideas. Tao Te-Ching, 59.
In his most famous work Sartre claims that 'the dualism of being and appearance is no longer entitled to any legal status in philosophy' (BN:xxi)._ He thereby aims to present an ontological explanation of 'the individual in the world', arguing that individual human subjectivity is to be understood as absolute freedom, autonomous and indestructible. While the work begins (and ends) with a discussion of the character of being in general, Sartre is mostly concerned with inquiring into the nature of one 'region of being', the 'for-itself': human consciousness. He thus creates a new dualism: that of the for-itself opposed to the 'in-itself'. He also tries to show how individuals, through undetermined freedom of choice, make themselves what they are (although they often deny this reality through 'bad faith'). This discussion is nested in a wider phenomenological analysis examining other 'universals' such as temporality, finitude, embodiment and human relations: all humans experience these although they will of course vary from person to person.
1.1: Ontology.
Sartre criticises Cartesian dualism by arguing that its mistake is to understand consciousness as a 'relationship of knowing'. For if we conceive consciousness primarily as knowing or 'representational thought', then an object of knowledge is implied, and so arises the familiar separation of knower and known, of subject and object. While Husserl shows that all consciousness is consciousness of something, he does not escape this dualism. Sartre argues that if we accept the 'primacy of knowledge', if consciousness is only knowledge of objects, then, we must grant priority to subject or object, or face an infinite regress in which each endlessly constitutes the other.
To escape this, Sartre argues that 'there must be an immediate, non-cognitive relation of the self to itself' (:xxix). Prior to Husserl's 'consciousness of something', which Sartre terms 'positional consciousness', there is 'non-positional' or 'immediate' consciousness. This consciousness is not of objects, but of 'consciousness (of) self', it is a 'consciousness of consciousness'. However, this should not be understood as a knowing of the self, because knowledge must refer to objects, and the self cannot be an object to itself._ Instead, Sartre argues, 'immediate' consciousness 'renders the reflection possible; there is a pre-reflective cogito which is the condition of the Cartesian cogito'(:xxix). Moreover, '(A)t one stroke it determines itself as consciousness of perception and as perception' (:xxx; emphasis added).
How does this 'pre-reflective cogito' actually function? Sartre argues that whenever we do something (his example is counting cigarettes) the pre-reflective cogito is present or given with and inseparable from consciousness of the object; yet at the same time it is not some kind of 'extra'; it is 'one with the consciousness of which it is consciousness'. This pre-reflective consciousness (of) self means that 'an intention, a pleasure, a grief can only exist as immediate self-consciousness'. Moreover: 'Consciousness (of) pleasure is constitutive of the pleasure as the very mode of its own existence, as the material of which it is made' (xxx, emphasis added). If consciousness of self is 'constitutive' of our consciousness of things, but not vice versa, then consciousness must be absolute. It is self-determining and in no way limited by the world around it, since '(T)he existence of consciousness comes from consciousness itself' (:xxxi). It follows that consciousness is no-thing, or 'nothing'. It must therefore be a region of being completely distinct from that region in which causality operates, the region of the inert, the passive, the 'in-itself': no other thing 'outside' consciousness, from the inert or objective world can determine the 'for-itself'. And if consciousness is 'self-determined' then it is also 'freedom' in an absolute or ontological sense.
Thus Sartre arrives at his two-world view, a world in which 'being-for-itself' is opposed to 'being-in-itself'. The for-itself, as absolute freedom, can have no content or structuration from the social world, because the latter is in-itself. By contrast consciousness is 'nothingness' in the sense of emptiness; it is 'like a hole of being at the heart of Being' (:617). However, emptiness does not mean inactivity. On the contrary, '(T)he For-itself, in fact, is nothing but the pure nihilation of the In-itself' (ibid). The for-itself negates or 'nihilates' being-in-itself; having the power to question, alter and transcend the world. In other words, the for-itself is the origin of all meaning or essence. Or: humans are primarily active nothingness, not passive being.
1.2:Freedom, Anguish, Individual.
Sartre aims to 'penetrate into the profound meaning of the relation 'man-world'' by examining forms of human conduct (:4). Since 'Human freedom precedes essence in man and makes it possible' and 'there is no difference between the being of man and his being-free' (:25), extensive discussion of individual human freedom is required. Here I think can be discerned Sartre's greatest fear: the horror of being given an essence, and also his solution: the human essence is to have no essence, to be undetermined, absolute freedom. That is, humans still have an essence. But I am anticipating myself. For now, let me stress that for Sartre, to be human means to be free or 'uncaused', able to create oneself and choose one's own project in the world (:24-5). To be free means having the uniquely human ability to actively stand out over the world, the inert in-itself, which can be 'put out of circulation' so that it cannot act on us.
Sartre qualifies this: such freedom can only operate within limits. The for-itself cannot choose its 'position' but it can choose the meaning of its 'situation'. The contingencies of the social context, what Sartre calls facticity, may be beyond choice (I can not choose to have been born as a working-class person) but this context provides the situation in which I am free and must create the meaning of my life (or be inauthentic):
This inapprehensible fact of my condition... is what causes the for-itself, while choosing the meaning of its situation and while constituting itself as the foundation of itself in situation, not to choose its position (:83).
Absolute freedom causes anguish: 'Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being... If nothing compels me to save my life, nothing prevents me from precipitating myself into the abyss' (:32). At the moment of freedom, in which the choice is made, I am nothing, being suspended between my past and my future. I have necessarily put my own past 'out of circulation' (nihilated it) since, as knowledge, it should not shape my choice. But I am not yet my future act, and so I am forced to confront my nothingness, the power of my freedom to nihilate myself. This suspension and subsequent anguish may lead to 'bad faith' (inauthenticity) which is the attempt to deny freedom; in bad faith I surrender freedom by treating myself as an in-itself, a thing determined by the causal realm: I have an identity, an unchosen meaning which is false: therefore I am inauthentic and dishonest with myself.
If freedom is absolute and above the empirical, how does Sartre account for individuality? The answer is via facticity. Each mortal 'for-itself' has its unique particularity in terms of personal history and culture. Accordingly, each faces different constraints on her or his actions, due to varying social and economic situations. Some people very obviously are less free than others. However, Sartre is concerned not with this social reality but with ontological freedom:
'To be free' does not mean, 'to obtain what one has wished', but rather, 'by oneself to determine oneself to wish' (in the broad sense of choosing). In other words success is not at all important to freedom (:483).
That is, even in the worst kinds of situations a project is always possible. The torture victim is still 'free' to sustain an active project in relation to his condition. The victim may not achieve the project, but they can still choose; the uniqueness of their project is what creates individuality.
Facticity, the being 'thrown into the world' of the for-itself, is contingent or accidental, having not been chosen. Here a paradox seems to arise. As already mentioned, I cannot choose the social class into which I am born, yet my relation to my facticity must be freely chosen by me since 'facticity cannot constitute me as being a bourgeois or being a worker' - facticity does not constitute me (:83). Since I am not free not to choose, I must choose to 'nihilate' my thrownness in some way, so as to freely recreate its meaning. And it seems that I must choose the meaning of my facticity ever anew, in order to be authentic. This leads to the question of embodiment.
1.3: Sartre and the Body.
Embodiment is clearly a necessary part of one's facticity; it might be thought that the body is what most clearly demonstrates unique identity. For Sartre however, the body is also ultimately contingent. This becomes apparent when he argues that the body is essentially different from the for-itself, yet somehow still identical to it: 'Being-for-itself must be wholly body and it must be wholly consciousness; it can not be united with a body' (:305). He then goes on to show how the body is only experienced secondarily, mediated through my relations with other people.
Since humans have been defined as being primarily pure consciousness, Sartre argues (consistently as ever) that the for-itself must first encounter the world as consciousness, and that this meeting is therefore not that of an embodied self-consciousness, because the body is part of knowledge:
the body, whatever may be its function, appears first as the known. We cannot therefore refer knowledge back to it or discuss it before we have defined knowing; nor can we derive knowing in its fundamental structure from the body in any way whatsoever (:218; my italics).
Before the discovery of the contingent body exists pure consciousness (the pre-reflective cogito). The body appears later, as the 'known' - but how? By the look of the Other: 'the discovery of my body as an object is indeed a revelation of its being. But the being which is thus revealed to me is its being-for-others' (:305). This is what Sartre means when he says that the body is 'absolutely' not the for-itself. However, the body can not just be this; if it were, we should not be able to explain internal sensations such as pain. It must therefore also be what Sartre calls 'my body for-me' or the body 'as being-for-itself' (:309). This is the body as consciousness, not essentialised by the look of the Other. Sartre says that the body is lived 'non-reflectively', as a 'movement of internal self-nihilation', that 'consciousness exists its body' (:329). He goes on to argue that pain is not, therefore, a relation in which my body (a thing) hurts me (consciousness), but that pain is only 'pain-consciousness', constituted by consciousness. It follows that perceptions and feelings, as well as situation, are constituted through my project (:319).
1.4: Situatedness, Meaning and the Other.
The 'paradox of freedom' is that 'there is freedom only in a situation, and there is a situation only through freedom' (:489). The for-itself is responsible for constituting its inevitable situatedness, but this situatedness does not and cannot constitute the for-itself, unless one is in bad faith. Sartre argues, through his discussion of the climber confronting the crag, that the inert 'resistance' of nature is possible only because freedom has already 'integrated' it into its situation by, in this example, the climber's choosing to climb the crag. Even if the climber fails in his or her attempt, it does not mean that the crag somehow limits freedom; freedom does not depend on success. It is the climber's project which gives specific meaning to the crag (:488). The meaning of the contingent in-itself is always constituted by the free project of the for-itself:
For the simple traveller who passes over this road and whose free project is a pure aesthetic ordering of the landscape, the crag is not revealed either as scaleable or as not scaleable; it is manifested only as beautiful or ugly (ibid).
It might appear that Sartre believes that there is another type of situatedness whose meaning is not constituted by the for-itself. If so, the for-itself would not after all be the ultimate source of all essence. This is when the situation is 'neither objective nor subjective, so it can be considered neither as the free result of a freedom nor as the ensemble of the constraints to which I am subject' (:551). Such situations may be structured by others, and these others may give me an 'exteriority' which involves a 'loss of self' or alienation. There is in freedom 'a weakness' which 'causes everything it undertakes always to have one face which freedom will not have chosen, which escapes it and which for the Other will be pure existence' (:526). Our past also seems to compel us to act in certain ways; once we have chosen the meaning of the past in relation to the current project, it 'imposes itself upon us and devours us' (:503). These points suggest that our freedom is limited or conditioned by situation. However, to admit this would open the floodgates and undermine the whole Sartrean project - for how would the authentic human know when he was being devoured - determined - or not? Accordingly, Sartre writes that
my freedom by freely choosing itself chooses its limits; or, if you prefer, the free choice of my ends (i.e., of what I am for myself) includes the assumption of the limits of this choice, whatever they may be... I choose that my choice be limited by something other than itself ( 530, my emphasis).
So, even if I am alienated by the look of the Other (of which more below) this alienation has been freely chosen by me since I have constituted the meaning of the situation - even the slave in chains chooses his limits, 'as free as his master' because always 'a freedom in situation'. Furthermore, as outsiders we cannot know if the slave has less freedom than his master, since 'there is no absolute viewpoint where one could place oneself so as to compare different situations, each person realises only one situation - his own' (:550).
Despite appearances then, Sartre understands all situations as fundamentally individual, portraying humans as being 'islands (of radical subjectivity) unto themselves', each constituting all meaning around her or him. But, since I constitute the meaning of my situation, the other for-itself must, as another island of subjectivity, be perceived as a threat; the Other must necessarily invade my island, and I his. Here I am not confronting simply another in-itself:
'(T)he appearance among the objects of my universe of an element of disintegration in that universe is what I mean by the appearance of a man in my universe...(this) corresponds... to a decentralisation of the world which undermines the centralisation which I am simultaneously effecting' (:255).
The other threatens to reduce me to an object in his world, and my only defence (despite having chosen to be alienated!) is to do the same to him. Sartre describes the experience of being caught while looking through a keyhole, of how one experiences 'shame' which is, he argues, the awareness of having an outside, of finding myself to be an object of the Other's look (:222); I become 'Being-for-Others'. The Other attempts to 'steal' my being-in-situation from me in order to incorporate it into his or her own situation. Short of death however, my ontological freedom must remain intact (to allow the possibility of my falling into bad faith), for I am always free to choose my response, to try and objectify the Other, while never managing to destroy the Other's core-freedom. Thus, '(C)onflict is the original meaning of being-for-others' (364). Social reality is primarily conflictual, a war of all against all.
Sartre's conclusions are completely - elegantly - consistent with his basic dualistic premise: man is different: 'the being through whom nothingness comes into the world'. In effect, each human creates the meaning of the world from a position outside it. And if consciousness is primarily the 'individual upsurge' of nihilating freedom in the world, then multiple sources of meaning must collide. Hence, there is virtually no account of 'collective' or 'shared' meaning and experience in Being and Nothingness. I say 'virtually' because Sartre does suggest that there is a 'we-subject' which arises when subjects pursue common ends, and he writes that it seems that this 'overcomes the original conflict of transcendences' (:425). To admit this however, would again be to destroy the fundamental premises of his project. I shall return to this below.
2: Critique - The Problems of Dualism.
Men are born soft and supple; dead, they are stiff and hard.
Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible is a disciple of death. Tao Te-Ching, 76.
My intention now is to try to show how the main themes of Being and Nothingness are ultimately incoherent, and also how they relate to mainstream 'liberal thinking'._ I shall start with 'the look' and inter-human relations, moving onto the problem of the body and self-identity, attempting to show how the weaknesses and contradictions of Sartre's position resemble those of the liberal tradition as identified in recent feminist and communitarian criticism. If valid these criticisms not only point to the difficulties of adapting traditional individualistic approaches to cater for 'environmental' issues, but they also reinforce claims of mind-body dualism and the 'domination of nature' thesis so often heard in green literature and 'perennial wisdom'. In other words, they support the grand contention that dominant western thinking is fundamentally flawed - dualistic - and that the crisis around us is being - at least in part - created and worsened by leaving basic dualistic premises unchallenged. Such thinking manifests itself as 'subjectivism' and 'objectivism', and determines both the dominant ways in which we view the world and the way we treat it.
2.1: Looking into 'the Look' - Sartre and Social Relations.
The ordinary man keeps reaching for power; thus he never has enough. Tao Te-Ching, 38.
To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see. C.S. Lewis.
A recent documentary entitled 'Monkey in the Mirror' revealed how certain troops of semi-domesticated Japanese monkeys have expanded in numbers from their regular troop-size of 40 or so individuals to huge groups of a thousand or more._ Normally peaceable behaviour has been transformed; individuals no longer know each other on a face to face basis and are liable to be attacked without warning. When eating the behavioural differences were particularly pronounced; the monkeys gorge free grain as quickly as possible, before their 'rivals' get there; and, intriguingly, they adopt a novel defence strategy - they avoid all eye-contact assiduously. This, the programme speculated, was to minimise the chances of provocation and conflict. It would seem that 'if looks could kill' is no empty threat._
This links into my argument conveniently. As outlined earlier the look represents for Sartre the sole way in which one realises one's self or 'exteriority': 'my freedom is alienated in the presence of the Other's pure subjectivity which founds my objectivity. It can never be alienated before the Other-as-object' (:375)._ The ontological basis of social relations is a reciprocal 'ebb and flow' of objectification, as the possibility of 'being looked at' is a permanent one. Notice however the example of the monkeys: it is when their social relations become abnormal that hostility and conflict result. This abnormality does not deny that 'the look' is a common occurrence, and plays an important part in social relations, but it implies that it can become the norm under various pressures, in this case competition over food and space.
Consider our own 'mass' society: we too seem to have evolved devices for avoiding the power of 'the look'. Simmel (1969) comments that in modernity there has been a huge increase in our reliance on visual impressions due to the anonymity of large cities, whereas in small towns and local communities we knew (know) everybody personally and, crucially, this knowing was not based just on sight. In the small community we can easily talk to people, to hear and touch them, knowing them on an engaged level; our immediate circle could be the whole community. But in metropolis we become habituated to judging primarily by sight alone, and other sense impressions are diminished. Instead of genuine community, we find too often a 'lack of orientation in the collective life, the sense of utter loneliness, and the feeling that the individual is surrounded on all sides by closed doors' (Simmel 1969:358).
In this modern situation then, small wonder that Sartrean notions of objectification and isolation within ourselves appear so plausible. To protect ourselves against anonymous strangers we too seek to become anonymous, reading newspapers on the bus or train, wearing dark glasses in the shade, looking in shop windows as the Other approaches. Perhaps we put on facial masks such as beards, long fringes, or wear distracting jewellery, attempting to protect subjectivity. This seems to tie in with Sartre's frightening claim that 'it is never when eyes are looking at you that you find them beautiful or ugly, that you remark on their colour,' because 'the Other's look hides his eyes; he seems to go in front of them' (:258). Sartre seems aware only of how looks can separate, ignoring the fact that we can actually look into each other's eyes and feel part of the Other, in the personal relation. But for Sartre, looks only go one way: outwards from the centre. All 'looks' must be 'piercing'; otherwise one exposes one's privacy or subjectivity to the Other.
For Simmel, by contrast, there is bi-directionality, and therefore the possibility of union:
By the glance that reveals the other one discloses himself. By the same act in which the observer seeks to know the observed, he surrenders himself to be understood by the observed' (Simmel 1969, 359).
Simmel believes that 'the union and interaction of individuals is based upon mutual glances' and that looking into (as opposed to at) somebody's eyes is 'perhaps the most direct and purest reciprocity which exists anywhere...' (ibid:356). I would add: The mutual glance contains no judgement. It is spontaneous, immediated, and non-cognitive, it is of the whole body, not cold intellect alone, and it is thus based on emotion. It is a look of trust, and it represents the normal mode of human sociality, that of the personal relation, as I will argue in section 3. One sees the Other without the intermediary of a mental concept representing him, keeping the relation at a safe distance.
Compared to Simmel's glance, the Sartrean look seems Orwellian. In 1984, a fundamental theme is that of the continuous surveillance or super-vision in which people are constantly watched by 'telescreens', a mechanism allowing one-way viewing only. Winston Smith always feels afraid: constantly monitored and objectified, always self-aware. Even outside he cannot escape, hunted and haunted by the huge, omnipresent posters of the great leader reading 'Big Brother is Watching You', by the piercing eyes that 'follow you everywhere'. Winston's freedom is indeed threatened; the look destroys his freedom by making him aware, by forcing him into self-consciousness, unable to lead normal pursuits in an un-selfconscious way. He is imprisoned in subjectivity, just like Sartre. Only with Julia in the woodland clearing or in the bedroom above the old shop does Winston ever feel free enough to relax, to become a whole self once again. For only then does he believe himself to be away from 'super-vision'.
In short, there can be little doubt of the implications of Orwell's portrayal - hyper-consciousness or endless subjectivity is not normal: it is hell on earth.
* * *
Sartre famously wrote that 'Hell is other people'. Indeed it ultimately is, for one locked into the illusion of the primacy of consciousness. For hell is full of hate and suffering, and my claim is that subjectivism, the dualism of consciousness and world, in the end, must lead to it. Sartre simply followed through the logic of mind-body/world dualism more completely than anyone else.
In the section dealing with 'Being-for-Others' there is a subsection discussing 'Indifference, Desire, Hate, Sadism (:379-413). Here Sartre's analysis of 'the look' reaches its fruition. The sado-masochistic relationship is presented as the incarnation par excellence of Sartrean ontology, the logical result of the objectifying look. The sadist attempts to turn his_ victim into an instrument, the in-itself, or - simply - the object. Similarly, the subject (as sadist) 'has reapprehended his body... He experiences himself in the face of the Other as pure transcendence' (:399).
However, Sartre finds no escape from incoherent duality here. In order to treat the Other as object, she must first be recognised as subject, as requiring objectification. And this re-cognition implies my masochism, since the Other's subjectivity now transcends me. Needless to say, this also ends in failure: back I rebound, unable to be object because it is through my own transcendence that I choose to be transcended. I am alone in the world: my 'objectness' slips away, as the effort to objectify myself 'is accompanied by the exhausting and delicious consciousness of failure' (:379). Realising my 'indestructible subjectivity', I must 'head back' towards sadism (it is not clear how many nano-seconds this pleasure lasts however, before I am again masochist)._
This eternal oscillation between 'subjectivity' and 'objectivity' is the root cause of existential hate. Hate 'implies a fundamental resignation: the for-itself abandons its claim to realise any union with the Other; it gives up using the Other as an instrument to recover its own being-in-itself' (:410). And so we desire - uselessly - a world in which our freedom rules supreme, free of the look. Sartre, always loyal to his belief in the primacy of the conscious subject, does not flinch from logical conclusion: I must also desire the death of all Others ('The Other I hate actually represents all Others'), since their looks eternally threaten me with annihilation. 'The one who hates projects no longer being an object; hate presents itself as an absolute positing of the freedom of the for-itself before the Other' (:410-11). However, even hate must ultimately disappoint - and expose the paradoxicality of dualism. For in order to hate, I must implicitly recognise that Others do exist - I cannot escape the Other and her meaning from outside my private uni-verse. No wonder that 'hell is other people'. For the subjectivist.
It seems almost unnecessary to add that love must be impossible for, since '(T)he lover's freedom, in his very effort to make himself loved as an object by the Other, is alienated... it is brought into existence with a dimension of flight toward the Other... the Other holds the key to its being (:375). For Sartre, love means dependency, not transcendence. It destroys freedom and the primacy of the isolated for-itself; it thereby blocks transcendence, is a tie to the world, and must be denied.
It might be objected in Sartre's defence that he does have an account of common experience, that we are not just condemned to ontological isolation and hatred. As already mentioned, he does discuss the 'we-subject' and also the 'us-object'. However, this is in order to destroy any last vestiges of human communality from his account, to protect his premises.
To explain: the 'us-object' is merely the 'community' formed under the objectifying look of a third party who seeks to incorporate 'us' into his own world. Such unity is temporary and secondary, for we will look back! As for the 'we-subject' - this in no way corresponds to 'a real unification of the for-itselfs under consideration'. Instead, 'the experience of the we-subject is a pure psychological subjective event in a single consciousness' (:425, my emphasis). It is a 'fleeting' experience, arising from 'the fact that I am engaged with others in a common rhythm which I contribute to creating'. In other words, each for-itself continues to constitute his or her own individual situation - radical, individual subjectivity remains dominant, and atomised. Sartre states that 'the subjectivities remain out of reach and radically separated... I apprehend through the world that I form a part of "we"' (:424-25). He finishes this section by reiterating that 'The essence of the relations between consciousnesses is not the mitsein. It is conflict' (:429)._ Community or identity not resulting from conscious choice is thereby rejected._
This account shows the proximity of Sartre to the liberal tradition: Hobbes comes to mind. First, Sartre's social world appears profoundly Hobbesian in that it is both fundamentally conflictual and also random, unstructured and anarchic. Second, out of Hobbes' state of nature, society only arises through selfish, conscious agreements among men, who install a leader to control the human atoms of 'society'._ This second view recurs throughout liberalism, from Locke, Bentham and Mill, and on to Rawls (in later liberal thought, conflict is glossed over as universal 'self-interestedness'). Like these theorists, even the later Sartre, through his 'logical' privileging of the constituting individual over constituted society, has a problem understanding the genesis of society or indeed of any interrelations:
It is not history that causes there to be human relationships in general. It is not the problems of the organisation and division of labour that have caused relationships to be set up among those initially separate objects, men (1976 [1960]): 179, italics added).
Like other liberals sharing the ontological presuppositions of an atomistic world and the primacy of consciousness Sartre can only explain communal identity and common cause through (rational) choice theory, or dismissively, as in Being and Nothingness.
* * *
I obviously refuse this nightmare vision. I propose that Sartre has, by presenting interrelations as necessarily and uniquely conflictual, mistaken (and promoted) the lesser half of the story for reality. The 'look' is ontologised and conflict portrayed as the basic truth of the world, instead of being perceived as one possible mode of interrelating which may become dominant, as the result of social tension, crisis and so on, as it would appear to have done in the case in the monkeys - and in modernity. In a social context in which we find ourselves ever more dominated by the visual sense and/or (as I shall shortly argue) the contemplative, theoretical standpoint of the isolated intellectualist view of the world, is it not likely that, as the analysis of the look most clearly suggests, Sartre should be best understood as documenting modern life under the guise of providing us with a universal understanding of the human condition? If so it is superb evidence that subjectivism, just like objectivism, seeks to universalise itself._
The power of Being and Nothingness is that it describes so chillingly and accurately how life is becoming. But it doesn't have to be that way. One is always free to reject dualism, and abandon the philosophy of consciousness._ But to do this, to abandon one's fundamental beliefs or presuppositions about the world and oneself, one must sacrifice a part of one's very identity, so carefully nurtured over time, centuries even, at the cultural level. I shall say more about value, belief and identity later. Before that, I want to show how the Sartrean approach to the body is basically Cartesian, and thus also on a par with liberal notions of self.
2.2: The Problem of Embodiment and the Sartrean Self.
If you treat the world like an object, you'll lose it. Tao Te-Ching, 29.
They are not men at all: they are artefacts. C.S. Lewis.
Conflict begins within the western individual; dualism means that struggle between self and other occurs primarily between the for-itself and its body. How is this so? As described earlier, Sartre posits two aspects of the body: my 'body-for-me' or for-itself and 'my body-for-others'. By insisting that these are on 'different and incommunicable levels of being' (:305, my emphasis) he recreates dualistic paradox. The problem is that (with the body as 'for-itself') what Sartre has done is to reduce the body to non-reflective consciousness, to the 'pre-reflective cogito'; this changes as soon as I have any reflective relation to my body. As an item of knowledge, a representation, my body has an essence: when I thematise the body, it ceases 'being for-me'.
To exemplify the paradox: if I were to be injured, I could not focus on treating the injury without objectifying myself, I would have to become a body-for-the-other - without the other being there. But then I am no longer body-for-me. I cannot be both levels simultaneously, since these are 'incommunicable' - to admit that it was possible would be to deny dualism: there would be unity between consciousness and body. As this is impossible, Sartre must face an unavoidable either/or situation. Either 'I am my injury' or 'my injury is an object for the Other', and thus exists for me too as an object (again, eternal oscillation pure subjectivity and pure objectivity is my fate). But this paradox is an illusion because the two 'incommunicable levels' belong to one physical entity - the embodied human being. Or as Levinas puts it 'the I always has one foot caught in its own existence' it is 'riveted to its own being' (Levinas 1978: 84). Zaner (1971: 122) comments that
To say that the 'dimensions' of the body are radically, ontologically separate, is to lose the body as the unitary embodiment of consciousness (that which is 'besouled' by consciousness). To say that the being of the pour-soi is not connected to the being of the body of consciousness, is to raise the insuperable Cartesian problem of how the one being can ever be united with the other being.
Simone de Beauvoir clearly exhibited the tensions of Sartrean dualism in The Second Sex. In this work, a woman's relation to her body fits neither the category of 'body-for-itself' nor 'for-others': a woman experiences her lived body as having an objectivity which is not the result of being-looked-at. de Beauvoir (1972: 61) writes that woman 'encounters' her body as 'an obscure alien thing' whose biological processes intrude upon her 'transcendent freedom', dragging her back into 'a merely natural existence'. LLoyd (1992) points out that what Beauvoir is doing is portraying woman's body as nature, describing an 'objectivity' that the body has irrespective of interpersonal or social experiences. It cannot have the non-reflective quality of Sartre's body-for-itself, and so woman is the second sex. But that the body is nature applies to men too; while it may be that this fact is felt less profoundly by men (particularly free-floating, middle-class intellectuals), it seems impossible to deny that human life entails both materiality and consciousness, freedom and necessity. Against this, (Sartrean) dualism refuses earthly constraints.
If consciousness is somehow prior to both body and world, then the main task of Being and Nothingness, resolving dualism by attempting to situate the for-itself in existence, is impossible: Descartes and Heidegger are irreconcilable. The result is the reinforcement, not the challenging of the hierarchical mind-body relation. Sartre thereby further entrenches subjectivism and the domination of the body ('nature').
* * *
It is difficult to see how Sartre's position differs from traditional liberal notions of possession of the body. For example, the insistence that the conditions of selfhood require one to determine oneself over and against the world sounds much like J.S. Mill, who wrote that 'he who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation'. Moreover, Mill understood the self as somehow detached from the embodied individual: 'In the part which merely concerns himself his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign'._ This mysterious individual, somehow existing beyond body and mind, still manages to control them and thus determine their meaning. I propose that this is very much like the pre-reflective cogito.
Sartre's 'hole in being' is essentially different from the in-itself, because free of all exterior determination. To be free in this sense means that it is both disembodied and prior to contamination by external context. If self-identity - as nothingness - is essentially given before its relations with others then I fail to see how the 'for-itself' differs from traditional liberal notions of self (humans as rational beings) apart from - apparently - its ability to 'spontaneously choose'. But: this ability is the same as that of a pure rationality, in the sense that empirical factors - and I mean embodied values, tastes and beliefs, specific to each individual - are supposed not to determine 'pure' decisions or choices, for the human essence is ideally above all that. Sartre simply follows the liberal ideal of 'impartiality' or 'neutrality' through to its logical conclusion. Nothing can determine nihilating nothingness, which is not of this world.
It is precisely this type of purity of self which has attracted so much recent criticism from communitarians and feminists. Rosalyn Diprose (1994:ch.1) for example makes a very convincing case to show how liberal notions of ethics as contractual presuppose the non-social (non-human) self, and thus cannot account for sexual difference. This is particularly evident in the case of pregnant women, where the identity of self and other is uncertain. One feature of Diprose's argument allows me to draw out a 'characteristic' of what I shall now call the non-social self._
The idea of a free and equal ethical contract between individuals (deriving from Locke) assumes two things; first, the non-social 'individual', sovereign over body and mind, and second, that 'the agent should or does remain the same over time even if the body changes'. Locke located and understood the essential personal identity in and as the continuity of the same consciousness throughout any corporeal changes, arguing that an entity is 'identical with itself' if it has the same origin in time and space. Diprose claims that this principle of individuation is what underpins the idea of the liberal self. The liberal can thus believe that a contract with another establishes a social relationship without affecting the respective identities of those involved._ The point is that Sartre's pre-reflective consciousness, like the Lockean self, must also be continuous through time and corporeal change in its capabilities (i.e. spontaneous choice/nihilation)._ The core of Sartrean consciousness is a constant essence, the 'hole' is a permanent one. It is only 'nothing' in the sense of existing outside of material being. The human self must therefore be ahistorical and acultural, and cannot ever be situated or located because alien._
Thinking of the liberal self as 'unencumbered' reinforces this claim that Sartre is a liberal. Very crudely, liberal theorists argue that to avoid the possibility of a totalitarian state imposing its notions of 'the good' onto individuals, it is necessary to give precedence to notions of justice. What is 'right' must 'trump' what is 'good', therefore the state must be neutral or have a commitment to no commitment, except liberalism, since if it did not, domination threatens. Liberals believe that each unique l, having her or his 'private' 'good' (uniquely selfish) is likely to seek to impose it on others. Thus the basis of the right must precede all empirical ends, or we will not be truly 'free'. This basis (and the argument derives from Kant, as interpreted by Sandel 1982 and 1992) is found within the subject, whose autonomous will alone 'elevates man above himself as part of the world of sense' and 'enables him to participate in an ideal, unconditional realm wholly independent of our social and psychological inclinations' (Sandel 1992:16, emphasis added). Only then are we sufficiently unencumbered to freely choose for ourselves. Of course, 'unencumbered' implies undetermined: or, freedom from nature (and from our natural, empirical selves, since we are nature, not transcendence)._
Sandel goes on to point out the (liberal) self must always distinguish between the person he is and the values he has; this means that the is - being - is before the valuing, the ought (as traditionally understood)._ In other words, how we value and feel in our lives, our beliefs and aims, can not, on this interpretation, be constitutive of our identity or character: all these must be freely chosen by some prior, non-empirical - and therefore impersonal - part of our nature, something not determined by values. Something like the pre-reflective cogito in fact.
As 'emptiness', the pre-reflective cogito can have no determinate value - because it is value itself. It is thus the measure of all other values, which are necessarily relocated 'out there'._ In this way we become value-free, detached, contemplative non-participants, for all liberals, Rawlsians and Sartreans alike (and beyond)._ We are no longer feeling, valuing entities whose 'threads of being are interwoven with the world' (to borrow one of Merleau-Ponty's evocative metaphors) but evaluating subjects who consciously calculate from a position of supposed neutrality. All value flows outwards: we choose or create the values of a world from a position outside value;_ in this way possession is possible. But I digress. To briefly return to Sandel: he goes on to point out that the non-social conception of the self means that we are in fact essentially characterless; 'For to have character is to know that I move in a history I neither summon nor command' (ibid). This question of characterlessness is one which I wish to address in the next section.
2.3: The Universal Individual.
Stop thinking, and end your problems. Tao Te-Ching, 20.
Freedom as 'nothingness' must destroy character and individuality. Sartrean freedom feeds on the contingency of the empirical, and must logically seek to remove the individual from all history, cultural context, and emotional bonds, in order to create 'authenticity' out of 'inauthenticity'. But if it succeeds and we become truly in 'good faith', what essential identity is left? My meaning is nothingness - nihilation - and let me stress again that Sartre has objectified us all with this dogma - in order to recreate all meanings of what I am._ Which clearly leaves the mother of all meanings firmly operative.
Liberalism in general presupposes the tacit communal and emotional bonds of society; like Sartrean freedom, it is parasitic on them. For it is only against a background of communal interconnectedness that 'social contracts' can be made. If every decision were subject to the principle of the individual's acceptance, itself subject to continual renewed questioning, then no decision could be binding and all bonds of loyalty disappear. Instead of ensuring the liberation of the individual, the conditions of freedom are lost: worse, moral autonomy is sacrificed to enforced, legislated universal moral codes._ It follows from this that 'individuals' without contingency, without history, culture or bonds can not be thought of as 'individual' at all, for what is left to distinguish them except a number? Are they not universal individuals? Sartre's best intentions are destroyed by his metaphysical presuppositions, and at the risk of becoming tedious I wish to demonstrate how this may be so.
If I use the term 'car' with the definite article, then I am employing it as a general term: 'the car' refers to the abstract notion, the modern invention. If I say 'my car' or 'your car' then of course I qualify the noun in to refer to an individual example. But as a class concept, 'the car' subsumes all particulars under it, leaching out the common 'essence' of those particulars. Of course, such a usage is unavoidable; without such categories and concepts it would be impossible to think theoretically. A similar state of affairs concerns the term 'self'. 'The self' is a general term under which are subsumed all particular instances of it: your self, my self and so on. It is thus used to generalise about particularities. 'The Self' as a theoretical concept is the name of that which we all possess in common. As a class concept the term only works if we think of all its members in terms of their identicality._
Traditionally the universal essence of the human being has been thought of as 'the rational self'._ Such commonality conveniently means predictability. This is because if we behave in accordance with our common essence - i.e.. think logically and rationally - then it follows that in the same circumstances we will - or should - all act or respond in the same way. Convenient, because as predictable, humans are amenable to management. However, predictability can only 'surface' if all empirical differences between real individuals are obscured and ignored, devalued as contingent, relative to our essential nature. We are thus stripped clean of all individuality, reduced to units for the purposes of calculation._ Then we are able to rise above contingency and the failings of this horrible earthly existence, to the realm of the pure intellect in which we can all pursue genuine reflective inquiry. In this realm each of us finally partakes of the 'universal mind' and will therefore reach common, identical conclusions. In this fantasy, the only difference between individuals is thus quantitative, not qualitative. To be individual means to have a number, as Winston Smith knew only to well.
The 'for-itself', as a general term, performs the same totalising function as the traditional usage, ascribing a universal essence to the human against which the empirical is devalued._ The obvious next question then is: must we use such totalising terminology? Must we think only from the theoretical standpoint, which seeks to master being through the manipulation of universal representations and categories? That is, can philosophy begin at a point prior to the birth of subjectivity, prior to the illusion that all meaning must stem from the conscious ego? Can it truly escape the idea that thinking must begin with knowing? The 'philosophy of consciousness' privileges the power of calculating, 'objective' thought, thus devaluing the practical knowledge of the whole human being, of which it is necessarily derivative. Subjectivism creates its objects. It thereby forgets its origins on the earth, and leads to fear, hate and totalitarianism. That it can be avoided will be discussed, affirmatively, in section 3. Before beginning this reconstruction, I want to look at the vacuity of the idea of 'free choice' and the issue of nihilism.
2.4: Choice, Belief, and the Non-sense of Nihilism.
When you realise there is nothing lacking,
the whole world belongs to you. Tao Te-Ching, 44.
Since freedom is completely unconditioned it follows that all choice can have no explanation. Sartre necessarily resists explanation because it would show how humans are determined by situation; dualism would be threatened. And one can sympathise with this fear; objectivism and structuralist theories of historical change do seem to destroy the autonomy and worth of the individual, leaving no room for the self-determination of the 'subject'. The problem is that Sartre takes such a radically defensive stand on individual freedom that the idea of choice becomes meaningless. And in trying to avoid 1984, he reproduces it via subjectivism.
To explain the problem of choice: firstly, since 'authentic selfhood' means that we are not free not to choose, the notion of passivity has no positive place. It would appear that for the authentic hero there can be no sitting back and waiting, no letting others make the decisions. Passivity must be something subhuman, in-itself. Thus we must be forever active, forever freely choosing and reaffirming our commitments. But if so, then choice as essential condition must be continuously present; it follows that both this term and its opposite, not-choosing, appear to lose all coherence. Standish (1992:140) argues that action and choice can only be understood against a background of inaction and not-choosing, pointing out that these are just as much part of normal human behaviour.
Secondly, if all choice is indeed free of any justification, the concept does indeed become 'absurd'. Sartre's premises force him into arguing that all choice must be made in a vacuum and be unfounded (:479)._ Moreover, since 'good faith' would seem to entail that choices (random?) must also be continuous, it is difficult in the extreme to understand how they could be strung together in projects._ Further problems arise with the question of belief. Are we really free to choose our values and beliefs?_ I want to develop this by considering Pascal's wager.
Pascal argued that someone who gambles on the existence of God is making a safe bet since they are staking something finite for something infinite. It is therefore clear that belief in God is the only rational course of action (provided of course one believes sufficiently in reason). The problem is that one cannot found belief on a rational decision without making reason 'collaborate' in its own annihilation in belief. That is, in order to move from the reasoned decision to believe, to 'a durable belief that can withstand the intermittences of consciousness and will' (Bourdieu, 1990:48), one has to depend on powers other than those of reason. As Pascal wrote:
Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton, which leads the mind unconsciously along with it. Who ever proved that it will dawn tomorrow, and that we shall die? (in Bourdieu, ibid)._
Despite this view on belief, Bourdieu notes, Pascal errs by continuing his argument as if will and consciousness were the basis or origin of the disposition to believe, that a conscious decision to believe founds belief. Thus he is
carried away by the infinite regression of the decision to decide; by making belief the product of a free but self-destructive decision to free himself from freedom, he falls into the antimony of voluntary arbitrary belief' (ibid:49, emphasis added).
This error leads subjectivism into similar difficulty. Since Sartre refuses to recognise any kind of habit or 'durable disposition' which might mean the determination of probable outcomes, he makes each human action or choice a kind of 'antecedent-less confrontation between subject and world' (ibid, 42)._
With regard to the problem of choosing a belief or value, consider the following scenario: suppose that, despite the problem of the inexplicability of choice (that is, assume that 'voluntary arbitrary choice' has meaning) someone freely chooses to believe that 'nature has intrinsic value'. The difficulty is that she or he could not both believe in the intrinsic value of nature and believe that this belief is the result of a decision to believe in nature. By definition a successful decision to believe in nature must also obliterate itself from the memory of the believer._ Belief as self-founded, as a conscious choice can have no stability or duration. It is a self-contradictory idea; belief does not 'appear' ex nihilo. By extension it can I think be seen how any type of 'successful' choice a Sartrean might make would have to nihilate all memory of preceding choices in order to be free of any taint of conditioning.
Over and above this problem, there is no logical way of deciding on a project that can be thought of as somehow 'good' or 'bad'; what makes it 'good' is that nothing determines it: there can be no meanings outside the subject-as-God, no objective reasons for anything, no exterior meaning to life which could define our projects for us, since we hold no values. One wonders if Sartre had a typewriter and eternity at his disposal, to produce such a position. I understand it as a type of nihilism. This leads me into my main claim: the dualistic premises of Being and Nothingness must lead to nihilism, and these premises are shared by the dominant intellectual tradition of the west. Further: the logic of dualism must seek to dominate and finally destroy 'nature' - and thus life itself. It is from dualism that our environmental crisis largely stems.
These are obviously huge claims; but they are not ones I can ignore. One must fire one's best shot; I must grasp and pin down what it is that has bothered me for so many years. I shall take a broad definition of nihilism, but it is nonetheless the nihilism I believe to be inherent in Sartre's thought (this is obviously a complex area and I can only hope to pick out principle themes, rather than provide a conclusive case). So, taking the terms 'nihilist' and 'nihilism' in their popular senses to mean those who appear to hold no values, expressing views such as 'the ultimate meaninglessness of life', the 'absence of objective value', consider the following question, asked of a 'would-be' nihilist (or sympathiser of nihilism):
Does Nihilism exist?
If the answer is 'yes', the speaker believes in the existence of something called nihilism, be it a doctrine, idea or whatever. However, if he then says that he subscribes to nihilism - 'I believe in nihilism', or 'I am a nihilist' he contradicts himself: he believes something that says all belief is false. To say 'I am' is to give objective existence to oneself, to give oneself being. In Sartre's terms, the would-be nihilist must be in bad faith, for he denies his freedom: by believing a dogma which must be false he has being, not nothingness. Yet he also believes that there can be no objective meaning outside himself (by the same token, this suggests that the moment we 'freely choose' to be-come anything, we must also become inauthentic, rendering the whole sad story incoherent anyway).
Having argued thus, now suppose that someone holding nihilist views (I will avoid saying 'a nihilist') accuses an environmentalist of being in bad faith, since the latter claims that 'nature is sacred' (and thus claims objective meaning to his life). The accuser does not provide reasons or proof as to why the environmentalist's belief is false (he does not show that nature isn't sacred) - nevertheless, he is certain, and has passed judgement. Here, the accuser is clearly in bad faith himself: his accusation has been determined by his belief in the falseness of the Other's belief, not by logic or reason. Now it is simply one faith against another, and if he wants to avoid being called a hypocrite, the accuser must retract.
Nihilism understood in this way must be absolutist: it must be the original bad faith, since it is the only belief that claims that 'all beliefs are false', except itself. Nietzsche calls this 'radical nihilism': 'the conviction of an absolute untenability of existence when it comes to the highest values one recognises'. It is when 'all that one has left are the values that pass judgement - nothing else' (1968:2, 37). C.S. Lewis was even less forgiving: 'When all that says 'It is good' has been debunked, what says 'I want' remains... (such people) will envy us as eunuchs envy men' (1947:78-9). It is precisely this type of nihilism that is implicit in Being and Nothingness: Sartre accuses everyone not accepting their essence of absolute freedom to be in bad faith, but excludes his own values. Furthermore: such a position is a microcosm of the dominant western view of the world, as I shall shortly argue.
* * *
Of course, the reply to the question of the existence of nihilism may be 'no', on the grounds that it is incoherent; if so, then no accusations of bad faith against greens or anybody else with a cause not provably false are possible. The respondent accepts that beliefs may be 'true', and perhaps ought to worry a little more about whether the way he lives his own life is responsible or not, rather than how others live their lives. This would be in line with other existential ideas about authenticity pertaining to one's own life, rather that to the lives of others (Judge not lest...).
Probably the most probable response (if the person concerned knows something about the philosophical minefield of nihilism) is to refuse to engage with the question. He may say that nihilism is 'a state of mind' or 'yes, but there's no such thing as a true nihilist' (and I am certainly not denying that one may feel nihilistic)._ These responses are unproblematic inasmuch as they deny absolutist nihilism, but the respondent still has to admit that unsubstantiated accusations of bad faith are now no longer possible.
The strongest possible position for the would-be nihilist might be to say 'Tell me your belief and I will show you that it is false'. The speaker here is apparently not committed to any position. But this is radical scepticism, not nihilism. Again, the speaker has being, is still a sceptic, still committed to scepticism, and so must provide reasons for why the believer is mistaken, in order to accuse him of bad faith. The sceptic still believes - in the power of logical argument and reasoning to prove falsity.
Perhaps the nihilist sympathiser can parry the question by saying that 'it's not that I believe in nihilism, it is that I believe nothing.' But this amounts to saying that 'I believe everything is false', which is the same as 'I believe every belief is false', or 'I have a belief: every belief is false - except this one'. This person wants to say that he has no beliefs at all, and still be a living human. To do this he must explain how it is possible to have no beliefs at all. But I fail to see how this is possible.
The mistake that the would-be nihilist makes is to conflate non-certainty and radical nihilism. The nihilism outlined here is absolutist, and by claiming that all beliefs are false renders itself incoherent. Uncertainty, on the other hand is agnosticism, the state of not knowing. The agnostic believes he can never know for sure; belief is a personal affair. However, it is still a question of belief, of not knowing: as a non-knower, I believe that I do not know any absolute truths, but others might (notice here the priority of belief over knowledge). Far be it for me to judge anyone without reason. The position of agnosticism breeds tolerance, unlike nihilism.
Some of the confusion may be traced to a simple mistake in logic. It may be thought that the opposite of 'I believe in God' is 'I don't believe in God'. But they are only opposite in a grammatical sense. 'I don't believe in God' means 'I believe that God doesn't exist', not that I have no belief. Even the agnostic 'I don't know if God exists' means that 'I believe I don't know'. In all cases, escape from a state of belief appears impossible. In fact, the only way to understand the opposite of the state of believing appears to be in terms of a state of death, or perhaps coma. This suggests a somewhat flippant solution to the old existential nightmare: the meaning of life is to believe, without guarantee of certainty. It is the primacy given to knowledge (because believed certain) which ultimately leads to despair.
Now, recall that for Sartrean nihilists, there are two types of people in the world; the inauthentic sheep, those with external meaning, and the heroes, who have their measure._ These heroes are 'value-free', because they are value. That is, all 'value' steams outwards, never inwards. Sartrean heroes, claiming to be 'nothingness' and to hold no values, are both the source and judge of all value, and therefore of all other value: this makes them truly beyond the mere human. For 'belief-free' or 'value-free' mean, as we have just seen, non-being; but humans do have being, and to be human is to believe. To want no belief is to want to give up existence. In other words, 'value-free' is an impossible state for a living human, since the implicit end-meaning of such a term is death. And - to make the crucial connection between Sartre and the wider tradition - other privileged terms, synonyms for 'value-free', are central to western thought: for example, 'neutrality' or 'objectivity'. When taken to their logical end these terms also demand the absence of belief and therefore of life.
And so, on to global-domination. From the perspective of 'the nihilist/westerner/Sartrean hero' (all the same beast, and clearly not 'value-free') 'liberating the sheep' may become irresistible; a new religious vocation even. Since we are value or God, we should try to heal the wrongs of the world (science and 'progress' are good tools for this). Since we have the measure of all other beliefs we feel rather superior, and, mysteriously, obliged to inform the deluded masses of their enslavement (the Other's plight matters)._ What a burden of guilt to perceive such ignorance and delusion, much of it no doubt superstitious. We may seek to inform Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, indigenous peoples, goddess-worshippers, greens, anyone cursed with a cause, that they are sadly deluded, for there can be no causes - except value-freedom (by the same token, non-western/non-objective/non-value-free discourse is devalued precisely because it does not purport to be value-free). Moreover, false faith can only cause sheep to have a conscience, thus limiting and denying their freedom. This must be avoided, for then an individual may feel responsible for the Other rather than for his own value-freedom.
Sartrean/western nihilism is ultimately the escape from all interdependency and thus responsibility: it is the desire to be free of all earthly concerns. It is implicitly endemic wherever there is commitment to value-freedom and 'objectivity'. This nihilism is a kind of modernist inverted religion, an extreme doubting of everything. But while this 'suspicion breeds confidence',_ it is not applied reflectively. It is this (ironically unreflective) frame of mind that fuels western imperialism and domination of others, inert 'nature' per se. The 'hole in being', the 'unencumbered self', 'nothingness': these terms express the metaphysical belief that there is something essentially non-empirical about humans, that they are free while the rest of nature is not: this difference is not seen as one of inferiority. Because of its commitment to value-freedom, because of its refusal to acknowledge itself as another belief system, western thought is thus the original 'Bad Faith'. Western man recognises himself only as subject, and as such refuses to realise that he is also determined object in the world, subject to values, beliefs and nature, just as all humans always have been.
All this helps explain the empty disdain of so much western intellectualism for those 'trapped' in belief and meaning; and the presumed superiority of the detached intellectual, apart from worldly concerns or getting his hands dirty, contemplating the naked objects of the world laid out before her or him, ready to be cloaked in meaning. Intellectualism,_ on this account, is simply on an earlier part of the trail to nihilism. These consequences flow from dualism, from the privileging of thematic thought over and above other, prior understandings. But - and this is the next stage of my argument - such privileging is not inevitable.
(Physician, heal thyself).
3: Reconstruction - Dwelling on Earth.
The Master is her own physician, she has healed herself of all knowledge.
Thus she is truly whole. Tao Te-Ching, 71.
3.1: Beyond Subjectivism.
Naming is the origin of all particular things. Tao Te-Ching, 1.
The thing is conceived only in the form of the object of contemplation, but not as human activity, practice. Karl Marx.
In Being and Time Heidegger aims to reveal the metaphysical presuppositions of the intellectualist-subjectivistic tradition, and to undermine the western subject-object dichotomy in order to renew what he saw as the central question, that of the question of being. Philosophy has traditionally concerned itself with understanding knowing, the knowledge of beings, not being (Dreyfus 1991: introduction). Heidegger sought to bring the (Husserlian) transcendental ego down to earth, arguing that people do solve the 'problem of understanding' in their everyday lives, although their solutions may not match those philosophical ideals of purity and precision. But, I suggest, too bad for the philosophers. If Husserlian absolute truth and true understanding can only be found in an imaginary, prejudice-free transcendental realm somehow sterilised of its earthly infections, then goodbye absolute truth and full understanding. The attraction of Heidegger, for me, is that he investigates the worldly existence of dasein, prior to and uncontaminated by false philosophy, rather than a consciousness mysteriously 'purified' of worldly existence by intellectualist legislators. In my book, he is primarily a physician.
This is all very well, but how -and where - does he do it? Explaining 'where' is easy: in the famous phenomenological description of the craftsman hammering in his workshop in Section 15 of Being and Time. Near the beginning of this Heidegger states that 'the kind of dealing which is closest to us is... not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of 'knowledge'' (1961:95, my emphasis). It is this 'knowing' which undermines the primacy of thematic consciousness. He calls it zuhandenheit or 'readiness-to-hand', to be distinguished from vorhandenheit - 'presence-to-hand'. The vital point is that 'presence-to-hand' presupposes or is derivative from 'readiness-to-hand'. To use more familiar terms: theoretical or representational knowledge and thought presupposes and depends on the lived background of practical knowledge, which of course is necessarily embodied._
But what is this 'practical knowing'? To give an example: you can drive thirty miles, talking all the time to a friend. What you noticed, and remembered, was the conversation, but somehow you responded to the road, the other cars, the traffic lights, all without focusing your mental 'spotlight' upon them. In our everyday dealings with the world we are for the most part not thematising as objects of consciousness lots of discrete, atomised 'things', nor do we even have dealings with things, for 'In addressing these entities as 'Things' (res) we have tacitly anticipated their ontological character' and 'one goes ontologically astray' (ibid:96).
Or consider a different case: when fishing, one focuses intently on the float, particularly after a 'twitch', wondering and hoping if it will go under. But all the time you are aware of and perceiving not just the float, but the whole lake and much else besides. However, these are not the conscious objects of thematic thought in the way that thoughts about the float and what will happen next are. When we give objective attention to things like floats we 'ignore' (not know thematically) everything else. Such attention may be thought of as narrowed perception, a way of looking at life bit by bit. When we do this, memory is important because it strings the bits together, like examining a dark room with a small, narrow-beamed torch.
Imagine what it would be like to have to continually concentrate on fifty or so floats simultaneously, or feel that all the faces in the crowd were reporting your every move to the Ministry of Love. Alternatively, imagine sitting by the lake gazing out over the water, thinking about nihilism, when suddenly the float twitches, and nihilism vanishes from representational thought, as new thoughts - such as what type of fish did that? - become the primary focus or our mental attention. Meanwhile your bodily intentionality prepares you to strike.
The problematic result or illusion caused by this thinking 'bit by bit', in terms of objects, is that such a 'scanning process' soon persuades its user that the world is a great collection of bits, and these bits are called 'things' or 'events'._ But 'things' are actually the discrete products of representational thought, derivative from that primordial realm of the pre-ontological, in which Heidegger is interested. For every float, there is also a lake. To escape this difficulty of referring to 'things', and to refer to our knowledge of the world prior to the atomising effects of theoretical consciousness, he introduces the uncountable noun 'equipmentality'.
Equipmentality allows us to conceive of an holistic meaning of the world, of which humans are intrinsically part:
Equipment... always is in terms of belonging to other equipment: ink-stand, pen, ink, paper, blotting pad, table, lamp, furniture, windows, doors, room. These 'Things' never... add up to a sum of realia and fill up a room. What we encounter as closest to us (though not as something taken as a theme) is the room... Out of this the 'arrangement' emerges, and it is in this that any 'individual' item of equipment shows itself. Before it does so, a totality of equipment has already been discovered (BT 97-8, my italics).
The 'discovery' of the totality depends on 'practical knowledge', not thematic consciousness, for that, as I have tried to exemplify, is narrowed perception. 'Things' do not normally ob-ject onto consciousness, they are not objectified or thematised (in Heidegger's account, only when an 'item' of the equipment, a part of the referential totality, 'breaks down', 'goes missing' or 'does not 'work'' properly does it become the centre of our conscious attention).
Heidegger calls this the arrival of the 'unusable'. In pre-reflective consciousness, all 'items' have their use, role and meaning as an indivisible part of the totality: in reflective consciousness they lose their holistic usability. It is then that the torchlight of subjective consciousness 'focuses' on the problem. Representations - mental objects - names - 'come into play'. But this event is secondary: Heidegger's crucial point is that, for most of the time, there are no objects and therefore no subjects, because consciousness is not prior to the world. Instead, everyday humans are 'one with the world' - without the basis of a lived knowledge, of a 'know-how' which is bodily/mental, theoretical knowledge is not possible. It is this truth that subjectivism and objectivism, both manifestations of the philosophy of consciousness, refuse to acknowledge or understand. Dasein is primarily part of the referential totality.
Heidegger's position is fundamentally opposed to that of Sartre. The dualism of for-itself/in-itself is an illusion. What Sartre and all philosophy harbouring the same presuppositions about the primacy of consciousness does is to confuse vorhandenheit - thematic consciousness - as the fundamental reality. Subjective, representational consciousness is thus elevated above lived knowledge, and it is this privileging which results in dualism and all the other antimonies of western thought, as so well displayed in Being and Nothingness. Of course, Heidegger's critique of the 'philosophy of presence' aimed to address not Sartre's work but the entire western tradition._
By contrast, Heidegger's alternative account suggests a world in which humans are primarily interconnected, interdependent entities both among themselves and with the wider environment. It clearly has profound similarities to the insights of later scientific, ecological understandings of the world, and suggests that the traditional view of humans as discrete beings present-in-themselves is seriously misguided, with limitations and antimonies mirroring those of Newtonion physics. However, rather than pursue this comparison, I want now to try and develop an account of what it would mean to abandon the theoretical standpoint, to reinterpret what we understand by the term 'self' and to try and think from 'the practical standpoint'.
3.2: The Self as Agent.
Love the world as your self; then you can care for all things. Tao Te-Ching, 13.
Sartre's for-itself is primarily in a disembodied intellect, a representation or impersonal, universal theorem called the subject which he tries to re-embody. Heidegger's dasein is primarily the active self-as-agent engaged with the world, always already with a history and a culture. I don't mean that self-as-agent should somehow never adopt the theoretical attitude, remaining in primordial anonymity; on the contrary, it clearly must not, in order to be fully human. But I want to try and understand the traditional self-as-thinker - the Cartesian 'I think' - as really a kind of self-negation. That is, the act of thinking, of withdrawing into representational thought, is also a withdrawal from all practical relations with the world. In this state we see 'things', think in terms of objects, against which the tradition defines humans as subjects.
I claim that this is the root of existential solipsism - when vorhandenheit is mistaken for the essence of being, then indeed 'The Cogito must be our point of departure', as Sartre puts it. We become imprisoned in egocentrism because distanced from the world by our representations, our images of it. Instead of immediate involvement, we have mediated distance, the objectifying look displaces and denies the mutual glance: isolation and detachment result. We remove ourselves from all equipmentality, no longer participating. The theoretical standpoint lays things in front of us ready for inspection and ordering. When we contemplate, the other becomes mere idea, a datum of knowledge, the object of thought, opposed to the subject. By the same token, thematism represents lived values and beliefs as merely mental images or concepts, and they become reified: the illusion then is that they depend on consciousness for their existence, and can be 'chosen or 'discarded' at will. Thus we become evaluating calculators instead of valuing beings.
However, from the standpoint of practice, the 'I' exists only as part of the referential totality, or, to simplify, as part of a complex - 'you' and 'I', or Self-Other. In this 'unconscious' state of affairs, individual empirical selves regain their rightful prominence over the universal subject. That is, while from the theoretical standpoint we are all identical subjects called 'I'; from the standpoint of practice we are all unique persons of whom it is true to say that only I am 'I': everybody else is Other. Moreover, as embodied agent in-the-world, a person is both subject and object, prior to duality, and thus not some kind of accretion to a mystical essence, Rationality or Freedom._ On this account rationality, like knowledge, is primarily practical.
Although the 'I' is to be understood in terms of the self-other complex, in which the relation is personal, I can of course still isolate myself through thematisation so that the relation to the Other becomes impersonal; when this happens the Other becomes objectified, represented to me via an image or conception or category and thus not immediate. If I treat you impersonally I treat you as an object and I negate both your personal character and your freedom as an agent. Which of course is precisely what Sartre sought to avoid, but made much worse through mistaking this derivative, impersonal attitude for the base reality._ But the relationship of the look, that impersonal part of the personal relation is always potentially present, only it is not always noticed; it is subordinated. It is derivative on a lived basis. In other words normal relations are personal, abnormal relations are those in which the impersonal aspect dominates.
Macmurray (1961:ch.1) - from whom I have borrowed this beautifully simple personal-impersonal terminology - argues that a personal relationship requires no justification, since it is the norm for all personal relations. Within personal relations with the Other it is absurd to ask me to justify my behaviour. This relation can never be wrong. By the same token, the impersonal relation is right only conditionally. To illustrate this, Macmurray provides the example of a teacher of psychology and his pupil, who are on good terms. The student visits for a chat about work and a normal conversation gets underway. The teacher's attitude is at first fully personal. However, it becomes evident that the student is in an abnormal state of mind, hysterical even. The teacher's attitude therefore changes to that of the professional psychologist, as she seeks to understand and classify the patient's problem. Equipmentality has broken down, and what the psychologist now says is determined by the theoretical intention of trying to solve a problem.
This example illustrates two things. First, that science is a practice of the theoretical attitude, by no means unique: it is another manifestation of our propensity at problem-solving. Second, it is, as another example of the theoretical attitude, subordinate to the personal relation, upon which it is derivative. In Macmurray's example situation, the personal relation became impracticable and there was a loss of freedom; the student was partially unable to act, determined by his condition. The psychologist becomes objective in order to help the student, and it is this that justifies her taking the theoretical attitude, in order to restore fully-personal relations.
It is not difficult to see that this must be so. For suppose that the impersonal attitude were self-justifying and unconditionally right. It would then be normative for the activities which it initiates (1961:36, my emphasis).
What would it mean if the impersonal attitude was taken as self-justifying? In the example scenario the psychologist might decide that the case was intrinsically interesting and would contribute to the increasing of scientific knowledge; however, this might be possible only by accentuating the neurosis, and this would be the right thing to do.
If this is preposterous, if it reminds us of certain Nazi doctors of infamous memory, it can only be because we know that a purely objective attitude to another person can only be justified if it falls within and is subordinated to a personal norm (1961: 37).
3.3: Freedom and the Agent as Embodied.
When the body's intelligence declines,
cleverness and knowledge step forth. Tao Te-Ching, 18.
It is I think necessary for my positive case to show more clearly how the agent is embodied and how 'intentionality' is primarily of the 'body-subject', not simply of the cogito. Yet at the same time, I wish to show that humans are not simply determined automatons reacting blindly to objective structures and forces such that the idea of individual human agency becomes meaningless. To do this I shall turn to the thought of Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
In The Phenomenology of Perception (1962) Merleau-Ponty argues that the 'body-subject' is the product of its cultural and temporal context, inevitably immersed in situation and world - he also calls it 'the impure subject'. However, he should not be thought of as a structuralist; there is still human agency since the body-subject has 'freedom in situation'. This freedom is not absolute - instead of Sartre's 'hole in being', Merleau-Ponty talks of a 'hollow' (1962:215). Like Heidegger, he is interested in the practical attitude, the pre-ontological realm:
In perception we do not think the object and we do not think ourselves thinking it... In this originary layer of sense experience which is discovered only provided that we really coincide with the act of perception and break with the critical attitude, I live the unity of the subject and the intersensory unity of the thing, and do not conceive them after the fashion of analytical reflection and science (ibid:238-9, emphasis added).
The 'subject of sensation' is neither a Cartesian cogito nor a for-itself (not that the latter pair are essentially different):
He need not be a pure nothingness with no terrestrial weight. That would be necessary only if, like constituting consciousness, he had to be present everywhere at the same time, co-extensive with being, and in process of thinking the truth of the universe (ibid: 215).
However, the body-subject cannot perceive 'true being' either, for each of us brings 'sediments' from previous experience to our perceptions, cultural filters which prevent unmediated understanding of 'the in-itself'. I am a sentient body-subject, 'a repository filled with natural powers at which I am the first to be filled with wonder' and part of the world (ibid:215). Of course, I can still detach myself from the world, and assume the theoretical standpoint, but '(W)ith the cogito begins that struggle between consciousnesses, each of which, as Hegel says, seeks the death of the other' (ibid:355). Like Macmurray Merleau-Ponty believes that in the normal, non-reflective personal attitude my being 'interweaves harmoniously with the other'. But when adopting the theoretical attitude, I lose individuality by becoming 'universal subject', and therefore 'cease to be a finite self', becoming 'an impartial spectator before whom the other and myself, each as an empirical being, are on a footing of equality' (ibid:358).
But how are we to understand intentionality, if it is not that of the traditional constituting consciousness?
[T]he life of consciousness - cognitive life...- is subtended by an 'intentional arc', which projects round about us our past, our future, our human setting, our physical, ideological and moral situation, or rather which results in our being situated in all these respects. It is this intentional arc which brings about the unity of the senses, of intelligence, of sensibility and motility. And it is this which goes limp in illness (ibid:136, my italics).
That is, the 'intentional arc' underpins thematic consciousness. It explains how I am aware in some sense of being engaged with the world without conscious control of this engagement. This is what Bourdieu calls 'the feel for the game'. It is bodily, and it means that the body is not something 'I' have but something I am. Like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty is saying that in everyday activities there is no distinction between consciousness and body, between self and world. But more than Heidegger, this 'arc' is the means by which moral and social norms, habits and gestures particular to our general, cultural and uniquely familial backgrounds inform our activities; this arc is embodied history, sedimented knowledge of family, culture and world. Finally, this unified, lived body is what breaks down and therefore becomes the object of theoretical consciousness when we are ill. And, I would add, illness can happen at the cultural level. The illness of dualism begins when the body becomes the permanent object of consciousness, as a split is introduced between the mental and the corporeal, and the latter is devalued along with the material world._ Such a condition may then become a cultural norm.
I think it can now be seen how objectification of one's body by subject limit's one's freedom. Freedom is not simply the liberal notion of freedom from physical and intellectual interference by others, since this is based on the false assumptions already discussed; it is also - and I think primarily - the freedom inherent in the lived body's ability to structure its world and to realise the potentialities informed by its social history, while being thoroughly engaged with that world. To throw further light on this, and to show how the theory of practice undermines such metaphysical dualisms as 'subject-object' or 'freedom-determinism', we can briefly turn to Bourdieu, who gives 'intentional arc' a more user-friendly name, the habitus:
The habitus - internalised as a second nature and so forgotten as history - is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product. As such, it is what gives practices their relative autonomy with respect to external determinations of the immediate present... The habitus is a spontaneity without consciousness or will, opposed as much to the mechanical necessity of things without history as it is to the reflexive freedom of subjects 'without inertia' in rationalist theories (1990 56)._
We are free within the 'rules of the game'. 'Nothing is simultaneously freer and more constrained than the action of the good player'. The good player materialises at just the place the ball is about to fall, 'as if the ball were in command of him. But by that very fact, he is in command of the ball'. The habitus enables the infinite number of acts of the game to be produced; and the constraints impose themselves only on those people who already have 'a feel for the game', and thus are prepared to perceive and carry out the 'rules' (1994 63).
Of course, this game metaphor does not work perfectly, for it suggests that someone originally wrote the rules, thus returning us to the social contract idea, in which rules are consciously obeyed. 'You can use the analogy of the game in order to say that a set of people take part in a rule-bound activity, an activity which, without necessarily being the product of obedience to rules, obeys certain regularities' (1994 64). That is, one must distinguish between rule and regularity. To give an example: middle class teenagers regularly go to university, but this does not make it a rule. Unfortunately, because of the dualistic premises discussed here, the 'objective observer' - the anthropologist for example - sees regularities in behaviour and understands them as rules: the illusion is then to assume that the agents consciously choose and obey these rules in order to function. But as Marx said (and Bourdieu is fond of repeating), this is to 'mistake the things of logic for the logic of things'. Illusion is dispelled when we realise that the habitus, as a regulated disposition to generate regulated and regular behaviour outside any reference to rules, can explain 'orchestration without a conductor'. This is what Bourdieu means by 'the logic of practice': things run themselves. Finally:
Because the habitus is an infinite capacity for generating products - thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions - whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its production, the conditioned and conditional freedom it provides is as remote from creation of unpredictable novelty as it is from simple mechanical reproduction of the original conditioning (1990: 55).
3.4: Self and Other.
When we don't see the self as self, what do we have to fear? Tao Te-Ching, 13.
One more, rather obvious element is missing from my necessarily brief 'reconstruction'. This is the question of self-constitution. How exactly do we obtain our impure, social identities? Without accounting for this, it might seem that there could still be some sort of identity removed from the real world common to each individual. To settle this matter, I shall turn back to Merleau-Ponty and his important essay, 'The Child's Relations with Others'(1964).
In this essay Merleau-Ponty describes the 'intersubjective'_ nature of the lived body. Because my capacities, habits, values, beliefs and therefore interests do not arise separately from my engagement with the world nor from the discourses and practices which make up this world in which I dwell, my 'corporeal schema' is never purely 'individual'. It is constituted in relation to the Other,_ and is therefore uniquely specific to my social, environmental, and familial situation. That is, there can be no unambiguous, absolute separation between my identity and that of the Other; to claim otherwise is to deny the fact that 'sociality runs within us'. In other words, 'subjectivity' can not be unproblematically identified with the physical bounds of the human body; it runs beyond into my world.
This last point is clearly seen in the development of the child, for whom, Merleau-Ponty argues, there is no 'original consciousness' of some kind of fixed distinction between self and world; there is instead a state of 'anonymous collectivity'. In this state 'the other's intentions somehow play across my body while my intentions play across his' (1964:119). As the child's motility develops, it picks up the 'corporeal schemas' of others and in-corporates these gestures and habits within its own immediate body-space. And a reciprocal process occurs too. The theoretical distinction between self and other only arises gradually, through a steady differentiation of the child's experience of its own body from its experience of the bodies of others.
Merleau-Ponty now develops Lacan's model of 'the mirror stage'. The child can recognise herself in the mirror, and thus learns to distinguish between 'introspectivity' and 'extroceptivity'. Her mirror-image has simultaneously three aspects: firstly herself, secondly something separate from herself and thirdly what the other might make of her. By recognising herself in the mirror, the child learns that she is an object for another and therefore distinct from the other. The crucial point which Sartre failed to understand however, is that this distinction from the other can never be absolute. Merleau-Ponty shows how a system of indistinction is established between the child's 'introspective body', its visual, extroceptive body-for-the-other and the Other. Inasmuch as the child identifies with the image of itself it cannot easily differentiate between what it lives, what the other lives and what it perceives the other to be doing (1964:135). This tripartite system is one of 'syncretism': the reciprocal transfer of movements and gestures between dispersed bodies.
On this account the emergence of my 'corporeal schema' and sense of self as separate from others, while dependent on objectification by others, occurs through the organisation of my body in reciprocal relation to others. Moreover, this constitution of myself as 'body-subject' through the other occurs without any conscious intervention or control: as a child (and beyond) I assume the gestures, conducts, habits, values and beliefs, of the other through mimesis and I project my own ways of being onto the other through identification with the other, in what Merleau-Ponty calls 'transitivism' (1964:148). I am thus socially constituted, and my identity is built on the interpenetration of self and Other, and Others are already socially constructed beings also. The modes of being - and their social significance - are incorporated into myself and therefore the limits to my potential modes of being will vary depending on whom I associate with and under what social/environmental contexts.
There is then a fundamental ambiguity between the identities of self and Other. My lived-body is only a self thanks to objectification by the Other, as Sartre thought, yet by identifying myself with and differentiating myself from the (mirror) image of myself, which I am not, my self lives through another. My identity depends on the construction of a partition between the inside and the outside of my body, and between my body and the Other's, but it is a partition, not a wall. It is permeable, and my self can never be 'pure' or insular. It is because I differentiate my identity from the Other that I am able to 'give' my ways of being to the Other, and my ways of being can then be lived in the world of the Other's body.
We are then primarily body-subjects, neither subject nor object, but whole selves primordially one with the world. This is still the case when we are adult; we still encounter Others primarily in the personal mode, the result of a familiar dwelling with them, rather than in the mode of intellectual recognition. We can only begin to 'know' the other if we have conducts and therefore a social history in common (PP 186). And even then, engaging with others is still a matter of exchanging gestures and meanings; 'self' and 'other' only 'arrive' because of the encounter through the 'blind' (i.e. non-cognitive) identification with the Other's 'conducts' (PP 185). Inasmuch as I distance myself from the Other through the theoretical attitude, the non-thematic knowledge - that is lived knowledge - is lost. But in the personal relation I do not objectify the Other nor myself: I live my relations in 'familiar dwelling' with others and in this way I 'lose myself': the self-conscious 'I', the isolated individual who tries 'to know resumes its normal place.
A few final points need to be explained. The personal relation of the 'self-other complex' will always be fundamentally ambiguous, and so cannot be calculated. However, ambiguity can be denied, and from this denial injustice can arise. Suppose I encounter a stranger from a different culture or background: they necessarily have a different habitus. I may be ill-at-ease, resist or show intolerance in the encounter, just as I am at ease in encounters with those I know well from my own local background. If I do not make the effort of dwelling-with the Other I may seek to remove intolerable uncertainty in two ways. The first of these is to treat difference as absolute - in which case the other becomes hostile alien. The second is to assume that the other is identical (1964:102-6).
Both ways - another expression of the logic of identity and difference - result from dualism. In the first, the other's identity is assumed to be fixed, 'natural', and knowable, apart from (and unaffected by) our embodied dwelling together. This is allowing the impersonal relation to dominate, representations distance self and Other. Moreover, I am likely to give the Other my own unwanted characteristics through the same logic (I am good, right, fair, white: she is not). In the second I refuse to recognise any difference resulting from situation - cultural, social, familial etc. - I become colonialist and efface all difference, seeking to fuse with the other, to swallow her up. 'There is an abstract or rigid liberalism which consists in thinking that all men are identical' (!964 106)._ Those who do the swallowing are of course primarily white, middle class, male, industrialised westerners with their value-systems of neutrality and objectivity. But at this point, I will draw my account to a close.
The Upshot.
This account of dualism is obviously missing a good deal; in particular, I have not been able to fully develop my account of how global conclusions drawn from my critique of Sartre apply to main currents of thought in 'environmental ethics'. The latter has not exactly been the focus of discussion either, largely for reasons that I hope are by now evident - what exactly counts as such a discipline anyway? If the main thrust of the position here is correct, then it seems to me the issues I have raised are prior to much of that which I have met described as 'environmental philosophy'.
In conclusion, I have two final points to make. First, there is no such thing as Sartrean 'nothingness', the human hole in the heart of being. Instead, the self is more like, as Marx put it, the 'ensemble of social relations'. More precisely, what can be found at the heart of the human is actually everythingness, an insight central to Taoism and other perennial wisdom for thousands of years. Ecological science would appear to support this idea, that there is no concreteness to the 'boundary' between the human self and the rest of the world. At the centre of the human one can only find everything - the Tao. This is not to deny individuality, quite the reverse: I have tried to show how it is precisely egotistical notions of the isolated consciousness contemplating the theoretical world which leads ultimately to the suppression of all individual difference, to conflict and hate. I believe that it is this that green thinkers must most beware of. Once dualism is refused by adopting a practical standpoint, subjects and objects lose their dominating pre-eminence, totalising thought can be challenged, and the foundations of anthropocentrism are much weakened, while the need to get one's hands dirty through committed engagement becomes much more obvious.
The second point follows on from this. We should be suspicious of those who profess to 'know', to having knowledge on what is right before what is good, especially when when they do not - and can not - practice what they preach. Why should I accept dogmatic dismissal of the non-orthodox from intellectuals who presume to know better, without their ever having engaged in those practicalities so easily disparaged? Knowledge and belief rightly flow from practice, from commitment to life and engagement, and there are many ways of doing good in the world. Trying to be 'neutral' or 'value-free' with regard to those who do seems to me to be profoundly wrong, which is not to say that reasoned, balanced critique therefore has no place. I have been groping toward a basic point: the particularity of a personal situation is to be preferred to the universality of abstract thought, or, to adapt the slogan, act locally, think globally. Know your goddess-worshipper as a fellow-practitioner, before judging his 'way' irrelevant to the cause. Try blocking a bulldozer before deciding that such action is not worthy of effort. Such activism may well be more relevant in a time when intellectualism simply struggles to react, seeking to colonise and represent one more area of the real world, ready for inspection and ordering.
Post Script: On the Examination.
Nick: Well, what do you think? Will it pass?
Pierre: I would think so. You have included all the basics. Your sentences are not too short or grammatically simplistic, you have got plenty of comparatives, reflexive pronouns, conjunctions and jargon terms. You show a suitable grasp of the academic-linguistic habitus required for such occasions._ I'd say your truth is well-enough presented. In addition, you stressed the exceptional importance and interest which the topic has at the outset: always a good move.
Nick: If it's just an exercise in rhetoric then I'm not sure I want it to pass!
Pierre: I'm just saying that you haven't counted yourself out by using an inappropriate register or ignoring the correct vocabulary. You know, the essay is 'one of the most apt instruments for perpetuating cultural privilege' (Bourdieu, 1990:90).
Nick: I beg your pardon?
Pierre: Well, if all goes well you are soon going to have an M.A.: a mark of distinction. You'll be a partly-qualified environmental philosopher, you'll have a social destiny!_ If you carry on, you'll build up a nice head of authority in your rather elite field. Or as Michel might put it (he's always a little more blunt than myself) after the examination is over you'll know your true self, you'll have been classified as an object, a subjected or politically dominated being. Basically, if you know your essence, you can be dominated by it.
Nick: Well, maybe... but will I be any wiser?
Pierre: Not if you don't see through the charade! You know, academia is a tricky issue - even I have to partake if I want to try and change anything. It has advantages though - at least now you won't have to think 'this is not for the likes of me'. I mean, you'll speak the language, be accepted and able to participate in the social activity of academia, not be overawed by all the technicalities which might well lead your average green protester into self-censorship. That, of course, is a much wider theory of mine...
Michel: Perhaps I could make a comment here. I think you should remember that your discipline is disciplining you!_ I mean, your educational site, like all such sites, is a generator of an historically specific discourse - it's a site in which certain modern validations of, and exclusions from, the 'right to speak' are generated. The possibilities for meaning and for definition are 'pre-empted' through the social and institutional position held by those who use them. Is that what you want? You've been given access to a certain kind of discourse, into which you've been normalised; you've been partly constituted as a subject of philosophical discourse._
Nick: I'm having doubts. But to get back to my essay - I suppose this 'examination' is one of your 'micro-technologies'?
Michel: Of course! You are on display - about to be measured! Your examiners are going to measure you, to see if you are up to scratch! If you are, you'll be thought suitable for the field, another docile body._
Nick: Is that wise?
Pierre and Michel: Hmmm...
Nick: I mean, I'm a teacher too - one has to give a mark! One must strive for neutrality!
Pierre: Marked for life! Between the last one to pass the exam and the first to fail is a difference that lasts a lifetime. Just think of your '11-plus'. You brother and sister didn't feel too good about your passing it did they?
Michel: When they mark you, you'll no longer be 'below the threshold of description' - you'll have a quantity! And if you don't measure up... It is only the normalising gaze, a surveillance that makes it possible to qualify, to classify and to punish'.
Nick: All right - so what should I do? Rip it up?
Pierre: As long as you realise that your role is just another practice, and that 'it is through the illusion of freedom from social determinants (an illusion which I have said a hundred times is the the specific determination of intellectuals) that social determinations win the freedom to exercise their full power' (1994: 15), then I don't think you need to rip anything up. There's also nothing to stop you exposing privilege from within... But a more sociological approach can free you from the illusion of freedom, then you'll be constituting yourself as a freer subject.
Michel: I think I could go along with that.
Nick: Well, thanks chaps - I'll bear all this in mind.
_________________
Notes.
_All further numbered references in this section refer to Being and Nothingness.
_It is interesting to note that this view accords with Taoism. Lao-tzu's first statement about the Tao is that it cannot be defined - for the simple reason that you cannot make what is basically you and basically real an object of knowledge. You cannot stand aside from it and examine it as something 'out there'. This position extends to the whole of 'nature'; not an object, because part of the self. Unlike Sartre, Lao-tzu does not speculate about a 'pre-reflective cogito'.
_By 'liberal thinking' I am referring to the dominant Anglo-American tradition of political philosophy stretching from Hobbes, Locke and Bentham down to Rawls and Nozick, as identified by communitarian and feminist critics (not to mention its extension into 'environmental philosophy' via Regan, Singer and others).
_BBC 2 television documentary, broadcast in January 1995.
_I present this example as a interesting possible parallel to modern human experience, not a conclusive argument: other interpretations of the monkeys' behaviour are no doubt possible.
_It should be noted that Sartre does talk about self-objectification when others are absent, but this is still derivative of believing that the Other is present.
_It is hard to read this section thinking that a woman could, for Sartre, assume the transcendent role of the sadist. Nor am I forgetting the obvious misogyny so graphically displayed in those sections of Being and Nothingness which describe Sartre's terror of the feminine, whose 'holes' and 'slime' trap masculine transcendence in the world of nature. By the same token, it is easy to understand why feminists see traditional epistemology at large as so threatening, being especially well-exemplified in sexuality. 'The erotic becomes the pornographic; women are seen as objects empty of value except when they can be used. The sexual arena becomes one of domination, charged with rage, fear and violence' (Starhawk, 1990:9).
_Sartre thus demonstrates to us the meaning of human life (and reveals himself as an inauthentic nihilist); he clearly has faith that a meaning attaches to 'nothingness': it is to be eternally tossed back and forth between the two poles of subject and object.
_'Mitsein' - Sartre refers to Heidegger's Being and Time, in which he provides an account of common identity through the 'with-being'.
_For further discussion of how this position affects concepts of class consciousness and historical change, see Dobson (1993).
_The comparison is not perfect. There are many differences, not least that the for-itself is thrown into an already-structured world from and which it must liberate itself from if it is to be authentic. And Sartre's notion of choice is irrational in the sense that it appears to rule out even selfish motives for forming societies, since it must be free of all determination.
_Bourdieu (1990:45-6) writes 'The example of Sartre, the intellectual par excellence...shows that just as objectivism universalises the theorist's relation to the object of science, so subjectivism universalises the experience that the subject...has of himself'.
_Sartre later abandoned absolute freedom. He recounts how he re-read some of his early work , 'truly scandalised' that he had written that 'whatever the circumstances, a man is always free to choose to be a traitor or not..' 'When I read this, I said to myself: it's incredible, I actually believed that!' (Sartre, 1974:33-4).
_On Liberty, p.71 and p.12, emphasis added. The idea of humans as proprietors of their own bodies goes back to Locke, who wrote that 'Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a 'property' in his own 'person' (1924:130).
_There is no question that this 'self' has characteristics, a meaning, and can be described, despite purporting to be 'nothingness'. What is really meant by nothingness is 'no individual identity', the ultimate purity. But 'purity' has meaning.
_Diprose, p.9-10. She goes on to argue that it is precisely this idea of self which has been the subject of critique since Hegel, and that 'Hegel's challenge to self-present identity implies a different assessment of the form and function of exchange in social life'.
_Two observations here: first, I claim only certain basic similarities between Sartre and Locke on the notion of self, primarily constancy through time (identity as pre-reflective cogito, both unchanging in their essence) and the superiority or privileging of this constancy over the transient, empirical 'self, such that in the thought of Locke, Mill et al a mysterious 'self' stands over and above both body and mind, the latter being part of the lived-world. My argument is that Sartre's core notion of self resembles this in its implications (I shall present an alternative conception of self in section 3). Second: the 'I' does seem to have 'substance', something indestructible from which thoughts and acts emanate, without seemingly affecting this 'something'. But I think this is an illusion caused by representational thought or knowing: a 'relationship with what remains outside of all relationships, an action which maintains the agent outside of the events he brings about'. It is the concept of knowing that makes it possible to fix the identity of the I, to 'keep it enclosed in its secrecy'. 'Knowledge is the secret of its freedom with respect to all that which happens to it. And its freedom guarantees its identity' (Levinas1978:86-87).
_Sartre's efforts to escape subject-object dualism are of course heroic. In the earlier work The Transcendence of the Ego he also thought that he had got rid of the 'subject'; he writes that 'The world has not created the me; the me has not created the world. These are two objects for absolute, impersonal consciousness, and it is by virtue of this consciousness that they are connected. This absolute consciousness, when it is purified of the I, no longer has anything of the subject. It is no longer a collection of representations. It is quite simply a first condition and an absolute source of existence' (pp.105-6). But where is this absolute to be found, and where does it come from?
_Sartre apparently accepts the necessity of 'obstacles' and 'limits' against which his absolute freedom of the individual can 'gain purchase', but as pointed out, those obstacles are nevertheless still the product of the assigning of meaning by the for-itself, which means that radical freedom is not limited by the given at all. It has nothing to do with success. But if so, and if humans are already free (even if they refuse to recognise this), what on earth is the point of ever taking any action to liberate them? And what does this say about the motives for writing Being and Nothingness? I suggest that Sartrean freedom is actually a case of 'goodbye cruel world' - a 'fleeing' from recognition of life and its attendant responsibilities and interdependencies: the western response. As such, and despite the initial attraction of the idea of total responsibility for one's choices, Sartrean freedom is actually the surrender of all responsibility: the intellectual can, for example, always claim that the oppressed worker is still 'free to choose another project' in the face of his oppression, rather than muddy her or his hands in practical support. This point needs expanding. If freedom means the ability to redefine projects, and the successful conclusion of these projects is irrelevant, then (to rework an example by Marcuse, in Dobson 1993:29) green protesters may decide that their initial project to stop the M65 extension in Lancashire is unrealistic when faced with the intransigence of 200 Group 4 security guards, so they decide instead to protect a small wood; but this project becomes 'unrealistic' when the bulldozers arrive, and so they decide instead to recycle a bottle... The protesters are of course still free to give up their cause.
_Precisely this point is turned on its head by Levinas, who argues for 'ethics as first philosophy'; that is, one's 'ethical obligations' to the other are infinite because prior to thematic knowledge or being - the 'is'. My duty to the Other does not depend on my knowledge of her or of rules and obligations, but on the demands of the 'naked face'; the moral relation is thus asymmetrical rather than reciprocal. See Bauman 1994 and Levinas 1985.
_'Value in its original upsurge is not posited by the for-itself; it is consubstantial with it' and 'Nothing makes value exist - unless it is that freedom which by the same stroke makes me exist' (BN 94).
_Sandel observes that 'Rawls conceives the self as a subject of possession, bounded in advance, and given prior to its ends, and he assumes furthermore that the bounds of the subject unproblematically correspond to the bodily bounds between human beings' (1982:80; my italics).
_Charles Taylor (1992) comments that liberalism means that 'people have come to accept the utterly facile moral psychology of traditional empiricism, according to which humans possess the full capacity of choice as a given rather than as a potential that has to be developed'. I would add that one might wonder what 'full capacity' could possibly mean anyway.
_Charles Taylor writes that 'The complete freedom desired would be a void in which nothing would be worth doing, nothing would deserve to count for anything. The self which has arrived at freedom by setting aside all external impingements and obstacles is characterless, and hence without defined purpose, however much of this is hidden by such seemingly positive terms as 'rationality' or 'creativity' (in Allen, 1982:202).
_For more detailed discussion on conditions of freedom, see Standish (1992:ch.5). On the totalitarianism of universal moral codes, see Bauman (1994) and Levinas (1960).
_This account is not meant to suggest that I endorse such a view of how language works, only that 'essentialism' has tended to go along with it.
_Marx rejected such abstraction: 'the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations' (1977:157).
_More than this, duality is again generated: hierarchical pairs of opposite categories are established, with various manifestations, such as 'rational' and 'irrational', essence and appearance, reason and emotion, male and female and so on. Moreover, these pairs usually correspond with or are built upon the mother of dualisms, the good/bad dichotomy, which feeds the privileging, in each case, of one of the two mutually-exclusive terms. Something like this argument derives most recently from Derrida, Levinas and Adorno, although I came across it indirectly in the crystal-clear work of Iris Marion Young (1993), who, in discussing group difference, calls it the 'Logic of Identity and Difference'.
_Remembering of course that 'freedom' has been substituted for 'rationality' as the common essence (although my argument is that they are identical).
_Sartre here (479-81) perhaps best illustrates the perplexing nature of freedom understood as choice. On the one hand he writes that 'The freedom of the for-itself is always engaged; there is no question here of a freedom which could be undetermined and which would pre-exist its choice' (Thus freedom and choice are synonymous and necessarily determined by engagement, presumably with the in-itself) but on the other hand (and immediately after this phrase), that 'freedom is simply the fact that this choice is always unconditioned'. Whatever Sartre means by this second (?) 'choice' bears little resemblance to any kind of evaluating decision-making and as such seems incomprehensible. If synonymous with ontological freedom, then choice is absurd because it is 'that by which the very notion of the absurd receives a meaning... being beyond all reasons'. But, if not ontological, it must be a more familiar type of 'choice', part of the empirical individual self or reflective consciousness and therefore always available for nihilation by the primacy of the 'hole in the heart of being' (and so determined by no-thingness). Needless to say, I find Sartre's choice of adjective apt, but not his two options.
_See Standish (1992:139-41) for a more detailed discussion of this difficulty.
_I shall be arguing that to a large extent we are not, which implies that intellectualist privileging of rational argument over experience as a means of persuasion in environmental issues is overrated.
_This statement and its talk of humans as 'automatons' may appear to suggest an overly determinist position is being endorsed: this is not the case, as will become clear later.
_In this respect it is interesting to note that de Beauvoir later expressed her unease about this refusal: 'We remained frozen in our rationalist-voluntarist position: in a clear-minded individual, we thought, freedom would win out over complexes, memories, influences or any traumatic experience. it was a long time before we realised that our emotional detachment from, and indifference to, our respective childhoods was to be explained by what we had experienced as children' (1965:21-2, my italics).
_This argument derives from Bernard Williams (1973). Bourdieu comments that all such antimonies 'flow from the will to think practice in terms of the logic of decisions of the will' (1990, 49), a point which I shall develop below.
_In The Will to Power Nietzsche attacks two forms of nihilism as being negative and dishonest: the already mentioned 'radical nihilism' and a prior stage, nihilism as 'a state of mind', or 'religious' nihilism, which presupposes that the material world is valueless without some exterior justification (the person has already judged that the world needs a reason. The latter is certainly 'inconsistent' and 'illogical', as argued here. Nietzsche comments, 'The immodesty of man: to deny meaning where he sees none' (ibid: 599). He also argues that nihilism is 'the logic of our great values and ideals, thought through to its end' (ibid:11). Furthermore, he speaks of a 'complete nihilism', in which 'one cannot judge, measure, compare, or even deny the whole! (ibid:765). This means that one is no longer nihilist. For a detailed account, see White (1990).
_Lewis commented: 'I am inclined to think that the conditioners will hate the conditioned', ibid:80.
_Alan Watts comments: Religions harden into institutions that must command loyalty, be defended and kept pure' and - because all (such) belief is fervent hope, and thus a cover-up for doubt and uncertainty - religions must make converts'(1966:10).
_Slogan on a Government building in the film Brazil.
_My terminology is rather confusing. By 'intellectualism' I mean an ideology that privileges thematic knowledge or representational thinking over other ways of knowing, primarily seen as practical. 'Intellectualism' thus encompasses idealism, realism, objectivism, structuralism and so on, since I think it can be shown that all of these share dualistic premises. This amounts to saying that the differences between say, objectivism and subjectivism are actually superficial. As a non-dualist, I would say this.
_Heidegger is noticeably reticent about the body and sexuality. It is left to Merleau-Ponty to fill in the details of the 'body-subject; one might say that if Heidegger brings the self as dasein back home to earth, Merleau-Ponty gives it back its body.
_A negative feedback effect might be postulated here: the more objectifying thought becomes dominant, the greater the persuasiveness of the illusion of the primacy of representational thought. Starhawk comments: 'estrangement permeates our society so strongly that to us it seems to be consciousness itself' (1990:9). Indeed.
_Sartre's work may thus be thought of reactionary: I would argue that he wrote very much as an attempt to defend Cartesian thought against Heidegger's main thesis. Thus: 'Heidegger has completely avoided any appeal to consciousness in his description of dasein' (:85). More than this, Heidegger's famous definition of dasein - 'Dasein is a being such that in its being its being is in question' is 'completed' by Sartre to read 'Consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself' (:xxxviii). No reversal could be more complete; from wonder and concern to dualism. Small wonder then that Heidegger reportedly read only the first few pages of Being and Nothingness before understanding what Sartre had done, deciding that it was rubbish. He later - and consistently - treated Sartre's work as simply another example of the subjectivism he sought to overturn See 'Letter on Humanism' (in Heidegger, 1992).
_I hope it is clear that I am not rejecting 'rationality' per se, only disputing its elevation to an essentially superior and therefore dominating position in most philosophical thought.
_Which of course is precisely what Sartre sought to avoid, but worsened through mistaking the derivative impersonal attitude for base reality. But saying this is also to confirm that fear of 'the look' is no idle fantasy. Sartre acutely diagnosed what is happening in the world as the theoretical attitude secures its domination.
_There is much that could be said here about the history of dualism and its origins in the west; the Gnostic tradition gives a fascinating account of how the belief that the material is 'evil' is so embedded in western thought. Of course, dualism has long been enemy no.1 of mystics, greens, and other alternative thinkers for centuries. Such thought gets little serious attention in academic philosophy (which from my point of view makes academic philosophy all the poorer), most probably for reasons of power, ignorance, authority and snobbery - not to mention 'tradition' (the academic habitus).
_I am not claiming that 'habitus' and 'intentional arc' are identical concepts, but the similarities are so profound that I feel comfortable without detailed analysis of the minutae.
_The scare quotes refer to the reservations expressed earlier about terminology , i.e. subject.
_Merleau-Ponty talks largely of the Other as a human individual. But everything is 'other' to an individual, which means that everything can potentially constitute the self, a fact which once again has enormous implications for critical thinking.
_This claim fits Sartre perfectly; in fact, he seems guilty of both ways of effacing difference, when he writes that 'I am at the root of my being the project of assimilating and making an object of the Other'(:363).
_'Research into the factors which have the strongest influence on academic marking shows that it is inequalities in linguistic performance which most strongly differentiate good from bad scripts' (Bourdieu et al 1994:84). For data on the other claims here, see ibid.
_Social destinies... enclose those who whom they characterise within the limits that are assigned to them and that they are made to recognise'(ibid:122).
_Discipline: a collapsed form of the latin 'discipulina' - literally, getting learning into the child.
_Discourses are 'practices that systematically form the objects of which they speak... Discourses are not asbout objects; they do not identify objects, they constitute them and in the practice of doing so conceal their own invention' Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, 49.
_Foucault calls the exam 'that which combines the deployment of force and the establishment of truth'; further, 'the superimposition of the power relations and the knowledge relations assumes in the examination all its visible brilliance' (1977:184-5). It dominates by making 'each individual a case' and makes individuals into 'a population of cases, with norms and quantifiable deviations from the norm' (ibid:191-2).
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