READERS' WRITE, "NEVER UNDERSTOOD SARTRE'S 'BEING AND NOTHINGNESS!'"

READERS’ WRITE, "NEVER UNDERSTOOD SARTRE'S 'BEING and NOTHINGNESS!'”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© October 6, 2014

It surprised me to hear from so many when I mentioned, actually in passing, Jean Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothing” (1943).  My sense is that someone, perhaps a teacher or professor or friend, told them it is a book that they should read.  My suggestion is that they first read man, and then tackle him as philosopher, playwright, novelist and political activist if not also Freudian psychologist.

Sartre is about freedom, individualism, situations, contingencies, words, and all of this in terms of existence.

Every author of some serious inclination is influenced when he was born, his relationship with his parents, friends, teachers, and the circumstances of his time.  Sartre was born in 1905 and died in 1980.  Being French and essentially a Parisian, he endured WWI and WWII where those wars were fought.  He writes candidly that his life was divided in two parts, before and after WWII.  Interesting enough, he lived thirty-five years before and thirty-five years after that war, reaching celebrity status after 1945 until the end of his life.

But more importantly, his youth was divided between his intimate relationship with his mother, his father died a year after his birth, and his mother’s remarriage when he was not yet a teenager.  He considered their relationship that of friends of equal interest and status, until the “betrayal” of her remarriage, when he felt disengaged from that intimacy, which he never found to his total satisfaction the rest of his life despite his legendary relationship with author and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. 

Thinkers, and even distinctly individualistic thinkers such as Jean Paul Sartre, write out of experience, what they have read, relationships and what they passionately believe. 

My wonder is what my life would have been like without a university education for it was in a reading French class at university that I was first introduced to Sartre and existentialism, having not idea before that time that either he or it existed.  My mother read a lot but didn’t share what she read with me except peripherally.  Sartre’s mother was apparently of a similar mind. 

In that French class I was introduced to Sartre’s play, “No Exit” (Huis Clos), with the play and Sartre having a stunning effect upon me, long after I graduated and was moving towards an executive career in the corporation, a world Sartre despised. 

The original title of “No Exit” was “The Other” (Les Autres), written a year after “Being and Nothingness” exploring some ideas in that philosophical work concerning relations with “the other,” as he would put it.  The play concerns two women and one man condemned to live in hell for eternity. 

Considered by some critics as pessimistic, strangely, I considered it realistic, all twenty-years-old of me.  Critics justified their criticism on one line in the play, “Hell is other people.”

Sartre defended the line, saying that relationships with “the Other” are not always negative or poisonous; nor are they necessarily of a forbidden nature.  But should relations with “the Other” become twisted, all bets are off, and they can be literally like living in hell.

According to Sartre, “the Other,” and somehow I got this from the play, what is most important in life in order for life to have meaning, substance and importance is fundamentally our relationship in and to ourselves and our own understanding of ourselves separate from everyone else.

If this is missing, Sartre is saying, then life is hell including people.

WHY I ANSWERED THIS QUERY

Many who religiously read my blog are writers, would be authors, or original thinkers in their own right.  These queries come from all over the world, and often come with this question, “Am I too old to write?”  The answer is that writing has no age or academic, ethnic or cultural qualification other than a passion to express yourself without embarrassment.

On the other hand, Americans, when they query me, they don’t ask such questions, but boldly ask, “Can you make money writing?” 

It is the wrong question and I never answer it. 

Sartre rejected the Nobel Prize for Literature, and before that a prestigious decoration by the French government for his bravery with the French resistance against the Nazis in WWII.  He declined the honor stating that he was not a resistance fighter, but only a writer who resisted.

This is mentioned because “Being and Nothingness” is his “this I believe” and his life is a reflection of that belief.

BEING AND NOTHINGNESS

As I once told engineers and administrators, programmers and managers who came to me with questions about books they were reading for credit in college courses, “I am not an academic, and am only a reader of books like them.”  It was the 1980s when I was an organizational development psychologist at Honeywell Avionics, Inc. in Clearwater, Florida.

Were they to be of such a mind, they could see the influence of Sartre in my reading over the last six decades.  The evidence is in all my books.

Sartre is telling us that it is through individual choices that we create ourselves.  These choices are not determined by our history, what is past is past.  Having made a choice that doesn’t seem to be working out the person can make a very different choice to respond to changing circumstances.  I went from a chemist, to a chemical engineer, to a manager, to a corporate executive, scuttled it all, became a drifter reading books, playing tennis and vegetating for two years, then went back to school for six years to earn a Ph.D. in a totally different discipline, social/industrial/organization psychology, taught as an adjunct professor, then acted as a consultant, then went back into industry as an industrial psychologist, rose to a corporate executive again, then turned to giving seminars, writing books, and doing what I’m doing now, telling you about it. 

As you can see, I’ve followed Sartre’s boilerplate, which rules out any kind of essentialism or fixed givens including “I can’t afford to do that!”

We exist, and then through a continuous process that lasts until death, we constitute and reconstitute ourselves through the choices we make.  Sartre puts it simply, existence precedes essence!

The next factor Sartre entertains is the one that confuses and often conflicts us.  Because we are condemned to be free we are overwhelmed by the responsibility of that freedom.

This produces anxiety and a desire to flee from freedom.  What follows is a game we constantly play on ourselves.  We deny that we are free and then try to behave as if we were simply a BEING-IN-ITSELF.

Sartre calls this (this denial or great psychological dodge) refusal to accept that we are free as a matter of bad faith, or self-deception.  

In a condition of “bad faith,” we pretend that we are not free to make choices that circumstances dictate our choices that we don’t.

It is as if we fell into a role and we become the role and we did not choose to have the role, but yet we cannot escape the role. 

What we refuse to see is that none of this is true, not a single moment of it is true, because what has happened is that we are locked in to a constant frantic attempt to escape ourselves.  Consequently, we are unable to make choices, unable to set new goals, unable to change our circumstances.

We find ourselves defending ourselves by saying “that is just the way I am,” which is the epitome of bad faith.  We do this in an effort to deny the inescapable fluidity and instability and chaos that is indigenous to freedom.

Besides the self, Sartre also explores the Other.  This hammers home that the individual is not alone in a world consisting only of BEINGS-IN-THEMSELVES (or objects), but also must share it with BEINGS-FOR-THEMSELVES (or the Other).

Because we live in a world with others – BEINGS-FOR-THEMSELVES – we have no choice but are condemned to live in that world where there is a conflict to freedom.

Reality invades our consciousness and tells us that the Other threatens our freedom and makes us aware that the world is not our own.  We have to share that world.

We can develop the mindset that the Other steals our world away from us.  The Other invades our privacy, takes over our projects, and asserts the Other’s agenda and its will on us.  The Other rewrites our script.  We are no longer a solitary actor on stage, unique, driven by our individuality and freedom.

Sartre has an answer to this dilemma.  He offers three pessimistic solutions to our relation with the Other:

We can make ourselves into a desirable object, but this is simply an attempt to flee from freedom by placing ourselves in an obsequious, fawning or servile position of unfreedom (masochism):

We can attempt to dominate the Other (sadism);

We can attempt to be apathetic or indifferent to the Other and the situation, which Sartre claims is impossible, leaving us only with the other two options, which is to say, we are trapped both ways.

First, there is the internal conflict between BEING-FOR-ITSELF and BEING-IN-ITSELF.

Man, Sartre is saying, is condemned to a divided self, to be what he is not and not to be what he is.

Second, the BEING-FOR-ITSELF (individual) is condemned to an existence that is fundamentally irreconcilable with the existence of BEINGS-FOR-THEMSELVES (the Other).

According to Sartre, the individual can only be authentic when he accepts his condition as a useless passion.

Those familiar with my books know that I write a great deal about being authentic given this dilemma, and also these ideas in a different nomenclature and more pragmatic focus, especially in the “Fisher Model of Conflict and Stress Resolution” where reference is made to the “ideal self” and “real self” and  “self-demands” and “role demands” as they relate to “you” (being-in-itself) and “others” (being-for-itself) in the situation, which is described as the “Zone of Conflict.” 

How we see our situation in a given circumstance determines whether it will be “well defined” or “poorly defined.” 

This is mention as few of us writing about people, relationships, circumstances and their consequences can escape an indebtedness to Jean Paul Sartre.  This is shared for that reason.

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