Jean Paul Sartre – Existentialism: an answer to existential crisis?

By: Hatto Fischer, Athens

Some further thoughts to Sartre’s 100th birthday

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Another kind of definition of Existentialism would be: ‘you exist, now you don’t’ – such elongation of the child’s perception of the world (or blending out of reality) can be ascribed to Existentialism when existence in the imagination depends on own decisions. It is like the child holding in front of its eyes the hands or not: for what cannot be seen by the child does not exist and vice versa everything seen is due to the decision to see that these things exist. If such insistence can persist, then surely existence becomes the reality we want to see and our existence in reality the way to look forward. It was Sartre who said, only once we know the goals of the future, we know how to exist in the presence. This means childhood is something like an elongation of a dream we can exist in reality without a final end.

Although Jean Paul Sartre has been associated with Existentialism, hardly anyone thought to develop further thoughts out of what everyone claimed to be the case, namely ‘life having become an existential crisis’.

Dostoevsky had seen in such crisis not only the confusion of the mind, but the danger of an absolute break-down of ‘morality’: in ‘Brother Karamazov’ he poses that critical question: ‘what if God is dead is then everything allowed?’ [1]

The linkage of morality to the existence of God was considered to be the most disturbing phenomenon since Nietzsche had pushed in his ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra” things to an absolute limit. As if ‘self-belief’ was an absurdity onto itself: the projection of the self not onto the mirror but what people cared to listen to while waiting for something else. [2]

[1] It echoes a fear of at least ‘moral relativism’, if not complete break down of ‘law and order’ by believing once there is no longer an absolute power upholding not merely belief in God, but also the belief in the power of church, state and community to uphold not only a certain type of law, but also a morality that goes with the observance of such law, then everything is lost to chaos and violence.

 

[2] Hoelderlin, Empedocles, as adopted by Peter Stein for the Schaubuehne in Berlin 1976, depicted people waiting in a train station after 1945; no more trains were arriving nor departing, but they all were still waiting for the big leader to speak to them. They had not gotten out of their dependency to the leader. As a matter of fact, the slave can be defined as the one who gives up everything – house, wife, family, children, friends – to serve the leader. There is no freedom if such ‘mental’ chains are created in absence of meaning in anything else but serving the leader. Such disturbing features as devotion were played through in the theatre to understand the more subtle points in not merely Fascism, but in slave like attitudes dominating in people’s lives over centuries. This existence without any freedom was what created ‘fear’ in the seventies. Despite the Student Revolt having started to question things, developments thereafter meant turning again attention to the ‘failure of the Enlightenment’ as described already by Adorno and Horkheimer 1944.

 

Clearly Nietzsche was making up with his brand of Nihilism for loss of recognition and understanding by following the path of the would-be prophet, if conditions allow for. Unfortunately for him they never came and hence Nietzsche ended up admiring but the fruit seller on the market of Torino. He thought that person was able to understand him while others, in particular the academics, were not. [1]

A similar theme is touched upon by Thomas Mann in his Dr. Faustus: a model of Schoenberg as advised by Adorno. In the story of Dr. Faustus, the composer leaves in his final years of creative work the city of Munich to live on a farm in the rural countryside of Baveria; when he finally invites friends from the city to hear his newest piano composition which he plays himself, he breaks down. The farm woman throws the guests out. She claims to be the only one to understand the genius but not those high nosed supposing cultivated urban people.

Now, it is interesting to be side tracked on the relationship between Sartre and Existentialism by letting a narrative glance at biographies and their literary replicas reveal certain things. They all show a similar pattern: the understanding writers, artists, poets etc. seek from other people as a highly precarious undertaking. When Klaus Mann heard about the publisher’s refusal to publish his book about the actor Gruendgens, he commits suicide. It relates to existential crisis especially once intellectual thought is no longer safeguarded by academic institutions. Not only Ingeborg Bachmann or Slyvia Plath, but Kleist and Guenderrode as described by Christa Wolf in ‘Kein Ort. Nirgends’ (No place. Nowhere) were subject to an existential crisis that begins not with the ‘God that failed’ (Arthur Koestler) but with not being able to live inside of society as it has become: an academia turned scientific and more so technological orientated as the new power over the masses (Bertrand Russell). ‘Not knowing how to exist in such a society’ goes hand in hand with not having any money or even squandering it like Dostoevsky did when still a gambler and only rescued once the love of a woman made him write himself out of a crushing debt.

Here Orwell’s description of his life as journalist in Paris is most apt, for once his editor did not send him the money he needed to live on he was forced to put his winter coat on loan in exchange for a few coins and when that little money had vanished due to need for food and shelter he had to work as dish washer down in the third cellar of a big hotel and restaurant place. This is when Orwell discovered the dishonesty of the waiters: when they serve people at the tables their faces are all smile, but behind their backs, once through those swing doors separating kitchen from restaurant, they curse them or else make disgusting remarks about those they wait on. It may be a way of getting back at this constant humiliation which is a core experience of their jobs: serving people who are often outrageous in their discontent and take pleasure in looking down on those who have to attend to their whimsical wishes.

Once back in London Orwell sees the other system of poverty by which society keeps at bay the existential crisis of those without jobs, without homes: they can stay in places for the homeless but only one night and after having undressed they get washed by the hose; the next day they have to move on and so the poor rotate themselves around the entire country with society never seeing fully their plight but forces them to move on until out of sight both literally and physically.

Indeed there was a longing by writers and artists for society to see reality as it is. After Second World War, it became, however, clear that many people did not want to see the disappearance of the Jews, never mind what happened to them in the concentration camps. That inspired some to reflect upon a possible ‘ethics of seeing’ or what action it takes before seeing can be called knowing what is happening in reality. For actions means overcoming fear of consequences for the ‘self’ once the position of the neutral bystander is given up. Jean Paul Sartre would call this ‘political action’ as exemplified by him visiting the Baader-Meinhof group when imprisoned already in Stammheim. It made explicit a morally inspired seeing ‘for myself’ what is the case the Existentialist answer to any crisis.

 Still, there are many ways to understand existential crisis as it presented itself to writers and philosophers after 1945. As shown by Albert Camus in view of the crisis in Algier, it can lead to a loss of words: a silence. Ronald Aronson calls it a strange withdrawal from reality by someone who not only came from there but knew so well its reality. The interpretation given by Ronald Aronson carries here some weight for Camus differently from Sartre did not want to tell his own people the truth of the matter, namely that the colonial system as such had failed and there could not be any reconciliation at humanistic level between the one and the other side. Sartre’s own interpretation is that Camus had not learned since Resistance and Liberation ‘to live in history’. It means being fully committed and the willingness to take risks. In his last letter to Camus to end their friendship he parts with the question why Camus, “though born into the working class, has ignored since the war, ‘the struggle of man’:

 

You rebelled against death, but in the industrial belts which surround cities, other men rebelled against social conditions that raise the morality rates. When a child dies, you blamed the absurdity of the world and the deaf and blind God that you created in order to be able to spit in his face. But the child’s father, if he was unemployed or an unskilled laborer, blamed men. He knew very well that the absurdity of our condition is not the same in Passy as in Billancourt.”[2]

 

Sartre ended this friendship with Camus by ‘refusing to fight him’. In other words, he buried this relationship in silence and thereby crushed perhaps Camus more than what would have been important to not merely Camus, but to the entire debate amongst the political Left, namely how not to fall silent in view of atrocities occurring but for various reasons not capable of contradicting the very mechanism that produces such crisis. In the case of Sartre, the most obvious case was his over identification with the Communist party after 1945. He did so out of a desire to become politically active and in realizing a struggle without violence was impossible. He did leave, however, the party once the bloody crushing of the Hungarian uprising in 1956 could no longer be justified by supporting such a Party that evokes suppression. In that sense, existential crisis takes on a political meaning or what is provoked in the mind when the contradiction between human ideals and violence of actions can no longer be bridged but have to be confronted anew.

Let us return, however, to the existential crisis being provoked as in the case of Nietzsche by being thrown out of the Academic world. As said earlier on in a footnote, Nietzsche spoiled his own relationship to the academic world by making highly outrageous speeches containing a strong taint of anti-Semitism. He did so again under the influence of Wagner. But Nietzsche suffered thereafter under this lack of recognition. Over and again he would attempt to re-enter the academic world e.g. when in Turin he applied to the University of Athens.

Now Sartre differs here greatly when it comes to the academic world. Although he was always chided in the academic world as being not a philosopher of great validity, but an activist, Sartre answered back by taking philosophy to mean political action. This makes Sartre unique and very different from Nietzsche. Sartre did not seek the understanding so much of the others but was himself a protagonist of the situation he found himself in at the moment.

An interpretation of Sartre would be that existence begins by drawing a personal circle around oneself and by just turning around see how the shadow one casts stands still or rather flirts with the movement one makes while not being distracted from the source of light: the sun. Camus would use this shadow of existence to examine perception as deception, or when the sun stands the highest and no shadows are cast. That would mean in the culture of Algier and the Mediterranean death: when the person no longer casts any shadow. The significance of personal existence lies in this material something, something existing as long as that person does not go away.

Therefore, as an image of a personal circle of understanding, here Sartre oddly enough would not be very far from what Gadamer described as the method of Hermeneutic: a method to be used to understand the context of words in an original text so that they can be translated into the present. But again Sartre would dance out of that academic and sophisticated realm (and out of the shadow of towering greatness of former philosophers) and speak first of all about the difference between imagining and then seeing in real terms first the shadow, then the self as body and mind living at a certain moment and thereby realizing that existence is the situation in which one is in.

Sartre sees ‘situation’ not as predicament but as having material substance or more precisely a ‘built in inertia’ and tension. What resonates in the situation is the ‘energy of existence’, something which should not be converted into ‘power of existence’ as would later Michel Foucault. For Sartre is much closer to Descartes’ dictum: “I doubt, therefore I am” but he approaches this “I am” from quite a different angle. For Sartre differs again in nuances from Descartes by describing the self as physical existence through which some energy provides the ‘self’ with the power to live and to see himself as existence in reality. Sartre seems to suggest everything depends on making that link between “I exist” and, therefore, “I am” without being assertive about it but rather to let existence in reality be formed by the situation the ‘I’ finds itself to be in. Of importance is to Sartre that only once freedom enters as link between existence and being, then there is no absolute necessity – a coercive principle - needed but a becoming in the situation as free person in this world.[3]

How important that philosophical premise of existence of self is, that can only be understood better when compared with how Kant relates ‘self’ to the mind being affected when deducing the lawfulness of existence out of something and thereby affecting the mind. In one of his most important criticisms of Kant Adorno made the remark that Kant uses so many times the ‘self’ as term but never defines this anywhere in his writings. This is because Kant wanted to abstract from locality and redefine everything in terms of the experiment performed solely in space and time i.e. when it comes to testing laws and thereby discovering that a certain lawfulness exists in things e.g. when two balls with different weights are let free to roll down a declined slope. As in any set experiment, lawfulness can be described as outcome of predicting and learning out of the failure of the hypothesis. It was later what Karl Popper developed into the method of falsification in order to demand every theory has to be falsifiable for otherwise it could never be true.

Karl Popper did follow Kant more closely than any other philosopher but that did not offer anything to the need of the individual to discover such a ‘self’ that was not arbitrary, could exist and would not be falsified in different situations. Here Kant discovered to his dismay that not even the imagination of the self could follow everywhere, even though his personal dictum was “Ich denke, ich kann ueberall hin meine Vorstellung begleiten” – ‘I think, I can accompany everywhere my imagination. That split between a personal self and someone moving within social structures was then exactly the reason for disasters to come: persons becoming soldiers who leave their selves behind and undergo a countless deaths (Shakespeare) in order to realize not themselves, but the power someone else has over them when they give up their individual freedom and therefore conscience. The consequences of power over people being gained by splitting social actors off from their personal ‘selves’ has not been understood to date. It is merely circumscribed as the process of dehumanization when soldiers caught in a dirty war end up despising their enemies and forgetting that they are like themselves just ordinary human beings.

Of interest is what Habermas said in response to the split between personal and scientific ways of thinking, preparing the way for power over the masses by pushing ahead technology without morality (Bertrand Russell) and refining the methodology of organization (Max Weber’s bureaucracy), namely this leaves but Psychoanalysis as the only science which allows for ‘self-understanding’. Freud developed this method of self understanding as an interesting counter example from the usual alienation of people with regards to their ‘self’.

Now, from an analytical viewpoint, understanding (empathy) does not go very far nor does it allow for resistance against the false argument that if God is dead, then everything is allowed. Human self consciousness, even when constituted through human language touched by ‘universal pain’ (as Sartre saw especially Jazz, the music of the Black people), does not allow everything. Sartre sees in freedom not a random or arbitrary existence, but is related to ‘le vecu’: lived through experiences. ‘Le vecu’ makes everything said and thought authentic once conscious of the limits since expressions thereof are in terms of self referential existence.

‘Le vecu’ is the reality of existence in which the ‘I’ can trust out of which develops the dialectic of perception and recognition (Jean Amery). Not to be perceived as mere sum of experiences – here a trace of psychoanalytical approach becomes noticeable – but as ‘memory track’ to be worked through before ‘dialectical reasoning’ becomes conceivable, Sartre spend a great deal of his philosophical efforts to ensure in answer to the above mentioned philosophers and especially to Kant that a ‘critique of practical reasoning’ would be possible.

In other words, if upholding freedom is to be considered as a first answer to the existential crisis that man faces, then it should be remembered what Sartre said about Existentialism: the working out of special conditions by which then the theories of Marx could be implemented. But while discussions about the relationship between Existentialism and Marxism has faded out since 1989 and the collapse of the former Soviet Union, the existential crisis in a global situation has shifted attention even more so to what Sartre had in mind when writing extensively about his understanding of a ‘critique of practical reasoning’. That philosophical work of Sartre has yet to be understood and applied to a world faced by the challenge of globalization.

[1] Nietzsche had been misused by Wagner who preferred him to remain an academic since praise of his type of music by a professor would carry more weight. Nietzsche spoiled his academic reputation by becoming extreme anti-Semitic. It is said again due to the influence of Wagner.

[2] Ronald Aronson, “The Explosion” in: Camus and Sartre, Chicago Press, 2004, p. 153

[3] Such freedom makes a God also not necessary, or it explains the atheism of Sartre whereby the definition of Atheism by Ernst Bloch should be kept in mind: a belief in God but outside any kind of institutional framework.

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