UK Sartre Society Annual Conference 2012
SARTRE AND ETHICS Friday 14 September Les Salons, Institut Français, Queensbury Place, London SW7 2DT 9.30 – registration 10.00-‐10.40 The Opening Pages of Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics Paul Wallace (independent) 10.40-‐11.20 Sartre and Negativist Ethics Patrick Engel (Basel) coffee 11.40-‐12.20 Ethics Between Liberty and Alterity: Sartre’s Point of View Annalisa Marinelli (Bari Aldo Moro) 12.20-‐1.00 Ethics in Practice: the Dialectic of Authenticity and Consequentialism Alfred Betschart (independent) lunch 2.20-‐3.00 Sartre on Hegel’s Dialectic of Mastery and Servitude Daniel Herbert (Sheffield) 3.00-‐3.40 Shame as Fellow Feeling Christian Skirke (UvA) coffee 4.00-‐4.40 A Legacy of Shame: Occupation, Ambiguity, and Abortion in Beauvoir and Sartre Ruth Kitchen (Leeds) 4.40-‐5.20 Catastrophe, Proximity, Adherence: Sartre on Cinema in Les Mots Patrick ffrench (KCL) 5.30-‐6.00 AGM of the UK Sartre Society (all welcome) bar
ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS
Paul Wallace The Opening Pages of Sartre’s Notebooks For an Ethics (with reference to Being and Nothingness and The Critique of Dialectical Reason, and commenting on Simone De Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity). Justification for the Research Dr. Annette Lavers has already perceptively commented in her TLS review of The Notebooks that it is a classic deserving equal status with Being and Nothingness and The Critique of Dialectical Reason. I agree and would add that it is a key transitional text. Apart from being the work Sartre promised at the end of Being and Nothingness, it comes at a key point in Sartre’s development (19471948) when, after the experience of the war years, Sartre moved from a position based on Rationalism and the abstract individual, to a position based on the historical and social conditioning of the individual and the importance of social relationships - and a more Dialectical approach. The terms he used in Being and Nothingness are transformed in line with this more dialectical principle e.g. the opposition between individuality and universality is transformed to the ‘concrete universal’ prefiguring Sartre’s later use of the ‘singular universal’. Approach /Method Despite many Sartre scholars’ use of the terms progressive-regressive, a long study of Sartre’s work has convinced me that the evidence points towards the formulation regressive-progressive. As Sartre says - we need to first construct a descriptive analytical, chronological account before we can move to synthesising dialectical judgements.
So, faced with this long - 574 page, relatively
understudied text, I propose to begin with a close descriptive-analytical reading of the opening section where many of Sartre’s preoccupations are stated. Content of the paper On the first page Sartre outlines the project, the programme of his research: to subject ontological, theological, formal views of ethics to an existential critique, including all the key terms of ethics; E.g. Right, Wrong, Good, Bad, Duty etc. Rather than doing (i.e. praxis) being subordinated to Being, Sartre proposes the opposite; desire, need, will be foregrounded. Sartre sums up his approach: ‘Give someone who is thirsty something to drink not in order to be good but in order to overcome his thirst’. We see Sartre consulting and commenting on previous ethical systems, e.g. Kant - and Sartre’s intention to make ethics social and historical and situated.
Patrick Engel Sartre and Negativist Ethics In my contribution, I want to pursue two (interrelated) aims. My first aim is to display the relation between Negativity and Ethics in Sartre. On the one hand, Sartre's early magnum opus Being and Nothingness describes human beings as constituted by a normative Negativity. In the literature, this has astonishingly seldom been considered as a topic in its own right. Following Philosophical Negativism, as it has been developed mainly by Michael Theunissen, I highlight the negativity in Sartre's ontology. Such Philosophical Negativism sets out from the thought that our present-day situation is such that it is no longer possible to positively determine what ought to be (i.e. to determine the good, the just, human happiness, and similar topics of traditional ethical thought). Hence, it suggests that we focus primarily on negative phenomena––e.g. suffering, alienation, or submission––, and on this basis gives a Social Philosophical account of what ought not to be. On the other hand, Sartre's repeated attempts to develop an ethical outlook all failed. The reason for this repeated failure lies mainly in the fact that on the basis of the negativist ontology of Being and Nothingness it is simply not possible to develop an ethical outlook––at least not of the traditional positive kind. Let me now come to the second aim, which builds on the first and is where my prime interest lies. Departing from Sartre, I hold that the fact that it is impossible to develop a traditional positive ethics based on Sartre's negativist ontology should not be interpreted as a failure. Rather, the problems Sartre encountered can be fruitfully drawn on by a genuine Negativist approach to ethics. For, that he encountered insurmountable difficulties in his attempt to determine what ought to be reinforces the main thesis of Philosophical Negativism I was talking about above, namely that it is simply no longer possible to determine the good and the just. In Adorno's words: "We may not know what the absolute good is, or what the absolute norm is, and not even what the human being, and what humanness and humanity is, but what inhumanity is––this we know very precisely." And that we indeed can determine and criticise inhumanity is something that is proved by Sartre's entire oeuvre, especially by his Social Philosophical late work. So, on the one hand, Sartre is concerned with phenomena of existential and social negativity (in Being and Nothingness and The Critique of Dialectical Reason, respectively). And on the other hand, he again and again attempts to formulate an ethical outlook on this basis. And this is why his philosophical work is an important source for a genuinely negative ethics. Based on relevant passages in his Notes on Ethics, I will display his founding insights into such an approach. Thereby, I will further spell out what such an ethics could amount to. Negativist Ethics is a counterbalance and genuine alternative to the prevalent 'positivism' of traditional ethical thought (that is, to its exclusive focus on the good and the just). And not surprisingly, in present-day Social Philosophy it is of growing importance. This is why it promises to show us Sartre's philosophy in a new and interesting light.
Annalisa Marinelli Ethics between Liberty and Alterity: Sartre’s point of view Sartre’s analysis of ethics is based on, at least, two outstanding concepts. They are liberty and alterity, topics that are typical of the French author’s whole intellectual life. The ethics question, as a matter of fact, investigated by Sartre in particular in the Cahiers pour une morale, is preceded (and not only chronological) by a well-known phenomenological analysis on liberty and alterity dealt with in L’Etre et le Néant . The ontological liberty of man intertwines with the alterity, creating a strong and continuous conflict. How can we make an ethics of mutual respect if to be for the others represent the conflict and if the liberty is an originary ontological matter? L’Etre et le Néant wants to be a work of phenomenological ontology and however, the possibility of an ethical development seems to appear in the last part, dedicated, in the last paragraph to the moral prospectives of Sartre’s thought. The individual that acts in a correct way is, as Sartre says in these pages, the man who is conscious of his “absolute” liberty and of the inexistence of transcendental values that should be the basis of the own way of life. The awareness of the personal liberty and the bad faith seem to be, in L’Etre et le Néant, the unique line of demarcation among the individuals. The theory of the ethical equivalence of the actions and the inexistence of transcendental values gives the L’Etre et le Néant a connotation of great ethical nihilism. In order to avoid these accusations, Sartre added in L’existentialisme est un humanisme Kant’s formal ethics, even if he didn’t accept completely it. The individual who acts ethically, Sartre says, is the man who bases his acting on liberty. According to me, these moral developments stand for extrinsic formulations in comparison with the philosophy of the L’Etre et le Néant. In my opinion also in Cahiers pour une morale ethics originated from a free game of liberty and alterity. Because of the fear of non involvement, liberty alienates the own will, in front of the others. The alterity in Cahiers pour une morale is still an principal concept. As a matter of fact, the only possibility of creating a path of release consists in the deconstruction of the forms of the alterity that tyrannize man. The attempt of release is impossible because man, since his birth, is compelled to face an existing reality, meeting immediately with the alterity.
Alfred Betschart Ethics in Practice: the Dialectics of Authenticity and Consequentialism The ethics which Sartre and Beauvoir left us resembles a quarry. Although its major piece is an ethics of authenticity, most of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s writings dealt with typical problems of a consequentialist ethics: ends vs. means; dirty hands; ethics vs. history. We can find elements of a material value-ethics as well (in Saint Genet) which turned sociological in the 60s. Additionally their ethics can be characterized as a situational ethics, and with his emphasis on the other (and the group) Sartre is a precursor to modern discourse ethics. Finally in the 60s, Sartre turned to meta-ethical questions. To rebuild a truly Sartrean and Beauvoirean ethics from these rocks is more difficult than to rebuild an ancient temple in Greece. The biggest challenge is the reconciliation of the two major pillars of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s ethics, their ethics of authenticity and their rigid consequentialism. To resolve the conflict between them, Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s theoretical works are of little help. An alternative approach is to turn to how Sartre and Beauvoir solved this ethical problem in practice, particularly in their political actions. When we analyse Sartre’s (and Beauvoir’s) political program, the high importance of authenticity is obvious. Their criticism of bourgeois morality and their political commitment to questions of equality of women, discrimination of Jews, and freedom for Third World Countries are all connected to issues of authenticity. Only the question of war mobilised Sartre and Beauvoir as much, but e.g. for economic or labour policies (the issue for socialist/communist parties) they showed complete disregard. Most of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s political actions consisted of signing declarations and the like. Due their short-term and superficial character they hardly posed any serious ethical problem. The case was different for actions of long-term nature with allies of partly doubtful quality. The most important case is definitely Sartre’s alliance with the USSR (my article written about this subject will be published in the German Sartre Yearbook later this year). Others are Algeria, Cuba, or Sartre’s collaboration with the Gauche Prolétarienne. In all these cases we see a dialectical development. For most of the time rigid consequentialism governed. Anything that served the success of joint political projects was acceptable to Sartre: he concealed his true positions, he even lied. But at the beginning and at the end, at the various turns these relationships took, the question of authenticity regained its importance. The dialectics of authenticity and consequentialism was decisive for questions why he never became an ally of Mao’s China or Ho’s Vietnam, too, and why he always supported Israel, But in particular this approach explains well what we today consider to be turning points in Sartre’s development (1952/54, 1956, 1968/70). These were in fact less turning points than moments when the ethics of authenticity regained predominance over the usual consequentialism.
Daniel Herbert Sartre on Hegel’s Dialectic of Mastery and Servitude My intention in this paper is to examine Sartre’s critical appropriation and transformation of certain Hegelian themes concerning authentic being-for-itself and the intersubjective dynamics of the demand for moral recognition as a self-legislating agent. Although similarly concerned with the moral, social and political implications of Kant’s groundbreaking and influential conception of human subjectivity as a form of apperceptive self-determining consciousness which lays claim to treatment as an end-in-itself, Sartre and Hegel differ over the potential which our existential predicament affords for the satisfaction of any such demand for mutual recognition of one another as autonomous agents and authors of our own self-creation, within the limits set by the irreducibly contingent facticity of the socio-historical circumstances within which we find ourselves. Whereas Hegel presents the one-sided aspiration to wrest from the other a recognition of one’s own authentic subjectivity, without providing the same treatment in return, as a dialectically unstable form of consciousness the internal tensions of which cannot help but eventually surface at some point in Spirit’s journey towards self-realisation, thereby motivating a demand for more equitable terms of intersubjective esteem, Sartre’s phenomenological account of one’s experience of the other, and of one’s being-for-others, presents the dynamics of interpersonal relationships as marked by an ever present threat of domination and of the tendency to objectify the other or to deny one’s own autonomous selfhood. In Being and Nothingness, then, Sartre accuses Hegel of failing to provide an accurate phenomenological portrayal of the ontology of our existential predicament as being-for-itself and being-for-others, finding his predecessor guilty of an epistemological and ontological optimism which risks complacency in our assessment of the actual state of human interaction, even in societies which proclaim the moral equality and freedom of all persons. Although he seeks to accommodate a role for Hegel’s discussion of the dialectic of mastery and servitude, along with its related account of the so-called ‘life and death struggle’ between two subjects which ensues from one’s attempts to affirm one’s own autonomous subjecthood by receiving recognition of that status from another, Sartre remains critical of Hegel for failing to acknowledge certain obstacles to the mutually satisfactory resolution of such conflict, which result from constitutive features of our precarious existential predicament as being-for-itself which is repeatedly tempted to relinquish its authenticity and become dominated by others who are no less ready to deny one’s self-determining status. As such, Sartre departs from Hegel in acknowledging extra-rational factors which are not to be tamed by the dialectical self-development of conceptual thought but retain a subterranean influence in one’s attitudes towards oneself and others and which inhibit the realisation of stable and enduring states of mutual recognition between agents. I shall discuss the implications which Sartre’s conception of phenomenological ontology carries for his engagement with the dialectic of mastery and servitude, outline his critical response to Hegel’s approach and assess possible defences of the Hegelian position before proceeding to examine how Sartre’s thinking on these matters altered with his later appreciation of the socio-historical conditionality of freedom.
Christian Skirke Shame as Fellow Feeling Fellow feelings usually give us an empathetic glimpse of the mental lives of others. Shame usually makes us feel exposed to the gaze of others. On this understanding of both concepts, shame is not a fellow feeling. Sartre’s conception of shame, from Being and Nothingness, is different, or so I will claim in this paper. Obviously, Sartre’s shame is not simply a psychological reaction to the gaze of others. To him shame is an intentional structure that allows subjects to take the presence of others at face value. I propose an examination of this intentional structure as a peculiar intentional experience of experiences which are present but not undergone. My contribution has a reconstructive part and a critical part. The reconstructive part will discuss Sartre’s shame in the context of a larger family of intentional experiences of experiences which, along with reflection and memory, includes a phenomenological interpretation of empathy. The aim of the reconstruction is to link Sartre’s shame closely with empathy as discussed by Edith Stein (On the Problem of Empathy) and Husserl (his studies on intersubjectivity, Husserliana 13-15). In the critical part I will try to bring to bear my empathetic interpretation of shame on a wellknown objection to Sartre’s account of others. This is the complaint that shame owes its prominent role to an inappropriate, objectifying, angle on interpersonal relations. I will defend Sartre’s account by presenting it as a response avant la lettre to what has come to be known as the conceptual problem of other minds, the sceptical problem that we may lack the very idea of others because we cannot conceive of others unlike ourselves. Sartre’s shame is central for his response to this sceptical problem because, like Stein’s and Husserl’s empathy, shame allows subjects to take at face value the presence of others unlike oneself. As far as the phenomenology of interpersonal relations is concerned, there seems much to recommend Sartre’s approach to interpersonal relations and the intentional structure at its heart.
Ruth Kitchen A Legacy of Shame: Occupation, Ambiguity, and Abortion in the writing of Beauvoir and Sartre This paper examines the concept of wartime and postwar shame in the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre. The paper explores the notion of shame by relating the ethics of abortion to the experience of the Nazi Occupation of France. Under Vichy, in 1942, abortion became a treasonable offence. The politicization of abortion suggests its ethical significance for the era. The discussion draws on the account of Hélène Bertrand's abortion in Le sang des autres (Lsda), and Beauvoir's discussion of abortion in Le deuxième sexe, (Lds) which she links to the topic of ambiguity, and compares this with Sartre's writing on shame in L'être et le néant (Leln). Lsda recounts key ethical issues of the wartime and postwar era including the humiliation of defeat and invasion, the complicity of living under Occupation, collaboration, and resistance. Although Hélène's abortion occurs before the war, the book is published postwar, in 1945. The paper proposes that Hélène's experience and Beauvoir's ethics of abortion can be read as an analogy for France's wartime experiences and postwar memories of shame about the Occupation. In Lds in 1949, Beauvoir describes the shame and fear of women who 'choose' to have an abortion. She argues that the procedure is profoundly divisive and fractures a woman’s sense of identity as although she may not desire to be pregnant, she often experiences a troubled reconciliation with her ‘choice’. Beauvoir declares that the predicament of the abortee exemplifies the problem of ‘ambiguity’. In Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté (Pumdla), Beauvoir explores the 'ambiguity' whereby a subject has the potential to deny the freedom of the other by treating her/him as an object rather than a conscious subject. Abortion engenders ambiguity by forcing a woman to 'choose' to either assume her own agency by limiting the ‘freedom’ of the foetus, or alternatively, to become object to the imposing will and freedom of the life force that is growing within her. In his 1943 work, Leln, Sartre examines this issue of opposing freedoms as a feature of shame. The paper will discuss how Sartre's philosophy of shame in Leln and Beauvoir's handling of the questions of abortion and ambiguity in Lsda, Lds and Pumdla reveal an implicit discourse of shame, which can be related to France's experience of Occupation. It will consider whether differences between these works might reflect a cultural shift between wartime and postwar ethics. Retrospective meditations on the ethics of wartime and the postwar period play an influential role in the later works of both writers. The paper concludes by reflecting on how the repercussions of wartime and postwar shame appear to inform Sartre's and Beauvoir's writing in works such as Les mandarins and Les séquestrés d'Altona and proposes that an ethics of shame resulting from the experiences of the war might be considered significant in their later philosophical and political writing.
Patrick ffrench Catastrophe, Proximity, Adherence: Sartre on Cinema in Les Mots This paper will offer a close reading of the passage in Sartre’s Les Mots where the writer considers the childhood experience of a first visit to the cinema (Les Mots, Gallimard Folio, pp. 99-104). I will trace the ways in which Sartre’s text establishes implicit parallels between the history of the cinema, the political history of modernity, and his own biography, through figures of physical proximity and sensory experience, both visual and tactile. The cinema as Sartre discovers it is an inclusive space, which permits a sudden discovery of the ‘neighbour’, the person next to you. The practical proximity which the ‘salle de projection’ permits has a political and ethical status insofar as it founds a distinct sense of social engagement and community, significantly different from that ordained by Sartre’s paternal family. It inaugurates, in the writer’s retrospective account of his childhood experience, a love of the crowd (‘la foule’), which he qualifies as ‘nudity’, a bare presence of each individual to the collective (‘présence sans recul de chacun à tous’). I will compare this quasi-‐sociological construction of a collective through proximity to Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of community in the short essay ‘Eloge de la mêlée’ (Être singulier pluriel, Galilée, 1996) and explore the multiple resonances of Sartre’s association of it with his later experience of incarceration in Stalag XII D in 1940. Sartre links the space of the cinema to that of the camp through the perception of a shared sense of danger, or ‘catastrophe’. The unexpected association of the concentrationary collective with the primal scene of a first experience of silent cinema poses provocative questions, which I will pursue through reference to Jean-Louis Schefer’s notion of the ‘nuit expérimentale’ of cinema (L’Homme ordinaire du cinema, Cahiers du cinema, 2000), in which the body and its subject are as if suspended and exposed to deformation and distortion. I will also draw upon Giorgio Agamben’s proposition of the camp as the nomos of political modernity (Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, 1998), arguing that Sartre’s account of the cinema as an eminently democratic space of proximity in the face of catastrophe contrasts with the notion common in a certain era of film theory, of the cinema as a space of ideological determination and subjection, and that this contrast runs parallel to the tension between Sartre’s notion of a collective in ‘adherence’, which emerges in the space of catastrophe (or of exception) and Agamben’s notion of bare life. I will show how Sartre constructs an implicit history of cinema in terms of its position and role in political modernity. It is a non-ceremonial, non-ritualised space, thus one which, in quasi-Benjaminian terms, is specific to modernity, but it is also a space of exception, where the status of the human and the ethical link to the neighbour emerges as a question.
