Sartrean Existentialism Research Articles

Nausea and the Experience of the "II y a"

Despite playing virtually no interlocutory role in Sartre's published texts, Emmanuel Levinas makes two interesting intrusions into Sartre's intellectual biography, one at the beginning and one at the very end of Sartre's career as a thinker. In the first place, it was Levinas's 1930 dissertation on Husserl that served as Sartre's written introduction to phenomenology and inspired him to travel to Germany to study firsthand the ideas that were to inspire his existentialist theories of consciousness and reality.' Five decades later, Levinas surfaces again as an implicit influence behind Sartre's suggestive comments on obligation and the philosophical and political relevance of Judaism in the interviews with Benny Levy published just before Sartre's death in 1980.2 As is well known, however, these final interviews caused something of a scandal among Sartre's closest friends and longtime associates. Perceived as a radical departure from principles central to his existentialism in both its phenomenological and Marxist incarnations, the interviews were dismissed by many (including de Beauvoir) as the unreliable products of a declining mind rendered susceptible to Levy's alleged manipulation by old age and rapidly failing health.3 My intention in the present essay is not to attempt to judge how compatible Sartre's final position might be with the thought of Levinas by entering into the contentious debate over the degree of importance that should be attributed to the 1980 interviews. I merely allude to them, along with the admittedly somewhat coincidental role Levinas played in Sartre's initial foray into phenomenology, as a word of caution against portraying the relationship between the two philosophers as one of nothing but sustained and intractable opposition. Without a doubt, vast divergences with Levinas mark Sartre's existentialism even prior to its turn towards Marxism and away from the Husserlian and Heideggerian inspirations the two thinkers share, as well as after his apparent embrace of certain Levinasian themes in his discussions with Levy. And in fact, many of Levinas's statements about the ethical encounter with the Other, particularly in Totality and Infinity, can be read as fairly direct responses to Sartre's influential description of intersubjectivity in Being and Nothingness.4 Despite the fact that the posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics make it impossible to maintain that Sartre consistently held interpersonal life to be inescapably conflictual, his notion of the originally allergic relation between Self and Other does indeed stand in marked tension with Levinas's vision of human relations as ultimately rooted in a primordial peace.5 In order to find some common ground between thinkers who can seem sometimes to stand in a relationship of irreducible antagonism, I would thus like to shift the focus of attention away from their fundamentally disparate conceptions of the Other to a less often discussed theme central to some of the earliest texts of both. Specifically, my aim is to explore the remarkable and under-appreciated convergence between Sartre's descriptions of the experience of naked or being-in-itself (in one of the senses this equivocal term bears in Sartre's early thought) and the somewhat sketchier analyses of conscious life in its encounter with pure being in Levinas's first original works. His frequent attempts to distance himself from the philosophy of existence notwithstanding,6 I will argue that these texts of Levinas are characterized by a markedly existentialist tenor, or more precisely, by an affinity with Sartre's classic analyses of nausea in the 1938 novel of that name. Although Sartre after Nausea and Levinas after Time and the Other have relatively little to say about the notion of pure existence, a notion which is, I will argue, philosophically problematic, my contention is that their early analyses of the disgust or horror before naked being remain implicitly in effect in much of their later work, and that the different solutions they envision to the problem posed by the confrontation with being can help to explain the divergent paths their mature philosophies end up taking. …

Warshawski's Situation: Beauvoirean Feminism and the Hard-Boiled Detective

When Sara Paretsky began publishing stories about hard-boiled detective Victoria (V. I.) Warshawski, her challenge, she remarked, was to negotiate the change from a male to a female protagonist without making Warshawski Philip Marlowe in drag, to work within the conventions of the traditional hard-boiled detective tradition without making Warshawski's femininity an occasion for parody.' This was not an easy task because, as Paretsky recognized, giving the hard-boiled detective a female body fundamentally complicates the web of associations that legitimate his patterns of action, attributes of character, and relations to his world; it disrupts the genre's association of masculinity with that special kind of self capable of the effective investigation and execution of justice. Escaping from the all-or-nothing economy of formulaic adherence to convention or outright genre parody, Paretsky instead undertakes the more complex work of reimagining and reconceiving the way the convention figures the relation between sexed bodies and individual agency.2 Grounded in the situation of a female body acting within a patriarchal environment, a detective like Warshawski fundamentally complicates the ethical opposition deeply enmeshed in the ethos of American masculinity that informs the classic Chandlerian hard-boiled detective, that between the inherent corruptness of collectivity and the potential purity of properly guarded individuality. The theoretical model that best articulates Warshawski's combination of individualist action with her awareness of its social context is one that, like Warshawski herself, is the product of a feminist reworking of a mid-century, masculinist vision of the world. In much the same way that Paretksy's fiction reconfigures the classic hard-boiled detective, in The Second Sex (1949) Simone de Beauvoir reworks the conceptual framework of Sartrean existentialism from a perspective grounded in the embodiedness of female experience.' And, just as Paretsky's fiction seems untimely in its contemporary feminist appropriation of a seemingly anachronistic set of conventions, Beauvoir's work is difficult to take seriously in a contemporary context because of its

Re-reading the Second Sex

In this re-reading of The Second Sex, the author argues that Beauvoir transgressively employs Sartre’s universal binary categories of Being and Nothingnessin her effort to account for the economic, political, cultural and psychological conditions of women’s situation. In doing so, she challenges Sartre’s theory of radical ontological freedom and concretizes his abstract philosophic voice, thereby avoiding their rationalist and voluntarist implications. Contesting Beauvoir’s feminist critics, who saw her as emotionally and philosophically dependent on Sartre and her work as an amalgam of Sartrean existentialism and feminist insights, the author maintains that Beauvoir had her own independent project – to transform Sartrean existentialism to make it contextually sensitive. Distancing herself from Sartre’s theory of freedom and its valorization of masculine experience and disembodied consciousnesses, Beauvoir’s theory of situational freedom and embodied subjectivity draws her closer to the existentialism of Merleau-Ponty.

Varieties of Determinism: Nabokov among Rorty, Freud, and Sartre

In 1989, Richard Rorty published an important, philosophically astute essay on Vladimir Nabokov entitled "The Barber of Kasbeam: Nabokov on Cruelty." Despite this essay's general excellence, however, it makes the curious mistake of all but dismissing Nabokov's notorious antipathy for Sigmund Freud as symptomatic of a jealousy borne of similarity . Though the author of the following essay has learned much from Rorty, he disputes Rorty's conflation of Nabokov, an optimist, with Freud, a pessimist. To this end, "Varieties of Determinism" explores the intellectual divide separating Nabokov from Freud by contrasting their divergent attitudes on determinism as said attitudes relate to art and science. The essay also seeks to explain why, in the context of his own project, Rorty makes the mistake of conflating two disparate figures in the first place. From there, the essay turns to a fourth writer, Jean-Paul Sartre. Another of Nabokov's bêtes-noires , Sartre is appropriate to this discussion insofar as his attitudes toward determinism resemble Nabokov's in key respects. In sum, "Varieties of Determinism" builds on "The Barber of Kasbeam" by placing its comments into sharper focus and by extending its discussion of Nabokov's metaphysical optimism into new areas: the scientism of Freud, the existentialism of Sartre, and the pragmatism of Rorty himself.

The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities, and: Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex', and: Beauvoir and The Second Sex : Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism, and: Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir (review)

Reviewed by: The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities by Debra B. Bergoffen, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’ by Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism by Margaret A. Simons, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir by Karen Vintges Nancy Bauer Debra B. Bergoffen. The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologıes, Erotic Generosities. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997. Pp. x + 250. Cloth, $54.50. Eva Lundgren-Gothlin. Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex.’ Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press and University Press of New England, 1996. Pp. xii + 329. Paper, $19.95. Margaret A. Simons. Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999. Pp. xx + 263. Cloth, $25.95. Karen Vintges, Philosophy as Passion: The Thinking of Simone de Beauvoir. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 202. Paper, $19.95. Anyone who is seriously interested in Simone de Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy must contend sooner or later with the fact that she denied, repeatedly and vehemently throughout her lifetime, that she was a philosopher. Of course, a certain species of Beauvoir-detractor will be tempted to take these denials at face value, especially since they almost always went hand in hand with Beauvoir’s plausible-sounding [End Page 688] declarations that anything philosophical about her work could be traced to the thinking of her lifelong companion Jean-Paul Sartre, who, she underscored, was the “real” philosopher in their relationship. But the very strength and frequency of her abjurations of the title of philosopher is a sign that, like Freud, Beauvoir (who wrote several straightforwardly philosophical essays, including the monograph-length Ethics of Ambiguity and Pyrrhus et Cınéas) was motivated not so much by modesty or self-abnegation but by a desire to distance herself from what counted, at least in the middle of this century, as philosophy. For most of the past 50 years, English-speaking readers of Beauvoir have simply accepted her portrayal of her relationship to philosophy. On the ordinary view, The Second Sex, while an important historical touchstone for “feminist theory” is not, or not quite, a philosophical piece of writing, and those of her publications that merit that title are mere apologetics for Sartrean existentialism. But in the years since Beauvoir’s death in 1986 allowed for the release of her voluminous and revealing letters to Sartre, more and more feminist philosophers have been taking a second look at The Second Sex and Beauvoir’s other essays and fiction as they try to engage productively both with non-academic feminist work and with the philosophical mainstream. As a result, the difficult question of just how to assess Beauvoir’s relationship both to philosophy in general and to Sartre in particular has become pressing and is at the center of the four books under review here. The authors of these books are each committed, in their own sometimes strikingly different ways, to two theses: first, that to understand Beauvoir’s place in the history of philosophy one must study her appropriations of the work of philosophers other than just Sartre and, second, that at the heart of Beauvoir’s enterprise in all of her work is a desire to think about how to create and sustain reciprocity between an existentially committed self and an equally autonomous other. The most historically oriented and, on my view, meticulous exploration of Beauvoir’s relationship to her philosophical influences is Lundgren-Gothlin’s superb Sex and Exıstence, which chronicles Beauvoir’s indebtedness to and interest in, especially, Hegel and Marx. Lundgren-Gothlin, a philosophically trained Swedish intellectual historian, shows decisively that one cannot make philosophical sense of The Second Sex as long as one reduces its philosophical dimension to boilerplate Sartreanism. Indeed, given Sartre’s antipathy toward Marx and his ambivalence about Hegel in Beıng and Nothingness, Lundgren-Gothlin’s work raises serious questions about the extent to which Beauvoir’s considered views in The Second Sex are even compatible with those of the early...

A Survivor's Ethics: Levinas's Challenge to Philosophy

If Heidegger's ontology is a modernist philosophy of disenchantment informed by a belligerent desire for authenticity1 and if Sartre's existentialism is a philosophy of and for those who are caught up in the very struggle of survival,2 Levinas's ethics can be viewed as a survivor's philosophy. Rather than merely theorizing and denouncing the dialectic of enlightenment and its cataclysmic denouement in the holocaust, Levinas relentlessly and uncompromisingly performs the subversion and displacement of reason and rationality in and through the very fabric of his ethical discourse. No doubt, Levinas's ethics will have emerged as one of the most complex, poignant, and responsible philosophical pronouncements on this century's darkest moments. In this essay, I trace Levinas's ethics, focusing in particular on his uneasy relation to and problematic place within the "Western" philosophical tradition, on his idiosyncratic ethical functionalization and conceptualization of language, and, finally, on his valorization of poetry as an outstandingly salient manifestation of and testimony to the ethical.3

Sartre's Existentialism and Social Work

Abstract The profession of social work is currently facing a crisis of authentic identity. Social work's persistent reliance on other social sciences for its ontological justification, and its tendency to change its mission in response to social reality is inconsistent with authenticity. Existentialism, as a philosophy that values human freedom, social praxis and mutual cooperation towards fulfillment of needs, offers a framework for individual and social transformation congruent with the ideals of social work. In addition, Sartre's existential evolution from unwavering individualism in Being and Nothingness to the necessity of cooperative action in the Critique of Dialectical Reason may help to unify social work practice on the micro and macro levels.

An Appeal to Reopen the Question of Influence

Since my paper is focused rather narrowly on a single issue, I would like to preface it with some personal remarks in appreciation of Hazel Barnes and her contribution to philosophy. We are perhaps most indebted to Hazel Barnes for first bringing existentialism to the United States. Her translation of Being and Nothingness was a labor of love. Engaging with it critically, she made Sartrean existentialism her own. She also provided an important female presence in the field. For young women in the 1960s studying philosophy in all-male philosophy departments, the name of Hazel Barnes on the cover of Being and Nothingness was often the only woman's name ever encountered. But for many of us, our debt to Hazel Barnes is more personal. Her warm and generous response to appeals for letters in support of tenure or grant applications is legendary. So when I began the work of co-editing a six volume series of Beauvoir's philosophical texts in English translation, I naturally wrote to Hazel Barnes inviting her to serve as a consultant to the project. She agreed, to my great relief, and replied to my first query about the translation of a particular phrase with a two-page letter that left me and the young translator charmed, and utterly convinced by Hazel's argument. Hazel Barnes was also one of the first (after Merleau-Ponty in 1945) to offer a sustained philosophical analysis of Beauvoir's 1943 metaphysical novel, She Came to Stay. In the otherwise depressing history of philosophical commentary on Beauvoir, a history marked by contemptuous dismissal and cavalier mistranslation and misrepresentation of Beauvoir's work, Hazel Barnes's 1959 essay Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility stands out. In her analysis of She Came to Stay Barnes calls the similarity between Beauvoir's novel and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, both published in 1943, "too striking to be coincidence." Although Barnes "feels" that "the inspiration of the book was simply de Beauvoir's decision to show how Sartre's abstract principles could be made to work out in `real life,"' Barnes does not allow her feeling to close off the question of influence. In a footnote, Barnes adds: "I do not at all preclude the possibility that de Beauvoir has contributed to the formation of Sartre's philosophy. I suspect that his debt to her is considerable. All I mean in the present instance is that the novel serves as documentation for the theory, regardless of who had which idea first" (Barnes 1959, 121-22). Other scholars have rarely been as careful regarding the possibility of Beauvoir's philosophical influence on Sartre. With no philosophical texts by Beauvoir pre-dating her relationship with Sartre, and thus no sure means of determining "who had which idea first," most scholars have simply assumed that Beauvoir was Sartre's philosophical follower, a view encouraged by Beauvoir in her autobiographies and interviews from the 1960s until the end of her life. But, as we know, Beauvoir's autobiographies and interviews are often deceptive. Barnes's analysis of Beauvoir's posthumously published letters and journals from 1939-1941 concludes: "there is blatant evidence that . . . [Beauvoir] lied . . . in at least one important instance, to us, her public." The lie in question concerns Beauvoir's heterosexuality: "Beauvoir, more than once and unequivocally, stated to interviewers that she had never had erotic relations with a woman." But Beauvoir's "own written words" in the posthumously published journals and correspondence detail her erotic relationships with women. Barnes concludes that "Beauvoir was obviously bisexual" and that her denials were meant to protect the women close to her from a homophobic society (Barnes 1991b, 13, 16, 17). My own research on another of Beauvoir's journals has uncovered evidence that she lied to us in at least one other important instance. This time the lie concerns Beauvoir's involvement in philosophy. Beauvoir stated more than once and unequivocally that she was not a philosopher, that she did not do philosophy, and that she could not have influenced Sartre's philosophy (for example, see Simons and Benjamin [1979]). …

The Art of Doubting

Merleau-Ponty's essay, Doubt,1 appeared in December 1945, the same year he published his Phenomenology Perception, which would become classic manifesto phenomenology, and collaborated with Jean-Paul Same to found Les Temps Modernes. While the ostensible aim Merleau-Ponty's essay is an examination Cezanne's painting, it is no less thumbnail sketch his own philosophy as developed in Phenomenology Perception. Given that Merleau-Ponty seeks in Cezanne an artistic parallel to his own philosophical ruminations, our caution should be alerted; as Sabine Cotte noted while Curator France's National Museums, theories are contradictory enough to enable one to justify anything.2 But, while there is the danger that Merleau-Ponty finds in Cezanne only what he has put there, it must also be mentioned that Merleau-Ponty's examination continues to influence art historians and interpreters Cezanne.3 It might be claimed, in fact, that the very malleability Cezanne's work has its parallel in Merleau-Ponty, whose Phenomenology one early critic labeled a philosophy ambiguity.4 To stick with only one ambiguity at time, I will leave aside the question how Merleau-Ponty's examination Cezanne relates to that other interpreters,5 and instead focus on the positive characterization he offers Cezanne and its parallels with his own philosophy. I will begin by discussing the explicit themes Merleau-Ponty's essay, namely (a) the importance Cezanne's return to and (b) the relation the artist's life to the meaning his work, particularly as these themes elucidate the nature the peculiar to Cezanne. In the second part this essay, I will explore the significance this for understanding Merleau-Ponty's own work and especially his relation to Jean-Paul Sartre. Giacometti, Sartre's paradigm artist, also manifests doubt. But, I will argue, the doubt shared by Giacometti and Sartre differs significantly from that Merleau-Ponty and Cezanne, and it is within the space this difference that we can distinguish Merleau-Ponty's brand existential phenomenology from Sartre's existentialism.6 Metaphysical Doubt As the title his essay indicates, MerleauPonty is interested in Cezanne's doubt, that is, in his uncertainty, his lack self-confidence, the struggle and tension his life. When Cezanne first made his decision to become painter, this lack self-confidence prevented him from asking his father to send him to Paris. When he finally did embark on his career, chastised by his childhood friend Zola for his instability, his weakness, and his indecision (CD, 14/60), his attempts met with complete critical rejection. Described as a kind madman who paints in delirium tremens,7 an artist with diseased eyes,8 and but lamentable failure,9 critics wrote that of all known juries, none could even in dream entertain the possibility accepting any pictures this painter.10 And in fact the government, art authorities, and the public all cried out for the refusal donated to the Musee du Luxembourg, and later transferred to the Louvre,11 which contained several Cezannes, calling it collection rubbish which publicly dishonors French art.12 In the face such criticism, it is perhaps no surprise that Cezanne himself came to wonder if the novelty his painting were nothing more than an accident his body stemming from trouble with his eyes (CD, 13/59).13 But Cezanne's anxiety ran deeper than doubt about his painting ability. He often said he found life terrifying, while his fear death drove him to create will at the age forty-six and to begin practicing religion in his fifties. As he grew older, he detached himself more and more from those who admired his work, would motion from distance for friends not to approach him, avoided new situations, and relied on the established habits his life solitude. …

The Eclipse of Gender

In critical passage of introduction his Birth of Clinic, Michel Foucault suggests that we belong age of criticism whose lack of primary keeps us distance from an original (Foucault 1973, xv) and dooms us to patient construction of about discourses (xvi). Thus for Foucault comment is to admit by definition an excess of signifier over signified; necessary, unformulated of thought that language has left in shade-a that is very essence of that thought, driven outside its secret-but comment also presupposes that this unspoken element also slumbers within speech, and that by superabundance proper signifier, one may, in questioning it, give voice content that was not explicitly signified (ibid.). It will be my contention that in thebirth of modern we find nuanced discourse about gender that has for far too long been left in shade. Eclipse of Simone de Beauvoir For those of us who have followed history of modern from its inception, contribution of Simone de Beauvoir philo sophical question of gender is unformulated remainder that is yet be explicitly signified. For while Simone de Beauvoir explicitly sought give body and substance (materiality) Sartre's existential philosophy of Other by way of instance of gender (Le Doeuff, 1989, 52; Le Doeuff 1981), that substance has become so deeply buried in fabric of contemporary about that we do not even talk about it anymore. Indeed Simone de Beauvoir, sole heir philosophical tradition that seems have died with Jean-Paul Sartre,' has been buried along with him. difficulty of course is that she has, all intents and purposes, been buried alive. It is in this that case of Simone de Beauvoir presents us with hermeneutical puzzle in its own right. On one hand she is hailed as prophetess extraordinaire (O'Brien 1981, 65) and Mother of Us All (Ascher 1987; qtd. in Dietz 1992, 74), the emblematic intellectual of twentieth century (Moi 1994, 1), the greatest feminist theorist of our century (Moi 1994, 2), author of the definitive analysis of sexism (Firestone qtd. in Dietz 1992, 74), the classic manifesto of liberated woman (Dietz 1992.74), on other, we have dismissed her (work) even before we have encountered it. As Mary Dietz has recently pointed out: The Bible of contemporary American Second Sex seems have been worshipped, often quoted, and little read (Dietz 1992, 78). Even with re-situation of academic feminist theorizing,2 break with what Rosi Braidotti calls a crusade against feminism (Braidotti 1991, 168), we have not seen an end feminist neglect of her thought as some suggest we have (Dietz 1992, 81). For those of us still locked into looking for Simone de Beauvoir in first stage of feminism, leap into recuperation is less than clear; particularly as it depends on prior appreciation of her workthe allegedly Beauvoir-style feminism-that still remains enigmatic, if only because it is so fundamentally untheorized and undivulged. For she is equally absent from pages of Sartrean existentialism and phenomenology that, at very least, she is (by feminists) given belong3 and faithful follower eventually bumps up against what Margaret Simons describes as the nearly universal failure of contemporary American phenomenologists acknowledge contribution of Beauvoir in Second Sex phenomenological analysis of social world (Simons 1983, 563). Whatever happened Simone de Beauvoir? How did she slip so unmentionably past us? In short discussion that follows, I propose do some digging unearth some of that life that vibrates today more than ever before in what Michele Le Doeuff calls tremendously well-hidden philosopher June philosophe formidablement cachee] (qtd. …

Existential Phenomenology and the Problem of Race

Lewis Gordon's Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism1 is the latest original contribution to the mushrooming field of African-American Philosophy. It is crucially significant in that, unlike the commonly expected treatment of issues in this tradition, it adopts an existential phenomenological approach. This use of phenomenological method is not antagonistic to the more common rights-based analytical approaches. This text is also ground breaking to the extent that it does not focus on the philosophically token issues of civil rights and black economic equality. Unlike earlier works in African and African-American philosophy, it is not concemed primarily with the question of how best to integrate blacks within the existing political and economic system. It also breaks rank with the common philosophical treatment of race. Most philosophers, acting as geographers of reason, often banish race to the philosophical jungle of the irrational and, consequently, exclude race from serious philosophical consideration. When not treating race as an irrationalism, they treat it as an epihenomenon, as impotent explanatorily. Some philosophers even claim that race has little claim for autonomous theoretical status. And finally, there is a certain popular, cultural view of racism. prevailing view concerning racism is that it is something that belongs to the past. Where it is taken to occur at all, it is considered as socially anomalous, as unusual, as individual aberration or institutional hangover placed in check as soon as its occurrence is noticed. Anyone extending racist expression a greater place in contemporary culture than this picture warrants is bound to be considered paranoid.2 Race, on Gordon's view, cannot be so easily dismissed. He seeks to show how race, among other things, survives as an existential reality. In acknowledging Gordon's text as existentialist in orientation, we need to be clear about what Gordon means by existential phenomenology. Descriptive ontology or existential phenomenology, correctly characterized, is the study of the basic structures of human existence and, unlike traditional ontology, is not primarily concerned with the study of what is or what exists; it simply describes the structures of human reality. The overwhelming presence of Sartrean phenomenological ontology in this text requires familiarity with Sartre's views. The main tenet of Sartrean existentialism is the freedom of human consciousness, i.e., the freedom to act, along with freedom to value and the freedom of self-creation. Consciousness, however, itself does not qualify as an object of consciousness. Consciousness is nothing more than intentional activity. Here, intentional activity should be understood in the sense that every act of thinking is directed towards an object; every act of consciousness has a corresponding object. However, consciousness is not an object for itself. Sartre posits two different kinds of being. First, he posits the being of objects for consciousness, which he calls being-in-itself. Being-initself refers to all that is not human consciousness. So, for example, a stone is a being-in-itself, for a stone is a physical thing. Being-in-itself, according to Sartre, is complete, fulfilled and, thus, has no possibilities. Put differently, being-initself is not free; we do not talk about a stone exercising its freedom. The second type of being is the being of consciousness, what Sartre calls being-for-itself. Being-for-itself is human consciousness. Now since consciousness is a nothing, namely not a thing, not an object, it is incomplete, lacking, and unfulfilled and, thus, full of possibilities. Understanding being-for-itself as designating the human individual, each individual human being, unlike physical objects, is condemned to freedom, meaning that human beings are not things; they are not substances. Things, objects, and substances are being-in-themselves. But a human being, being-for-itself, possesses possibilities, that is, freedom to choose, freedom to act, freedom to define oneself, etc. …

Caged Birds: Bad Faith in Tennessee Williams's Drama

In The Saturday Review of Literature, 6 March 1948, Tennessee Williams listed among his current reading the works of two existentialists: Albert Camus's The Stranger, Caligula, and Cross Purpose, and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit and The Flies. Reminiscing in his Memoirs about his 1948 stay in Paris, he expressed a particular admiration for Sartre: "I was most interested in meeting Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existential philosophy appealed to me strongly, as did his play Huit [sic] Clos." Despite Williams's admitted affinity for Sartrean existentialism, his work has never been read within the context of Sartre's philosophy. A Streetcar Named Desire has been examined in relation to the philosophies of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. But, as a rule, critics draw parallels between Williams and the existenti alists without positioning the playwright within anyone school of existentialist thought, or they discuss his existentialism in generalized terms. Gerald Weales's commentary, which represents the latter approach, suggests that Williams's drama is existentialist in the way that much of modem drama is perceived as such, namely in its presentation of humanity as alienated beings trapped in a meaningless universe: “it is the universe that has been implicit in all his work, one in which man is a stranger. ... There is no escape in a universe where there is no God and where the other inhabitants are as dangerous as one's own self." To facilitate our understanding of Williams's specific brand of existentialism, as it converges with and diverges from Sartre's, we will examine in relation to Williams's drama one of the central tenets of Sartrean existentialism: bad faith.

The Tenacity of Utopia: The Role of Intellectuals in Cultural Shifts within the Federal Republic of Germany

In Germany, European traditions of the Enlightenment remained alien for a long time. The heated campaign against the intellectuals that Edmund Burke had launched against the philosophers of the French Revolution took hold of the German university in the nineteenth century' and transformed the academic class of the country into an elitist caste of modern mandarins.2 The new humanities (Geisteswissenschaften), which were the most distinguished and universally acclaimed product of the German university, became the ground for the German ideology of a counter-Enlightenment. The historical origin of this trend was Paris of 1789, out of which a world of enemies had supposedly arisen who would soon isolate the Reich. Well into the mid-twentieth century, French rationalism was denigrated as superficial and vulgar, while German Dichten und Denken was considered profound and Greco-Germanic in origin. Even as late as the 1960s, philosophy departments were dismissing Sartre's existentialism as exemplary of a typically French misunderstanding of Heidegger, whose ontology was rallying academic audiences who listened devoutly to every word. Most German academics of the period maintained that any ism meant superficiality and loss of individuality. The symbolic capital of the German mandarins may have

Caged Birds: Bad Faith in Tennessee Williams's Drama

In The Saturday Review of Literature, 6 March 1948, Tennessee Williams listed among his current reading the works of two existentialists: Albert Camus's The Stranger, Caligula, and Cross Purpose, and Jean-Paul Sartre's No Exit and The Flies. Reminiscing in his Memoirs about his 1948 stay in Paris, he expressed a particular admiration for Sartre: "I was most interested in meeting Jean-Paul Sartre, whose existential philosophy appealed to me strongly, as did his play Huit [sic] Clos." Despite Williams's admitted affinity for Sartrean existentialism, his work has never been read within the context of Sartre's philosophy. A Streetcar Named Desire has been examined in relation to the philosophies of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. But, as a rule, critics draw parallels between Williams and the existenti alists without positioning the playwright within anyone school of existentialist thought, or they discuss his existentialism in generalized terms. Gerald Weales's commentary, which represents the latter approach, suggests that Williams's drama is existentialist in the way that much of modem drama is perceived as such, namely in its presentation of humanity as alienated beings trapped in a meaningless universe: “it is the universe that has been implicit in all his work, one in which man is a stranger. ... There is no escape in a universe where there is no God and where the other inhabitants are as dangerous as one's own self." To facilitate our understanding of Williams's specific brand of existentialism, as it converges with and diverges from Sartre's, we will examine in relation to Williams's drama one of the central tenets of Sartrean existentialism: bad faith.

The Historical Conditions of Possibility of the Rise and Fall of Sartrean Existentialism and Existential Marxism

For close to thirty years now, since his fall from intellectual paramountcy in Paris, there have existed essentially two attitudes towards Sartre. Among those who have shaped received intellectual opinion in France in these decades, the attitude has generally consisted either in a stony silence or in occasional off-the-cuff crushing dismissals. On the other hand, distinct from this dominant attitude of dismissal but perhaps symmetrical to it, there has been the response of a dwindling chapelle of fidèles which has sought to keep an interest in Sartre's work alive despite the fact that every indication of the last thirty years has pointed to the permanent obsolescence of his work in the eyes of dominant opinion.

Existential ethics and why it's immoral to be a housewife

For most feminists, it is acceptable to criticize the institution of marriage, but it is quite another to go on and claim that it is immoral for women to choose to be housewives and mothers. Nonetheless, this position is implied in Simone de Beauvoir's early work, The Second Sex, and is repeated in her 1975 interview with Betty Friedan. She says, "No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise children... Women should not have that choice ,,1 More than any other, this position sets Beauvoir apart from liberal feminists who believe that women's liberation means simply giving women a choice as to what sort of life they want to lead. Naturally, Beauvoir's position is unappealing to housewives who, at the same time, claim to be 'feminists.' For reasonable persons, however, whether the position is a popular one, or not, should not be the question. Rather, the concern should be whether Beauvoir's reasoning in support of her conclusion is sound or not. If it is, those who call themselves 'feminists' should no longer endorse those immoral women who choose to be housewives and mothers. Unfortunately while Beauvoir's position is clear, it is not without apparent philosophical difficulties. First, it might appear that as a thinker who draws heavily on Sartrean existentialism with its emphasis on the value of human freedom, her position to limit women's choices is contradictory? l believe, however, that if one accepts her analysis of marriage, housework, and motherhood as given in The Second Sex, her conclusion that on moral grounds women should be criticized for choosing to be housewives/mothers is quite defensible. In other words, it is indeed immoral for women to choose to be housewives. Let us examine her arguments.

Existentialism and Feminism: the Rhetoric of Biology in the Second Sex

For a feminist today The Second Sex is in many ways a deeply embarrassing document: a pioneering study of women's oppression which apparently relies entirely for its emancipatory impact on Sartre's philosophy. Feminist theorists have long criticised Sartrean existentialism for its inherent anti-feminism. How then does Beauvoir carry off her feminist project? Does she really manage to transform existentialist discourse into a rhetoric of liberation or do we have to reject The Second Sex as an awkward reminder of the inevitable limitations of a feminist analysis conducted in isolation, without the support of a broad political movement? Beauvoir's analysis of the oppression of women in The Second Sex is based on two fundamental principles: (1) Woman in patriarchal society is defined as man's Other. She is immanence (passivity, objectification) and he is transcendence (activity, striving, subject-being). (2) There is no such thing as a female nature, no essence of womanhood. All theories of the 'ewig Weibliche' or 'eternel feminin' are patriarchal mystifications. As it stands Beauvoir's analysis would seem to be entirely under the sway of Sartrean ontology. But although it is true that she never exp/icity distances herself from his abstract idealism, already the introduction to her essay demonstrates her swerve away from his master text Being and Nothingness. Already in her opening pages Beauvoir can be seen surreptitiously trying to tack a form of materialism on to Sartre's tragic ontology. There is a specific reason for this move: Beauvoir needs a materialist framework for her theory of woman as the Other in order to avoid the absurd conclusion that all

Heidegger and the Question of Renaissance Humanism (review)

106Philosophy and Literature Ifwe accept that the essays are, albeit loosely, centered around one main idea, we might proceed to read the book conscientiously from beginning to end. As the reviewer, I felt compelled to do just that, but too frequently for comfort found myselfbogged down in sentences like the following, chosen almost at random : "And the subject is pure not only in its manipulatory detachment from the object but also in its distance from the realm of togetherness with other subjects, which (bereft of an epistemological status of its own) has itself become 'objectified '" (p. 23). Interestingly enough, the three essays in the volume translated from Holdheim's original German text by one of his students read rather more lucidly than the others, although they too are by no means smooth and easy reading. Thus, while some pages and sections were stimulating (notably the "chapters" on Dostoyevsky, Gide, and "Poetic estrangement"), others had me painfully entangled in the coils of serpentine sentences and paragraphs, struggling in vain to cling to die main thread of argument. "The essay," we are told (p. 30), "is the hermeneutic genre par excellence." Agreed. And the word "hermeneutic" derives from the name of the god Hermes, whose principal task was to deliver messages. It is surely the hermeneutist's responsibility to ensure that his particular message is clear and that his critical comments on this or that writer, work or literary topic shed new light, not cast deeper darkness. In my more cynical moments I sometimes wonder if aposdes of "the hermeneutic mode" might be involuntary (or perhaps voluntary?) worshippers of another Hermes: Hermes Trismegistos, the thrice-greatest, the Greek version of the Egyptian deity Thoth, god of magic or alchemy, from which comes the word "hermetic." Professor Hondheim struck me as being radier more preoccupied widi the task of bewitching and enchanting his reader with verbal alchemy, blinding him with science, real or pseudo, dian widi mat of helping him clarify his own ideas on a literary text by writing in a lively, clear, and stimulating way. Thus die ideas in his book too often seem more hermetically sealed than hermeneutically revealed. University of Canterbury, New ZealandJohn Goodliffe Heidegger and the Question ofRenaissance Humanism, by Ernesto Grassi; 103 pp. Binghamton, New York: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1983, $12.00. Students of Heidegger and of Italian Renaissance humanism should not be put offby the apparently strangejuxtaposition of themes indicated by this book's title. Ernesto Grassi has been a creative and productive scholar regarding both Heidegger (with whom he studied at Freiburg) and of humanism, although because of die vagaries of translation and transatlantic reception he is probably Reviews107 best known to those who read only in English as an important commentator on Vico. The present book is a brief and clear version of theses that Grassi has developed in more detail in his many German publications. He challenges Heidegger's ambitious story ofthe history ofphilosophy, thinking part ofwhat is unthought in that brilliant but overly schematic account of the metaphysics of presence from Plato to NATO ("The Question Concerning Technology," and "The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking"). Heidegger had attacked humanism and Sartrean existentialism in his 1946/47 "Letter on Humanism" (published, incidentally, by Grassi). Yet while identifying humanism — as exemplified by Hegel, Sartre, and the implicit voluntaristic metaphysics of die technological worldview — as the destiny and denouement of Western philosophy , Heidegger never mentioned Renaissance humanism. (As Grassi notes, Heidegger's view of Latin as a coarser, less profound language than Greek — or German— tells us much about the reasons for Heidegger's ignorance here.) Grassi argues two interrelated claims: (1) In Renaissance humanism's concept of poetry and metaphor as productive of the truth, one finds a significant movement of thought that does not fit Heidegger's version of philosophy's history as a continual rationalization and narrowing ofthe concept of the world; (2) Renaissance humanism suggests the possibility of a thought that is both informed by an attempt to draw on the poetic resources of language for philosophical illumination and sensitive to the radically historical character of human existence, while yet (in contrast to Heidegger...

Meaning and Myth in the Study of Lives: A Sartrean Perspective (review)

Reviews227 its own rules for establishing the metaphysical meaning of what it has borrowed from the history of thought" (p. 12). I do not share his indifference, if indifference it is. Can the student of meaning and truth afford a plurality of realities? Is not ontological bankruptcy sure to ensue when epistemology knows no limits? Of course, the fictive artist may make a fictively valid use of a "wrong" idea. The house of meaning as we know by dwelling in it has room for deceptive vistas and blind corridors. But somebody sometime should have some sense of the uses of truth in the structuring of a work of literary art, or else we look in the direction of believing in no meaning whatever except in verbal structure as structured. In the long run, I think, and probably in the not very long run, the concept of meaning cannot do without the concept of truth. As I read Finnegans Wake, it is so crammed with meaning that it oozes meaning at every pore. It leers meaning, it insinuates meaning, it stumbles and staggers meaning, it plays meaning, it claims meaning, it fumbles meaning, it often blunderingly reaches down into the depths of human meaningfulness, its author knowing that the simple and the true thing is the child of the deeply obscure and the intricately complex. I have no quarrel with people who love the books I love — and a few who don't. Professor White loves the Wake. Whitman CollegeThomas D. Howells Meaning and Myth in the Study of Lives: A Sartrean Perspective, by Stuart L. Charme; vii & 190 pp. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984, $25.00. Stuart Charme links Eliade's notion of myth with Sartre's search for the "fundamental project"— as it is effected in every person's life and as it is revealed in Sartre's autobiography (The Words) and in his biographical studies of Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert. In this context, he does not hesitate to call these Sartrean works "religious" — in intention and in effect. Charmé shares with Eliade the belief that a myth, which is essentially cogmogonic, offers a unique vision of reality with its fundamental structures. The account of a mythic event is a "true story" insofar as it represents "what is truly real and significant for those who believe it" (p. 153). Through myth humanity imposes a pattern of meaningful repetition upon the irreversible flow of time. Charme claims that in our secular society the sphere of myth is within us. 228Philosophy and Literature The evolving self might best be compared, Charme believes, to the story one tells oneself as he retrospectively orders the events of his past and establishes meaningful relations among them. Obviously more than one line of plot and interpretation would be possible whether in biography or autobiography. The method is in any case hermeneutic. "In some ways," Charme says, "interpreting a person's life may fruitfully be compared with the process of creating and interpreting texts" (p. 3). A distinctive characteristic of Sartre's study of lives is its paradigmatic function , and this, too, Charmé links with religious hagiography. This is not to say that Sartre holds up his subjects, still less himself, as models to be imitated. But his purpose includes more than the discovery of what makes a given individual tick. In The Family Idiot Sartre seeks to show through Flaubert how everyone is a "singular universal," reflecting his familial and social conditioning and in turn putting his own stamp on his period. Sartre's own struggle to create a self, in Charmé's view, embodied the problems and tensions peculiar to our age. The result is not a pattern for us to follow but a gift to aid us in our own selfclarification . In this connection Charmé compares Sartre's works with Erik Erikson's "religious biographies" of Luther and Gandhi. Indeed, there is a running commentary on resemblances between Sartre's existentialism and Erikson's psychology which have been too little noted and deserve further exploration. Occasionally Charmé's attempt to find compatibility in writers usually thought of as offering opposing views (e.g., Sartre and Freud) leads him to blur distinctions. He goes...

The Context of the Phenomenological Movement.

1. Intention and Intentionality in the Scholastics, Brentano and (with Supplement 1979).- 2. Husserl's and Peirce's Phenomenologies: Coincidence or Interaction (with three Supplements 1979).- 3. Husserl's Phenomenology and Sartre's Existentialism.- 4. and Pfander on the Phenomenological Reduction (with Supplement 1979).- 5. Linguistic Phenomenology: John L. Austin and Alexander Pfander.- 6. Amiel's New 7. What William James Knew about Edmund Husserl: On the Credibility of Pitkin's Testimony (with Supplement 1979).- 8. Brentano's Image.- 9. On the Significance of the Correspondence between Brentano and Husserl.- 10. in England: Facts and Lessons.- 11. On the Misfortunes of Husserl's Encyclopaedia Britannica Article Phenomenology.- 12. Preface to W. R Boyce Gibson's Freiburg Diary 1928.- 13. Husserl's Approach to Phenomenology for Americans: A Letter and its Sequel.- 14. A Review of Wolfgang Kohler's The Place of Value in a World of Facts.- 15. The Puzzle of Wittgenstein's Phanomenologie (1929 -?) (with Supplement 1979).- Appendix: Supplement 1980 to Husserl in England.- Index of Names.