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Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge
Karsten Harries
mine what Sartre really meant. I wonder indeed whether that is the
sort of question that permits a definitive answer: do we not always
construct caricatures of the philosophers to whom we turn to clarify
our own thoughts? We can only hope that these will be illuminating
caricatures. But what matters to me is not so much Sartre, as the
Volume - 25 -
Sartre Studies International, 10, Issue 1, 2004
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ICarsten Harries
But instead of seeing that the transcendences there posited are main
tained in their being by my own transcendence, people will assume them
upon my surging up in the world; they come from God, from nature,
from my 'nature,' from society ... These abortive attempts to stifle free
dom under the weight of being (they collapse with the sudden upsurge
of anguish before freedom) show sufficiendy that freedom in its founda
tion coincides with the nothingness that is at the heart of man ... Human
nature cannot receive its ends, as we have seen, either from the outside or
from a so-called 'inner' nature. It chooses them and by this very choice
confers upon them a transcendent existence as the external limit of its
projects. From this point of view ... human reality in and through its very
upsurge decides to define its own being by its ends. It is therefore the
positing of my ultimate ends which characterizes my being which is iden
tical with the sudden thrust of freedom which is mine.4
As Sartre knew all too well, life becomes precarious when values
are determined by the choice with which the individual determines
him- or herself. If I am truly free, what lets me fix value to this rather
than to that? So understood freedom has to lead to an understand
To choose, man must possess criteria to guide his choice. Imagine having
to decide between two courses of action. Either there is a reason to
choose one over the other or there is no such reason. In the latter case
we cannot choose at all: if we are not to stand paralyzed before the alter
natives, like the ass of Buridan before the two piles of hay, we must
'choose' without reason, a 'choice' which cannot be from
distinguished
accident, spontaneity, inspiration, nature - call it what you will. If, on the
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Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge
other hand, there is a good reason, one can ask what makes it so: is it
possible only where it is limited. To affirm himself and his future man
must at least believe that he is given criteria, which he can use to arrive at
decisions. He may be mistaken in this; his belief may be unwarranted and
in bad faith. Still, without such belief there is no choice.5
being.'6 This description of man remains empty as long as we are not told
how man seeks to be like God. Different conceptions of God correspond
to different interpretations of man's fundamental project. Which inter
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Karsten Harries
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Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge
We should note not only the disgust, but also the fascination. An
adequate understanding of human being has to do justice to both. If
the human project were adequately described by the desire to pos
sess, there could only be disgust, but not this fascination, this desire
to surrender, to let go. The appeal of the slimy thus demonstrates
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Karsten Harries
like a leech. The sliding, however, is not simply denied as in the case of a
solid; it is degraded. The slimy seems to lend itself to me. It invites me;
for a body of slime at rest is not noticeably distinct from a body of very
dense liquid. But it is a trap. The sliding is sucked in by the sliding sub
stance and it leaves its traces upon me. The slime is like a liquid seen in a
nightmare where all the properties are animated by a sort of life and turn
back against me. Slime is the revenge of the In-itself. A sickly-sweet, fem
inine revenge which will be symbolized on another level by the quality
'sugary.'(BN 609)
The horror of the slimy is the horror that time itself might become slimy,
that facticity might progress continually and insensibly and absorb the
For-itself which exists it. It is the fear, not of death, of the
pure In-itself,
not of nothingness, but of a particular type of being, which does not
actually exist
any more than the In-itself-For-itself and which is only rep
resented by the slimy. It is an idea which I reject with all my strength and
which haunts me as value haunts my being, an ideal in which the founda
tionless In-itself has priority over the For-itself. We shall call it an Anti
value. (BN 610-11)
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Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge
In this connection I would like to take back one assertion made in the
book: in the Preface I express agreement with Sartre's thesis that the fun
damental project of man is the project to become I should
like God. not
have spoken of man, but of Western man, and even that is a caricature,
but one that captures something essential. The project to become like
God is born of an exaggerated demand for security that in turn presup
poses an inability to accept man as he is, vulnerable, and mortal. With the
death of God that desire must go unfulfilled. Nihilism and modern art
are essentially post-Christian phenomena. If in modern art the tradition
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Karsten Harries
of Western art is coming to an end, the necessity of this ending has its
foundation in the development of the West.9
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Sartre and the Spirit of Revenue
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ICarsten Harries
gerian authenticity demands God, just as morality did for Kant, even
though theoretical reason cannot know anything of His existence. In
that essay I was concerned with Heidegger, but in passing I did raise
the question: 'Is the appeal to resoluteness as understood in Being
and Time any more intelligible than Sartre's closely related attempt
to make an abstract freedom the foundation of value?'10 Santoni sug
give some account of what is meant here by 'self', and that account
furthermore has to show in just what sense this self can be said to be
'my' self. To speak of an 'acceptance of myself as and
gratuitous
unjustifiable freedom, and my radical decision to make the freedom
to which I am condemned my life's project' offers no answer, since
the being of the self is here already presupposed. How are we to
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Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge
understand this 'I' or 'selF that can, but also can fail, 'to make the
freedom to which I am condemned my life's project'? Heidegger
answers this question with his analysis of Daseiri1 s being-towards
death. Our sense of self, according to Heidegger, is inseparably
linked to a sense of our mortality. Sartre explicidy rejects this claim:
'Death can not therefore belong to the ontological structure of the
for-itself ....Thus we must conclude in opposition to Heidegger
that death, far from being my peculiar possibility, is a contingent fact
which as such in principle escapes me and originally belongs to my
facticity' (BN 545). Given Sartre's understanding of the for-itself,
must not death in principle escape me? And must the same not be
said of the self? Just as Sartre has to reject Heidegger's analysis of
being-towards-death as giving us a constant self,11 he has to reject
whatever belongs to facticity as binding my freedom in an essential
way. This leaves us only with a freedom so abstract that, far from
generating what one might call moral imperatives, it does not even
allow for a robust sense of self. But I can make sense of freedom only
as my, or rather as someone's freedom. Sartre's understanding of the
ontological structure of the for-itself does not meet that condition.
To insist, as Sartre does, for example, in 'Existentialism Is a
Humanism', that 'We will freedom for freedom's sake in and
through particular circumstances,' does not help at all unless we can
show how particular circumstances demand that we do one thing
rather than another.12 What here obligates us cannot be sought in
our freedom, nor in a mute in-itself but must be able to join for
itself to in-itself in some fashion, must be a third.
And this leads me to a final point of disagreement with Sartre. To
- as for
quote Santoni, 'Harries argues that for Sartre Heidegger in
- freedom is in need of criteria,
important places grounds, "some
authoritative measure to guide actions" and "integrate life". Eventu
ally Harries argues that the "Godhead" serves this function in Hei
- a
degger position that would, of course, be totally unacceptable to
Sartre, for it would exhibit "the spirit of seriousness"' (BFGF 231,
note 184), which 'considers values as transcendent givens indepen
dent of human subjectivity' (BN 626). But Heidegger's Godhead
cannot be considered as such a given. It haunts human being as a
never to be possessed source of meaning. And does Sartre not end
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Karsten Hurries
passion, that the authentic self finds the strength to renounce the
impossible project to be God. But, given Sartre's ontology, would
the price of such renunciation not be a loss of self?
Given Sartre's ontology we gain such a self only by appropriating
what is in a particular way (BN 602). And that means also, by appro
priating the fundamental project in a particular way. Sartre calls such
appropriation the individual's original project, where such appropria
tion is said to be itself chosen. Recalling Kant and Schopenhauer,
Sartre speaks in this connection of the 'choice of an intelligible char
acter,' which names 'the total relation to the world by which the
subject constitutes himself as a self (BN xxx). I find such an essen
tially groundless choice unintelligible. But if unintelligible, in Being
and Nothingness it yet appears as the ground of all value and every
human pursuit:
Ontology has revealed to us, in fact, the origin and nature of value; we
have seen that value is the lack in relation to which the for-itself deter
mines its being as a lack. By the very fact that the for-itself exists, as we
have seen, value arises to haunt its being-fbr-itself. It follows that the var
ious tasks of the for-itself can be made the object of an existential psycho
analysis, for they all aim at producing the missing synthesis of
consciousness and being in the form of value or self-cause. Man makes
himself man in order to be God, and selfness considered from this point
of view can appear to be egoism; but precisely because there is no com
mon measure between human reality and the self-cause which it wants to
be, one could just as well say that man loses himself in order that the self
cause may exist. (BN 626)
Doesthat mean that with his ontology and the existential psycho
analysis based on it, Sartre, too, is subject to the 'spirit of serious
ness'? That Sartre should invoke Nietzsche's 'spirit of seriousness'
here invites comment, for if anyone would have had little patience
with Sartrean freedom it is Nietzsche, for whom freedom is a name
for the body-based will to power, where what Nietzsche means by
body once again straddles the abyss that Sartre's has
ontology
opened up between For-itself and In-itself, an existential counterpart
to the divide between res cogitans and res extensa.13 It is to
easy
imagine what fun Nietzsche would have had with Sartre's descrip
tions of the slimy.
I suggested at the very beginning of my talk that in Sartre's Being
and Nothingness what Nietzsche called the spirit of revenge finds
paradigmatic expression. How did Nietzsche understand this 'spirit
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Karsten Harries
Notes
1. This lecture was given on 6 October 2002 as part of the symposium 'Philosophy,
Freedom, and Action,' in honour of the retirement of Professor Ron Santoni,
Denison University, Ohio.
2. Ronald E. Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre's Early Phi
University, 1961.
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans, and intro. Hazel E. Barnes, New
York: Philosophical Library, 1956, pp. 440-43. (Hereafter: BN). See Harries, In
a Strange Land, pp. 16-17.
5. Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art, Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1968, p.xii. (Hereafter: MMA).
6. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p.565.
7. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, Garden City: Doubleday,
1959, pp.23,400-6.
8. Augustine, The City of God, XIV, 15. 17, trans. M. Dods, New York: 1950,
pp.463,465.
9. Japanese translation of The Meaning of Modern Art by Takeo Narukawa: Gendai
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