Sartre on Violence
by Ronald E. Santoni
Chapter 1: Theoretical Underpinnings
Hegel and the Master-Slave Relationship:
A Pivotal Analysis
From Alexandre Kojève’s brilliant lectures
and commentary on G. W. F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit—which were gathered as lecture notes by the
poet and novelist Raymond Queneau at the École des
Hautes Études between 1933 and 1939—we can
gain the crux of Hegel’s driving Master- Slave relationship.1 In his “nascent state,” the human being is never
simply human being. “To speak of the ‘origin’
of Self-Consciousness [or For-itself] is necessarily to
speak of a fight to the death for ‘recognition.’”2 I want the Other to “recognize” my value as
his value; and conversely, the Other has the same desire.
Each is willing to risk his own life and the life of the
Other to satisfy this desire for “recognition.”
Their confrontation can only be a “fight to the death.”
Thus, human reality “comes to light,” is “formed”
and realized, for Hegel, only in and by “the fight”
that culminates in the Master-Slave relation. The “revelation
of human reality,” the “truth of man,”
prerequires it; as Kojève puts it, “it is only
through the risk of life that freedom comes to light,”3 that man moves from “animal” being, or “nature,”
to human being, or Being-for-itself (in Hegel’s sense).
Human reality is necessarily either Master or Slave, rooted
in conflict or mutual opposition. It is presupposed here
that this struggle does not end in death: human reality
cannot come into being as “recognized” reality
unless the antagonists in the fight stay alive after the
fight. Self-realization demands recognition by the Other.
This means that they must adopt different behaviors in the
fight and “constitute” themselves as “unequals.”
The one must fear the Other, submit to the Other, refuse
to risk his life for the sake of satisfying the Other’s
desire for “recognition.” He must be willing
to “recognize” the Other without being “recognized,”
to “recognize” the Other as Master and himself
as recognized only as the Master’s Slave.4 In short, the Slave becomes the “defeated adversary”
who has refused to adopt the Master’s principle: “to
conquer or to die.” In refusing to risk his life,
in choosing to remain alive, he has chosen the life of Slavery
over death, of “dependent consciousness” rather
than “autonomous consciousness.” His fear of
death, his dependence on Nature, gives him a sense of Terror
(Furcht) and of his nothingness and “justifies”
his dependence on the Master. While the Slave remains at
the natural bestial level, the Master is already recognized
by another consciousness—is already “mediated”
and freed from Nature by his “fight to the death”
for “pure prestige.” The Master becomes “Consciousness
for-itself” mediated with itself by a “slavish
consciousness” that is bound to Nature and is afraid
of death.5
But this fight has not yielded the authentic recognition that the two adversaries mutually seek. Although “Man was born and History began with the first Fight,”6 in the ensuing appearance of Master and Slave neither of the adversaries receives the kind of recognition he or she wishes. Although the Master has been recognized in “his human reality and dignity,”7 he has not accorded the same recognition to the Slave. So he is recognized by someone whose humanity he does not “recognize.” But his wish for recognition can be satisfied only by one whom he recognizes as worthy— by another “human,” not a Slave or someone the fight has turned into a thing. So the Master is condemned to an “existential impasse.”8 Although he can force the Slave to recognize him as Master, he cannot get the human recognition that he wanted when he engaged in the fight to the death. For, if recognition must come from “another man” and the Slave is not human, then the Master can never be satisfied. “The Master is fixed in his Mastery” and cannot accept any Other as Master. He prefers death to having to “recognize” another as Master. Only the Slave, who does not want to risk his life to be Master and does not “bind himself to his condition as Slave” (he has good reasons for wanting to leave his servility), is ready for change: he is, “in his very being,” “change, transcendence, transformation, ‘education.’” He wants to transcend himself and attain autonomy.9 Thus, in an ironic twist, the details of which are beyond the scope of this background summary, only the Slave—the being who has known Slavery, who is predisposed to go beyond it, who struggles to surpass it, and who does overcome it “dialectically”—is capable of achieving satisfaction and bringing History to completion. And, as Kojève points out, this is why Hegel says that History belongs to (the work of) the Slave and that the “truth,” or “revealed reality,” of the Master is the Slave.10 In the Terror of the Master’s rule and domination, the Slave discovers his humanity as something negated and oppressed.11 Mark Poster’s way of putting it—in addition to his suggestion that Marx (as well as Sartre, I might add) is indebted to this Hegelian insight—merits repeating: “The slave is the secret of change in history and his desire for freedom from oppression is the ground of man’s becoming more human”12 (an observation relevant to Sartre’s defense of Frantz Fanon).
In “overcoming” his Master as Master, the Slave “overcomes” himself as Slave and reveals reality; in surpassing Slavery, he achieves satisfaction, authentic freedom, and self-transformation.13 So if History is, as Hegel claims, a “dialectic between Mastery and Slavery,” then this “overcoming” by the Slave starts a new “period” in History in which the postfight domination of the Slave by the Master is replaced by the Slave’s “determination” of human existence. In this way, Mastery, though an “impasse,” is “justified” as a necessary stage in human History. On this dialectical account of History, the end or completion of History could come about only with the realized synthesis of Mastery and Slavery.14 If and how and in what form this ultimate transition would take place becomes the issue for Hegel and those who—like Sartre—are both unsettled and motivated by Hegel’s analysis. For so long as Master and Slave exist and are in opposition, human existence will not be satisfied, for neither Slave nor Master will be universally recognized.15
Although Sartre does not totally endorse this Hegelian account of the Master-Slave relation, its influence and reverberations are evident in Sartre’s initial pessimism with regard to the possibility of authentic human relationships and the likelihood of overcoming interhuman struggle and violence. Moreover, the fundamental violence related to material scarcity in the Critique of Dialectical Reason does, I believe, echo some of Hegel’s analysis. Further, insofar as part of the Sartre-Camus dispute pertains to the relation of violence (and revolution) to the “end,” or “completion,” of history, it too echoes Hegel’s analysis. Yet this is not to assume that Sartre finally agrees with Hegel’s perception that conflict is necessary to the development of human consciousness, or For-itself.16 In passing, let me note that Sartre is said to have heard Kojève’s discerning lectures on Hegel: how faithful he was, however, to attendance at those lectures—or, for that matter, to the content of those lectures—remains a matter of disagreement among his intellectual peers of that period.17
But to gain some preliminary insights into Sartre’s subsequent views on violence, we must proceed to a brief background sketch of Sartre’s account of the genesis of interhuman conflict in Being and Nothingness.
Conflict in Being and Nothingness
Anyone familiar with even a skeletal account of Sartre’s phenomenological ontology recognizes that Sartre’s study of the “phenomenon” in the introduction to Being and Nothingness leads him to affirm two radically different “regions of being.” Adopting Husserl’s axiom of intentionality—namely, that all “consciousness is consciousness of something,”18 that all consciousness intends or posits an object outside of itself—Sartre contends that any phenomenon points to the existence of two transphenomenal beings: the transphenomenal being of consciousness and the transphenomenal being (or foundation) of the phenomenon. To these divergent beings Sartre gives, respectively, the names—already suggested by Hegel—“being-for-itself” (l’être-pour-soi) and “being-in-itself” (l’être-en-soi).19 This basic distinction pervades, even directs, Being and Nothingness and recurs, with contextual modifications—some quite significant—in virtually all of Sartre’s writing. Being-in-itself is “object” being or “thing” being: it is what it is, has “identity,” is not conscious, cannot refer to itself, has no possibilities or projects (human reality has projects for it), coincides with itself, is one with itself. In radical contrast to being-in-itself, being-for-itself is conscious, self-aware, and selfreferential being. As distinctive human reality, being-for-itself is not what it is and is what it is not.20 It is not a “what” or object or thing. That is to say, since it is not what it is, it lacks identity or “a certain coincidence with itself”; it is always at a distance from itself; it has no fixed essence; it is “no-thing.” On the other hand, since it is what it is not, it is its possibilities, its continuous potential for transcendence, its future undetermined projects. In short, then, the being of human reality is not what it is and is what it is not, because it is free. Although human reality is “born supported” by a being that is not itself (and is other than itself), it is always evanescent and self-surpassing. In a word, being-for-itself, or human reality, is freedom. “What we call freedom,” Sartre says, “is impossible to distinguish from the being of ‘human reality.’ . . . there is no difference between the being of man and his being-free.”21 As freedom, then, human reality—being-for-itself—is ambiguous, metastable, open, fleeting consciousness (i.e., bodily consciousness), which is nothing outside of a “revealing intuition” of a “transcendent being,” attendance was not recalled by many of the French “luminaries” who attended them (p. 8). It is also interesting—and perplexing—to note, here, that when asked by Orestes Pucciani, in the interview related to the Sartre volume of the Library of Living Philosophers, whether he had read Hegel during his École Normale days, Sartre responded: “No, I knew him through seminars and lectures, but I didn’t study him until much later, around 1945.” Paul Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981), that is, of “something other than itself.”22 In contrast to being-in-itself, which is object-being, being-for-itself is self-conscious subject-being.
This brief elucidation of Sartre’s pivotal distinction between being-initself and being-for-itself paves the way for considering the ontological status of the Other and our being-for-Others, and for understanding the origin of the conflict that Sartre first attributes to the original for-itself/for-itself relationship.
For Sartre, “we encounter the Other; we do not constitute him”; the Other is not “a consequence which can derive from the ontological structure of the for-itself.”23 I encounter the Other when he “looks” at me. His “looking” at me makes me conscious of myself as an object of his look. The Other is the one who looks at me, the one who reveals my being as object “in the world,” the one for whom I am an object, the one who renders me vulnerable because he makes me what I am “in the midst of the world.” The Other’s look is revelatory of another aspect of my being. Because the Other’s look enables me to see myself as an in-itself, it may be said to give me a “nature,” or “fixed” essence: “behold now I am somebody!” The Other gives my being a “foundation.” The Other’s look forces me to pass judgment on myself as an object.24 It precipitates an immediate modification of my being and world. For instance, I react to the Other in shame, fear, or embarrassment. Why? Because the Other’s look reveals me as a “looked at.” It congeals me as an “object” in the world. I recognize that I am the object that the Other is looking at. I am this being, and do not for the moment “think of denying it: my shame is a confession.” I am ashamed of what I am—an outside “nature” with which the Other has endowed me.25 And my modified being does not reside in the Other: I am responsible for it.26
With the Other’s look, then, “I am no longer master of the situation.”27 In giving me a “nature,” the Other decenters my world and restricts my possibilities. “I am a slave [this language immediately recalls Hegel’s analysis] to the extent that my being is dependent within the bosom of a freedom that is not mine and that is even the condition of my being. . . . Through the Other’s look, I live my life as fixed [figé] in the midst of the world, as in danger, as irremediable.”28 I apprehend myself as an “unknown object of unknowable appraisals—in particular of value judgments” over which I do not have control. I become an “instrument of possibilities which are not my possibilities.” My transcendence is denied in order to “make” me a “means to ends” of which I’m unaware. I become “a defenseless being for a freedom which is not my freedom.”29 I start to apprehend my possibilities from without. My possibilities are thus limited and alienated by the Other’s “looking” at me. In this sense, I am enslaved—not by choice, one might say, as in Hegel’s account of the “fight,” but simply by being “looked at” by the Other. “My original fall is the existence of the Other.”30 The Other is a source of constant threat and danger to me. In the words of Garcin in Sartre’s No Exit—and in keeping with that brilliant play’s disturbing theme—“There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!”31 The Other is watching me: I grasp the Other’s look as the “solidification” of my possibilities.32
But the story is not over: there are two sides to it. Sartre makes it clear that the Other is given to us not as an object but as another freedom—presumably a subject—who abruptly challenges my being as the center of possibilities. For by fixing, objectifying, and alienating my possibilities, the Other reveals to me that I can be an object only for another freedom: I cannot be an object for myself. Moreover, I cannot be an object for another object; a material object or obstacle cannot restrict my possibilities or confer a “nature” on me; only another freedom can do that. Thus, the objectifying look of the Other “abandons me at the heart of the Other’s freedom,” causes me to experience the freedom of the Other.33 “Consciousness can be limited only by consciousness.”34 The Other “looks” at me as he comes to the world and to me as a transcendence or freedom that is not mine. The Other, through whom I give my “objectness” and even the possibility of conceiving of myself in the objective mode, is thus given to me as pure, conscious subject, not as an object of my universe.35
But I must defend myself against this conferral of a nature on me, this assault on my freedom, this “death of my possibilities,” this decentering of my world by the freedom of the Other who looks at me. By making me “be” irremediably an object for the Other, the Other possesses me. But I must refuse this objectification, this “possession.” Although the Other holds the “secret of what I am,” I must not, like a defenseless freedom, allow the Other to define who I am, to capture, imprison, or assimilate my freedom.36 So I must try to recover myself as freedom. And as Sartre says at the beginning of his unsettling chapter “Concrete Relations with Others,” “my project of recovering myself [as free for-itself] is fundamentally a project of absorbing the Other,” and “my attitudes with respect to the object which I am for the Other” will “wholly govern” my concrete relations with the Other.37 Sartre’s descriptions of these (doomed) efforts at self-recovery are, as Arthur Danto has contended, among the most “psychologically rich” but relationally pessimistic pages in Sartre’s writings.38
For Sartre, there are two main ways—equally unsuccessful—by which I can attempt to break the hold of the Other on me, to overcome his objectification 39 (objectivation) of me. Counterobjectification is one possibility. I can try to deny that being which the Other has conferred on me from the outside: if I can confer on the Other a “being-for-me,” if I can constitute the Other as object, the Other’s “objectness” will destroy my objectness, for, as we have seen, I cannot be an object for another object. In other words, by suppressing the freedom of the Other, by trapping him in his facticity, by giving him an object status, I can free myself from the consciousness through and for whom I’ve become an object, and from any subsequent danger that might come from it. In short, I can “transcend the Other’s transcendence.” 40 Violence would be one means by which I might try to accomplish this. On the other hand, to the extent that the freedom of the Other is the foundation of my being as object, of my being-in-itself, I might try to recover and “possess” that freedom without destroying its character as freedom or transcendence, by, for example, trying to “incorporate” that freedom within me and identifying with that freedom as the foundation of myself. In this case, as Francis Jeanson so adroitly illustrates, I might try to seduce the Other in her transcendence so as “to obtain [her] free choice of me as a limitation of [her] freedom.” I would strive to be loved by her: if successful, my existence would be justified by my being given a “sort of supreme value” by the Other.41 For my beloved, then, I would not be de trop, that is to say, an unjustifiable upsurge. But because love involves the mutual demand to be loved freely by the Other, my acknowledgment of her freedom would, reciprocally, call for her addressing her freedom to my own. The beloved, too, shares the lover’s project to be loved and also aims at seducing the lover’s freedom. For, as Sartre points out, “to the extent that the upsurge of being is an upsurge in the presence of the Other, to the extent that I am both a pursuing flight [fuite poursuivante] [toward the attainment of being] and a pursued-pursuing [poursuivant poursuivi], I am, at the very root of my being, a project of objectification and assimilation of the Other. That is the original fact.”42 This is true for the Other as well as for me. Here is not the place to recount the details of Sartre’s meticulous but pessimistic accounts of many of the concrete relations with Others that illustrate the “primitive attitudes” and gestures by which I attempt to recover my freedom from the Other’s objectification of mine. For Sartre, each attempt is opposed to the other, is the “death of the other,” yet “motivates the adoption of the Other” and “enriches the failure of the Other.”43 To use Joseph Catalano’s language, “Both projects fail because each implies the other.” If I constitute the Other as object, I can recognize in this freedom made object the freedom of a subject (as in sadism, e.g.). If I try to appropriate and preserve the freedom of the Other, I run the risk of turning this freedom into an object44 and also the risk of further “objectification” by the Other (as in the project of love). This means that my relations with the Other are circular, not dialectical—as in Hegel—and neither of us can escape this circle of conflictual and doomed relations. “Everything which may be said of me in my relations with the Other applies to him as well. While I attempt to free myself from the hold of the Other, the Other is trying to free himself from mine; while I seek to enslave the Other, the Other seeks to enslave me.” In a word, Sartre concludes, “conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others,”45 and—at least in Being and Nothingness— there is no successful way out of it. To invoke Hegel’s words, there is an “existential impasse” on each side of the relationship.
As dismal as this conclusion may be, it does not come as a surprise. Although Sartre has told us earlier in Being and Nothingness that we do not constitute the Other, but encounter him, he also tries, in these earlier pages, to provide an ontological foundation for our encounter with the Other. He tells us, for example, that “the Other exists for a consciousness only as a refused self”—and vice versa. The Other is the Not-me-not-object. And Sartre adds: “The Other whom I recognize in order to refuse to be him is before all else the one for whom my For-itself is. Not only do I make myself not-be this other being by denying that he is me, [but] I make myself not-be a being who is making himself not-be me.”46 As we have seen more concretely in “relations with Others,” this double negation self-destructs. “Either I make myself not-be a certain being, and then he is an object for me and I lose my object-ness for him”—in which case “the Other ceases to be . . . the subject who makes me be an object by refusing to be me”—or “this being is indeed the Other and makes himself not-be me, in which case I become an object for him and he loses his own object-ness.”47 Either way, this double negation fails, and, as Klaus Hartmann has pointed out, our “being-for-others stands as a concrete foundation” of our conflictual encounter with the Other.48 In other words, it grounds the incessant conflict that characterizes our concrete relations with Others. Although, as Sartre contends, our being-for-others is “not an ontological structure of the Foritself,” 49 conflict is indeed the core and “original meaning” of our being-forothers. (In passing, the reader may note that this becomes the basis for Merleau-Ponty’s later contention, against Sartre, that a philosophy that fails to permit intersubjectivity must be in conflict with Marxism.)The themes of struggle, domination, “enslavement” by the Other, pursuit of autonomy, and so forth, which we saw in Hegel’s treatment of the Master- Slave relationship, have reappeared in Sartre’s consideration of our beingfor- Others. Without attempting a detailed comparison between the two, we may at least pause to observe a couple of contrasting points. Although there is no question that Sartre’s analysis is, in many ways, a reconstruction of Hegel’s analysis of the Master-Slave relationship in the “Lordship and Bondage” section of Phenomenology of Spirit, it seems similarly obvious that these two complex analyses exhibit differences. As Sartre points out, for Hegel “the relation ‘Master-Slave’ is not reciprocal”:50 it is, rather, the struggle between two unequal self-consciousnesses striving for “recognition”—indeed, “fighting to the death” for recognition. The reader will recall that in the fight the two consciousnesses “constitute” themselves as “unequals”: although the Slave accords humanity to the dominating Master by recognizing him, the Master refuses to “recognize” the consciousness and dignity of the Slave-Other, who, for him, is not “essential,” is not human, but is more like a thing. But, for Sartre, the relationship between being-for-itself and the Other is reciprocal: as we have seen above, “the Other exists for a consciousness only as a refused self.” Negation and counternegation are mutual; objectification and counterobjectification are reciprocal; “I make myself not-be a being who is himself making himself not-be me”;51 the Other negates my making him “be” as object, and I negate his making me “be” as object. Each negates his or her objectified, alienated Me-as-object, yet in doing so recognizes his or her “being-as-object” for the Other. In fact, in a strange way, for both Me and the Other, the “alienated and refused Me” becomes both the “symbol of our absolute separation” and our bond (lien) to the (i.e., each) Other.52 Perhaps more important, my account above has also shown that, in Sartre, the Me-asobject effected by the Other’s look leads to my awareness that an object cannot be an object for another object and, thus, that my “objectness” must have been given to me by the Other as subject. The situation is the same for the Other. This reciprocal acknowledgment of the Other as subject (or freedom) is precisely what leads to the incessant struggle of each side to appropriate or recover the freedom she lost to the Other. Of course, it also provides a basis for hope in the possibility of authentic intersubjectivity, but Sartre does not take us there in Being and Nothingness.53
Despite the conflict and struggle that marks and pervades these two analyses of our original relation to the Other, there yet appears to be another related difference between these two accounts. However bleak the relationship between the Slave and Master, Hegel’s account seems to offer an optimism that Sartre’s does not share. Somewhat surprisingly, this optimism falls on the side of the Slave, not the Master. In spite of the Master’s failure to “recognize” the Slave as anything but a thing (or animal), it is the Slave who, through the Master’s domination, discovers his oppressed (or thingified) humanity, seeks his freedom, works to free himself from his oppression, dialectically overcomes his Master as Master and himself as Slave, and becomes the agent for making the human being more human in history. While the Master continues to fight, the Slave works and—unlike the Master—gains satisfaction and authenticity by overcoming slavery. For Hegel, even enslaved work in the service of Others is humanizing.54 The Slave, unlike the Master, gains satisfaction through his self-expression in the product of his work. Although, to be sure, for Hegel as for Sartre, the Other may possess “the secret of what I am” (Sartre),55 it is only for Hegel that the Slave as Other becomes the secret of change in history—assuming, of course, for the moment, that we are now restricting Sartre to his account in Being and Nothingness. Put another way, however much Sartre’s analysis of our original relation to the Other may reflect Hegel’s analysis of Master- Slave, it does not exhibit the same possibility of “overcoming” objectification, on the part of the Other or Me, that Hegel’s account at least partially allows.56
The preceding summary and high points of Hegel’s Slave-Master relationship and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness version of our “existence-forothers” have made evident the constant threat represented by the Other, the root of conflict in our original relation to the Other, and, for Sartre, the genesis of our perennial failure—at least according to Being and Nothingness— to have authentic intersubjective rapport with Others. To say the least, human beings originally relate to one another concretely in an instrumental, adversarial manner that would have to be transcended for genuine intersubjectivity to be attained.
Now, to facilitate a transition to my book’s basic project—namely, a study of Sartre’s trajectory on violence—and to anticipate the language of violence that Sartre will use in his Notebooks for and Ethics, I must add in passing that Sartre’s analysis in Being and Nothingness of the conflict at the heart my being-for-Others and all my “concrete relations” with Others can be viewed as an entry into his developing understanding of violence—and, perhaps also, its inevitability. The Other’s original refusal of me, the Other’s “looking” at me as object, the Other’s “objectification” of me, and, conversely, my counterrefusal and counter-“objectification” of the Other violate me, as well as the Other, as being-for-itself, as free conscious being, as subject, as human reality, or—to repeat Sartre’s idiomatic usage of the word—as a freedom. Although in Being and Nothingness Sartre does not employ the word “violence” to characterize my or the Other’s attempts to “steal,” absorb, assimilate, or recover my or the Other’s freedom, it seems clear that these mutual violations have a claim to that word, for, etymologically, to violate (violare)—in this case, to violate free, conscious subjects— is at the root of the word “violence.” (Readers might recall that one attitude toward and method of recovery of one’s freedom even projects the “death” of the Other’s freedom.) In fact, it is not, in my judgment, too extreme to suggest—if I may integrate two of Sartre’s most unforgettable statements— that violence is at the core of my “original fall” and my original “being-forothers.”57 We shall do well to keep these observations in mind as we proceed to study and interrelate Sartre’s explicit discussions of violence in selected but representative works, from the early Notebooks for an Ethics (1947–48) to the “final” published “conversations” (1979–80) in his brilliant but controversial philosophical oeuvre.
But, in proceeding, I want to reemphasize one qualifying point. The preceding analysis of conflict is based on Sartre’s account in Being and Nothingness, but he later refers to this work as “an ontology before conversion” (une ontologie d’avant la conversion) that “takes for granted that conversion is necessary” (suppose qu’une conversion est nécessaire).58 Even in a footnote in the latter part of Being and Nothingness, he tells us that his preceding analysis “does not exclude the possibility of an ethics of deliverance and salvation,” which could come “only after a radical conversion that we cannot discuss here.”59 This means—as Thomas Anderson and others have also pointed out60—that conflict is the inevitable structure of relationships between people who are unconverted, that is, who are in natural bad faith and have not yet converted to an authentic way of being.61 In support of this debated point, we may note Sartre’s contention, early in the Notebooks, that the “struggle of consciousness” only makes sense “before conversion” and that, after authenticity has been achieved, “there is no ontological reason to stay on the level of struggle” (le plan de la lutte).62 So we must bear this qualification in mind as we proceed, but should not be tempted to presume that conflict will disappear from Sartre’s subsequent writings as a pervasive characteristic of interpersonal relationships. Such a presumption would invite an abrupt rethinking of Sartre’s subsequent thought.
The preceding allows me to turn to Sartre’s Notebooks for an Ethics and consider his first explicit and sustained effort to explore the issue of violence. In doing so, I begin a methodical presentation of the progression of Sartre’s grappling with this issue at distinct points in his life and writing.
1. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (New York: Basic Books, 1969).
2. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 7.
3. Ibid., 12.
9. Ibid., 22. In this paragraph I rely not only on pages 19–22 of Kojève’s introduction but also on Kojève’s excellent summary of the relevant part of The Phenomenology of Spirit, on pages 43–47 especially.
11. Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 14. I express gratitude for what I have gained from this book.
12. Ibid., 13. See also Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 19–20.
13. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 27; see also 46–48.
16. For a discussion of this point, see, e.g., Linda A. Bell, Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence: A Feminist Approach to Freedom (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 161–63. I have reacquainted myself with this engaging book after my completion of the core version of the present manuscript. I recommend it to the reader’s attention. In fact, I look closely at a part of this book—specifically chapter 5—toward the conclusion of my present study.
17. Poster, Existential Marxism, 145. Note also that earlier in this informative book Poster suggests that although Sartre was enrolled in Kojève’s lecture class on Hegel’s Phenomenology, hisattendance was not recalled by many of the French “luminaries” who attended them (p. 8). It is also interesting—and perplexing—to note, here, that when asked by Orestes Pucciani, in the interview related to the Sartre volume of the Library of Living Philosophers, whether he had read Hegel during his École Normale days, Sartre responded: “No, I knew him through seminars and lectures, but I didn’t study him until much later, around 1945.” Paul Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1981), 9.
19. I base most of this summary account on Sartre’s analysis in the introduction to BN.
21. BN 25 (EN 65); cf. also, e.g., BN 439 (EN 515–16).
23. BN 250 (EN 307), BN 297 (EN 358).
24. BN 261–63 (EN 319–21); also BN 268–71 (EN 327–30). For an earlier characterization of the Other, see, e.g., BN 230–31 (EN 285–86).
26. E.g., BN 221–23 (EN 275–77). As Sartre says later, “I am responsible for my being for-Others, but I am not the foundation of it” (BN 364).
28. EN 326–27, translation mine: “Je suis esclave dans la mesure où je suis dépendant dans mon être au sein d’une liberté qui n’est pas la mienne et qui est la condition même de mon être. . . . Par le regard d’autrui, je me vis, comme figé au milieu du monde, comme en danger, comme irrémédiable.” See also BN 267–68.
29. BN 267–68 (EN 326), italics mine.
30. BN 263 (EN 321: “Ma chute originelle c’est l’existence de l’autre”).
31. Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, in No Exit and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), 47; in French, Huis Clos, available, e.g., in Théatre (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 167: “Pas besoin de gril, l’enfer c’est les Autres.”
36. BN 362, 364 (EN 429–30). Sartre says that the “What I am,” the in-itself, that the Other confers on me “fixes me wholly in my very flight” (as For-itself) from the in-itself (BN 362).
37. BN 364, 363 (EN 431, 430).
38. Arthur Danto, Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 175.
39. Hazel Barnes uses “objectivation” in this context as the literal translation of the same word in French. I prefer the ordinary-language English usage. See, e.g., BN 268 (EN 327).
40. BN 363 (EN 430); also BN 268 (EN 327).
41. Francis Jeanson, Sartre and the Problem of Morality, trans., with an introduction, by Robert V. Stone (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 167.
42. BN 363, translation altered (EN 430). The reader may note—or recall—that, for Sartre, being-for-itself is both a flight (fuite) and a pursuit (poursuite); that is to say, it tries perpetually both to flee the in-itself and to pursue it (in order to complete itself, fill its emptiness). BN 362 (EN 429).
44. Joseph S. Catalano, A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1974; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 180.
45. BN 364 (EN 431: “le conflit est le sens originel de l’être-pour-autrui”), italics mine.
48. Klaus Hartmann, Sartre’s Ontology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1966); see 114–24, esp. 114, 123–24. I am indebted to him for insights he has provided in this context.
49. See, again, BN 282, also 297 (EN 342, 358).
53. This is clearly the topic for another work. I only intend to suggest this optimistic point here. In my judgment, a reciprocal acknowledging of the existence of the Other as subject whose look objectifies me might also become a step toward transcending the reciprocal objectification and perpetual conflict.
54. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 20, 27–28, 42–43.
56. This is not intended to bypass or ignore Hegel’s contention that “universal history, the history of the interaction between [human beings] and of their interaction with Nature, is the history of the interaction between war-like Masters and working Slaves.” But—to go even further—Hegel also projects an end of history through a dialectical overcoming of both the Master and the Slave. Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, 43–44. On the other hand, I must also point out that, in the Notebooks, Sartre challenges Hegel’s view that conflict is inevitable for civilization.
57. BN 263, 364 (EN 321, 431). I shall, of course, elucidate the meanings of violence for Sartre in subsequent chapters.
60. Thomas C. Anderson, “Sartre’s Early Ethics and the Ontology of Being and Nothingness,” in Sartre Alive, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 195.
61. See Ronald E. Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre’s Early Philosophy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995)—in particular, the final two chapters. There, I attempt to show the details of what I take to be a moral conversion from what Sartre calls a “natural attitude” of bad faith to an authentic mode of existing in which one affirms one’s freedom and refuses one’s natural “quest for being” (la quête de l’être).
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