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JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

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Responsibility201psychoanalysis, both to be interested and that the Good be his interest. He defineshimself by this interest in the very moment that he defines the world and ethics by thisinterest. For me, he will never be an interested man, but rather a man who chooses tobe interested. And we shall truly know what this interest is when we have madeexplicit the metaphysical reasons one might have for reducing the human condition tointerest. At the level of his choice, the interested man is disinterested; that is, he doesnot explain himself in terms of an interest.Analyze (existential psychoanalysis):pleasureinterestEthics ofwill to powervirtuedutyloveStudy a few types of value:nobilityvalues of lifegracegenerosityvalues of action devotionfrankness—purity—innocenceFrom this it also necessarily follows that the person is inseparable from the Goodhe has chosen. The person is the agent of this Good. Take this Good away from him,he is nothing at all, just as if you were to take the world away from consciousness, itwould no longer be consciousness of anything, therefore no longer consciousness atall. But the person does not cling to his Good to preserve himself. Instead it is inprojecting himself toward his Good that he makes and preserves himself. Thus theperson is the bridge between being and the ought-to-be. But as such, he is necessarilyunjustifiable. This is why he chooses to hypostasize the essential characteristics ofhis Good in order to give this Good an ontological priority over himself. Then, existingas the servant of this a priori Good, man exists by right. He is in some way raised upby the Good to serve it. We see this clearly in religion—for God has raised up man toreflect his glory.Paulhan speaks of the illusion of totality that makes us believe in the presence ofthe armadillo when we see the armadillo. 4 But this illusion of totality is not just a factof knowing something. We find it in every domain. Everything we experience, weexperience as though it were our whole life and this is why across our experiences wegrasp a meaning of the human condition. This sad street, with its large barracklike

202Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsbuildings, which I am walking along, extends out of sight for me, it is my life, it is life.And my solitude at Bordeaux was solitude, the forlornness of man.Difficulty: there are two orders. The man in hell and the saved man. Once we allowthat freedom is built up on the ground of the passions, this difficulty no longer exists:there is natural man with his determinism, and freedom appears when he escapes theinfernal circle. But if you are not a Stoic, if you think that man is free even in hell, howthen can you explain that there is a hell?To put it another way, why does man almost always first choose hell, inauthenticity?Why is salvation the fruit of a new beginning neutralizing the first one? Let us considerthis. What we are here calling inauthenticity is in fact the initial project or originalchoice man makes of himself in choosing his Good. His project is inauthentic whenman’s project is to rejoin an In-itself-for-itself and to identify it with himself; in short,to be God and his own foundation, and when at the same time he posits the Good aspreestablished. This project is first in the sense that it is the very structure of myexistence. I exist as a choice. But as this choice is precisely the positing of a transcendent,it takes place on the unreflective plane. I cannot appear at first on the reflective planesince reflection presupposes the appearance of the reflected upon, that is, of anErlebnis that is given always as having been there before and on the unreflective plane.Thus I am free and responsible for my project with the reservation that it is preciselyas having been there first.In fact, it is not a question of a restriction on freedom since, in reality, it is just theform in which it is freedom that is the object of this reservation. Being unreflective,this freedom does not posit itself as freedom. It posits its object (the act, the end of theact) and it is haunted by its value. At this level it realizes itself therefore as a choice ofbeing. And it is in its very existence that it is such. Nor is it a question of a determinismor of an obligation, but rather that freedom realizes itself in the first place on theunreflective plane. And there is no sense in asking if it might first realize itself on thereflective plane since this by definition implies the unreflective. It would be equallyuseless to speak of a constraint on the mind of a mathematician because he, being ableto conceive of a circle or a square, cannot conceive of a square circle. It is not a questionof a limit which freedom trips over, but rather, in freely making itself, it does sounreflectively, and as it is a nihilating escape from being toward the In-itself-for-itselfand a perpetual nihilation, it cannot do anything unless it posits the In-itself-for-itselfas the Good existing as selbständig.Whence the real problem: “can one escape from hell?” cannot be posed on anyother level than the reflective level. But since reflection emanates from an alreadyconstituted freedom, there is already a question of salvation, depending on whether

Responsibility201psychoanalysis, both to be interested and that the Good be his interest. He defineshimself by this interest in the very moment that he defines the world and ethics by thisinterest. For me, he will never be an interested man, but rather a man who chooses tobe interested. And we shall truly know what this interest is when we have madeexplicit the metaphysical reasons one might have for reducing the human condition tointerest. At the level of his choice, the interested man is disinterested; that is, he doesnot explain himself in terms of an interest.Analyze (existential psychoanalysis):pleasureinterestEthics ofwill to powervirtuedutyloveStudy a few types of value:nobilityvalues of lifegracegenerosityvalues of action devotionfrankness—purity—innocenceFrom this it also necessarily follows that the person is inseparable from the Goodhe has chosen. The person is the agent of this Good. Take this Good away from him,he is nothing at all, just as if you were to take the world away from consciousness, itwould no longer be consciousness of anything, therefore no longer consciousness atall. But the person does not cling to his Good to preserve himself. Instead it is inprojecting himself toward his Good that he makes and preserves himself. Thus theperson is the bridge between being and the ought-to-be. But as such, he is necessarilyunjustifiable. This is why he chooses to hypostasize the essential characteristics ofhis Good in order to give this Good an ontological priority over himself. Then, existingas the servant of this a priori Good, man exists by right. He is in some way raised upby the Good to serve it. We see this clearly in religion—for God has raised up man toreflect his glory.Paulhan speaks of the illusion of totality that makes us believe in the presence ofthe armadillo when we see the armadillo. 4 But this illusion of totality is not just a factof knowing something. We find it in every domain. Everything we experience, weexperience as though it were our whole life and this is why across our experiences wegrasp a meaning of the human condition. This sad street, with its large barracklike

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