JeanPaul_Sartre_JeanPaul_Sartre_Basic_Writing

224Jean-Paul Sartre: Basic Writingsothers of what I am. This is a kind of bad-faith according to Sartre becauseI really or authentically am what my freedom makes me. Nevertheless, mybeing a waiter, a woman, a soldier, a leader, or my adopting any role, dependsupon the acquiescence of others. The other holds the secret of what I am. Itfollows that the other may choose to bestow or withhold his recognition ofwhat I am. My psychological security, my social identity as a person, issubject to the freedom of the other. The other ‘has a hold’ over me.For this reason I try to deny the freedom of the other and the other tries todeny mine. In denying each other’s freedom we are exercising our own.This is the antagonistic power-struggle that pervades all human relationsaccording to Sartre. It has no optimistic resolution.Why, we might object, should not conflict be overcome in love? Why shouldnot two human beings, who perhaps care more for each other than they dofor themselves, feel secure in each other’s freedom and not threaten oneanother’s psychological security? Sartre’s reply is that love is a conflict.Love is a conflict because the love of the lover can always be withdrawn.There is no absolute security in love and it is in the nature of love not torequire such absolute security. Love presupposes freedom. Love is freelybestowed and freely withheld. The lover wants the object of their love to lovethem, but to love them freely. The lover would not feel loved if who they lovedwas forced to love them. To be loved is to be freely loved. However, to lovefreely implies the possibility of not loving, and to be loved freely implies thepossibility of not being loved. To be truly loved involves the perpetual possibilityof that love being withdrawn. Love implies insecurity.Love presupposes freedom but freedom does not presuppose love, andfreedom for Sartre is in many ways a terrible thing. Indeed the layers ofhuman interaction in which each of us is implicated accentuate our badfaith. Our being-for-others hides our freedom from ourselves, and this is astrue of loving relationships as much as sadistic ones. Sartre thinks thedialectic of freedom and domination is more fundamental than the moraldistinction between acts of love and acts of sadism. In the 1944 play No Exit(Huis Clos), which is set in hell, Joseph Garcin says ‘l’enfer, c’est les Autres’,‘Hell is other people’.BEING AND NOTHINGNESS