Simone de Beauvoir, Philosophy, and Feminism

by Nancy Bauer

  GARCIN: I didn’t dream this heroism. I chose it. One is what one wills.

  INÈS: Prove it. Prove that it wasn’t a dream. Only acts decide what one has willed (43, translation modified).14

  This judgment of Inès’s is all the more devastating because she is shown to know intimately what cowardice is: in both her own eyes and Garcin’s, she, too, is hopelessly craven (42). For the two of them not to be cowards any more would require acts of self-transformation. But they both think of themselves as dead.

  In No Exit, then, we find acted out the exceedingly bleak view of “the Other” in Being and Nothingness. The play specifies that it is narcissism, taking the form of a fixated wish for another’s person’s recognition of oneself as one dreams or wishes—or fears—oneself to be, that brings on the conditions of hell. Interestingly, since Sartre in Being and Nothingness describes the phenomenon of love in terms of just such a wish, the implication is that the desire to respond to the Other’s gaze with something other than self-petrifaction or the return of the Look is what makes human life hellish. Later in his life Sartre was explicitly at pains to specify that what’s hellish about our relations with one another has to do with a narcissistic desire for self-confirmation—for, that is, a species of recognition—as we see in his answer to an interviewer’s question about No Exit’s climactic line “Hell is other people”:

  “Hell is other people” has always been poorly understood. People have thought that I wanted to say by it that our relationships with others are always poisoned, always hellish. Now, what I want to say is something else entirely. I want to say that if relationships with others are twisted, corrupted, then the other can be nothing but hell. Why? Because others are fundamentally what’s of most importance for us for our own self-consciousness/ self-knowledge [connaissance de nous-mêmes; “connaissance” means both “consciousness” and “knowledge”]. When we think about ourselves, when we try to know/become conscious of ourselves, we resort fundamentally to the knowledge/ consciousness of ourselves that others already have. We judge ourselves with the means that others have given us for judging ourselves. Whatever I say about myself, the judgment of others always bursts in (entre dedans). Whatever I sense in myself, the judgment of others bursts in. In other words, if my relationships are bad, I make myself totally dependent on others. And then, effectively, I’m in hell. And there are a number of people in the world who are in hell because they depend too much on the judgment of others. But that’s to say nothing more than that one can’t have other relationships with others [i.e., relationships in which the judgments of others do not burst in on my own self-consciousness]. It simply marks the prime importance of all others for each of us.

  The second thing I should have wanted to say is that these people [in Huis clos] are not similar to us. The three people in Huis clos don’t resemble us in that we are living and they are dead. Correctly understood, “dead” symbolizes something here. What I wanted to indicate is precisely that many people are stuck in their own habits and customs—that they suffer from [others’] judgments but don’t even try to change them. And that these people are like the dead, in the sense that they can’t get beyond their anxieties, their preoccupations, and their habits; and that they therefore often remain victims of judgments that have been brought against them. From this it’s quite evident that they are cowards, for example, or bastards. If they started out as cowards, nothing is going to change the fact that they are cowards. That’s why they’re dead people; it’s a way of saying that being fenced in by perpetual worry about judgments and actions that one doesn’t want to change is a living death. So that actually I wanted to use absurdity to demonstrate the importance for us who are living of freedom [la liberté], that is to say, the importance of changing acts by means of other acts. Whatever the circle of hell in which we live, I think we are free to break it. And if people don’t break it, it’s still freely that they don’t. So that they freely put themselves in hell.15

  What Sartre seems to be saying here is that if my relationships with other people are “good,” then their judgments of me are of fundamental but not decisive importance in shaping my consciousness of myself. The things I say or sense about myself are influenced but not determined, per se, by such judgments. But when my relationships with other people are “twisted” or “corrupted,” then their judgments of me are of decisive, determinative importance in shaping my consciousness of myself; I necessarily in this case depend “too much” on them. One could raise a number of questions about Sartre’s comments on these matters, not least of which are the questions of exactly what constitutes a “good” or “corrupt” relationship and exactly why twisted relationships produce overdependence on the judgment of others. But what’s important to emphasize in light of my purposes in looking at this gloss is that what apparently produces twisted relationships are individuals’ “anxieties, preoccupations, and habits.” If I am obsessed with a certain picture of myself, then my relationship with the Other will consist in the sense of confirmation—or lack or variation thereof—I find myself experiencing in the wake of his Look, and I will be unable to exercise my subjectivity in order to act—specifically, that is, to get past or transcend this fixed picture I have of myself.

  The form of narcissism that, Sartre suggests, drives a self-defeating response to the encounter with the Other (the response, that is, in which I try to get the Other to confirm my sense of myself as an object) is closely linked with what I’m going to identify as a structure of paranoia inherent in his description of this encounter. The idea that narcissism and paranoia might go together naturally, as it were, finds indirect support in Sigmund Freud’s classic paper “On Narcissism.”16 Freud suggests that all human infants—indeed, in all likelihood, all living creatures—naturally feel a certain love for themselves, a self-love he calls “primary narcissism” (73–74). But just as the encounter with the Other in the master-slave dialectic renders the previously presocial being’s pure subjective self-certainty problematic—just as it shows this self-certainty to be lacking an objective dimension—so in Freud’s text the infant’s inculcation into human society, the society of others, which Freud measures according to his absorption of this society’s rules, renders his primary narcissism untenable. This is because the pure self-love of primary narcissism is a self-love oblivious to others; it is a love that turns on a sense of the self as brute, absolute, necessary, and central. Once the infant, through encounters with others, begins to give up this sense of himself, his primary narcissism cannot remain intact.

  Of course, as Freud suggests, the absorption of social rules does not simply rob the infant of a sense of self. Indeed, the infant’s new sense of himself is precisely as of an entity whose mission is to live up to these social standards. Freud identifies the new set of standards as themselves constituting an “ideal ego,” that is, “an ideal by which [the child] measures his actual ego” (93).17 In Freud’s view, the primary narcissism characteristic of infancy, the form of narcissism no longer tenable in the wake of the infant’s absorption of social rules, resurfaces in a secondary form as a love of the ideal ego. He writes:

  This ideal ego is now the target of the self-love which was enjoyed in childhood by the actual ego. The subject’s narcissism makes its appearance displaced on to this new ideal ego, which, like the infantile ego, finds itself possessed of every perfection that is of value. As always where the libido is concerned, man has here again shown himself incapable of giving up a satisfaction he had once enjoyed. He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonitions of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as this ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal. (94)

  Freud goes on to suggest that there is a psychic agency that “constantly watches the a
ctual ego and measures it by that ideal” (95) and that this agency is what we ordinarily call the “conscience.”18 In other words, the narcissistic investment we have in the ideal ego inevitably, on Freud’s view, leads us to, as it were, police ourselves. Taking things back a step, this means that our encounter with others produces a form of narcissism in which we—all human beings—find ourselves split between a part that we are in-ourselves, so to speak, and a part that constantly surveys the extent to which the in-itself falls short of its own ideal.

  It is at this juncture in “On Narcissism” that Freud links the development of secondary narcissism with the phenomenon of paranoia:

  Recognition of this agency [the conscience] enables us to understand the so-called “delusions of being noticed” or more correctly, of being watched, which are such striking symptoms in the paranoid diseases. … Patients of this sort complain that all their thoughts are known and their actions watched and supervised; they are informed of the functioning of this agency by voices which characteristically speak to them in the third person (“Now she’s thinking of that again,” “now he’s going out”). This complaint is justified; it describes the truth. A power of this kind, watching, discovering and criticizing all our intentions, does really exist. Indeed, it exists in every one of us in normal life. … What prompted the subject to form an ego ideal, on whose behalf his conscience acts as watchman, arose from the critical influence of his parents (conveyed to him by the medium of the voice), to whom were added, as time went on, those who trained and taught him and the innumerable and indefinable host of all the other people in his environment—his fellow-men—and public opinion. (95–96)19

  Notice that far from drawing a sharp line between “normal” people and paranoiacs, Freud says that the paranoiac’s insistence that he or she is being watched is true. What seems to distinguish the paranoiac is that he or she is convinced that the Look, as it were, is coming from the outside. At the risk of overstretching the bounds of Freud’s thought, I want to suggest that the paranoiac’s problem is something like a radical sense of being split, one so extreme that the surveying agency, or consciousness, seems for all the world as if, though “mine” in some sense, it is “not me.” It is mine in the sense that I recognize it as inescapably indicting me. And yet, if I am paranoid, it strikes me at the same time as coming from an entity that is radically Other.

  Freud’s understanding of the basic structure of paranoia, in which a certain, inherently human sense of being split becomes radically exaggerated, seems to me to be expressed perfectly in Sartre’s appropriation of the master-slave dialectic. What Freud sees as pathological—the feeling that I am continuously threatened by the judgment of the Other—is precisely Sartre’s picture of the normal human predicament. The decisive difference between Freud and Sartre on this point is that Freud identifies the judging agent to be internal, inside the head of the paranoid person (which means that the pathological dimension of paranoia lies precisely in this person’s misidentification of the locus of this agent), whereas for Sartre the judging agent genuinely is external, which means that a person’s sense of being watched is straightforwardly sane. That there is a decisive difference between Freud and Sartre here is not surprising, given Sartre’s early opinion of Freud. Indeed, in his early philosophical work (up to and including Being and Nothingness), Sartre explicitly aspired to develop an analysis of the human mind—a “psychoanalysis,” as he himself called it so as to declare a challenge to the work of Freud—based on the conviction that human beings are in principle capable of achieving perfect transparency of self-consciousness. In other words, Sartre, as a young philosopher writing in the heyday of Freud’s fame, set himself the task of disproving the idea of the Freudian unconscious.20 I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to identify this rejection of the idea of the unconscious as a hallmark of Sartre’s philosophy, in this period and beyond. There is no place in his thinking for the possibility that the sense of being watched characteristic of what he calls the Look might come from some part of my self that is presently not available to me (where this is an inadequate if, I hope, reasonable enough description in this context of Freud’s understanding of the role of the unconscious in paranoia). For Freud paranoia is a pathological response to the ongoing dialectic between internal and external that characterizes the phenomenon of conscience: the paranoiac imagines a sharp split between an external social censor and an internal self. I am arguing that in Being and Nothingness Sartre in effect identifies the paranoiac view as ontologically basic.

  It is tempting to suggest that Sartre’s understanding of the Look as genuinely coming from the outside, as it were, is itself a product of paranoia. The text is peppered with strikingly paranoid-sounding passages such as this one: “The original relation of myself to the Other is not only an absent truth aimed at across the concrete presence of an object in my universe; it is also a concrete, daily relation which at each instant I experience. At each instant the Other is looking at me” (345). But to reduce Sartre’s conceptualization of the Look to a mere diagnosis would be, at least, philosophically remiss. For the paranoid structure of the Look—a structure I’ve linked, following Freud, with a certain form of narcissism—can be shown to be a manifestation of a form, albeit an idiosyncratic one, of philosophical skepticism. And it is in fact Sartre’s investment in this form of philosophical skepticism that accounts for the drastic difference between his and Beauvoir’s appropriations of Hegel.

  The skepticism that infuses Sartre’s work stems from his understanding of what it is to be a subject and what it is to be an object and thus, of course, what it is to be a human being. For Sartre, to be a subject requires that one view the world as a collection of objects radically separate from oneself. But, more than this, it requires that I see these objects, this world, as the raw material from and in response to which I am to create myself, as it were, as a human being. And yet in what sense do I stand in need of creation, on Sartre’s view? It is pretty much a cliché that at the heart of Sartre’s existentialism is the idea that to be truly human—to create oneself as an authentic human being—is to “transcend” oneself through one’s freely chosen “projects.” But why must I do this, and what exactly does it entail? An answer for Sartre, though perhaps not the only one, is that it is the only way that I free myself from the Other’s Look. In Sartre’s world, I am constantly in danger of being reduced to the status of the in-itself, constantly under siege. The only way to escape from the Other’s fixating gaze is to deliberately undertake to overcome my own sense of shame by asserting myself as being-for-itself—as, that is, a form of being that is, literally, at the center of the universe.

  Sartre locates the superiority of his philosophy over that of his predecessors (and particularly that of Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger) in the thoroughgoing ontological character of his descriptive phenomenology. The mistake his predecessors make, Sartre argues, is that they figure the encounter with the Other not as the ontological phenomenon it is but as an event whose significance is to be measured in epistemic terms. They focus not on the change in ontological status precipitated for myself and the Other in our encounter but on the question of how I can know of and about the existence of myself and the other and the world. What’s perverse about this focus, Sartre observes, is that to be under the gaze of another is to be overwhelmed with the fact of the existence of that other, not to mention of oneself as an object in his world. The Other’s power over me through his Look, as revealed through what Sartre regards as genuinely ontological investigation, happens to “disclose to me the concrete, indubitable presence of a particular, concrete Other” (338)—that is, it discloses a piece of knowledge the epistemological certainty of which is, paradoxically, precisely that which epistemology-obsessed and ontology-blind philosophers so eagerly seek.

  The Other’s Look has an effect on me that is initially ontological and not epistemological, so that I experience my being-for-the-Other not as a piece of knowledge but in the form of a sense
of shame. And yet this sense of shame itself induces a radical shift in my epistemic relationship to the world. Now, suddenly, those objects I thought I knew turn out not to be related to me in the way I thought they were. And yet at the same time my sense of shame constitutes something of a proof for me that I exist, albeit as mere being-for-the-Other. Thus for Sartre, I wish to suggest, the encounter with the Other performs for the looked-at person a variation on Descartes’s performance in meditations 1 and 2.21 In meditation 1, Descartes brings his existence, along with that of the world, into question, and in meditation 2 he offers up his famous cogito as proof to himself that he, at least, indeed exists. In Sartre’s version the Look immediately confirms the fact of my existence and yet, at the same time, calls its status, as well as that of the world, severely into question. According to Descartes in meditation 1, to doubt that the ordinary objects around you and that you yourself exist is to court madness, a madness whose threat is extinguished precisely to the extent that the cogito indeed puts your skepticism to rest.22 But the threat of madness is not correspondingly extinguished in Sartre’s version. Here, the looked-at person’s sense of the world’s slipping out of his grasp is not the immediate spur to but, paradoxically, the product of the proof of his existence. The Other’s Look proves that I exist (something I previously had no cause to think about as such, let alone doubt), but the content of this proof—my being-for-the-Other, and my sense of what I previously took to be the world as now exclusively for-the-Other—fills me with horror. I feel entrapped in some deep ontological way by the Other’s Look. This sense that the Other is looking at me and in so doing is somehow opposing me fundamentally, and that there is no obvious way I can permanently extricate myself from this situation, and that I am therefore constantly and indefinitely under siege is, I wish to suggest, the form that Cartesian (i.e., skepticism-induced) madness takes in Sartre’s scenario. In other words, it takes the form of paranoia.