Jacques
Maritain Center
1 "Therefore neither do I call myself yet a Christian, I am still far behind." The Instant, No. 6, in Kierkegaard's Attack Upon "Christendom" 1854-1855, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944, p. 189, note; (Oxford: O.U.P., 1945). Cf. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David Swenson, completed by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 417; (Oxford: O.U.P., 1942).
Cf. Jean Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes, 2nd ed., Paris: Vrin, 1949, pp. 442-443.
1 Cf. Pierre Mesnard, Le vrai visage de Kierkegaard, Paris: Beauchesne, 1948, pp. 421-422.
2 We are thinking now of irony as Kierkegaard practised it, rather than of the irony of which he spoke in his inaugural Dissertation. There, with youth and an overly brilliant mind to excuse him, he succumbed to an immoderate taste for systematic construction. (Cf. above, Chapter I, pp. 7-8.)
1 I am not referring here to poetic knowledge or to the natural mystical experience, which pose quite different problems.
1 ". . . to live with her in the peaceful and trusting sense of the word never occurred to me." The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1841, ed. and trans. by Alexander Dru, London - New York - Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1951 no. 377, p. 98. ". . . I had never really thought of being married." Ibid., no. 383, p. 99.
2 Cf. in particular Either / Or, A Fragment of Life, trans. by David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944, 2 vols. (Oxford: O.U.P., 1945), and Stages on Life's Way, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940. On the role of the dialectic in Kierkegaard, see Jean Wahl, op. cit., pp. 140-148, 165-166, 490-492, 546.
3 "The only reality that exists for an existing individual is his own ethical reality." Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 280. ". . . Hegelian philosophy, by failing to define its relation to the existing individual, and by ignoring the ethical, confounds existence." Ibid., p. 275. "The seriousness of sin is its reality in the individual, whether it be thou or I. Speculatively one has to look away from the individual. So it is only frivolously one can [358]
talk speculatively about sin." The Sickness unto Death, in Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death, trans. Walter Lowrie, New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1955, p. 251.
1 Cf. Jean Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes, pp. 175 ff. Not only is it impossible for reason to prove the existence of God, but "to prove the existence of someone who is there is a joke. To prove the existence of a God who is there is a joke and an impiety." Ibid., p. 181.
"Now how are the sciences to help? Simply not at all, in no way whatsoever. They reduce everything to calm and objective observation -- with the result that freedom is an inexplicable something. . . ."
"In that way man is left juggling with a phantom: freedom of choice -- with the question whether he does or does not possess it, etc. And it even becomes scientific. He does not notice that he has thus suffered the loss of his freedom." The Journals, 1850, no. 1051, pp. 371-372.
2 Kierkegaard was certainly neither an idealist nor a subjectivist! For him the real is not in the notion, but in extra-mental existence, and truth is independent of man. (Cf. Th. Haecker, La notion de la verité chez Sören Kierkegaard, trans. J. Chuzeville, in Essais sur Kierkegaard, Pétrarque, Goethe, Courrier des Iles, no. 4, Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1934, pp. 9-83.) In this sense, if we want to speak in these terms, there is in spite of everything -- and in spite of himself -- a certain "objectivity" for him. The fact remains, however, that in his eyes not only is it nothing to know without the passion by which the subject seizes truth and makes it really or existentially his own, but to turn away from the object and turn oneself toward the subjectivity is the only way -- uncertain and anguished -- of arriving, always at the price of risk and anxiety, at the truth and at the absolute.
The most decisive critique of Kierkegaard was formulated by Erik Peterson, when he wrote: "Subjectivity is truth -- this statement, which applies only to Christ, is applied by him to every man; this is a deification of the self and of immanence." Was ist Theologie, pp. 9-12. (Quoted by Jean Wahl, op. cit., p. 445.)
3 I am thinking, for example, of Cornelio Fabro ("Foi et raison dans l'oeuvre de Kierkegaard," Rev. des sc. Phil. et théol., 32 (1948), 169-206; Introduction to Italian translation: Kierkegaard, Diario, I, Brescia: Morcelliana, 1948), of Walter Lowrie, of James Collins. But how are we to leave out of account the quite opposite interpretation, founded on a profound spiritual connaturality, of a Chestov or a Fondane? It was near the end of his life that the attention of Chestov was directed to Kierkegaard, in the course of a conversation [359]
with Karl Barth. He read him passionately then, and recognized himself in him, and he was certainly a competent expert in the matter of irrationalism. Cf. Chestov, Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle, Paris: V. Vrin, 1936.
On this question of interpretation, the work of Pierre Mesnard preserves, in our opinion, a judicious mean.
In connection with the problems under discussion here -- morality and faith in relation to the Singular -- we believe more than ever that it is in Fear and Trembling that one must look for the essential thought of Kierkegaard. This work, which he held to be his masterpiece, corresponds in an absolutely characteristic manner to his personal experience. It is just because he reveals himself in these pages that he hides himself under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio. It would in any case be absurd to write such things if one did not believe in them deeply. James Collins (The Mind of Kierkegaard, Chicago: Regnery, 1953, pp. 66-67) is right to point out that the use made by Sartre of the Kierkegaardian suspension of morality is contrary to the authentic thought of Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard himself took care to rule out any such interpretation. The fact remains that he regarded the Singular, in its "absolute relation with the absolute", as obeying a singular law which placed it above the general and could command it "to do that which morality forbade". If my remarks in Existence and the Existent "on the need to interiorize the natural law and appropriate it as the principle of one's individual conduct come close to the solution at which Kierkegaard ultimately aimed" (James Collins, op. cit., p. 280, note 23), the fact remains that he did not arrive at this solution, and that he was kept from arriving at it by the idea he formed of the passage from the stage of morality to the stage of faith.
1 Cf. our book Existence and the Existent, New York: Pantheon, 1948, pp. 123-127.
2 An analogous distinction must be made in the case of the idealist philosopher, this time between two kinds of discourse, the discourse of daily life (in which he speaks of things like everyone else) and ideological discourse (the discourse proper to his philosophy).
1 ". . . subjectivity is essentially passion, and in its maximum an infinite, personal, passionate interest in one's eternal happiness." Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 33. On faith as "the highest passion to which man can attain", cf. Pierre Mesnard, op. cit., pp. 344-345.
2 Jean Wahl, op. cit., pp. 276-277.
3 Cf. ibid., pp. 299-301. "In Fear and Trembling . . . Kierkegaard only considers the faith of Abraham in connection with the test of the sacrifice of Isaac. He says nothing of the faith which adheres to the universal divine truths: as if the latter did not exist for him, or were to be identified with the former. . . . It is true that in relation to the universally proposed divine truths, however firm its adherence, faith involves an incompleteness, a certain inquisitio, as St. Thomas says (De veritate, 14, 1) which is like an uneasiness of the intelligence; but which, except in great spiritual trials, does not have the character of anguish in the sense Kierkegaard means." Raissa Maritain, Histoire d'Abraham, Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1947, p. 47.
4 "Faith is: that the self in being itself and in willing to be itself is grounded transparently in God." The Sickness unto Death, trans. W. Lowrie, op. cit., p. 213.
5 The Christian must "give up his reason". Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 337. "The Socratic inwardness in existing is an analogue to faith; only that the inwardness of faith, corresponding as it does, not to the repulsion of the Socratic ignorance, but to the repulsion exerted by the absurd, is infinitely more profound." Ibid., p. 184. Cf. ibid., pp. 338, 413, 449.
1 Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 230c; Republic, 475d. -- Kierkegaard, The Point of View, etc., trans. Walter Lowrie, London, etc.: Oxford University Press, 1939, p. 61.
2 Cf. "Observations about marriage" in Stages on Life's Way, trans. by Walter Lowrie, pp. 171 ff.
3 "He who has learned that to exist as the individual is the most terrible thing of all will not be fearful of saying that it is great . . . ." Fear and Trembling, trans. W. Lowrie, op. cit., p. 85.
1 Either / Or, Vol. I, p. 104.
2 Cf. Mesnard, op. cit., p. 278.
3 The Journals, May 17, 1843, no. 444, p. 121.
4 As we know, that is the title of one of the writings of Kierkegaard: Guilty? Not Guilty? This kind of imaginary confession occurs in Stages on Life's Way.
5 "This shows that the individual is at once the universal and the particular. Duty is the universal which is required of me; so if I am not the universal, I am unable to perform duty. On the other hand, my duty is the particular, something for me alone, and yet it is duty and hence the universal. Here personality is displayed in its highest validity. It is not lawless, neither does it make laws for itself; for the definition of duty holds good, but personality reveals itself as the unity of the universal and the particular." Either / Or, Vol. II, pp. 220-221.
6 Discourse of the Assessor, in Either / Or.
7 In the bottom of his heart, he disapproved of marriage, as becomes evident at the time of The Instant: "There is no doubt," says Mesnard (op. cit., pp. 404-405), "that the condemnation of 'Christian' marriage had its profound source in shame for the informal union contracted by his father and consummated well in advance of its benediction by the priest. One understands better in this perspective our author's severe judgment on the procreation [363] of children: 'From the Christian point of view it is the height of egoism that, because a man and a woman have not been able to control themselves, another being should be introduced into this valley of tears' (L'Instant, p. 112)."
1 Also in his defense of marriage Kierkegaard holds that marriage is forbidden to all by ethics. That is one of the reasons why the assessor condemns mysticism. "Now since in my opinion . . . it is the duty of every man to marry, . . . you will easily see that I must have an aversion to all mysticism." Either / Or, Vol. II, p. 205.
Cf. ibid., p. 254: "The ethical teaches him that this relationship [marriage] is the absolute. For the relationship is the ordinary and universal."
2 There is good reason for Regis Jolivet (Introduction to Kierkegaard, pp. 154-158) to insist on the importance of the notion of "the individual before God" for Kierkegaard. "Only when the self as this definite individual is conscious of existing before God, only then is it the infinite self. . . ." The Sickness unto Death, trans. W. Lowrie, op. cit., p. 211.
1 "If no one has had compassion upon me, what wonder that compassion has fled like me out among the graves, where I sit comforted as one who sacrifices his life to save others, as one who voluntarily chooses banishment to save others", Kierkegaard makes the leper say in Guilty? Not Guilty? (5 February at midnight), in Stages on Life's Way, p.221.
Speaking of the poet who loves religion like an unhappy lover, he writes: "His collision is essentially this: is he the elect, is the thorn in the flesh the expression for the fact that he is to be employed as the extraordinary, is it before God quite as it should be with respect to the extraordinary figure he has become? or is the thorn in the flesh the experience he must humble himself under in order to attain the universal human?" The Sickness unto Death, trans. W. Lowrie, op. cit., p. 209.
2 On the deeper meaning of these things and on the sanctity of Abraham, see the study by Raissa Maritain, Histoire d'Abraham (Paris: Desclée De Brouwer, 1947); English translation in The Bridge , Vol. I, ed. by John M. Oesterreicher, New York: Pantheon Books, 1955, 23-52.
3 "The domain of ethics and the domain of the measurable." Jean Wahl, op. cit., p. 588. The author cites in this connection A. Gilg, S. Kierkegaard, 1926, p. 140.
4 "The story of Abraham contains therefore a teleological suspension of the ethical. As the individual he became higher than the universal." Fear and Trembling, trans. W. Lowrie, op. cit., p. 77.
1 Fear and Trembling, trans. W. Lowrie, op. cit., p. 80.
2 Ibid., p. 124. "Whoever has had inwardness enough to lay hold of the ethical with infinite passion, and to understand the eternal validity of duty and the universal, for him there can neither in heaven or on earth or in hell be found so fearful a plight, as when he faces a collision where the ethical becomes the temptation." Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 231.
3 "The paradox of faith is this, that the individual is higher than the universal, that the individual (to recall a dogmatic distinction now rather seldom heard) determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relalation to the universal. The paradox can also be expressed by saying that there is an absolute duty toward God; for in this relationship of duty the individual as an individual stands related absolutely to the absolute." Fear and Trembling, trans. W. Lowrie, op. cit., p. 80.
4 "The paradox is that he [Abraham] as the Individual put himself in an absolute relation to the absolute." Ibid., p. 72.
"Either there is . . . the paradox that the individual as the individual . . . stands in an absolute relation to the absolute / or . . . Abraham is lost." Ibid., p. 91.
"For if the ethical (i.e. the moral) is the highest thing, and if nothing incommensurable remains in man in any other way but as the evil (i.e. the particular which has to be expressed in the universal), then one needs no other categories besides those which the Greeks possessed or which by consistent thinking can be derived from them. . . . Faith is precisely this paradox, that the individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified over against it, is not subordinate but superior -- yet in such a way, be it observed, that it is the particular individual who, after he has been subordinated as the particular to the universal, now through the universal becomes the individual who as the particular is superior to the universal, for the fact that the individual as the particular stands in an absolute relation to the absolute." Ibid., pp. 65-66.
Then "interiority can no longer be expressed externally, as morality demands. The religious man is as necessarily enclosed within himself as the criminal and the hypocrite. He hides himself, but it is because he has within him something better which he hides; such is the man of the Gospel, who hides his face when he prays." Jean Wahl, op. cit., p. 193.
Cf. Pierre Mesnard, op. cit., p. 344: "The man who truly has faith can experience only that reflection which consists of constant meditation on the nourishing rapport which unites him with his master. He no longer has any duty except an absolute duty toward God: to realize himself fully as an individual with the help of faith."
Is not God himself the "rule of the individual", as Martin Thust said (Sören Kierkegaard, des Dichter des Religiosen, Munich, 1931)? "He is the original, absolute exception, the absolute other who justifies all exceptions. He is, as the story of Job demonstrates, the one for whom the ethical categories are absolutely suspended." Jean Wahl, op. cit., p. 189. (Poor Job, the exhortations of his friends were not enough -- he still had to suffer the exegeses of the philosophers.)
1 "The absolute duty may cause one to do what ethics would forbid." Fear and Trembling, trans. W. Lowrie, op. cit., p. 84.
2 The Instant, No. 5, in Kierkegaard's Attack Upon Christendom, p. 167.
3 Ibid., no. 4, p. 151.
4 Ibid., no. 8, p. 256.
5 Ibid., no. 5, p. 159.
6 Ibid., no. 9, p. 268.
7 Ibid., no. 7, p. 221.
8 Cf. the collection of religious texts taken from the Papers of Kierkegaard and published under the title of Christ by P. H. Tisseau (Bazoges-en-Pareds, 1940), p. 196 (Mesnard, pp. 375-376).
1 Cf. Fear and Trembling, trans. W. Lowrie, op. cit., pp. 64-65. "The ethical as such is the universal, and as the universal it applies to everyone, which may be expressed from another point of view by saying that it applies every instant. It reposes immanently in itself, it has nothing without itself which is its telos. . . . Conceived immediately as physical and psychical, the particular individual is the individual who has his telos in the universal, and his ethical task is to express himself constantly in it, to abolish his particularity in order to become the universal. . . . Whenever the individual after he has entered the universal feels an impulse to assert himself as the particular, he is in temptation (Anfechtung), and he can labor himself out of this only by penitently abandoning himself as the particular in the universal."
Ibid., p. 79: "In the ethical way of regarding life it is therefore the task of the individual to divest himself of the inward determinants and express them in an outward way."
These passages, we believe, relate directly to the morality of Kant, but through it to morality as such, whose concept never ceased to exist for Kierkegaard, under the sign of Kant, just as the concept of speculative reason remained for him under the sign of Hegel.
2 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, pp. 133-136.
1 Ibid., p. 367. "The knight of faith renounces the universal in order to become the individual. . . . He who believes that it is easy enough to be the individual can always be sure that he is not a knight of faith, for vagabonds and roving geniuses are not men of faith. The knight of faith knows, on the other hand, that it is glorious to belong to the universal. He knows that it is beautiful and salutary to be the individual who translates himself into the universal, who edits as it were a pure and elegant edition of himself, as free from errors as possible and which everyone can read" . . . finding his joy "in the security of the universal. He knows that it is beautiful to be born as the individual who has the universal as his home, his friendly abiding-place, which at once welcomes him with open arms when he would tarry in it. But he knows also that higher than this there winds a solitary path, narrow and steep; he knows that it is terrible to be born outside the universal, to walk without meeting a single traveller. He knows very well where he is and how he is related to man. Humanly speaking, he is crazy and cannot make himself intelligible to anyone. And yet it is the mildest expression, to say that he is crazy. If he is not supposed to be that, then he is a hypocrite, and the higher he climbs on this path, the more dreadful a hypocrite he is." Fear and Trembling, trans. W. Lowrie, op. cit., p. 86.
2 Cf. Mesnard, op. cit., pp. 321-322; and Regis Jolivet, op. cit., p. 151.
1 Hosea, 1: 2.
2 Sum. theol., I-II, 94, 5 ad 2.
3 For Kierkegaard, on the contrary, Abraham "overstepped the ethical entirely. . . . For I should very much like to know how one would bring Abraham's act into relation with the universal, and whether it is possible to discover any connection whatever between what Abraham did and the universal . . . except the fact that he transgressed it." Fear and Trembling, trans. W. Lowrie, op. cit., pp. 69-70. (Our italics.)
What Kierkegaard does not see is that, as we noted in our Existence and the Existent, [370] (p. 67), "Abraham, stricken to the heart by the personal command of God and the contradiction by which he was torn, Abraham still had a universal law, the first of all laws: Thou shalt worship God, the Incomprehensible, and shalt obey Him. Abraham knew obscurely, not out of treatises on moral theology but by the instinct of the Holy Ghost, that the killing of his child was exempt from the law forbidding homicide, because it was commanded by the Master of life."
1 Vie de Monsieur Descartes, by Adrien Baillet, Paris: Ed. de la Table Ronde, 1946, pp. 47-48.
2 In a brief note of Pierre Reverdy on Baudelaire I find more truth than in all the analyses of Sartre. "I believe," writes Reverdy, "that the best definition of greatness is the power to surmount one's own weaknesses. The man whose acts and works show him exempt from weaknesses does not give proof particularly of greatness -- but of strength. Hugo is a fabulous Hercules. Baudelaire is great because one feels him to be weak and he shows himself so; but he is Baudelaire and it is his having known, in part at least, how to surmount his immense weakness, which permitted him all the same to be Baudelaire, what he is for us through his work, what counts after all and despite all, what qualifies the poet. From so many weaknesses surmounted has emerged, above the man, this work, which does not give the impression of genial force which emerges from the work of Hugo, but of a more profound, a keener touch -- at once much closer to and much more beyond us." (Pierre Reverdy, En Vrac, Monaco: éd. du Rocher, 1956, p. 164.)
1 Jean Paul Sartre, La nausée, Paris: Gallimard, 1938, p. 167. -- In the same passage Sartre speaks of the "people" who "have tried to surmount this contingency by inventing a being that would be necessary and cause of itself". These people, at least if it is a question of Aristotle and of Thomas Aquinas, never thought on this account that contingency was "a false semblance, an appearance which can be dissipated" -- on the contrary, contingency was for them something most real and entirely impossible to dissipate. Therein lies, doubtless, the fundamental mistake of existentialism, which cannot speak of the great [373] metaphysicians without calumniating them. The fact remains that if one denies the existence of God, Ipsum Esse per se subsistens (it is Descartes who said "cause of itself", the expression is meaningless), then contingency is not only real and irreducible -- it is necessary to make it "the absolute", and to posit at the same time the absurdity of being. Sartrian Nausea is a true demonstration through the absurd of the existence of God. As Father Garrigou-Lagrange wrote in 1918: "It is necessary to choose: God or radical absurdity." (Dieu, son existence et sa nature, Paris: Beauchesne, p. 342.) -- [All translations of Sartre are made directly from the French; no reference will be made to existing English translations.]
1 For those who are interested in the history of ideas, and in the fact that the same idea can be put into relief -- with altogether different connotations -- at nearly the same time in very different schools of thought, may I be permitted to refer the reader to my book Sept leçons sur l'être (notably pp. 51-57 and 96-99). This book, taken from a course given at the Institut Catholique of Paris in 1932-1933, appeared (Paris, Téqui) in 1934. (English trans., A Preface to Metaphysics, New York: Sheed and Ward, 1940; London: Sheed and Ward, 1939). La Nausée appeared in 1938.
1 La nausée, pp. 162-163.
1 Jean Wahl, "Essai sur le néant d'un problème", Deucalion, I, 1946, p. 71.
2 Benjamin Fondane, "Le lundi existentiel et le dimanche de l'histoire", in L'Existence, Paris: Gallimard, 1945, pp. 25-53.
1 Cf. L'être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), p. 98. The principle of identity defines the in-itself. "Far from being a universally universal axiom", it "is only a synthetic principle enjoying a simply regional universality". Cf. ibid., p. 33 and p. 116.
2 "Just now, I had the experience of the absolute: the absolute or the absurd. . . . The world of explanations and of reasons is not that of existence. A circle is not absurd, it is explained very well by the rotation of a line-segment around one of its extremities. But also, a circle does not exist. This root, on the contrary, existed in the measure that I was not able to explain it." La nausée, Paris: Gallimard, 1938, p. 165.
On the opacity, the total and totally neutral positivity of the in-itself, cf. L'être et le néant, pp. 33-34.
3 "Facticity, that is to say the irremediable contingency of our 'being-there', of our existence without end and without reason." J.-P. Sartre, "Un nouveau mystique", in Situations, I, Paris: Gallimard, 1947, p. 154.
"Thus the for-itself is sustained by a perpetual contingency, which it recaptures for its benefit and assimilates without ever being able to suppress it. This perpetually evanescent contingency of the in-itself which haunts the for-itself and attaches it to the being-in-itself without ever letting itself be seized, is what we will call the facticity of the for-itself. It is this facticity which permits one to say that it is, that it exists, although we may never be able to realize it and although we always grasp it through the for-itself." L'être et le néant, p. 125.
Facticity is thus the proper condition of the in-itself according as it affects and lives off the for-itself itself.
4 L'être et le néant, p. 61. The author adds: "For it [the human-reality], to put a particular existent out of circuit is to put itself out of circuit in relation to this existent. In this case it escapes it, it is out of reach, the existent cannot act on it, it has withdrawn beyond a nothingness. Descartes, after the Stoics, gave a name to this possibility for the human-reality of secreting a nothingness which isolates it: it is freedom.
"Human freedom precedes the essence of man and renders it possible; the essence of the human being is in suspense in his freedom. What we call freedom is therefore impossible to distinguish from the being of the 'human reality'." Ibid.
1 L'être et le néant, p. 58. -- Later (p. 61), the author describes human freedom (which is the very being of man) as that through which nothingness comes to the world.
2 Cf. L'être et le néant, p. 116.
3 Cf. above, p. 376, note 4.
4 L'être et le néant, p. 559.
5 Ibid., p. 560. -- This fundamental project "sets for its end a certain type of relation to the being which the for-itself wishes to entertain" (ibid., p. 559), and it constitutes the very being of man, the being which man gives himself and chooses for himself. Cf. ibid., p. 61: "Man is not at all a being first who would be free then, but there is no difference between the being of man and his 'being-free'."
6 Ibid., p. 560.
1 "It is because the human-reality is not enough that it is free. . . . Man is free because he is not himself but presence to himself. The being which is what it is cannot be free. Freedom is precisely the nothingness which has been in the heart of man and which constrains the human-reality to make itself, instead of being. . . . For the human-reality, to be is to choose itself: nothing comes to it from outside, nor from within either, which it can receive or accept. It is entirely abandoned, without any help of any kind, to the insupportable necessity of making its being even to the last detail. Thus freedom is not a being: it is the being of man, that is to say, his nothingness of being. If one first conceived man as a plenum, it would be absurd to seek in him, afterward, moments or psychic regions in which he would be free: you might as well seek the void in a container which has first been filled up to the brim. Man cannot be now free and now slave: he is entirely free or he is not." Ibid., p. 516.
It is curious to remark that, in the reality of things, there is one case, and one alone, where freedom thus consists in nihilating: when it voluntarily defaults and turns the eyes from the norm, thus introducing evil into the choice. Cf. my St. Thomas and the Problem of Evil, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1942, and chapter IV of my Existence and the Existent, New York: Pantheon, 1948.
2 "Nothingness can nihilate itself only on the foundation of being; if nothingness can be given, it is neither before nor after being, nor, in a general manner, outside of being; but it is in the very womb of being, in its heart, like a worm." L'être et le néant, p. 57.
3 "It is then that freedom will become aware of itself and discover itself in anguish as the unique source of value, and the nothingness through which the world exists." ibid., p. 722.
4 Cf. ibid., pp. 614-615. Freedom is infinite, not in the sense that it has no limits, but in the sense "that it never encounters them. The only limits which freedom runs against at each instant are those which it imposes on itself."
1 L'être et le néant, pp. 569-570.
2 "Man . . . is not at all: he is what he is not and he is not what he is, he is the nihilation of the contingent In-itself in so far as the self of this nihilation is its flight ahead toward the In-itself cause of itself. Human reality is pure effort to become God, without there being any given substratum of this effort, without there being anything which thus strives. Desire expresses this effort." Ibid., p. 664.
3 Ibid., p. 689.
4 Ibid., p. 664.
1 Cf. L'être et le néant, pp. 639-642.
2 Cf. ibid., pp. 111, 329-330, 433-439, 478-481, 537.
3 "Bad faith . . . is the immediate and permanent menace of every project of the human being, . . . consciousness hides in its being a permanent risk of bad faith. And the origin of this risk is that consciousness, at once and in its being, is what it is not and is not what it is." Ibid., p. 111.
"Whence it is doubtless necessary to conclude -- as Sartre himself invited us to do -- that 'bad faith', in the ontological sense of 'non- coincidence of self with self', is an evil of consciousness, its very mode of existence, but that it is important not to attribute to it in any way, on this basis, a positive moral signification. Like all the concepts which define the human, this one is ambiguous: man exists in bad faith, but he can, starting from there, realize himself according to bad faith or render himself authentic." Francis Jeanson, Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre, Paris: Ed. du Myrte, 1947, pp. 223-224.
4 Cf. Francis Jeanson, cited in the preceding note.
5 "My original fall," writes Sartre, "is the existence of the other." (L'être et le néant, p. 321); -- but it is at the same time my own Dasein.
6 Sartre, Les mouches, Thêâtre, Paris: Gallimard, 1947, p. 102.
7 Cf. L'être et le néant, p. 253. "We run toward ourselves," adds the author, "and we are, by that fact, the being which cannot rejoin itself."
8 La nausie, p. 170. -- Did not Jean-Jacques say: "Only what is not is beautiful"? This detestable phrase enunciates a first postulate of atheistic existentialism. "The real is never beautiful," wrote Sartre in his first book (L'imaginaire, Paris: Gallimard, 1940, p. 245).
1 Cf. F. Jeanson, op. cit., p. 167: "Defeat is the ontological climate of subjectivity"; p. 294: "Such is our freedom, on the ontological plane: freedom in fact, contingent, irreducible, absurd: simple condemnation of the human-reality to never coinciding with itself, perpetual self-evasion of a being which cannot 'be itself'. In this sense, our freedom appears rather like a kind of fatal impotence, which fascinates man in proposing to him a value without value, leads him to an absolute defeat, and makes of him 'a useless passion'." Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté, Paris: Gallimard, 1947, p. 17.
2 Sartre, L'existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris: Nagel, 1946, p. 94.
3 Cf. the last pages (720-722) of L'être et le néant.
1 Cf. L'existentialisme est un humanisme, pp. 84-85: "Those who will conceal, through the spirit of seriousness or through determinist excuses, their total freedom, I will call 'lâches'; the others who will try to show that their existence was necessary, whereas it is the very contingency of the appearance of man on the earth, I will call 'salauds'."
2 "If he is indifferent to being of good or bad faith, because bad faith recovers possession of good faith and slips itself in at the very origin of his project, this does not mean that one cannot radically escape from bad faith. But this supposes that the rotten being pulls itself together, which we will call authenticity. . . ." J.-P. Sartre, L'être et le néant, p. 111, note.
3 Cf. L'être et le néant, p. 484, note. Cited below, p. 387, note 4.
4 "We can never choose evil; what we choose is always the good, and nothing can be good for us without being good for all." J.-P. Sartre, L'existentialisme est un humanisme, pp. 25-26. -- Sartre is not alluding here to any value universal in itself; it is of human solidarity that he is thinking, in virtue of which in choosing for myself I choose for the human race.
5 "Such is Evil for M. Sartre: This violent desire to be a fixed and immutable thing, to make oneself a social object which exists only in an artificial order." R.-M. Albérès, Jean-Paul Sartre , Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1953, p. 93.
6 L'être et le néant, p. 450.
1 Since the time that this chapter was written, Sartre has published Critique de Ia raison dialectique, Tome I, Paris: Gallimard, 1960. In our opinion there is nothing in this voluminous work which would lead us to modify our views on the Ethics of atheistic Existentialism.
Let us remark in passing the note on pp. 285-286 of this book of Sartre's: "The fundamental alienation does not come, as L'Etre et le néant might wrongly lead one to believe, from a prenatal choice: it comes from the univocal relationship of interiority which unites man as practical organism to his environment."
If Sartre, who promises us still more works, continues in the path indicated by Critique de la raison dialectique, it seems that he is about to proceed to a "dialectical shift" (in the sense of footnote 4, p. 385 of the present volume) which in no way invalidates our analysis, but which causes his thought to lose an element of originality and depth; and which confirms our remarks (p. 389) on the essential role played in him by concern for politics (the politics of men of letters).
2 La problème moral et la pensée de Sartre.
3 Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté.
4 "Human freedom precedes the essence of man and renders it possible, the essence of the human being is in suspense in his freedom." L'être et le néant, p. 61. -- "Human-reality cannot receive its ends . . . neither from the outside nor from a pretended interior 'nature'. It chooses them and, through this choice itself, confers on them a transcendent existence [384]
as the external limit of its projects. From this point of view -- and if one well understands that the existence of the Dasein precedes and commands its essence -- human reality, in and by its very rising up, decides to define its own being through its ends. It is therefore the position of my ultimate ends which characterizes my being and which is identified with the original gushing forth of the freedom which is mine." Ibid., pp. 519-520.
1 On determinism, it is not Sartre, it is Kierkegaard who has written these admirable lines: "The determinist or the fatalist is in despair, and in despair he has lost his self, because for him everything is necessary. He is like that king who died of hunger because all his food was transformed into gold. Personality is a synthesis of possibility and necessity. The condition of its survival is therefore analogous to breathing (respiration) which is an in- and an a-spiration. The self of the determinist cannot breathe, for it is impossible to breathe necessity alone, which taken pure and simple suffocates the human self." The Sickness Unto Death, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 62; Oxford: O.U.P., 1942.
2 Cf. L'être et le néant, pp. 527, 550.
3 Cf. above, pp. 377-378.
4 This is what Maurice Merleau.Ponty very justly notes: "Choice supposes a preliminary engagement, and . . . the idea of a first choice is a contradiction." Phénoménologie de la perception, Paris: Gallimard, 1945, p. 502. -- Indeed, as we wrote in our Existence and the Existent (p. 7), one sees substituted here "for the unthinkable notion of a subject without nature the notion of pure action or pure efficiency in the exercise of an option, of pure liberty, in short, itself ambiguous and collapsing from within, for although it seems to appeal to a sovereign free will, it really appeals only to a pure spontaneity, which is inevitably suspected of being merely the sudden explosion of necessities hidden in the depths of that nature which was allegedly exorcised."
5 Cf. our Le Songe de Descartes, Paris: Corrêa, 1932, pp. 212-225; English trans. The Dream of Descartes, New York: Philosophical Library, 1944, pp. 142-149; London: Editions Poetry, 1946.
6 "Two centuries of crisis -- crisis of Faith, crisis of Science -- will be needed for man to recover that creative freedom which Descartes put in God, and for him finally to grasp this truth, the essential base of humanism: man is the being whose appearance makes a world exist. But we will not reproach Descartes for having given to God what properly belongs to us . . ." J.-P. Sartre, Descartes, Geneva-Paris: Les Trois Collines, 1946, p. 51.
1 ". . . The decision to adopt the moral attitude . . . is based on nothing; it is not founded on any absolute sign, no guarantee justifies it from without. In it resides the radical invention of man by man. And if this invention is human, it is because it proceeds from the nothingness of what is not, it is because nothing, absolutely nothing indicates its value in advance, and it is because the freedom from which it proceeds is as free to renounce itself as to conquer itself." Francis Jeanson, op. cit., p. 356.
2 Cf. L'être et le néant, p. 664. Quoted above, p. 379, note 2.
3 Cf. L'être et le néant, p. 111 (cited above, p. 382, note 2) and p. 484 (cited below p. 387, note 4).
4 Or is it necessary on the contrary (for one never knows what shifts a basically dialectical philosophy is capable of) to think that this radical conversion through which the free agent "pursues a radically different type of being" consists in delivering himself purely and simply from the project of being-God which is given in L'être et le néant as "the fundamental structure of the human reality"? M. Sartre alone could tell us. In the meantime, the interpretation which we here propose seems to us, although more complicated, to do more credit to the coherence of the system.
5 Cf. L'être et le néant, p. 670: "This particular type of project which has freedom for its foundation and end would merit a special study. It is in fact radically differentiated from all the others in that it aims at a radically different type of being. It would be necessary to explain in full indeed its relations with the project of being-God which has seemed to us the profound structure of the human reality. But this study cannot be made here: it belongs in fact to an Ethics and it supposes that one has first defined the nature and the role of the purifying reflection (our descriptions have up to now aimed only at the 'conniving' reflection)" . . . .
1 Cf. below, p. 388.
2 Cf. L'être et le néant, p. 721.
4 Cf. L'être et le néant, p. 111, note. Cited above, p. 282, note 2.
5 J.-P. Sartre, L'existentialisme est an humanisme, p. 23.
1 "Dostoievsky had written 'if God did not exist, everything would be permitted'. There is the point of existentialism. In reality, everything is permitted if God does not exist. . . ." Ibid., p. 36.
2 F. Jeanson, op. cit., p. 352. "One sees," continues the author, "that it is a question of a balance, always to be invented and always unstable, between action -- demanding an engagement followed -- and reflection -- necessitating the consecration, under the form of distance from self, of this hidden rending which presence to self is."
It is known that for Sartre, by reason of our total abandonment in a world in which no recourse is offered to us, "anguish is the mode of being of freedom as consciousness of being". L'être et le néant, p. 66. Cf. ibid., pp. 69-71.
3 "Freedom throughout each concrete circumstance cannot have any other end than to will itself." J.-P. Sartre, L'existentialisme est un humanisme, p. 82. "In setting its ends, freedom must put them in parentheses, confront them at each moment with this absolute end which it itself constitutes, and debate in its own name the means which it uses to conquer itself." Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté, p. 187. (Italics ours.)
4 "These considerations do not exclude the possibility of a morality of deliverance and salvation. But this must be reached at the term of a radical conversion of which we cannot speak here." J.-P. Sartre, L'être et le néant, p. 484, note.
1 ". . . Then he assumes the defeat. And the action condemned insofar as effort for being recovers its validity insofar as manifestation of existence." Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté, p. 19.
2 Cf. L'être et le néant, p. 670; and F. Jeanson, op. cit., pp. 295-298.
3 Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté, pp. 43-47.
4 Cf. ibid., p.81; p.180.
5 ". . . He [man] shamefully regrets not being one of those things which need make no effort to exist, while his existence is for him only the constant exercise of his freedom." R. M. Albérès, op. cit., p. 63.
"His being is lack of being, but there is a manner of being this lack which is precisely existence." Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 19.
1 Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit., pp. 17-18, p. 165.
2 Ibid., p. 185: "It has often been noted: only revolt is pure. Every construction involves the scandal of dictatorship, of violence." -- p. 216: "It would be absurd to contract a liberating action under the pretext that it involves crime and tyranny; for without crime and without tyranny the liberation of man would not be possible: one cannot escape this dialectic which goes from freedom to freedom through dictatorship and oppression.
3 Cf. R. M. Albérès, op. cit., pp. 104-106.
4 To tell the truth, one wonders what sense the expression "human person" can have in an ethics for which, as M. Jeanson writes, human reality is "perpetual self-evasion of a being which cannot 'be itself'." (Cf. above, p. 381, note 1.)
5 This is strongly accentuated in the book of Mme. de Beauvoir -- with that kind of ambiguous rigorism, and that revengeful ardor to prohibit and condemn through which existentialism would like to show that it can handle revolutionary thunder with as much [390]
energy as Communism can. "So far from the absence of God authorizing every license, it is on the contrary because man is abandoned on the earth that his acts are definitive, absolute engagements." (Which is pure verbiage, from the moment that man thus engages himself only with respect to a destiny and a world without any other value than that which he himself gives to them, and from the moment that no reason or objective norm obliges him in conscience to direct his free choice in one direction or another.) The author adds (and this time this is quite true, to the extent at least that the notion of fault keeps an authentically ethical sense): "A God can pardon, efface, compensate; but if God does not exist, the faults of men are inexpiable." op. cit., p. 23. Later we are told of "a true terrestrial damnation" (ibid., p. 49).
1 J.-P. Sartre, L'être et le néant, p. 722.
2 Ibid., p. 721. See above pp. 385-386.
1 "As soon as a liberation appears possible, not to exploit this possibility is a resignation of freedom, a resignation which implies bad faith and which is a positive fault." Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 56. "To will existence, to will to unveil the world, to will man free, all this is a single will." ibid., p. 122. Cf. Ibid., pp. 114, 124-125.
2 Cf. ibid., pp. 117 ff. -- There is little philosophy in these pages in which the idea of emancipation and of struggle against oppression, in itself a great and holy idea, is turned into the old story of revolutionary pedantism and seasoned with the trash of confusions and untruths in which a facile journalism delights. On the other hand, let us be grateful to the author for having written: "If in all the oppressed countries, the face of an infant is so moving, it is not that the infant . . . has more right to happiness than the others: it is that he is the living affirmation of human transcendence . . ." Ibid., p. 143.
3 Cf. our Existence and the Existent, p. 9; "No need even to mention Pascal," we remarked there. "In existentialism there is nothing equal to the stature of a Nietzsche. This astounding renunciation of any measure of grandeur is probably the most original and most highly appreciated contribution that existentialism has made to our age."
4 Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit., p. 189.
5 After having summarized the pages in which J.-P. Sartre (L'être et le néant, pp. 615-638) explains that death "cannot belong to the ontological structure of the for-itself" and that finally "death escaping my projects because it is unrealizable, I myself escape death through my project itself" (ibid., pp. 629, 632), M. Francis Jeanson concludes that the free project proper to human reality "suppresses death by making it, as Epicurus said more or less, the moment of life which we never have to live". (La problème moral et la pensée de Sartre, p. 301.)
1 Francis Jeanson, loc. cit.
2 See, for example, L'existentialisme est un humanisme, pp. 40-47 (cf. our book Existence and the Existent, pp. 59-61; or Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté, pp. 188-217).
3 J.-P. Sartre, Les mouches, p. 101.
4 "If I have suppressed God the father, someone is certainly needed to invent values . . ." J.-P. Sartre, L'existentialisme est un humanisme, p. 89.
5 On the notion of "situation", cf. J.-P. Sartre, L'être et le néant, pp. 633 sq.; Situations, II, Paris: Gallimard, 1948, pp. 26-27, 312.
One can form an idea of the dialectical process we are speaking of here by letting a reading of Les Mandarins illustrate that of Pour une morale de l'ambiguïté (in particular pp. 180-217). [393]
1 "One can choose all if this is on the plane of free engagement." J.-P. Sartre, L'existentialisme est un humanisme, pp. 88-89.
1 Cf. L'être et le néant, p. 555.
2 F. Jeanson, op. cit., pp. 294-295. See above p. 387, note 4. L'être et le néant, p. 670. Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, op. cit., pp. 20-21. Cf. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Sum. theol., I-II, 89, 6.
3 Cf. our essay on "The Immanent Dialectic of the First Act of Freedom", in The Range of Reason. This first act of freedom is produced, according to St. Thomas, at the moment when in leaving childhood the child deliberates about himself and opts for or against God as ultimate end of his life. Mme. de Beauvoir writes on her part: "It is adolescence which appears as the moment of moral choice: then freedom reveals itself and it is necessary to decide on one's attitude in the face of it." (op. cit., p. 58.)