The second question raised above was, does an authentic attitude require us to abandon the original quest for completeness? If we see the original project as both synonymous with existential lack and a basic, unavoidable project of bad faith (I am always attempting to become God) then we end up undermining an authenticity based on BN. Either we end up claiming that we are always, on some level, in bad faith (as Santoni has argued),401 or we undermine the ontology of Being and
Nothingness. Neither of these options (at least, without a positive picture of what an alternative ontology looks like) is desirable, so it is worth working past them.
When it comes to authenticity demanding a fundamentally different configuration of consciousness, we can sidestep the issue. Since the existing Sartrean picture purports to describe how
consciousness must be structured to be consciousness at all, an argument that consciousness can be structured differently needs to tear down the argument to get off the ground. At the very least, it would need to show how it is possible for something which has one set of conditions of possibility to transition toward having another set of conditions of possibility, which on the face of it is extremely implausible. Nonetheless, Anderson appeals to textual evidence that there has to be a separate ontology of authenticity and inauthenticity: “In fact, Sartre stated explicitly in Being and Nothingness that he was dealing there only with descriptions on the level of impure, or accessory, reflection”.402 Commentators such as Zheng have shown in detail how his specific textual evidence does not hold up403 when taken into wider context,404 but I do not think we need to go that far. If the ontology of BN were incorrect, or worse, incorrect because it is generated by a project of bad faith, then the text would be self-defeating and ultimately pointless. Without an accompanying text that shows a different ontology and gives us a good reason why we should study a purposefully inaccurate text, writing BN would have been an exercise in futility. This is not to mention how the literary projects in Nausea, and The Roads to Freedom foreshadow or depend on the descriptions given in BN. Why would Sartre go to the trouble of creating an oeuvre that is basically worthless except as a warning, without pointing out that fact – if only for pedagogical reasons? And why, moved by his experiences and his conversion to the Marxist cause, would he maintain an ontology he knew to be flawed in
401See Santoni, Ronald E.,Good Faith, Bad Faith, and Authenticity. Temple University Press: Philadelphia, 1995. Chapter Three deals with this issue.
402 Sartre’s Two Ethics, p.54.
403 E.g. the comments on Notebooks p.6 where BN is described as an “ontology before conversion”.
404 See Yiwei, Zheng, “Sartre on Authenticity” in Sartre Studies International, vol. 8 no. 2 (2002), pp. 127-40. pp.
129-31.
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order to write the Critique(s) of Dialectical Reason? All of this means there is a burden on anyone pushing an alternative ontology to create it, rather than being able to support it in abstraction from its actual content. As a result, the issue can be safely avoided unless there seems to be good reason to cast out the system as a whole, which is not obviously the case.
So turning to the other challenge: how is it possible for us to value something other than identity and completeness if all our action depends on existential lack? The idea is, since all projects point to the goal of completion, by transitivity completion is the ultimate value endorsed by all of them.
Since valuing completion leads to bad faith, we are able to talk about an original project of bad faith which is never overcome, even if we have projects that are authentic in the sense outlined above.
The most promising way out of this comes out of insisting on separating the ethical and ontological spheres; even though ethics might be grounded in ontology for Sartre, that does not have to mean that there is an ethical value inherent to ontology. An analogy would be that, although winning a game is grounded in its rules, you cannot win or lose at the rules of a game. Moreover, if we were locked into bad faith by our most basic structure, Sartre would not be able to talk about an ethics at all – if bad faith leads necessarily to the unethical, then we should be able to formulate an ethics purely within ontology, something Sartre denies: “[o]ntology itself cannot formulate ethical precepts”.405 He would also be unable to make the following comment: “one begins with flight and inauthenticity. But the question is whether this nature is universal or historical.”406 If Sartre saw the ontological constitution of consciousness as either necessarily instantiating bad faith or having bad faith for its being, there would be no room to ask in the first place – and in what follows, he is emphatic about the importance of history: “Ethics must be historical”.407 Were the god-project relevantly identical with existential lack, it would be analytically, uninterestingly true that we are in bad faith.
If we can talk separately about a project to become God and existential lack providing a motor for all action, what does that look like in practice? The most promising picture comes to us through Zheng’s interpretation of Sartre on play. Take running a race as an analogy: the whole notion of a race only makes sense because the runners are attempting to win. The conditions of possibility of calling an event a race include the fact that someone will win and everyone involved is trying to win; if it
405 BN, p.645.
406 Notebooks, p.6.
407 Ibid.
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doesn’t matter which order the racers finish in (or if nobody wholeheartedly tries to win), it simply isn’t a race.408 However, it would be a mistake to say that the only possible good motivation to race is to win – and it isn’t even intuitive for most people that you’d only compete out of wanting to win.
Whilst winning can be the whole point, with everything you do subordinated under the desire to win, it is also possible to subordinate winning under some other, higher goal like honour or sportsmanship. If I am competing to participate in some kind of honourable tradition of sport, winning stops being the primary end – it doesn’t matter if I lose, because losing is not a failure condition. (Conversely, if I aim to win every race without fail, a loss is going to be a hammer blow.) Nonetheless, even if I am trying to participate in this sportsmanlike tradition, I have not given up on winning. A goal of sportsmanship is absolutely compatible with trying to win, and crucially does not have to diminish the effort I make to win. Although it is only possible for me to will sportsmanship because of races having to be won, winning the race is not my overall goal – in practice, it is a subordinate or instrumental part of the overall whole.
By analogy, in authenticity we can adopt a (coherent) project other than becoming god as our core project – even though getting rid of ontological lack is still the core dependency of our projects. The ontological necessity of existential lack is never removed, but on the plane of our willed projects we adopt a stance of responsibility for our situation. We understand our projects as undertakings which are fragile, and do not try to get a fixed identity (i.e., symbolic existential completion) from them.
This attitude is not unprecedented in Sartre’s own writings; as Zheng points out,409 the description of play in BN is intimately connected to the ethical, since it is suggestive of “a particular type of project, which has freedom for its foundation and its goal” which “…belongs [rather] to an ethics”.410 In fact, the lines between the two are blurred from the start, since “[a]s soon as a man apprehends himself as free and wishes to use his freedom … then his activity is play”.411 The key connection between play and authenticity as “willing to will” is that the player “himself sets the value and rules for his acts and consents to play only according to the rules which he has established”,412 i.e., the player establishes the parameters for his free project, in order “to attain himself as a certain being, precisely the being which is in question in his being”. The rules of a game are invented, sustained, and willed by us, and can reveal our freedom to us insofar as they are context-dependent and can highlight the context-dependency of projects we have. If, in play, we have the ability to set an
408 See Zheng, Sartre on Authenticity, p.133.
409 Ibid., p.135.
410 BN, p.602.
411 Ibid., p.601.
412 Ibid.
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undertaking as our goal without primarily willing completion or the permanent loss of existential lack, then we have a working prototype of authenticity running under the ontology of BN.413
Zheng’s own opposition to play as a prototype of authenticity is telling. He claims that a life lived on the model of play would be too unstable to sustain a viable, ethical life: “if one adopts a playful attitude (whether unreflectively or reflectively) across the board, it is quite likely that she will lose all her securities and that she cannot satisfy her basic needs. If I play at my job, the result of my work is at best unstable, which is likely to cause me to lose my job”.414 Simplistically, the problem is that if we play at life, we will not take it seriously enough to sustain basic physical needs and social
connections; our institutions will crumble if everyone acts in this way. This isn’t a deep objection by itself, since it assumes that an ethical life has to resemble a vision of our current, average or
“normal” lifestyles, but it does point toward a deeper problem. The reason why a playful attitude would cause these problems is that individuals adopting it are free to stop “playing” at whatever attitude or project they are adopting at any time, making social relations unstable at best. This kind of play, where we drop out of commitments at any time and for whatever purely internal reasons, is childlike and untenable within a social context. Whilst the above has cashed out a lot of the
intrasubjective content of authenticity, it is only by including the social context that the picture can be completed.
So far, despite the added detail, the original problem is not deflected: an authentic torturer could see his vile deeds as a part of an undertaking that needs effort, that effort being mandated by the lack at the heart of his being, and will to will the concrete projects that keep his wider project alive.
It is no coincidence that bad faith cashes out concretely into the search for identity and, as we saw in the previous chapter, these identities depend on the intercession of the Other.415 Minimally, this suggests that a change in our relationship to the other is entailed in the authentic attitude, but it will prove impossible not to value the freedom of others as we value our own. Factoring this in will defeat the subjectivism charge once and for all.
413 Although claiming a direct identity between the two is impossible for reasons to do with the nature of reflection; authenticity has to operate on a (the) reflective plane whereas play is pre-reflective.
414 Zheng, Sartre on Authenticity, p.138.
415 This is made explicit in the Notebooks: “the quality of being courageous can be conferred upon one only by others in light of certain forms of behaviour … Others will hang an objective label on you that will then internalise in the form of an in-itself-for-itself. Notebooks, p. 474.
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