Simone de Beauvoir
translated from the French by BERNARD FRECHTMAN
Published by Citadel Press, A division of Lyle Stuart Inc.
120 Enterprise Ave.
Secaucus, N.J. 07094
Copyright 1948 by Philosophical Library
ISBN 0-8065-0160-X
SECTION I: AMBIGUITY AND FREEDOM, pp. 1-34
Contents
I Ambiguity and Freedom 7
II Personal Freedom and Others 35
III The Positive Aspect of Ambiguity 74
- The Aesthetic Attitude 74
- Freedom and Liberation 78
- The Antinomies of Action 96
- The Present and the Future 115
- Ambiguity 129
Conclusion 156
Index 160
"Life in itself is neither good nor evil. It is the place of good and evil, according to what
you make it." MONTAIGNE.
I. Ambiguity and Freedom
THE continuos work of our life," says Montaigne, "is to build death." He quotes the Latin
poets: Prima, quae vitam dedit, hora corpsit. And again: Nascentes morimur. Man knows
and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo. A new
paradox is thereby introduced into his destiny. "Rational animal," "thinking reed," he
escapes from his natural condition without, however, freeing himself from it. He is still a
part of this world of which he is a consciousness. He asserts himself as a pure internality
against which no external power' can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a
thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. At every moment he can grasp the nontemporal truth of his existence. But between the past which no longer is and the future
which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing. This privilege, which he alone
possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what
he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an
individual in the collectivity on which he depends.
As long as there have been men and they have lived, they have all felt this tragic
ambiguity of their condition, but as long as there have been philosophers and they have
thought, most of them have tried to mask it. They have striven to reduce mind to matter,
or to reabsorb matter into mind, or to merge them within a single substance.
Those who have accepted the dualism have established a hierarchy between body and
soul which permits of considering as negligible the part of the self which cannot be
saved. They have denied death, either by integrating it with life or by promising to man
immortality. Or, again they have denied life, considering it as a veil of illusion beneath
which is hidden the truth of Nirvana.
And the ethics which they have proposed to their disciples has always pursued the same
goal. It has been a matter of eliminating the ambiguity by making oneself pure
inwardness or pure externality, by escaping from the sensible world or by being engulfed
in it, by yielding to eternity or enclosing oneself in the pure moment. Hegel, with more
ingenuity, tried to reject none of the aspects of man's condition and to reconcile them all.
According to his system, the moment is preserved in the development of time; Nature
asserts itself in the face of Spirit which denies it while assuming it; the individual is again
found in the collectivity within which he is lost; and each man's death is fulfilled by
being canceled out into the Life of Mankind. One can thus repose in a marvelous
optimism where even the bloody wars simply express the fertile restlessness of the Spirit.
At the present time there still exist many doctrines which choose to leave in the shadow
certain troubling aspects of a too complex situation. But their attempt to lie to us is in
vain. Cowardice doesn't pay. Those reasonable metaphysics, those consoling ethics with
which they would like to entice us only accentuate the disorder from which we suffer.
Men of today seem to feel more acutely than ever the paradox of their condition. They
know themselves to be the supreme end to which all action should be subordinated, but
the exigencies of action force them to treat one another as instruments or obstacles, as
means. The more widespread their mastery of the world, the more they find themselves
crushed by uncontrollable forces. Though they are masters of the atomic bomb, yet it is
created only to destroy them. Each one has the incomparable taste in his mouth of his
own life, and yet each feels himself more insignificant than an insect within the immense
collectivity whose limits are one with the earth's. Perhaps in no other age have they
manifested their grandeur more brilliantly, and in no other age has this grandeur been so
horribly flouted. In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity,
the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the
world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign
importance of each man and all men. There was Stalingrad and there was Buchenwald,
and neither of the two wipes out the other. Since we do not succeed in fleeing it, let us
therefore try to look the truth in the face. Let us try to assume our fundamental ambiguity.
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength
to live and our reason for acting.
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. It
was by affirming the irreducible character of ambiguity that Kierkegaard opposed himself
to Hegel, and it is by ambiguity that, in our own generation, Sartre, in Being and
Nothingness, fundamentally defined man, that being whose being is not to be, that
subjectivity which realizes itself only as a presence in the world, that engaged freedom,
that surging of the for-oneself which is immediately given for others. But it is also
claimed that existentialism is a philosophy of the absurd and of despair. It encloses man
in a sterile anguish, in an empty subjectivity. It is incapable of furnishing him with any
principle for making choices. Let him do as he pleases. In any case, the game is lost.
Does not Sartre declare, in effect, that man is a "useless passion," that he tries in vain to
realize the synthesis of the for-oneself and the in-oneself, to make himself God? It is true.
But it is also true that the most optimistic ethics have all begun by emphasizing the
element of failure involved in the condition of man; without failure, no ethics; for a being
who, from the very start, would be an exact co-incidence with himself, in a perfect
plenitude, the notion of having-to-be would have no meaning. One does not offer an
ethics to a God. It is impossible to propose any to man if one defines him as nature, as
something given. The so-called psychological or empirical ethics manage to establish
themselves only by introducing surreptitiously some flaw within the manthing which they
have first defined. Hegel tells us in the last part of The Phenomenology of Mind that
moral consciousness can exist only to the extent that there is disagreement between
nature and morality. It would disappear if the ethical law became the natural law. To such
an extent that by a paradoxical "displacement," if moral action is the absolute goal, the
absolute goal is also that moral action may not be present. This means that there can be a
having-to-be only for a being who, according to the existentialist definition, questions
himself in his being, a being who is at a distance from himself and who has to be his
being.
Well and good. But it is still necessary for the failure to be surmounted, and existentialist
ontology does not allow this hope. Man's passion is useless; he has no means for
becoming tile being that he is not. That too is true. And it is also true that in Being and
Nothingness Sartre has insisted above all on the abortive aspect of the human adventure.
It is only in the last pages that he opens up the perspective for an ethics. However, if we
reflect upon his descriptions of existence, we perceive that they are far from condemning
man without recourse.
The failure described in Being and Nothingness is definitive, but it is also ambiguous.
Man, Sartre tells us, is "a being who makes himself a lack of being in order that there
might be being." That means, first of all, that his passion is not inflicted upon him from
without. He chooses it. It is his very being and, as such, does not imply the idea of
unhappiness. If this choice is considered as useless, it is because there exists no absolute
value before the passion of man, outside of it, in relation to which one might distinguish
the useless from the useful. The word "useful" has not yet received a meaning on the
level of description where Being and Nothingness is situated. It can be defined only in the
human world established by man's projects and the ends he sets up. In the original
helplessness from which man surges up, nothing is useful, nothing is useless. It must
therefore be understood that the passion to which man has acquiesced finds no external
justification. No outside appeal, no objective necessity permits of its being called useful.
It has no reason to will itself. But this does not mean that it can not justify itself, that it
can not give itself reasons for being that it does not have. And indeed Sartre tells us that
man makes himself this lack of being in order that there might be being. The term in
order that clearly indicates an intentionality. It is not in vain that man nullifies being.
Thanks to him, being is disclosed and he desires this disclosure. There is an original type
of attachment to being which is not the relationship "wanting to be" but rather wanting to
disclose being." Now, here there is not failure, but rather success. This end, which man
proposes to himself by making himself lack of being, is, in effect, realized by him. By
uprooting himself from the world, man makes himself present to the world and makes the
world present to him. I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I
should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I
whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this
distance that the sky and the water exist before me. My contemplation is an excruciation
only because it is also a joy. I can not appropriate the snow field where I slide. It remains
foreign, forbidden, but I take delight in this very effort toward an impossible possession. I
experience it as a triumph, not as a defeat. This means that man, in his vain attempt to be
God, makes himself exist as man, and if he is satisfied with this existence, he coincides
exactly with himself. It is not granted him to exist without tending toward this being
which he will never be. But it is possible for him to want this tension even with the
failure which it involves. His being is lack of being, but this lack has a way of being
which is precisely existence. In Hegelian terms it might be said that we have here a
negation of the negation by which the positive is re-established. Man makes himself a
lack, but he can deny the lack as lack and affirm himself as a positive existence. He then
assumes the failure. And the condemned action, insofar as it is an effort to be, finds its
validity insofar as it is a manifestation of existence. However, rather than being a
Hegelian act of surpassing, it is a matter of a conversion. For in Hegel the surpassed
terms are preserved only as abstract moments, whereas we consider that existence still
remains a negativity in the positive affirmation of itself. And it does not appear, in its
turn, as the term of a further synthesis. The failure is not surpassed, but assumed.
Existence asserts itself as an absolute which must seek its justification within itself and
not suppress itself, even though it may be lost by preserving itself. To attain his truth,
man must not attempt to dispel the ambiguity of his being but, on the contrary, accept the
task of realizing it. He rejoins himself only to the extent that he agrees to remain at a
distance from himself. This conversion is sharply distinguished from the Stoic conversion
in that it does not claim to oppose to the sensible universe a formal freedom which is
without content. To exist genuinely is not to deny this spontaneous movement of my
transcendence, but only to refuse to lose myself in it. Existentialist conversion should
rather be compared to Husserlian reduction: let man put his will to be "in parentheses"
and he will thereby be brought to the consciousness of his true condition. And just as
phenomenological reduction prevents the errors of dogmatism by suspending all
affirmation concerning the mode of reality of the external world, whose flesh and bone
presence the reduction does not, however, contest, so existentialist conversion does not
suppress my instincts, desires, plans, and passions. It merely prevents any possibility of
failure by refusing to set up as absolutes the ends toward which my transcendence thrusts
itself, and by considering them in their connection with the freedom which projects them.
The first implication of such an attitude is that the genuine man will not agree to
recognize any foreign absolute. When a man projects into an ideal heaven that impossible
synthesis of the for-itself and the in-itself that is called God, it is because he wishes the
regard of this existing Being to change his existence into being; but if he agrees not to be
in order to exist genuinely, he will abandon the dream of an inhuman objectivity. He will
understand that it is not a matter of being right in the eyes of a God, but of being right in
his own eyes. Renouncing the thought of seeking the guarantee for his existence outside
of himself, he will also refuse to believe in unconditioned values which would set
themselves up athwart his freedom like things. Value is this lacking-being of which
freedom makes itself a lack; and it is because the latter makes itself a lack that value
appears. It is desire which creates the desirable, and the project which sets up the end. It
is human existence which makes values spring up in the world on the basis of which it
win be able to judge the enterprise in which it will be engaged. But first it locates itself
beyond any pessimism, as beyond any optimism, for the fact of its original springing
forth is a pure contingency. Before existence there is no more reason to exist than not to
exist. The lack of existence can not be evaluated since it is the fact on the basis of which
all evaluation is defined. It can not be compared to anything for there is nothing outside
of it to serve as a term of comparison. This rejection of any extrinsic justification also
confirm the rejection of an original pessimism which we posited at the beginning. Since it
is unjustifiable from without, to declare from without that it is unjustifiable is not to
condemn it. And the truth is that outside of existence there is nobody. Man exists. For
him it is not a question of wondering whether his presence in the world is useful, whether
life is worth the trouble of being lived. These questions make no sense. It is a matter of
knowing whether he wants to live and under what conditions.
But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own
eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoevsky asserted,
"If God does not exist, everything is permitted." Today's believers use this formula for
their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to
repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary
is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive,
absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a
strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well. A
God can pardon, efface, and compensate. But if God does not exist, man's faults are
inexpiable. If it is claimed that, whatever the case may be, this earthly stake has no
importance, this is precisely because one invokes that inhuman objectivity which we
declined at the start. One can not start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not
importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance. It is up to man to make it
important to be a man, and he alone can feel his success or failure. And if it is again said
that nothing forces him to try to justify his being in this way, then one is playing upon the
notion of freedom in a dishonest way. The believer is also free to sin. The divine law is
imposed upon him only from the moment he decides to save his soul. In the Christian
religion, though one speaks very little about them today, there are also the damned. Thus,
on the earthly plane, a life which does not seek to ground itself will be a pure
contingency. But it is permitted to wish to give itself a meaning and a truth, and it then
meets rigorous demands within its own heart.
However, even among the proponents of secular ethics, there are many who charge
existentialism with offering no objective content to the moral act. It is said that this
philosophy is subjective, even solipsistic. If he is once enclosed within himself, how can
man get out? But there too we have a great deal of dishonesty. It is rather well known that
the fact of being a subject is a universal fact and that the Cartesian cogito expresses both
the most individual experience and the most objective truth. By affirming that the source
of all values resides in the freedom of man, existentialism merely carries on the tradition
of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, who, in the words of Hegel himself, "have taken for their
point of departure the principle according to which the essence of right and duty and the
essence of the thinking and willing subject are absolutely identical." The idea that defines
all humanism is that the world is not a given world, foreign to man, one to which he has
to force himself to yield without. It is the world willed by man, insofar as his will
expresses his genuine reality.
Some will answer, All well and good. But Kant escapes solipsism because for him
genuine reality is the human person insofar as it transcends its empirical embodiment and
chooses to be universal." And doubtless Hegel asserted that the "right of individuals to
their particularity is equally contained in ethical substantiality, since particularity is the
extreme, phenomenal modality in which moral reality exists (Philosophy of Right, §
154)." But for him particularity appears only as a moment of the totality in which it must
surpass itself. Whereas for existentialism, it is not impersonal universal man who is the
source of values, but the plurality of concrete ' particular men projecting themselves
toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and as
irreducible as subjectivity itself. How could men, originally separated, get together?
And, indeed, we are coming to the real situation of the problem. But to state it is not to
demonstrate that it can not be resolved. On the contrary, we must here again invoke the
notion of Hegelian "displacement." There is an ethics only if there is a problem to solve.
And it can be said, by inverting the preceding line of argument, that the ethics which have
given solutions by effacing the fact of the separation of men are not valid precisely
because there is this separation. An ethics of ambiguity will be one which will refuse to
deny a priori that separate existants can, at the same time, be bound to each other, that
their individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all.
Before undertaking the quest for a solution, it is interesting to note that the notion of
situation and the recognition of separation which it implies are not peculiar to
existentialism. We also meet it in Marxism which, from one point of view, can be
considered as an apotheosis of subjectivity. Like all radical humanism, Marxism rejects
the idea of an inhuman objectivity and locates itself in the tradition of Kant and Hegel.
Unlike the old kind of utopian socialism which confronted earthly order with the
archetypes of justice, Order, and Good, Marx does not consider that certain human
situations are, in themselves and absolutely, preferable to others. It is the needs of people,
the revolt of a class, which define aims and goals. It is from within a rejected situation, in
the light of this rejection, that a new state appears as desirable; only the will of men
decides; and it is on the basis of a certain individual act of rooting itself in the historical
and economic world that this will thrusts itself, toward the future and then chooses a
perspective where such words as goal, progress, efficacy, success, failure, action,
adversaries, instruments, and obstacles, have a meaning. Then certain acts can be
regarded as good and others as bad.
In order for the universe of revolutionary values to arise, a subjective movement must
create them in revolt and hope. And this movement appears so essential to Marxists that
if an intellectual or a bourgeois also claims to want revolution, they distrust him. They
think that it is only from the outside, by abstract recognition, that the bourgeois
intellectual can adhere to these values which he himself has not set up. Regardless of
what he does, his situation makes it impossible for the ends pursued by proletarians to be
absolutely his ends too, since it is not the very impulse of his life which has begotten
them.
However, in Marxism, if it is true that the goal and the meaning of action are defined by
human wills, these wills do not appear as free. They are the reflection of objective
conditions by which the situation of the class or the people under consideration is
defined. In the present moment of the development of capitalism, the proletariat can not
help wanting its elimination as a class. Subjectivity is re-absorbed into the objectivity of
the given world. Revolt, need, hope, rejection, and desire are only the resultants of
external forces. The psychology of behavior endeavors to explain this alchemy.
It is known that that is the essential point on which existentialist ontology is opposed to
dialectical materialism. We think that the meaning of the situation does not impose itself
on the consciousness of a passive subject, that it surges up only by the disclosure which a
free subject effects in his project. It appears evident to us that in order to adhere to
Marxism, to enroll in a party, and in one rather than another, to be actively attached to it,
even a Marxist needs a decision whose source is only in himself. And this autonomy is
not the privilege (or the defect) of the intellectual or- the bourgeois. The proletariat, taken
as a whole, as a class, can become conscious of its situation in more than one way. It can
want the revolution to be brought about by one party or another. It can let itself be lured
on, as happened to the German proletariat, or can sleep in the dull comfort which
capitalism grants it, as does the American proletariat. It may be said that in all these cases
it is betraying; still, it must be free to betray. Or, if one pretends to distinguish the real
proletariat from a treacherous proletariat, or a misguided or unconscious or mystified one,
then it is no longer a flesh and blood proletariat that one is dealing with, but the idea of a
proletariat, one of those ideas which Marx ridiculed.
Besides, in practice, Marxism does not always deny freedom. The very notion of action
would lose all meaning if history were a mechanical unrolling in which man appears only
as a passive conductor of outside forces. By acting, as also by preaching action, the
Marxist revolutionary asserts himself as a veritable agent; he assumes himself to be free.
And it is even curious to note that most Marxists of today - unlike Marx himself - feel no
repugnance at the edifying dullness of moralizing speeches. They do not limit themselves
to finding fault with their adversaries in the name of historical realism. When they tax
them with cowardice, lying, selfishness, and venality, they very well mean to condemn
them in the name of a moralism superior to history. Likewise, in the eulogies which they
bestow upon each other they exalt the eternal virtues, courage, abnegation, lucidity,
integrity. It may be said that all these words are used for propagandistic purposes, that it
is only a matter of expedient language. But this is to admit that this language is heard,
that it awakens an echo in the hearts of those to whom it is addressed. Now, neither scorn
nor esteem would have any meaning if one regarded the acts of a man as a purely
mechanical resultant. In order for men to become indignant or to admire, they must be
conscious of their own freedom and the freedom of others. Thus, everything occurs
within each man and in the collective tactics as if men were free. But then what
revelation can a coherent humanism hope to oppose to the testimony which man brings to
bear upon himself? So Marxists often find themselves having to confirm this belief in
freedom, even if they have to reconcile it with determination as well as they can.
However, while this concession is wrested from them by the very practice of action, it is
in the name of action that they attempt to condemn a philosophy of freedom. They
declare authoritatively that the existence of freedom would make any concerted
enterprise impossible. According to them, if the individual were not constrained by the
external world to want this rather than that, there would be nothing to defend him against
his whims. Here, in different language, we again meet the charge formulated by the
respectful believer of supernatural imperatives. In the eyes of the Marxist, as of the
Christian, it seems that to act freely is to give up justify one's acts. This is a curious
reversal of the Kantian "you must; therefore you can," Kant postulates freedom in the
name of morality. The Marxist, on the contrary, declares, "You must; therefore, you can
not." To him a man's action seems valid only if the man has not helped set it going by an
internal movement. To admit the ontological possibility of a choice is already to betray
the Cause. Does this mean that the revolutionary attitude in any way gives up being a
moral attitude? It would be logical, since we observed with Hegel that it is only insofar as
the choice is not realized at first that it can be set up as a moral choice. But here again
Marxist thought hesitates. It sneers at idealistic ethics which do not bite into the world;
but its scoffing signifies that there can be no ethics outside of action, not that action
lowers itself to the level of a simple natural process. It is quite evident that the
revolutionary enterprise has a human meaning. Lenin's remark, which says, in substance,
"I call any action useful to the party moral action; I call it immoral if it is harmful to the
party," cuts two ways. On the one hand, he refuses to accept outdated values, but he also
sees in political operation a total manifestation of man as having-to-be at the same time
as being. Lenin refuses to set up ethics abstractly because he means to realize it
effectively. And yet a moral idea is present in the words, writings, and acts of Marxists. It
is contradictory, then, to reject with horror the moment of choice which is precisely the
moment when spirit passes into nature, the moment of the concrete fulfillment of man
and morality.
As for us, whatever the case may be, we believe in freedom. Is it true that this belief must
lead us to despair? Must we grant this curious paradox: that from the moment a man
recognizes himself as free, he is prohibited from wishing for anything?
On the contrary, it appears to us that by turning toward this freedom we are going to
discover a principle of action whose range will be universal. The characteristic feature of
all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the
means of winning. Now, we have seen that the original scheme of man is ambiguous: he
wants to be, and to the extent that he coincides with this wish, he fails. All the plans in
which this will to be is actualized are condemned; arid the ends circumscribed by these
plans remain mirages. Human transcendence is vainly engulfed in those miscarried
attempts. But man also wills himself to be a disclosure of being, and if he coincides with
this wish, he wins, for the fact is that the world becomes present by his presence in it. But
the disclosure implies a perpetual tension to keep being at a certain distance, to tear one
self from the world, and to assert oneself as a freedom. To wish for the disclosure of the
world and to assert oneself as freedom are one and the same movement. Freedom is the
source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of
all justification of existence. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom
itself absolutely and above everything else. At the same time that it requires the
realization of concrete ends, of particular projects, it requires itself universally. It is not a
ready-made value which offers itself from the outside to my abstract adherence, but it
appears (not on the plane of facility, but on the moral plane) as a cause of itself. It is
necessarily summoned up by the values which it sets up and through which it sets itself
up. It can not establish a denial of itself, for in denying itself, it would deny the
possibility of any foundation. To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and
the same decision.
It seems that the Hegelian notion of "displacement" which we relied on a little while ago
is now turning against us. There is ethics only if ethical action is not present. Now, Sartre
declares that every man is free, that there is no way of his not being free. When he wants
to escape his destiny, he is still freely fleeing it. Does not this presence of a so to speak
natural freedom contradict the notion of ethical freedom? What meaning can there be in
the words to will oneself free, since at the beginning we are free? It is contradictory to set
freedom up as something conquered if at first it is something given.
This objection would mean something only if freedom were a thing or a quality naturally
attached to a thing. Then, in effect, one would either have it or not have it. But the fact is
that it merges with the very movement of this ambiguous reality which is called existence
and which is only by making itself be; to such an extent that it is precisely only by having
to be conquered that it gives itself. To will oneself free is to effect the transition from
nature to morality by establishing a genuine freedom on the original upsurge of our
existence.
Every man is originally free, in the sense that he spontaneously casts himself into the
world. But if we consider this spontaneity in its facticity, it appears to us only as a pure
contingency, an upsurging as stupid as the clinamen of the Epicurean atom which turned
up at any moment whatsoever from any direction whatsoever. And it was quite necessary
for the atom to arrive somewhere. But its movement was not justified by this result which
had not been chosen. It remained absurd. Thus, human spontaneity always projects itself
toward something. The psychoanalyst discovers a meaning even in abortive acts and
attacks of hysteria. But in order for this meaning to justify the transcendence which
discloses it, it must itself be founded, which it will never be if I do not choose to found it
myself. Now, I can evade this choice. We have said that it would be contradictory
deliberately to will oneself not free. But one can choose not to will himself free. In
laziness, heedlessness, capriciousness, cowardice, impatience, one contests the meaning
of the project at the very moment that one defines it. The spontaneity of -the subject is
then merely a vain living palpitation, its movement toward the object is a flight, and itself
is an absence. To convert the absence into presence, to convert my flight into will, I must
assume my project positively. It is not a matter of retiring into the completely inner and,
moreover, abstract movement of a given spontaneity, but of adhering to the concrete and
particular movement by which this spontaneity defines itself by thrusting itself toward an
end. It is through this end that it sets up that my spontaneity confirms itself by reflecting
upon itself. Then, by a single movement, my will, establishing the content of the act, is
legitimized by it. I realize my escape toward the other as a freedom when, assuming the
presence of the object, I thereby assume myself before it as a presence. But this
justification requires a constant tension. My project is never founded; it founds itself. To
avoid the anguish of this permanent choice, one may attempt to flee into the object itself,
to engulf one's own presence in it. In the servitude of the serious, the original spontaneity
strives to deny itself. It strives in vain, and meanwhile it then fails to fulfill itself as moral
freedom.
We have just described only the subjective and formal aspect of this freedom. But we
also ought to ask ourselves whether one can will oneself free in any matter, whatsoever it
may be. It must first be observed that this will is developed in the course of time. It is in
time that the goal is pursued and that freedom confirms itself. And this assumes that it is
realized as a unity in the unfolding of time. One escapes the absurdity of the clinamen
only by escaping the absurdity of the pure moment. An exist ence would be unable to
found itself if moment by moment it crumbled into nothingness. That is why no moral
question presents itself to the child as long as he is still incapable of recognizing himself
in the past or seeing himself in the future. It is only when the moments of his life begin to
be organized into behaviour that he can decide and choose. The value of the chosen end
is confinned and, reciprocally, the genuineness of the choice is manifested concretely
through patience, courage, and fidelity. If I leave behind an act which I have
accomplished, it becomes a thing by falling into the past. It is no longer anything but a
stupid and opaque fact. In order to prevent this metamorphosis, I must ceaselessly return
to it and justify it in the unity of the project in which I am engaged. Setting up the
movement of my transcendence requires that I never let it uselessly fall back upon itself,
that I prolong it indefinitely. Thus I can not genuinely desire an end today without
desiring it through my whole existence, insofar as it is the future of this present moment
and insofar as it is the surpassed past of days to come. To will is to engage myself to
persevere in my will. This does not mean that I ought not aim at any limited end. I may
desire absolutely and forever a revelation of a moment. This means that the value of this
provisional end will be confirmed indefinitely. But this living confirmation can not be
merely contemplative and verbal. It is carried out in an act. The goal toward which I
surpass myself must appear to me as a point of departure toward a new act of surpassing.
Thus, a creative freedom develops happily without ever congealing into unjustified
facticity. The creator leans upon anterior creations in order to create the possibility of
new creations. His present project embraces the past and places confidence in the
freedom to come, a confidence which is never disappointed. It discloses being at the end
of a further disclosure. At each moment freedom is confirmed through all creation.
However, man does not create the world. He succeeds in disclosing it only through the
resistance which the world opposes to him. The will is defined only by raising obstacles,
and by the contingency of facticity certain obstacles let themselves be conquered, and
others do not. This is what Descartes expressed when he said that the freedom of man is
infinite, but his power is limited. How can the presence of these limits be reconciled with
the idea of a freedom confirming itself as a unity and an indefinite movement?
In the face of an obstacle which it is impossible to overcome, stubbornness is stupid. If I
persist in beating my fist against a stone wall, my freedom exhausts itself in this useless
gesture without succeeding in giving itself a content. It debases itself in a vain
contingency. Yet, there is hardly a sadder virtue than resignation. It transforms into
phantoms and contingent reveries projects which had at the beginning been set up as will
and freedom. A young man has hoped for a happy or useful or glorious life. If the man he
has become looks upon these miscarried attempts of his adolescence with disillusioned
indifference, there they are, forever frozen in the dead past. When an effort fails, one
declares bitterly that he has lost time and wasted his powers. The failure condemns that
whole part of ourselves which we had engaged in the effort. It was to escape this
dilemma that the Stoics preached indifference. We could indeed assert our freedom
against all constraint if we agreed to renounce the particularity of our projects. If a door
refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free. But by doing that, one
manages only to save an abstract notion of freedom. It is emptied of all content and all
truth. The power of man ceases to be limited because it is annulled. It is the particularity
of the project which determines the limitation of the power, but it is also what gives the
project its content and permits it to be set up. There are people who are filled with such
horror at the idea of a defeat that they keep themselves from ever doing anything. But no
one would dream of considering this gloomy passivity as the triumph of freedom.
The truth is that in order for my freedom. not to risk coming to grief against the obstacle
which its very engagement has raised, in order that it might still pursue its movement in
the face of the failure, it must, by giving itself a particular content, aim by means of it at
an end which is nothing else but precisely the free movement of existence. Popular
opinion is quite right in admiring a man who, having been ruined or having suffered an
accident, knows how to gain the upper hand, that is, renew his engagement in the world,
thereby strongly asserting the independence of freedom in relation to thing. Thus, when
the sick Van Gosh calmly accepted the prospect of a future in which he would be unable
to paint any more, there was no sterile resignation. For him painting was a personal way
of life and of communication with others which in another form could be continued even
in an asylum. The past will be integrated and freedom will be confirmed in a renunciation
of this kind. It will be lived in both heartbreak and joy. In heartbreak, because the project
is then robbed of its particularity - it sacrifices its flesh and blood. But in joy, since at the
moment one releases his hold, he again finds his hands free and ready to stretch out
toward a new future. But this act of passing beyond is conceivable only if what the
content has in view is not to bar up the future, but, on the contrary, to plan new
possibilities. This brings us back by another route to what we had already indicated. My
freedom must not seek to trap being but to disclose it. The disclosure is the transition
from being to existence. The goal which my freedom aims at is conquering existence
across the always inadequate density of being.
However, such salvation is only possible if, despite obstacles and failures, a man
preserves the disposal of his future, if the situation opens up more possibilities to him. In
case his transcendence is cut off from his goal or there is no longer any hold on objects
which might give it a valid content, his spontaneity is dissipated without founding
anything. Then he may not justify his existence positively and he feels its contingency
with wretched disgust. There is no more obnoxious way to punish a man than to force
him to perform acts which make no sense to him, as when one empties and fills the same
ditch indefinitely, when one makes soldiers who are being punished march up and down,
or when one forces a schoolboy to copy lines. Revolts broke out in Italy in September
1946 because the unemployed were set to breaking pebbles which served no purpose
whatever. As is well known, this was also the weakness which ruined the national
workshops in 1848. This mystification of useless effort is more intolerable than fatigue.
Life imprisonment is the most horrible of punishments because it preserves existence in
its pure facticity but forbids it all legitimation. A freedom can not will itself without
willing itself as an indefinite movement. It must absolutely reject the constraints which
arrest its drive toward itself. This rejection takes on a positive aspect when the constraint
is natural. One rejects the illness by curing it. But it again assumes the negative aspect of
revolt when the oppressor is a human freedom. One can not deny being: the in-itself is,
and negation has no hold over this being, this pure positivity; one does not escape this
fullness: a destroyed house is a ruin; a broken chain is scrap iron: one attains only
signification and, through it, the for-itself which is projected there; the for-itself carries
nothingness in its heart and can be annihilated, whether in the very upsurge of its
existence or through the world in which it exists. The prison is repudiated as such when
the prisoner escapes. But revolt, insofar as it is pure negative movement, remains
abstract. It is fulfilled as freedom only by returning to the positive, that is, by giving itself
a content through action, escape, political struggle, revolution. Human transcendence
then seeks, with the destruction of the given situation, the whole future which will flow
from its victory. It resumes its indefinite rapport with itself. There are limited situations
where this return to the positive is impossible, where the future is radically blocked off.
Revolt can then be achieved only in the definitive rejection of the imposed situation, in
suicide.
It can be seen that, on the one hand, freedom can always save itself, for it is realized as a
disclosure of existence through its very failures, and it can again confirm itself by a death
freely chosen. But, on the other hand, the situations which it discloses through its project
toward itself do not appear as equivalents. It regards as privileged situations those which
permit it to realize itself as indefinite movement; that is, it wishes to pass beyond
everything which limits its power; and yet, this power is always limited. Thus, just as life
is identified with the will-to-live, freedom always appears as a movement of liberation. It
is only by prolonging itself through the freedom of others that it manages to surpass death
itself and to realize itself as an indefinite unity. Later on we shall see what problems such
a relationship raises. For the time being it is enough for us to have established the fact
that the words "to will oneself free" have a positive and concrete meaning. If man wishes
to save his existence, as only he himself can do, his original spontaneity must be raised to
the height of moral freedom by taking itself as an end through the disclosure of a
particular content.
But a new question is immediately raised. If man has one and only one way to save his
existence, how can he choose not to choose it in all cases? How is a bad willing possible?
We meet with this problem in all ethics, since it is precisely the possibility of a perverted
willing which gives a meaning to the idea of virtue. We know the answer of Socrates, of
Plato, of Spinoza: "No one is willfully bad." And if Good is a transcendent thing which is
more or less foreign to man, one imagines that the mistake can be explained by error. But
if one grants that the moral world is the world genuinely willed by man, all possibility of
error is eliminated. Moreover, in Kantian ethics, which is at the origin of all ethics of
autonomy, it is very difficult to account for an evil will. As the choice of his character
which the subject makes is achieved in the intelligible world by a purely rational will, one
can not understand how the latter expressly rejects the law which it gives to itself. But
this is because Kantism defined man as a pure positivity, and it therefore recognized no
other possibility in him than coincidence with himself. We, too, define morality by this
adhesion to the self; and this is why we say that man can not positively decide between
the negation and the assumption of his freedom, for as soon as he decides, he assumes it.
He can not positively will not to be free for such a willing would be self-destructive.
Only, unlike Kant, we do not see man as being essentially a positive will. On the
contrary, he is first defined as a negativity. He is first at a distance from himself. He can
coincide with himself only by agreeing never to rejoin himself. There is within him a
perpetual playing with the negative, and he thereby escapes himself, he escapes his
freedom. And it is precisely because an evil will is here possible that the words "to will
oneself free" have a meaning. Therefore, not only do we assert that the existentialist
doctrine permits the elaboration of an ethics, but it even appears- to us as the only
philosophy in which an ethics has its place. For, in a metaphysics of transcendence, in the
classical sense of the term, evil is reduced to error; and in humanistic philosophies it is
impossible to account for it, man being defined as complete in a complete world.
Existentialism alone gives - like religions - a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps,
which make its judgments so gloomy. Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet,
it is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words
like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is
because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.
Therefore, in the very condition of man there enters the possibility of not fulfilling this
condition. In order to fulfill it he must assume himself as a being who "makes himself a
lack of being so that there might be being." But the trick of dishonesty permits stopping
at any moment whatsoever. One may hesitate to make oneself a lack of being, one may
withdraw before existence, or one may falsely assert oneself as being, or assert oneself as
nothing.. ness. One may realize his freedom only as an abstract independence, or, on the
contrary, reject with despair the distance which separates us from being. All errors are
possible since man is a negativity, and they are motivated by the anguish he feels in the
face of his freedom. Concretely, men slide incoherently from one attitude to another. We
shall limit ourselves to describing in their abstract form those which we have just
indicated.
SECTION II: PERSONAL FREEDOM AND
OTHERS, pp. 35-73
Man's unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first been a child. And indeed the
unfortunate choices which most men make can only be explained by the fact that they
have taken place on the basis of childhood. The child's situation is characterized by his
finding himself cast into a universe which he has not helped to establish, which has been
fashioned without him, and which appears to him as an absolute to which he can only
submit. In his eyes, human inventions, words, customs, and values are given facts, as
inevitable as the sky and the trees. This means that the world in which he lives is a
serious world, since the characteristic of the spirit of seriousness is to consider values as
ready-made things. That does not mean that the child himself is serious. On the contrary,
he is allowed to play, to expend his existence freely. In his child's circle he feels that he
can passionately pursue and joyfully attain goals which he has set up for himself. But if
he fulfills this experience in all tranquillity, it is precisely because the domain open to his
subjectivity seems insignificant and puerile in his own eyes. He feels himself happily
irresponsible. The real world is that of adults where he is allowed only to respect and
obey. The naive victim of the mirage of the for-others, he believes in the being of his
parents and teachers. He takes them for the divinities which they vainly try to be and
whose appearance they like to borrow before his ingenuous eyes. Rewards, punishments,
prizes, words of praise or blame instill in him the conviction that there exist a good and
an evil which like a sun and a moon exist as ends in themselves. In his universe of
definite and substantial things, beneath the sovereign eyes of grown-up persons, he thinks
that he too has in a definite and substantial way. He is a good little
boy or a scamp; he enjoys being it. If something deep inside him belies his conviction, he
conceals this imperfection. He consoles himself for an inconsistency which he attributes
to his young age by pinning his hopes on the future. Later on he too will become a big
imposing statue. While waiting, he plays at being, at being a saint, a hero, a guttersnipe.
He feels himself like those models whose images are sketched out in his books in broad,
unequivocal strokes: explorer, brigand, sister of charity. This game of being serious can
take on such an importance in the child's life that he himself actually becomes serious.
We know such children who are caricatures of adults. Even when the joy of existing is
strongest, when the child abandons himself to it, he feels himself protected against the
risk of existence by the ceiling which human generations have built over his head. And it
is by virtue of this that the child's condition (although it can be unhappy in other respects)
is metaphysically privileged. Normally the child escapes the anguish of freedom. He can,
if he likes, be recalcitrant, lazy; his whims and his faults concern only him. They do not
weigh upon the earth. They can not make a dent in the serene order of a world which
existed before him, without him, where he is in a state of security by virtue of his very
insignificance. He can do with impunity whatever he likes. He knows that nothing can
ever happen through him; everything is already given; his acts engage nothing, not even
himself.
There are beings whose life slips by in an infantile world because, having been kept in a
state of servitude and ignorance, they have no means of breaking the ceiling which is
stretched over their heads. Like the child, they can exercise their freedom, but only within
this universe which has been set up before them, without them. This is the case, for
example, of slaves who have not raised themselves to the consciousness of their slavery.
The southern planters were not altogether in the wrong in considering the negroes who
docilely submitted to their paternalism as "grown-up children." To the extent that they
respected the world of the whites the situation of the black slaves was exactly an infantile
situation. This is also the situation of women in many civilizations; they can only submit
to the laws, the gods, the customs, and the truths created by the males. Even today in
western countries, among women who have not had in their work an apprenticeship of
freedom, there are still many who take shelter in the shadow of men; they adopt without
discussion the opinions and values recognized by their husband or their lover, and that
allows them to develop childish qualities which are forbidden to adults because they are
based on a feeling of irresponsibility. If what is called women's futility often has so much
charm and grace, if it sometimes has a genuinely moving character, it is because it
manifests a pure and gratuitous taste for existence, like the games of children; it is the
absence of the serious. The unfortunate thing is that in many cases this thoughtlessness,
this gaiety, these charming inventions imply a deep complicity with the world of men
which they seem so graciously to be contesting, and it is a mistake to be astonished, once
the structure which shelters them seems to be in danger, to see sensitive, ingenuous, and
lightminded women show themselves harder, more bitter, and even more furious or cruel
than their masters. It is then that we discover the difference which distinguishes them
from an actual child: the child's situation is imposed upon him, whereas the woman (I
mean the western woman of today) chooses it or at least consents to it. Ignorance and
error are facts as inescapable as prison walls. The negro slave of the eighteenth century,
the Mohammedan woman enclosed in a harem have no instrument, be it in thought or by
astonishment or anger, which permits them to attack the civilization which oppresses
them. Their behavior is defined and can be judged only within this given situation, and it
is possible that in this situation, limited like every human situation, they realize a perfect
assertion of their freedom. But once there appears a possibility of liberation, it is
resignation of freedom not to exploit the possibility, a resignation which implies
dishonesty and which is a positive fault.
The fact is that it is very rare for the infantile world to maintain itself beyond
adolescence. From childhood on, flaws begin to be revealed in it. With astonishment,
revolt and disrespect the child little by little asks himself, "Why must I act that way?
What good is it? And what will happen if I act in another way?" He discovers his
subjectivity; he discovers that of others. And when he arrives at the age of adolescence he
begins to vacillate because he notices the contradictions among adults as well as their
hesitations and weakness. Men stop appearing as if they were gods, and at the same time
the adolescent discovers the human character of the reality about him. Language,
customs, ethics, and values have their source in these uncertain creatures. The moment
has come when he too is going to be called upon to participate in their operation; his acts
weigh upon the earth as much as those of other men. He will have to choose and decide.
It is comprehensible that it is hard for him to live this moment of his history, and this is
doubtless the deepest reason for the crisis of adolescence; the individual must at last
assume his subjectivity.
From one point of view the collapsing of the serious world is a deliverance. Although he
was irresponsible, the child also felt himself defenseless before obscure powers which
directed the course of things. But whatever the joy of this liberation may be, it is not
without great confusion that the adolescent finds himself cast into a world which is no
longer ready-made, which has to be made; he is abandoned, unjustified, the prey of a
freedom that is no longer chained up by anything. What will he do in the face of this new
situation? This is the moment when he decides. If what might be called the natural history
of an individual, his affective complexes, etcetera depend above all upon his childhood, it
is adolescence which appears as the moment of moral choice. Freedom is then revealed
and he must decide upon his attitude in the face of it. Doubtless, this decision can always
be reconsidered, but the fact is that conversions are difficult because the world reflects
back upon us a choice which is confirmed through this world which it has fashioned.
Thus, a more and more rigorous circle is formed from which one is more and more
unlikely to escape. Therefore, the misfortune which comes to man as a result of the fact
that he was a child is that his freedom was first concealed from him and that all his life he
will be nostalgic for the time when he did not know its exigencies.
This misfortune has still another aspect. Moral choice is free, and therefore
unforeseeable. The child does not contain the man he will become. Yet, it is always on
the basis of what he has been that a man decides upon what he wants to be. He draws the
motivations of his moral attitude from within the character which he has given himself
and from within the universe which is its correlative. Now, the child set up this character
and this universe little by little., without foreseeing its development. He was ignorant of
the disturbing aspect of this freedom which he was heedlessly exercising. He tranquilly
abandoned himself to whims, laughter, tears, and anger which seemed to him to have no
morrow and no danger, and yet which left ineffaceable imprints about him. The drama of
original choice is that it goes on moment by moment for an entire lifetime, that it occurs
without reason, before any reason, that freedom is there as if it were present only in the
form of contingency. This contingency recalls, in a way, the arbitrariness of the grace
distributed by God in Calvinistic doctrine. Here too there is a sort of predestination
issuing not from an external tyranny but from the operation of the subject itself. Only, we
think that man has always a possible recourse to himself. There is no choice so
unfortunate that he cannot be saved.
It is in this moment of justification - a moment which extends throughout his whole adult
life - that the attitude of man is placed on a moral plane. The contingent spontaneity can
not be judged in the name of freedom. Yet a child already arouses sympathy or antipathy.
Every man casts himself into the world by making himself a lack of being; he thereby
contributes to reinvesting it with human signification. He discloses it. And in this
movement even the most outcast sometimes feel the joy of existing. They then manifest
existence as a happiness and the world as a source of joy. But it is up to each one to make
himself a lack of more or less various, profound, and rich aspects of being. What is called
vitality, sensitivity, and intelligence are not ready-made qualities, but a way of casting
oneself into the world and of disclosing being. Doubtless, every one casts himself into it
on the basis of his physiological possibilities, but the body itself is not a brute fact. It
expresses our relationship to the world, and that is why it is an object of sympathy or
repulsion. And on the other hand, it determines no behavior. There is vitality only by
means of free generosity. Intelligence supposes good will, and, inversely, a man is never
stupid if he adapts his language and his behavior to his capacities, and sensitivity is
nothing else but the presence which is attentive to the world and to itself. The reward for
these spontaneous qualities issues from the fact that they make significances and goals
appear in the world. They discover reasons for existing. They confirm us in the pride and
joy of our destiny as man. To the extent that they subsist in an individual they still arouse
sympathy, even if he has made himself hateful by the meaning which he has given to his
life. I have heard it said that at the Nuremberg trial Goering exerted a certain seductive
power on his judges because of the vitality which emanated from him.
If we were to try to establish a kind of hierarchy among men, we would put those who are
denuded of this living warmth - the tepidity which the Gospel speaks of - on the lowest
rung of the ladder. To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the
world. Those who occupy themselves in restraining this original movement can be
considered as sub-men. They have eyes and ears, but from their childhood on they make
themselves blind and deaf, without love and without desire. This apathy manifests a
fundamental fear in the face of existence, in the face of the risks and tensions which it
implies. The sub-man rejects this "passion" which is his human condition, the laceration
and the failure of that drive toward being which always misses its goal, but which thereby
is the very existence which he rejects.
Such a choice immediately confirms itself. just as a bad painter, by a single movement,
paints bad paintings and is satisfied with them, whereas in a work of value the artist
immediately recognizes the demand of a higher sort of work, in like fashion the original
poverty of his project exempts the sub-man from seeking to legitimize it. He discovers
around him only an insignificant and dull world. How could this naked world arouse
within him any desire to feel, to understand, to live? The less he exists, the less is there
reason for him to exist, since these reasons are created only by existing.
Yet, he exists. By the fact of transcending himself he indicates certain goals, he
circumscribes certain values. But he at once effaces these uncertain shadows. His whole
behavior tends toward an elimination of their ends. By the incoherence of his plans, by
his haphazard whims, or by his indifference, he reduces to nothingness the meaning of his
surpassing. His acts are never positive choices, only flights. He can not prevent himself
from being a presence in the world, but he maintains this presence on the pl e of bare
facticity. However, if a man were permitted to be a brute fact, he would merge with the
trees and pebbles which are not aware that they exist; we would consider these opaque
lives with indifference. But the sub-man arouses contempt, that is, one recognizes him to
be responsible for himself at the moment that one accuses him of not willing himself -
The fact is that no man is a datum which is passively suffered; the rejection of existence
is still another way of existing; nobody can know the peace of the tomb while he is alive.
There we have the defeat of the sub-man. He would like to forget himself, to be ignorant
of himself, but the nothingness which is at the heart of man is also the consciousness that
he has of himself. His negativity is revealed positively as anguish, desire, appeal,
laceration, but as for the genuine return to the positive, the sub-man eludes it. He is afraid
of engaging himself in a project as he is afraid of being disengaged and thereby of being
in a state of danger before the future, in the midst of its possibilities. He is thereby led to
take refuge in the ready-made values of the serious world. He will proclaim certain
opinions; he will take shelter behind a label; and to hide his indifference he will readily
abandon himself to verbal outbursts or even physical violence. One day, a monarchist, the
next day, an anarchist, he is more readily anti-semitic, anti-clerical, or anti-republican.
Thus, though we have defined him as a denial and a flight, the sub-man is not a harmless
creature. He realizes himself in the world as a blind uncontrolled force which anybody
can get control of. In lynchings, in pogroms, in all the great bloody movements organized
by the fanaticism of seriousness and passion, movements where there is no risk, those
who do the actual dirty work are recruited from among the sub-men. That is why every
man who wills himself free within a human world fashioned by free men will be so
disgusted by the sub-men. Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity, and the subman feels only the facticity of his existence. Instead of aggrandizing the reign of the
human, he opposes his inert resistance to the projects of other men. No project has
meaning in the world disclosed by such an existence. Man is defined as a wild flight. The
world about him is bare and incoherent. Nothing ever happens; nothing merits desire or
effort. The sub-man makes his way across a world deprived of meaning toward a death
which merely confirms his long negation of him, self. The only thing revealed in this
experience is the absurd facticity of an existence which remains forever unjustified if it
has not known how to justify itself. The sub-man experiences the desert of the world in
his boredom. And the strange character of a universe with which he has created no bond
also arouses fear in him. Weighted down by present events, he is bewildered before the
darkness of the future which is haunted by frightful specters, war, sickness, revolution,
fascism, bolshevism. The more indistinct these dangers are, the more fearful they
become. The sub-man is not very clear about what he has to lose, since he has nothing,
but this very uncertainty re-enforces his terror. Indeed, what he fears is that the shock of
the unforeseen may remind him of the agonizing consciousness of himself.
Thus, fundamental as a man's fear in the face of existence may be, though he has chosen
from his earliest years to deny his presence in the world, he can not keep himself from
existing, he can not efface the agonizing evidence of his freedom. That is why, as we
have just seen, in order to get rid of his freedom, he is led to engage it positively. The
attitude of the sub-man passes logically over into that of the serious man; he forces
himself to submerge his freedom in the content which the latter accepts from society. He
loses himself in the object in order to annihilate his subjectivity. This certitude has been
described so frequently that it will not be necessary to consider it at length. Hegel has
spoken of it ironically. In The Phenomenology of Mind he has shown that the sub-man
plays the part of the inessential in the face of the object which is considered as the
essential. He suppresses himself to the advantage of the Thing, which, sanctified by
respect, appears in the form of a Cause, science, philosophy, revolution, etc. But the truth
is that this ruse miscarries, for the Cause can not save the individual insofar as he is a
concrete and separate existence. After Hegel, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche also railed at the
deceitful stupidity of the serious man and his universe. And Being and Nothingness is in
large part a description of the serious man and his universe. The serious man gets rid of
his freedom by claiming to subordinate it to values which would be unconditioned. He
imagines that the accession to these values likewise permanently confers value upon
himself. Shielded with "rights," he fulfills himself as a being who is escaping from the
stress of existence. The serious is not defined by the nature of the ends pursued. A
frivolous lady of fashion can have this mentality of the serious as well as an engineer.
There is the serious from the moment that freedom denies itself to the advantage of ends
which one claims are absolute.
Since all of this is well known, I should like to make only a few remarks in this place. It
is easily understood why, of all the attitudes which are not genuine, the latter is the most
widespread; because every man was first a child. After having lived under the eyes of the
gods, having been given the promise of divinity, one does not readily accept becoming
simply a man with all his anxiety and doubt. What is to be done? What is to be believed?
Often the young man, who has not, like the sub-man, first rejected existence, so that these
questions are not even raised, is nevertheless frightened at having to answer them. After a
more or less long crisis, either he turns back toward the world of his parents and teachers
or he adheres to the values which are new but seem to him just as sure. Instead of
assuming an affectivity which would throw him dangerously beyond himself, he
represses it. Liquidation, in its classic form of transference and sublimation, is the
passage from the affective to the serious in the propitious shadow of dishonesty. The
thing that matters to the serious man is not so much the nature of the object which he
prefers to himself, but rather the fact of being able to lose himself in it. So much so, that
the movement toward the object is, in fact, through his arbitrary act tile most radical
assertion of subjectivity: to believe for belief's sake, to will for will's sake is, detaching
transcendence from its end, to realize one's freedom in its empty and absurd form of
freedom of indifference.
The serious man's dishonesty issues from his being obliged ceaselessly to renew the
denial of this freedom. He chooses to live in an infantile world, but to the child the values
are really given. The serious man must mask the movement by which he gives them to
himself, like the mythomaniac who while reading a love-letter pretends to forget that she
has sent it to herself. We have already pointed out that certain adults can live in the
universe of the serious in all honesty, for example, those who are denied all instruments
of escape, those who are enslaved or who are mystified. The less economic and social
circumstances allow an individual to act upon the world, the more this world appears to
him as given. This is the case of women who inherit a long tradition of sub. mission and
of those who are called "the humble." There is often laziness and timidity in their
resignation; their' honesty is not quite complete; but to the extent that it. exists, their
freedom remains available, it is not denied.' They can, in their situation of ignorant and
powerless individuals, know the truth of existence and raise them. selves to a properly
moral life. It even happens that they turn the freedom which they have thus won against
the very object of their respect; thus, in A Doll's House, the childlike naivete of the
heroine leads her to rebel against the lie of the serious. On the contrary, the man who
has the necessary instruments to escape this lie and who does not want to use them
consumes his freedom in denying, them. He makes himself serious. He dissimulates his',
subjectivity under the shield of rights which emanate from the ethical universe recognized
by him; he is no longer a man, but a father, a boss, a member of the Christian Church or
the Communist Party.
If one denies the subjective tension of freedom one is evidently forbidding himself
universally to will freedom in an indefinite movement. By virtue of the fact that he'
refuses to recognize that he is freely establishing the, value of the end he sets up, the
serious man makes him. self the slave of that end. He forgets that every goal is at the
same time a point of departure and that human freedom is the ultimate, the unique end to
which man should destine himself. He accords an absolute meaning to the epithet useful,
which, in truth, has no more meaning if taken by itself than the words high, low, right,
and left. It simply designates a relationship and requires a complement: useful for this or
that. The complement itself must be put into question, and, as we shall see later on, the
whole problem of action is then raised.
But the serious man puts nothing into question. For the military man, the army is useful;
for the colonial administrator, the highway; for the serious revolutionary, the revolution -
- army, highway, revolution, productions becoming inhuman idols to which one will not
hesitate to sacrifice man himself. Therefore, the serious man is dangerous. It is natural
that he makes himself a tyrant. Dishonestly ignoring the subjectivity of his choice, he
pretends that the unconditioned value of the object is being asserted through him; and by
the same token he also ignores the value of the subjectivity and the freedom of others, to
such an extent that, sacrificing them to the thing, he persuades himself that what he
sacrifices is nothing. The colonial administrator who has raised the highway to the
stature of an idol will have no scruple about assuring its construction at the price of a
great number of lives of the natives; for, what value has the life of a native who is
incompetent, lazy, and clumsy when it comes to building highways? The serious leads to
a fanaticism which is as formidable as the fanaticism of passion. It is the fanaticism of
the Inquisition which does not hesitate to impose a credo, that is, an internal movement,
by means of external constraints. It is the fanaticism of the Vigilantes of America who
defend morality by means of lynchings. It is the political fanaticism which empties
politics of all human content and imposes the State, not for individuals, but against them.
In order to justify the contradictory, absurd, and outrageous aspects of this kind of
behavior, the serious man readily takes refuge in disputing the serious, but it is the
serious of others which he disputes, not his own. Thus, the colonial administrator is not
unaware of the trick of irony. He contests the importance of the happiness, the comfort,
the very life of the native, but he reveres the Highway, the Economy, the French Empire;
he reveres himself as a servant of these divinities. Almost all serious men cultivate an
expedient levity; we are familiar with the genuine gaiety of Catholics, the fascist "sense
of humor." There are also some who do not even feel the need for such a weapon. They
hide from themselves the incoherence of their choice by taking flight. As soon as the Idol
is no longer concerned, the serious man slips into the attitude of the sub-man. He keeps
himself from existing because he is not capable of existing without a guarantee. Proust
observed with astonishment that a great doctor or a great professor often shows himself,
outside of his specialty, to be lacking in sensitivity, intelligence, and humanity. The
reason for this is that having abdicated his freedom, he has nothing else left but his
techniques. In domains where his techniques are not applicable, he either adheres to the
most ordinary of values or fulfills himself as a flight. The serious man stubbornly engulfs
his, transcendence in the object which bars the horizon and bolts the sky. The rest of the
world is a faceless desert. Here again one sees how such a choice is immediately
confirmed. If there is being only, for example, in the form of the Army, how could the
military man wish for anything else than to multiply barracks and maneuvers? No appeal
rises from the abandoned zones where nothing can be reaped because nothing has been
sown. As soon as he leaves the staff, the old general becomes dull. That is why the serious
man's life loses all meaning if he finds himself cut off from his ends. Ordinarily, he does
not put all his eggs into one basket, but if it happens that a failure or old age ruins all his
justifications, then, unless there is a conversion, which is always possible, he no longer
has any relief except in flight; ruined, dishonored, this important personage is now only a
"has-been." He joins the sub-man, unless by suicide he once and for all puts an end to the
agony of his freedom.
It is in a state of fear that the serious man feels this dependence upon the object; and the
first of virtues, in his eyes, is prudence. He escapes the anguish of freedom only to fall
into a state of preoccupation, of worry. Everything is a threat to him, since the thing
which he has set up as an idol is an externality and is thus in relationship with the whole
universe and consequently threatened by the whole universe; and since, despite all
precautions, he will never be the master of this exterior world to which he has consented
to submit, he will be instantly upset by the uncontrollable course of events.
He will always be saying that he is disappointed, for his wish to have the world harden
into a thing is belied by the very movement of life. The future will contest his present
successes; his children will disobey him, his win will be opposed by those of strangers; he
will be a prey to ill humor and bitterness. His very successes have a taste of ashes, for the
serious is one of those ways of trying to realize the impossible synthesis of the in-itself
and the foritself. The serious man wills himself to be a god; but he is not one and knows
it. He wishes to rid himself of his subjectivity, but it constantly risks being unmasked; it is
unmasked. Transcending all goals, reflection wonders, "What's the use?" There then
blazes forth the absurdity of a life which has sought outside of itself the justifications
which it alone could give itself. Detached from the freedom which might have genuinely
grounded them, all the ends that have been pursued appear arbitrary and useless.
This failure of the serious sometimes brings about a radical disorder. Conscious of being
unable to be anything, man then decides to be nothing. We shall call this attitude
nihilistic. The nihilist is close to the spirit of seriousness, for instead of realizing his
negativity as a living movement, he conceives his annihilation in a substantial way. He
wants to be nothing, and this nothing that he dreams of is still another sort of being, the
exact Hegelian antithesis of being, a stationary datum. Nihilism is disappointed
seriousness which has turned back upon itself. A choice of this kind is not encountered
among those who, feeling the joy of existence, assume its gratuity. It appears either at the
moment of adolescence, when the individual, seeing his child's universe flow away, feels
the lack which is in his heart, or, later on, when the attempts to fulfill himself as a being
have failed; in any case, among men who wish to rid themselves of the anxiety of their
freedom by denying the world and themselves. By this rejection, they draw near to the
sub-man. The difference is that their withdrawal is not their original movement. At first,
they cast themselves into the world, sometimes even with a largeness of spirit. They exist
and they know it.
It sometimes happens that, in his state of deception, a man maintains a sort of affection
for the serious world; this is how Sartre describes Baudelaire in his study of the poet.
Baudelaire felt a burning rancor in regard to the values of his childhood, but this rancor
still involved some respect. Scorn alone liberated him. It was necessary for him that the
universe which he rejected continue in order for him to detest it and scoff at it; it is the
attitude of the demoniacal man as Jouhandeau. has also described him: one stubbornly
maintains the values of childhood, of a society, or of a Church in order to be able to
trample upon them. The demoniacal man is still very close to the serious; he wants to
believe in it; he confirms it by his very revolt; he feels himself as a negation and a
freedom, but he does not realize this freedom as a positive liberation.
One can go much further in rejection by occupying himself not in scorning but in
annihilating the rejected world and himself along with it. For example, the man who
gives himself to a cause which he knows to be lost chooses to merge the world with one of
its aspects which carries within it the germ of its ruin, involving himself in this
condemned universe and condemning himself with it. Another man devotes his time and
energy to an undertaking which was not doomed to failure at the start but which he
himself is bent on ruining. Still another rejects each of his projects one after the other,
frittering them away in a series of caprices and thereby systematical annulling the ends
which he is aiming at. The constant negation of the word by the word, of the act by the
act, of art by art was realized by Dadaist incoherence. By following a strict injunction to
commit disorder and anarchy, one achieved the abolition of all behavior, and therefore
of all ends and of oneself.
But this will to negation is forever belying itself, for it manifests itself as a presence at the
very moment that it displays itself. It therefore implies a constant tension, inversely
symmetrical with the existential and more painful tension, for if it is true that man is not,
it is also true that he exists, and in order to realize his negativity positively he will have
to contradict constantly the movement of existence. If one does not resign himself to
suicide one slips easily into a more stable attitude than the shrill rejection of nihilism.
Surrealism provides us with a historical and concrete example of different possible kinds
of evolution. Certain initiates, such as Vache and Crevel, had recourse to the radical
solution of suicide. Others destroyed their bodies and ruined their minds by drugs. Other
succeeded in a sort of moral suicide; by dint of depopulating the world around them, they
found themselves in a desert, with themselves reduced to the level of the sub-man; they no
longer try to flee, they are fleeing. There are also some who have again sought out the
security of the serious. They have reformed, arbitrarily choosing marriage, politics, or
religion as refuges. Even the surrealists who have wanted to remain faithful to themselves
have been unable to avoid returning to the positive, to the serious. The negation of
aesthetic, spiritual, and moral values has become an ethics; unruliness has become a
rule. We have been present at the establishment of a new Church) with its dogmas, its
rites, its faithful, its priests, and even its martyrs; today, there is nothing of the destroyer
in Breton; he is a pope. And as every assassination of painting is still a painting, a lot of
surrealists have found themselves the authors of positive works; their revolt has become
the matter on which their career has been built. Finally, some of them, in a genuine
return to the positive, have been able to realize their freedom; they have given it a
content without disavowing it. They have engaged themselves, without losing themselves,
in political action, in intellectual or artistic research, in family or social life.
The attitude of the nihilist can perpetuate itself as such only if it reveals itself as a
positivity at its very core. Rejecting his own existence, the nihilist must also reject the
existences which confirm it. If he wills himself to be nothing, all mankind must also be
annihilated; otherwise, by means of the presence of this world that the Other reveals he
meets himself as a presence in the world. But this thirst for destruction immediately takes
the form of a desire for power, The taste of nothingness joins the original taste of being
whereby every man is first defined; he realizes himself as a being by making himself that
by which nothingness comes into the world. Thus, Nazism was both a will for power and
a will for suicide at the same time. From a historical point of view, Nazism has many
other features besides; in particular, beside the dark romanticism which led Rauschning
to entitle his work The Revolution of Nihilism, we also find a gloomy seriousness. The
fact is that Nazism was in the service of petit bourgeois seriousness. But it is interesting
to note that its ideology did not make this alliance impossible, for the serious often rallies
to a partial nihilism, denying everything which is not its object in order to hide from itself
the antinomies of action.
A rather pure example of this impassioned nihilism is the well-known case of Drieu la
Rochelle. The Empty Suitcase is the testimony of a young man who acutely felt the fact of
existing as a lack of being, of not being. This is a genuine experience on the basis of
which the only possible salvation is to assume the lack, to side with the man who exists
against the idea of a God who does not. On the contrary - a novel like Gilles is proof -
Drieu stubbornly persisted in his deception. In his hatred of himself he chose to reject his
condition as a man, and this led him to hate all men along with himself. Gilles knows
satisfaction only when he fires on Spanish workers and sees the flow of blood which he
compares to the redeeming blood of Christ; as if the only salvation by man were the
death of other men, whereby perfect negation is achieved. It is natural that this path
ended in collaboration, the ruin of a detested world being merged for Drieu with the
annulment of himself. An external failure led him to give to his life a conclusion which it
called for dialectically: suicide.
The nihilist attitude manifests a certain truth. In this attitude one experiences the
ambiguity of the human condition. But the mistake is that it defines man not as the
positive existence of a lack, but as a lack at the heart of existence, whereas the truth is
that existence is not a lack as such. And if freedom is experienced in this case in the form
of rejection, it is not genuinely fulfilled. The nihilist is right in thinking that the world
possesses no justification and that he himself is nothing. But he forgets that it is up to him
to justify the world and to mat". himself exist validly. Instead of integrating death into
life, he sees in it the only truth of the life which appears to him as a disguised death.
However, there is life, and the nihilist knows that he is alive. That's where his failure lies.
He rejects existence without managing to eliminate it. He denies any meaning to his
transcendence, and yet he transcends himself. A man who delights in freedom can find an
ally in the nihilist because they contest the serious world together, but be also sees in him
an enemy insofar as the nihilist is a systematic rejection of the world and m an, and if this
rejection ends up in a positive desire destruction, it then establishes a tyranny which
freedom must stand up against.
The fundamental fault of the nihilist is that, challenging all given values, he does not find,
beyond their ruin, the importance of that universal, absolute end which freedom itself isIt is possible that, even in this failure, a man may nevertheless keep his taste for an
existence which he originally felt as a joy. Hoping for no justification, he will
nevertheless take delight in living. He will not turn aside from things which he does not
believe in. He will seek a pretext in them for a gratuitous display of activity. Such a man
is what is generally called an adventurer. He throws himself into his undertakings with
zest, into exploration, conquest, war, speculation, love, politics, but he does not attach
himself to the end at which he aims; only to his conquest. He likes action for its Own
sake. He finds joy in spreading through the world a freedom which remains indifferent to
its content. Whether the taste for adventure appears to be based on nihilistic despair or
whether it is born directly from the experience of the happy days of childhood, it always
implies that freedom is realized as an independence in regard to the serious world and
that, on the other hand, the ambiguity of existence is felt not as a lack but in its positive
aspect. This attitude dialectically envelops nihilism's opposition to the serious and the
opposition to nihilism by existence as such. But, of course, the concrete history of an
individual does not necessarily espouse this dialectic, by virtue of the fact that his
condition is wholly present to him at each moment and because his freedom before it is,
at every moment, total. From the time of his adolescence a man can define himself as an
adventurer. The union of an original, abundant vitality and a reflective scepticism. will
particularly lead to this choice.
It is obvious that this choice is very close to a genuinely moral attitude. The adventurer
does not propose to be; he deliberately makes himself a lack of being; he aims expressly
at existence; though engaged in his undertaking, he is at the same time detached from the
goal. Whether he succeeds or fails, he goes right ahead throwing himself into a new
enterprise to which he will give himself with the same indifferent ardor. It is not from
things that he expects the justification of his choices. Considering such behavior at the
moment of its subjectivity, we see that it conforms to the requirements of ethics, and if
existentialism were solipsistic, as is generally claimed , it would have to regard the
adventurer as its perfect hero.
First of all, it should be noticed that the adventurer's attitude is not always pure. Behind
the appearance of caprice, there are many men who pursue a secret goal in utter
seriousness; for example, fortune or glory. They proclaim their scepticism in regard to
recognized values. They do not take politics seriously. They thereby allow themselves to
be collaborationists in '41 and communists in '45, and it is true they don't give a hang
about the interests of the French people or the proletariat; they are attached to their
career, to their success. This arrivisme is at the very antipodes of the spirit of adventure,
because the zest for existence is then never experienced in its gratuity. It also happens
that the genuine love for adventure is inextricably mixed with an attachment to the values
of the serious. Cortez and the conquistadors served God and the emperor by serving their
own pleasure. Adventure can also be shot through with passion. The taste for conquest is
often subtly tied up with the taste for possession. Was seduction all that Don Juan liked?
Did he not also like women? Or was he not even looking for a woman capable of
satisfying him?
But even if we consider adventure in its purity, it appears to us to be satisfying only at a
subjective moment, which, in fact, is a quite abstract moment. The adventurer always
meets others along the way; the conquistador meets the Indians; the condottiere hacks
out a path through blood and ruins; the explorer has comrades about him or soldiers
under his orders; every Don Juan is confronted with Elviras. Every undertaking unfolds
in a human world and affects men. What distinguishes adventure from a simple game is
that the adventurer does not limit himself to asserting his existence in solitary fashion. He
asserts it in relationship to other existences. He has to declare himself.
Two attitudes are possible. He can become conscious of the real requirements of his own
freedom, which can will itself only by destining itself to an open future, by seeking to
extend itself by means of the freedom of others. Therefore, in any case, the freedom of
other men must be respected and they must be helped to free themselves. Such a law
imposes limits upon action and at the same time immediately gives it a content. Beyond
the rejected seriousness is found a genuine seriousness. But the man who acts in this way,
whose end is the liberation of himself and others, who forces himself to respect this end
through the means which he uses to attain it, no longer deserves the name of adventurer.
One would not dream for example, of applying it to a Lawrence, who was so concerned
about the lives of his companions and the freedom of others, so tormented by the human
problems which all action raises. One is then in the presence of a genuinely free man.
The man we call an adventurer, on the contrary, is one who remains indifferent to the
content, that is, to the human meaning of his action, who thinks he can assert his own
existence without taking into account that .of others. The fate of Italy mattered very little
to the Italian condottiere; the massacres of the Indians meant nothing to Pizarro; Don
Juan was unaffected by Elvira's tears. Indifferent to the ends they set up for themselves,
they were still more indifferent to the means of attaining them; they cared only for their
pleasure or their glory. This implies that the adventurer shares the nihilist's contempt for
men. And it is by this very contempt that he believes he breaks away from the
contemptible condition in which those who do not imitate his pride are stagnating. Thus,
nothing prevents him from sacrificing these insignificant beings to his own will for
power. He will treat them like instruments; he will destroy them if they get in his way. But
meanwhile he appears as an enemy in the eyes of others. His undertaking is not only an
individual wager; it is a combat. He can not win the game without making himself a
tyrant or a hangman. And as he can not impose this tyranny without help, he is obliged to
serve the regime which will allow him to exercise it. He needs money, arms, soldiers, or
the support of the police and the laws. It is not a matter of chance, but a dialectical
necessity which leads the adventurer to be complacent regarding all regimes which
defend the privilege of a class or a party, and more particularly authoritarian regimes
and fascism. He needs fortune, leisure, and enjoyment, and he will take these goods as
supreme ends in order to be prepared to remain free in regard to any end. Thus,
confusing a quite external availability with real freedom, he falls, with a pretext of
independence, into the servitude of the object. He will range himself on the side of the
regimes which guarantee him his privileges, and he will prefer those which confirm him
in his contempt regarding the common herd. He will make himself its accomplice, its
servant, or even its valet, alienating a freedom which, in reality, can not confirm itself as
such if it does not wear its own face. In order to have wanted to limit it to it. self, in order
to have emptied it of all concrete content, he realizes it only as an abstract independence
which turns into servitude. He must submit to masters unless he makes himself the
supreme master. Favorable circumstances are enough to transform the adventurer into a
dictator. He carries the seed of one within him, since he regards mankind as indifferent
matter destined to support the game of his existence. But what he then knows is the
supreme servitude of tyranny.
Hegel's criticism of the tyrant is applicable to the adventurer to the extent that he is
himself a tyrant, or at the very least an accomplice of the oppressor. No man can save
himself alone. Doubtless, in the very heat of an action the adventurer can know a joy
which is sufficient unto itself, but once the undertaking is over and has Congealed behind
him into a thing, it must, in order to remain alive, be animated anew by a human
intention which must transcend it toward the future into recognition or admiration. When
he dies, the adventurer will be surrendering his whole life into the hands of men; the only
meaning it will have will be the one they confer upon it. He knows this since he talks
about himself, often in books. For want of a work, many desire to bequeath their own
personality to posterity: at least during their lifetime they need the approval of a few
faithful. Forgotten and detested, the adventurer loses the taste for his own existence.
Perhaps without his knowing it, it seems so precious to him because of others. It willed
itself to be an affirmation, an example to all mankind. Once it falls back upon itself, it
becomes futile and unjustified.
Thus, the adventurer devises a sort of moral behavior because he assumes his subjectivity
positively. But if he dishonestly refuses to recognize that this subjectivity necessarily
transcends itself toward others, he will enclose himself in a false independence which will
indeed be servitude. To the free man he will be only a chance ally in whom one can have
no confidence; he will easily become an enemy. His fault is believing that one can do
something for oneself without others and even against
The passionate man is, in a way, the antithesis of the Adventurer. In him too there is a
sketch of the synthesis of freedom and its content. But in the adventurer it is the content
which does not succeed in being genuinely fulfilled. Whereas in the passionate man it is
subjectivity which fails to fulfill itself genuinely.
What characterizes the passionate man is that he sets up the object as an absolute, not,
like the serious man, as a thing detached from himself, but as a thing disclosed by his
subjectivity. There are transitions between the serious and passion. A goal which was
first willed in the name of the serious can become an object of passion; inversely, a
passionate attachment can wither into a serious relationship. But real passion asserts the
subjectivity of its involvement. In amorous passion particularly, one does not want the
beloved being to be admired objectively; one prefers to think her unknown,
unrecognized; the lover thinks that his appropriation of her is greater if he is alone in
revealing her worth. That is the genuine thing offered by all passion. The moment of
subjectivity therein vividly asserts itself, in its positive form, in a movement toward the
object. It is only when passion has been degraded to an organic need that it ceases to
choose itself. But as long as it remains alive it does so because subjectivity is animating
it; if not pride, at least complacency and obstinacy. At the same time that it is an
assumption of this subjectivity, it is also a disclosure of being. It helps populate the world
with desirable objects, with exciting meanings. However, in the passions which we shall
call maniacal, to distinguish them from the generous passions, freedom does not find its
genuine form. The passionate man seeks possession; he seeks to attain being. The failure
and the hell which he creates for himself have been described often enough. He causes
certain rare treasures to appear in the world, but he also depopulates it. Nothing exists
outside of his stubborn project; therefore nothing can induce him to modify his choices.
And having involved his whole life with an external object which can continually escape
him, he tragically feels his dependence. Even if it does not definitely disappear, the object
never gives itself. The passionate man makes himself a lack of being not that there might
be being, but in order to be. And he remains at a distance; he is never fulfilled.
That is why though the passionate man inspires a certain admiration, he also inspires a
kind of horror at the same time. One admires the pride of a subjectivity which chooses its
end without bending itself to any foreign law and the precious brilliance of the object
revealed by the force of this assertion. But one also considers the solitude in which this
subjectivity encloses itself as injurious. Having withdrawn into an unusual region of the
world, seeking not to communicate with other men, this freedom is realized only as a
separation. Any conversation, any relationship with the passionate man is impossible. In
the eyes of those who desire a communion of freedom, he therefore appears as a
stranger, an obstacle. He opposes an opaque resistance to the movement of freedom
which wills itself infinite. The passionate man is not only an inert facticity. He too is on
the way to tyranny. He knows that his will emanates only from him, but he can
nevertheless attempt to impose it upon others. He authorizes himself to do that by a
partial nihilism. Only the object of his passion appears real and full to him. All the rest
are insignificant. Why not betray, kill, grow violent? It is never nothing that one destroys.
The whole universe is perceived only as an ensemble of means or obstacles through
which it is a matter of attaining the thing in which one has engaged his being. Not
intending his freedom for men, the passionate man does not recognize them as freedoms
either. He will not hesitate to treat them as things. If the object of his passion concerns
the world in general, this tyranny becomes fanaticism. In all fanatical movements there
exists an element of the serious. The values invented by certain men in a passion of
hatred, fear, or faith are thought and willed by others as given realities. But there is no
serious fanaticism which does not have a passional base, since all adhesion to the serious
world is brought about by repressed tendencies and complexes. Thus, maniacal passion
represents a damnation for the one who chooses it, and for other men it is one of the
forms of separation which disunites freedoms. It leads to struggle and oppression. A man
who seeks being far from other men, seeks it against them at the same time that he loses
himself.
Yet, a conversion can start within passion itself. The cause of the passionate man's
torment is his distance from the object; but he must accept it instead of trying to eliminate
it. It is the condition within which the object is disclosed. The individual will then find his
joy in the very wrench which separates him from the being of which he makes himself a
lack. Thus, in the letters of Mademoiselle de Lespinasse there is constant passing from
grief to the assumption of this grief. The lover describes her tears and her tortures, but
she asserts that she loves this unhappiness. It is also a source of delight for her. She likes
the other to appear as another through her separation. It pleases her to exalt, by her very
suffering, that strange existence which she chooses to set up as worthy of any sacrifice. It
is only as something strange, forbidden, as something free, that the other is revealed as
an other. And to love him genuinely is to love him in his otherness and in that freedom by
which he escapes. Love is then renunciation of all possession, of all confusion. One
renounces being in order that there may be that being which one is not. Such generosity,
moreover, can not be exercised on behalf of any object whatsoever. One can not love a
pure thing in its independence and its separation, for the thing does not have positive
independence. If a man prefers the land he has discovered to the possession of this land,
a painting or a statue to their material presence, it is insofar as they appear to him as
possibilities open to other men. Passion is converted to genuine freedom only if one
destines his existence to other existences through the being - whether thing or man - at
which he aims, without hoping to entrap it in the destiny of the in-itself.
Thus, we see that no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself. It appeals to
the existence of others. The idea of such a dependence is frightening, and the separation
and multiplicity of existants raises highly disturbing problems. One can understand that
men who are aware of the risks and the inevitable element of failure involved in any
engagement in the world attempt to fulfill themselves outside of the world. Man is
permitted to separate himself from this world by contemplation, to think about it, to
create it anew. Some men, instead of building their existence upon the indefinite
unfolding of time, propose to assert it in its eternal aspect and to achieve it as an
absolute. They hope, thereby, to surmount the ambiguity of their condition. Thus, many
intellectuals seek their salvation either in critical thought or creative activity.
We have seen that the serious contradicts itself by the fact that not everything can be
taken seriously. It slips into a partial nihilism. But nihilism is unstable. It tends to return
to the positive. Critical thought attempts to militate everywhere against all aspects of the
serious but without foundering in the anguish of pure negation. It sets up a superior,
universal, and timeless value, objective truth. And, correlatively, the critic defines himself
positively as the independence of the mind. Crystallizing the negative movement of the
criticism of values into a positive reality, he also crystallizes the negativity proper to all
mind into a positive presence. Thus, he thinks that he himself escapes all earthly
criticism. He does not have to choose between the highway and the native, between
America and Russia, between production and freedom. He understands, dominates, and
rejects, in the name of total truth, the necessarily partial truths which every human
engagement discloses. But ambiguity is at the heart of his very attitude, for the
independent man is still a man with his particular situation in the world, and what he
defines as objective truth is the object of his own choice. His criticisms fall into the world
of particular men. He docs not merely describe. He takes sides. If he does not assume the
subjectivity of his judgment, he is inevitably caught in the trap of the serious. Instead of
the independent mind he claims to be, he is only the shameful servant of a cause to which
he has not chosen to rally.
The artist and the writer force themselves to surmount existence in another way. They
attempt to realize it as an absolute. What makes their effort genuine is that they do not
propose to attain being. They distinguish themselves thereby from an engineer or a
maniac. It is existence which they are trying to pin down and make eternal. The word, the
stroke, the very marble indicate the object insofar as it is an absence. Only, in the work of
art the lack of being returns to the positive. Time is stopped, clear forms and finished
meanings rise up. In this return, existence is confirmed and establishes its own
justification. This is what Kant said when he defined art as "a finality without end." By
virtue of the fact that he has thus set up an absolute object, the creator is then tempted to
consider himself as absolute. He justifies the world and therefore thinks he has no need of
anyone to justify himself. If the work becomes an idol whereby the artist thinks that he is
fulfilling himself as being, he is closing himself up in the universe of the serious; he is
falling into the illusion which Hegel exposed when he described the race Of "intellectual
animals."
There is no way for a man to escape from this world. It is in this world that - avoiding the
pitfalls we have just pointed out - he must realize himself morally. Freedom must project
itself toward its own reality through a content whose value it establishes. An end is valid
only by a return to the freedom which established it and which willed itself through this
end. But this will implies that freedom is not to be engulfed in any goal; neither is it to
dissipate itself vainly without aiming at a goal. It is not necessary for the subject to seek
to be, but it must desire that there be being. To will oneself free and to will that there be
being are one and the same choice, the choice that man makes of himself as a presence in
the world. We can neither say that the free man wants freedom in order to desire being,
nor that he wants the disclosure of being by freedom. These are two aspects of a single
reality. And whichever be the one under consideration, they both imply the bond of each
man with all others.
This bond does not immediately reveal itself to every. body. A young man wills himself
free. He wills that there be being. This spontaneous liberality which casts him ardently
into the world can ally itself to what is commonly called egoism. Often the young man
perceives only that aspect of his relationship to others whereby others appear as enemies.
In the preface to The Inner Experience Georges Bataille emphasizes very forcefully that
each individual wants to be All. He sees in every other man and particularly in those
whose existence is asserted with most brilliance, a limit, a condemnation of himself.
"Each consciousness," said Hegel, "seeks the death of the other." And indeed at every
moment others are stealing the whole world away from me. The first movement is to hate
them.
But this hatred is naive, and the desire immediately struggles against itself. If I were
really everything there would be nothing beside me; the world would be empty. There
would be nothing to possess, and I myself would be nothing. If he is reasonable, the
young man immediately understands that by taking the world away from me, others also
give it to me, since a thing is given to me only by the movement which snatches it from
me. To will that there be being is also to will that there be men by and for whom the
world is endowed with human significations. One can reveal the world only on a basis
revealed by other men. No project can be defined except by its interference with other
projects. To make being "be" is to communicate with others by means of being.
This truth is found in another form when we say that freedom can not will itself without
aiming at an open future. The ends which it gives itself must be unable to be transcended
by any reflection, but only the freedom of other men can extend them beyond our life. I
have tried to show in Pyrrhus and Cineas that every man needs the freedom of other men
and, in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant; the only thing he fails to
do is to assume honestly the consequences of such a wish. Only the freedom of others
keeps each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of facticity. And if we are to believe
the Christian myth of creation, God himself was in agreement on this point with the
existentialist doctrine since, in the words of an anti-fascist priest, "He had such respect
for man that He created him free."
Thus, it can be seen to what an extent those people are mistaken - or are lying - who try
to make of existentialism a solipsism, like Nietzsche, would exalt the bare will to power.
According to this interpretation, as widespread as it is erroneous, the individual,
knowing himself and choosing himself as the creator of his own values, would seek to
impose them on others. The result would be a conflict of opposed wills enclosed in their
solitude. But we have seen that, on the contrary, to the extent that passion, pride, and the
spirit of adventure lead to this tyranny and its conflicts, existentialist ethics condemns
them; and it does so not in the name of an abstract law, but because, if it is true that
every project emanates from subjectivity, it is also true that this subjective movement
establishes by itself a surpassing of subjectivity. Man can find a justification of his own
existence only in the existence of other men. Now, he needs such a justification; there is
no escaping it. Moral anxiety does not come to man from without; he finds within himself
the anxious question, "What's the use?" Or, to put it better, he himself is this urgent
interrogation. He flees it only by fleeing himself, and as soon as he exists he answers. It
may perhaps be said that it is for himself that he is moral, and that such an attitude is
egotistical. But there is no ethics against which this charge, which immediately destroys
itself, can not be leveled; for how can I worry about what does not concern me? I
concern others and they concern me. There we have an irreducible truth. The me-others
relationship is as indissoluble as the subject-object relationship.
At the same time the other charge which is often directed at existentialism also collapses:
of being a formal doctrine,, incapable of proposing any content to the freedom which it
wants engaged. To will oneself free is also to Will others free. This will is not an abstract
formula. It points out to each person concrete action to be achieved. But the others are
separate, even opposed, and the man of good will sees concrete and difficult problems
arising in his relations with them. It is this positive aspect of morality that we are now
going to examine.
SECTION III: THE POSITIVE ASPECTS OF
AMBIGUITY, pp. 74-155
- The Aesthetic Attitude
Thus, every man has to do with other men. The world in which he engages
himself is a human world in which each object is penetrated with human
meanings. It is a speaking world from which solicitations and appeals rise up.
This means that, through this world, each individual can give his freedom a
concrete content. He must disclose the world with the purpose of further
disclosure and by the same movement try to free men, by means of whom the
world takes on meaning. But we shall find here the same objection that we met
when we examined the abstract moment of individual ethics. If every man is free,
he can not will himself free. Likewise the objection will be raised that lie can will
nothing for another since that other is free in all circumstances; men are always
disclosing being, in Buchenwald as well as in the blue isles of the Pacific, in
hovels as well as in palaces; something is always happening in the world, and in
the movement of keeping being at a distance, can one not consider its different
transformations with a detached joy, or find reasons for acting? No solution is
better or worse than any other.
We may call this attitude aesthetic because the one who adopts it claims to have
no other relation with the world than that of detached contemplation; outside of
time, and far from men, he faces history, which he thinks he does not belong to,
like a pure beholding; this impersonal version equalizes all situations; it
apprehends them only in the indifference of their differences; it excludes any
preference.
Thus, the lover of historical works is present at the birth and the downfall of
Athens, Rome, and Byzantium with the same serene passion. The tourist
considers the arena of the Coliseum, the Latifundia of Syracuse, the thermal
baths, the palaces, the temples, the prisons, and the churches with the same
tranquil curiosity: these things, existed, that is enough to satisfy him. Why not
also consider with impartial interest those that exist today? One finds this
temptation among many Italians who are weighed down by a magical and
deceptive past; the present already seems to them like a future past. Wars, civil
disputes, invasions and slavery have succeeded one another in their land. Each
moment of that tormented. history is contradicted by the following one; and yet in
the very midst of this vain agitation there arose domes, statues, bas-reliefs,
paintings and palaces which have remained intact through the centuries and which
still enchant the men of today. One can imagine an intellectual Florentine being
skeptical about the great uncertain movements which are stirring up his country
and which will die out as did the seethings of the centuries which have gone by:
as he sees it, the important thing is merely to understand the temporary events and
through them to cultivate that beauty which perishes not. Many Frenchmen also
sought relief in this thought in 1940 and the years which followed. "Let's try to
take the point of view of history," they said upon learning that the Germans had
entered Paris. And during the whole occupation certain intellectuals sought to
keep "aloof from the fray" and to consider impartially contingent facts which did
not concern them.
But we note at once that such an attitude appears in moments of discouragement
and confusion; in fact, it is a position of withdrawal, a way of fleeing the truth of
the present. As concerns the past, this eclecticism is legitimate; we are no longer
in a live situation in regard to Athens, Sparta, or Alexandria, and the very idea of
a choice has no meaning. But the present is not a potential past; it is the moment
of choice and action; we can not avoid living it through a project; and there is no
project which is purely contemplative since one always projects himself toward
something, toward the future; to put oneself "outside" is still a way of living the
inescapable fact that one is inside; those French intellectuals who, in the name of
history, poetry, or art, sought to rise above the drama of the age, were willy-nilly
its actors more or less explicitly, they were playing the occupier's game. Likewise,
the Italian aesthete, occupied in caressing the marbles and bronzes of Florence, is
playing a political role in the life of his country by his very inertia. One can not
justify all that is by asserting that everything may equally be the object of
contemplation, since man never contemplates: he does.
It is for the artist and the writer that the problem is raised in a particularly acute
and at the same time equivocal manner, for then one seeks to set up the,
indifference of human situations not in the name of pure contemplation, but of a
definite project: the creator projects toward the work of art a subject which he
justifies insofar as it is the matter of this work; any subject may thus be admitted,
a massacre as well as a masquerade. This aesthetic justification is sometimes so
striking that it betrays the author's aim; let us say that a writer wants to
communicate the horror inspired in him by children working in sweatshops; he
produces so beautiful a book that, enchanted by the tale, the style, and the images,
we forget the horror of the sweatshops or even start admiring it. Will we not then
be inclined to think that if death, misery, and injustice can be transfigured for our
delight, it is not an evil for there to be death, misery, and injustice?
But here too we must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the
past, no further action is possible. There have been war, plague, scandal, and
treason, and there is no way of our preventing their having taken place; the
executioner became an executioner and the victim underwent his fate as a victim
without us; all that we can do is to reveal it, to integrate it into the human
heritage, to raise it to the dignity of the aesthetic existence which bears within
itself its finality; but first this history had to occur: it occurred as scandal, revolt,
crime, or sacrifice, and we were able to try to save it only because it first offered
us a form. Today must also exist before being confirmed in its existence: iis
destination in such a way that everything about it already seemed justified and
that there was no more of it to reject, then there would also be nothing to say
about it, for no form would take shape in it; it is revealed only through rejection,
desire, hate and love. In order for the artist to have a world to express he must
first be situated in this world, oppressed or oppressing, resigned or rebellious, a
man among men. But at the heart of his existence he finds the exigency which is
common to all men; he must first will freedom within himself and universally; he
must try to conquer it: in the light of this project situations are graded and reasons
for acting are made manifest. - Freedom and Liberation
One of the chief objections leveled against existentialism is that the precept "to
will freedom" is only a hollow formula and offers no concrete content for action.
But that is because one has begun by emptying the word freedom of its concrete
meaning; we have already seen that freedom realizes itself only by engaging itself
in the world: to such an extent that man's project toward freedom is embodied for
him in definite acts of behavior.
To will freedom and to will to disclose being are one and the same choice; hence,
freedom takes a positive and constructive step which causes being to pass to
existence m a movement which is constantly surpassed. Science, technics, art, and
philosophy are indefinite conquests of existence over being; it is by assuming
themselves as such that they take on their genuine aspect; it is in the light of this
assumption that the word progress finds its veridical meaning. It is not a matter of
approaching a fixed limit: absolute Knowledge or the happiness of man or the
perfection of beauty; all human effort would then be doomed to failure, for with
each step forward the horizon recedes a step; for man it is a matter of pursuing the
expansion of his existence and of retrieving this very effort as an absolute.
Science condemns itself to failure when, yielding to the infatuation of the serious,
it aspires to attain being, to contain it, and to possess it; but it finds its truth if it
considers itself as a free engagement of thought in the given, aiming, at each
discovery, not at fusion with the thing, but at the possibility of new discoveries;
what the mind then projects is the concrete accomplishment of its freedom. The
attempt is sometimes made to find an objective justification of science in technics;
but ordinarily the mathematician is concerned with mathematics and the physicist
with physics, and not with their applications. And, furthermore, technics itself is
not objectively justified; if it sets up as absolute goals the saving of time and work
which it enables us to realize and the comfort and luxury which it enables us to
have access to, then it appears useless and absurd, for the time that one gains can
not be accumulated in a store house; it is contradictory to want to save up
existence, which, the fact is, exists only by being spent, and there is a good case
for showing that airplanes, machines, the telephone, and the radio do not make
men of today happier than those of former times. But actually it is not a question
of giving men time and happiness, it is not a question of stopping the movement
of life: it is a question of fulfilling it. If technics is attempting to make up for this
lack, which is at the very heart of existence, it fails radically; but it escapes all
criticism if one admits that, through it, existence, far from wishing to repose in the
security of being, thrusts itself ahead of itself in order to thrust itself still farther
ahead, that it aims at an indefinite disclosure of being by the transformation of the
thing into an instrument and at the opening of ever new possibilities for man. As
for art, we have already said that it should not attempt to set up idols; it should
reveal existence as a reason for existing; that is really why Plato, who wanted to
wrest man away from the earth and assign him to the heaven of Ideas, condemned
the poets; that is why every humanism on the other hand, crowns them with
laurels. Art reveals the transitory as an absolute; and as the transitory existence is
perpetuated through the centuries, art too, through the centuries, must perpetuate
this never-to-be-finished revelation. Thus, the constructive activities of man take
on a valid meaning only when they are assumed as a movement toward freedom;
and reciprocally, one sees that such a movement is concrete: discoveries,
inventions, industries, culture, paintings, and books people the world concretely
and open concrete possibilities to men.
Perhaps it is permissible to dream of a future when men will know no other use of
their freedom than this free unfurling of itself; constructive activity would be
possible for all; each one would be able to aim positively through his projects at
his own future. But today the fact is that there arc men who can justify their life
only by a negative action. As we have already seen, every man transcends
himself. But it happens that this transcendence is condemned to fall uselessly
back upon itself because it is cut off from its goals. That is what defines a
situation of oppression. Such a situation is never natural: man is never oppressed
by things; in any case, unless he is a naive child who hits stones or a mad prince
who orders the sea to be thrashed, he does not rebel against things, but only
against other men. The resistance of the thing sustains the action of man as air
sustains the flight of the dove; and by projecting himself through it man accepts
its being an obstacle; he assumes the risk of a setback in which he does not see a
denial of his freedom. The explorer knows that he may be forced to withdraw
before arriving at his goal; the scientist, that a certain phenomenon may remain
obscure to him; the technician, that his attempt may prove abortive: these
withdrawals and errors are another way of disclosing the world. Certainly, a
material obstacle may cruelly stand in the way of an undertaking: floods,
earthquakes, grasshoppers, epidemics and plague are scourges; but here we have
one of the truths of Stoicism: a must assume even these misfortunes, and since he
must never resign himself in favor of any thing, no destruction of a thing will ever
be a radical ruin for him; even his death is not an evil since he is man only insofar
as he is mortal: he must assume it as the natural limit of his life, as the risk
implied by every step. Only man can be an enemy for man; only he can rob him
of the meaning of his acts and his life because it also belongs only to him alone to
confirm it in its existence, to recognize it in actual fact as a freedom. It is here that
the Stoic distinction between "things which do not depend upon us" and those
which "depend upon us" proves to be insufficient: for "we" is legion and not an
individual; each one depends upon others, and what happens to me by means of
others depends upon me as regards its meaning; one does not submit to a war or
an occupation as he does to an earthquake: he must take sides for or against, and
the foreign wills thereby become allied or hostile. It is this interdependence which
explains why oppression is possible and why it is hateful. As we have seen, my
freedom, in order to fulfill itself, requires that it emerge into an open future: it is
other men who open the future to me, it is they who, setting up the world of
tomorrow, define my future; but if, instead of allowing me to participate in this
constructive movement, they oblige me to consume my transcendence in vain, if
they keep me below the level which they have conquered and on the basis of
which new conquests will be achieved then they are cutting me off from the
future, they are changing me into a thing. Life is occupied in both perpetuating
itself and in surpassing itself; if all it does is maintain itself, then living is only not
dying, and human existence is indistinguishable from an absurd vegetation; a life
justifies itself only if its effort to perpetuate itself is integrated into its surpassing
and if this surpassing has no other limits than those which the subject assigns
himself. Oppression divides the world into two clans: those who enlighten
mankind by thrusting it ahead of itself and those who are condemned to mark time
hopelessly in order merely to support the collectivity; their life is a pure repetition
of mechanical gestures; their leisure is just about sufficient for them to regain
their strength; the oppressor feeds himself on their transcendence and refuses to
extend it by a free recognition. The oppressed has only one solution: to deny the
harmony of that mankind from which an attempt is made to exclude him, to prove
that he is a man and that he is free by revolting against the tyrants. In order to
prevent this revolt, one of the ruses of oppression is to camouflage itself behind a
natural situation since, after all, one can not revolt against nature. When a
conservative wishes to show that the proletariat is not oppressed, he declares that
the present distribution of wealth is a natural fact and that there is thus no means
of rejecting it; and doubtless he has a good case for proving that, strictly speaking,
he is not stealing from the worker "the product of his labor, since the word theft
supposes social conventions which in other respects authorizes this type of
exploitation; but what the revolutionary means by this word is that the present
regime is a human fact. As such, it has to be rejected. This rejection cuts off the
will of the oppressor, in his turn, from the future toward which he was hoping to
thrust himself alone: another future is substituted, that of revolution. The struggle
is not one of words and ideologies; it is real and concrete:, if it is this future which
triumphs, and not the former, then it is the oppressed who is realized as a positive
and open freedom and the oppressor who becomes an obstacle and a thing.
There are thus two ways of surpassing the given: it is something quite different
from taking a trip or escaping from prison. In these two cases the given is present
in its surpassing; but in one case it is present insofar as it is accepted, in the other
insofar as rejected, and that makes a radical difference. Hegel has confused these
two movements with the ambiguous term "aufheben"; and the whole structure of
an optimism which denies failure and death rests on this ambiguity; that is what
allows one to regard the future of the world as a continuous and harmonious
development; this confusion is the source and also the consequence; it is a perfect
epitome of that idealistic and verbose flabbiness with which Marx charged Hegel
and to which he opposed a realistic toughness. Revolt is not integrated into the
harmonious development of he world; it does not wish to be integrated but rather
to explode at the heart of the world and to break s continuity. It is no accident if
Marx defined the attitude of the proletariat not positively but negatively: he does
not show it as affirming itself or as seeking to realize a classless society, but
rather as first attempting to put an end to itself as a class. And it is precisely
because it as no other issue than a negative one that this situation must be
eliminated.
All men are interested in this elimination, the oppressor as well as the oppressed,
as Marx himself has said, for each one needs to have all men free. There are cases
where the slave does not know his servitude and where it is necessary to bring the
seed of his liberation to him from the outside: his submission is not enough to
justify the tyranny which is imposed upon him. The slave is submissive when one
has succeeded in mystifying him in such a way that his situation does not seem to
him to be imposed by men, but to be immediately given by nature, by the gods, by
the powers against whom revolt has no meaning; thus, he does not accept his
condition through a resignation of his freedom since he can not even dream of any
other; and in his relationships with his friends, for example, he can live as a free
and moral man within this world where his ignorance has enclosed him. The
conservative will argue from this that this peace should not be disturbed; it is not
necessary to give education to the people or comfort to the natives of the colonies;
the "ringleaders" should be suppressed; that is the meaning of an old story of
Maurras: there is no need to awaken the sleeper, for that would be to awaken him
to unhappiness. Certainly it is not a question of throwing men in spite of
themselves, under the pretext of liberation, into a new world, one which they have
not chosen, on which they have no grip. The proponents of slavery in the
Carolinas had a good case when they showed the conquerors old negro slaves
who were bewildered by a freedom which they didn't know what to do with and
who cried for their former masters; these false liberations - though in a certain
sense they are inevitable - overwhelm those who are their victims as if they were
a new blow of blind fate. What must be done is to furnish the ignorant slave with
the means of transcending his situation by means of revolt, to put an end to his
ignorance. We know that the problem of the nineteenth-century socialists was
precisely to develop a class consciousness in the proletariat; we see in the life of
Flora Tristan, for example, how thankless such a task was: what she wanted for
the workers had first to be wanted without them. "But what right does one have to
want something for others?" asks the conservative, who meanwhile regards the
workingman or the native as "a grown-up child" and who does not hesitate to
dispose of the child's will. Indeed, there is nothing more arbitrary than intervening
as a stranger in a destiny which is not ours: one of the shocking things about
charity - in the civic sense of the word - is that it is practised from the outside,
according to the caprice of the one who distributes it and who is detached from
the object. But the cause of freedom is not that of others more than it is mine: it is
universally human. If I want the slave to become conscious of his servitude, it is
both in order not to be a tyrant myself - for any abstention is complicity, and
complicity in this case is tyranny - and in order that new possibilities might be
opened to the liberated slave and through him to all men. To want existence, to
want to disclose the world, and to want men to be free are one and the same will.
Moreover, the oppressor is lying if he claims that the oppressed positively wants
oppression; he merely abstains from not wanting it because he is unaware of even
the possibility of rejection. All that an external action can propose is to put the
oppressed in the presence of his freedom: then he will decide positively and
freely. The fact is that he decides against oppression, and it is then that the
movement of emancipation really begins. For if it is true that the cause of freedom
is the cause of each one, it is also true that the urgency of liberation is not the
same for all; Marx has rightly said that it is only to the oppressed that it appears as
immediately necessary. As for us, we do not believe in a literal necessity but in a
moral exigency; the oppressed can fulfill his freedom as a man only in revolt,
since the essential characteristic of the situation against which he is rebelling is
precisely its prohibiting him from any positive development; it is only in social
and political struggle that his transcendence passes beyond to the infinite. And
certainly the proletarian is no more naturally a moral man than another; he can
flee from his freedom, dissipate it, vegetate without desire, and give himself up to
an inhuman myth; and the trick of "enlightened" capitalism is to make him forget
about his concern with genuine justification, offering him, when he leaves the
factory where a mechanical job absorbs his transcendence, diversions in which
this transcendence ends by petering out: there you have the politics of the
American employing class which catches the worker in the trap of sports,
"gadgets," autos, and frigidaires. On the whole, however, he has fewer
temptations of betrayal than the members of the privileged classes because the
satisfying of his passions, the taste for adventure, and the satisfactions of social
seriousness are denied him. And in particular, it is also possible for the bourgeois
and the intellectual to use their freedom positively at the same time as they can
cooperate in the struggle against oppression: their future is not barred. That is
what Ponge, for example, suggests when he writes that he is producing "postrevolutionary" literature. The writer, as well as the scientist and the technician,
has the possibility of realizing, before the revolution is accomplished, this recreation of the world which should be the task of every man if freedom were no
longer enchained anywhere. Whether or not it is desirable to anticipate the future,
whether men have to give up the positive use of their freedom as long as the
liberation of all has not yet been achieved, or whether, on the contrary, any human
fulfillment serves the cause of man, is a point about which revolutionary politics
itself is still hesitating. Even in the Soviet Union itself the relation between the
building of the future and the present struggle seems to be defined in very
different ways according to the moment and the circumstances. It is also a matter
wherein each individual has to invent his solution freely. In any case, we can
assert that the oppressed is more totally engaged in the struggle than those who,
though at one with him in rejecting his servitude, do not experience it; but also
that, on the other hand, every man is affected by this struggle in so essential a way
that he can not fulfill himself morally without taking part in it.
The problem is complicated in practice by the fact that today oppression has more
than one aspect: the Arabian fellah is oppressed by both the sheiks and the French
and English administration; which of the two enemies is to be combated? The
interests of the French proletariat are not the same as those of the natives in the
colonies: which are to be served? But here the question is political before being
moral: we must end by abolishing all suppression; each one must carry on his
struggle in connection with that of the other and by integrating it into the general
pattern. What order should be followed? What tactics should be adopted? It is a
matter of opportunity and efficiency. For each one it also depends upon his
individual situation. It is possible that he may be led to sacrifice temporarily a
cause whose success is subordinate to that of a cause whose defense is more
urgent; on the other hand, it is possible that one may judge it necessary to
maintain the tension of revolt against a situation to which one does not wish to
consent at any price: thus, during the war, when Negro leaders in America were
asked to drop their own claims for the sake of the general interest, Richard Wright
refused; he thought that even in time of war his cause had to be defended. In any
case, morality requires that the combatant be not blinded by the goal which he
sets up for himself to the point. of falling into the fanaticism of seriousness or
passion. The cause which he serves must not lock itself up and thus create a new
element of separation: through his own struggle he must seek to serve the
universal cause of freedom.
At once the oppressor raises an objection: under the pretext of freedom, he says,
there you go oppressing me in turn; you deprive me of my freedom. It is the
argument which the Southern slaveholders opposed to the abolitionists, and we
know that the Yankees were so imbued with the principles of an abstract
democracy that they did not grant that they had the right to deny the Southern
planters the freedom to own slaves; the Civil War broke out with a completely
formal pretext. We smile at such scruples; yet today America still recognizes
more or less implicitly that Southern whites have the freedom to lynch negroes.
And it is the same sophism which is innocently displayed in the newspapers of the
P. R. L. (Parti Republicain de la Liberte) and, more or less subtly, in all
conservative organs. When a party promises the directing classes that it will
defend their freedom, it means quite plainly that it demands that they have the
freedom of exploiting the working class. A claim of this kind does not outrage us
in the name of abstract justice; but a contradiction is dishonestly concealed there.
For a freedom wills itself genuinely only by willing itself as an indefinite
movement through the freedom of others; as soon as it withdraws into itself, it
denies itself on behalf of some object which it prefers to itself: we know well
enough what sort of freedom the P. R. L. demands: it is property, the feeling of
possession, capital, comfort, moral security. We have to respect freedom only
when it is intended for freedom, not when it strays, flees itself, and resigns itself.
A freedom which is interested only in denying freedom must be denied. And it is
not true that the recognition of the freedom of others limits my own freedom: to
be free is not to have the power to do anything you like; it is to be able to surpass
the given toward an open future; the existence of others as a freedom defines my
situation and is even the condition of my own freedom. I am oppressed if I am
thrown into prison, but not if I am kept from throwing my neighbor into prison.
Indeed, the oppressor himself is conscious of this sophism; he hardly dares to
have recourse to it; rather than make an unvarnished demand for freedom to
oppress he is more apt to present himself as the defender of certain values. It is
not in his own name that he is fighting, but rather in the name of civilization, of
institutions, of monuments, and of virtues which realize objectively the situation
which he intends to maintain; he declares that all these things are beautiful and
good in themselves; he defends a past which has assumed the icy dignity of being
against an uncertain future whose values have not yet been won; this is what is
well expressed by the label "conservative." As some people are curators of a
museum or a collection of medals, others make themselves the curators of the
given world; stressing the sacrifices that are necessarily involved in all change,
they side with what has been over against what has not yet been.
It is quite certain that the surpassing of the past toward the future always demands
sacrifices; to claim that in destroying an old quarter in order to build new houses
on its ruins one is preserving it dialectically is a play on words; no dialectic can
restore the old port of Marseilles; the past as something not surpassed, in its flesh
and blood presence, has completely vanished. All that a stubborn optimism can
claim is that the past does not concern us in this particular and fixed form and that
we have sacrificed nothing in sacrificing it; thus, many revolutionaries consider it
healthy to refuse any attachment to the past and to profess to scorn monuments
and traditions. A left-wing journalist who was fuming impatiently in a street of
Pompeii said, "What are we doing here? We're wasting our time." This attitude is
self-confirming; let us turn away from the past, and there no longer remains any
trace of it in the present, or for the future; the people of the Middle Ages had so
well forgotten antiquity that there was no longer anyone who even had a desire to
know something about it. One can live without Greek, without Latin, without
cathedrals, and without history. Yes, but there are many other things that one can
live without; the tendency of man is not to reduce himself but to increase his
power. To abandon the past to the night of facticity is a way of depopulating the
world. I would distrust a humanism which was too indifferent to the efforts of the
men of former times; if the disclosure of being achieved by our ancestors does not
at all move us, why be so interested in that which is taking place today; why wish
so ardently for future realizations? To assert the reign of the human is to
acknowledge man in the past as well in the future. The Humanists of the
Renaissance are an example of the help to be derived by a movement of liberation
from being rooted in the past; no doubt the study of Greek and Latin does not
have this living force in every age; but in any case, the fact of having a past is part
of the human condition; if the world behind us were bare, we would hardly be
able to see anything before us but a gloomy desert. We must try, through our
living projects, to turn to our own account that freedom which was undertaken in
the past and to integrate it into the present world.
But on the other hand, we know that if the past concerns us, it does so not as a
brute fact, but insofar as it has human signification; if this signification can be
recognized only by a project which refuses the legacy of the past, then this legacy
must be refused; it would be absurd to uphold against man a datum which is
precious only insofar as the freedom of man is expressed in it. There is one
country where the cult of the past is erected into a system more than anywhere
else: it is the Portugal of today; but it is at the cost of a deliberate contempt for
man. Salazar has had brand-new castles built, at great expense, on all the hills
where there were ruins standing, and at Obidos he had no hesitation in
appropriating for this restoration the funds that were to go to the maternity
hospital, which, as a result, had to be closed; on the outskirts of Coimbre where a
children's community was to be set up, he spent so much money having the
different types of old Portuguese houses reproduced on a reduced scale that barely
four children could be lodged in this monstrous village. Dances, songs, local
festivals, and the wearing of old regional costumes are encouraged everywhere:
they. never open a school. Here we see, in its extreme form, the absurdity of a
choice which prefers the Thing to Man from whom alone the Thing can receive its
value. We may be moved by dances, songs, and regional costumes because these
inventions represent the only free accomplishment which was allowed the
peasants amidst the hard conditions under which they formerly lived; by means of
these creations they tore themselves away from their servile work, transcended
their situation, and asserted themselves as men before the beasts of burden.
Wherever these festivals still exist spontaneously, where they have retained this
character, they have their meaning and their value. But when they are
ceremoniously reproduced for the edification of indifferent tourists, they are no
more than a boring documentary, even an odious mystification. It is a sophism to
want to maintain by coercion things which derive their worth from the fact that
men attempted through them to escape from coercion. In like manner, all those
who oppose old lace, rugs, peasant coifs, picturesque houses, regional costumes,
hand-made cloth, old language, etcetera, to social evolution know very well that
they are dishonest: they themselves do not much value the present reality of these
things, and most of the time their lives clearly show it. To be sure, they treat those
who do not recognize the unconditional value of an Alencon point as
ignoramuses; but at heart they know that these objects are less precious in
themselves than as the manifestation of the civilization which they represent.
They are crying up the patience and the submission of industrious hands which
were one with their needle as much as they are the lace. We also know that the
Nazis made very handsome bindings and lampshades out of human skin.
Thus, oppression can in no way justify itself in the name of the content which it is
defending and which it dishonestly sets up as an idol. Bound up with the
subjectivity which established it, this content requires its own surpassing. One
does not love the past in its living truth if he insists on preserving its hardened and
mummified forms. The past is an appeal; it is an appeal toward the future which
sometimes can save it only by destroying it. Even though this destruction may be
a sacrifice, it would be a lie to deny it: since man wants there to be being, he can
not renounce any form of being without regret. But a genuine ethics does not
teach us either to sacrifice it or deny it: we must assume it.
The oppressor does not merely try to justify himself as a conserver. Often he tries
to invoke future realizations; he speaks in the name of the future. Capitalism sets
itself up as the regime which is most favorable to production; the colonist is the
only one capable of exploiting the wealth which the native would leave fallow.
Oppression tries to defend itself by its utility. But we have seen that it is one of
the lies of the serious mind to attempt to give the word "useful" an absolute
meaning; nothing is useful if it is not useful to man; nothing is useful to man if the
latter is not in a position to define his own ends and values, if he is not free.
Doubtless an oppressive regime can achieve constructions which will serve man:
they will serve him only from the day that be is free to use them; as long as the
reign of the oppressor lasts, none of the benefits of oppression is a real benefit.
Neither in the past nor in the future can one prefer a thing to Alan, who alone can
establish the reason for all things.
Finally, the oppressor has a good case for showing that respect for freedom is
never without difficulty, and perhaps he may even assert that one can never
respect all freedoms at the same time. But that simply means that man must
accept the tension of the struggle, that his liberation must actively seek to
perpetuate itself, without aiming at an impossible state of equilibrium and rest;
this does not mean that he ought to prefer the sleep of slavery to this incessant
conquest. Whatever the problems raised for him, the setbacks that he will have to
assume, and the difficulties with which he will have to struggle, he must reject
oppression at any cost. - The Antinomies of Action
As we have seen, if the oppressor were aware of the demands of his own freedom,
he himself should have to denounce oppression. But he is dishonest; in the name
of the serious or of his passions, of his will for power or of his appetites, he
refuses to give up his privileges. In order for a liberating action to be a thoroughly
moral action, it would have to be achieved through a conversion of the
oppressors: there would then be a reconciliation of all freedoms. But no one any
longer dares to abandon himself today to these utopian reveries. We know only
too well that we can not count upon a collective conversion. However, by virtue
of the fact that the oppressors refuse to co-operate in the affirmation of freedom,
they embody, in the eyes of all men of good will, the absurdity of facticity; by
calling for the triumph of freedom over facticity, ethics also demands that they be
suppressed; and since their subjectivity, by definition, escapes our control, it will
be possible to act only on their objective presence; others will here have to be
treated like things, with violence; the sad fact of the separation of men will
thereby be confirmed. Thus, here is the oppressor oppressed in turn; and the men
who do violence to him in their turn become masters, tyrants, and executioners: in
revolting, the oppressed are metamorphosed into a blind force, a brutal fatality;
the evil which divides the world is carried out in their own hearts. And doubtless
it is not a question of backing out of these consequences, for the ill-will of the
oppressor imposes upon each one the alternative of being the enemy of the
oppressed if he is not that of their tyrant; evidently, it is necessary to choose to
sacrifice the one who is an enemy of man; but the fact is that one finds himself
forced to treat certain men as things in order to win the freedom of all.
A freedom which is occupied in denying freedom is itself so outrageous that the
outrageousness of the violence which one practices against it is almost cancelled
out: hatred, indignation, and anger (which even the Marxist cultivates, despite the
cold impartiality of the doctrine) wipe out all scruples. But the oppressor would
not be so strong if he did not have accomplices among the oppressed themselves;
mystification is one of the forms of oppression; ignorance is a situation in which
man may be enclosed as narrowly as in a prison; as we have already said, every
individual may practice his freedom inside his world, but not everyone has the
means of rejecting, even by doubt, the values, taboos, and prescriptions by which
he is surrounded; doubtless, respectful minds take the object of their respect for
their own; in this sense they are responsible for it, as they are responsible for their
presence in the world: but they are not guilty if their adhesion is not a resignation
of their freedom. When a young sixteen-year old Nazi died crying, "Heil Hitler!"
he was not guilty, and it was not he whom we hated but his masters. The desirable
thing would be to re-educate this misled youth; it would be necessary to expose
the mystification and to put the men who are its victims in the presence of their
freedom. But the urgency of the struggle forbids this slow labor. We are obliged
to destroy not only the oppressor but also those who serve him, whether they do
so out of ignorance or out of constraint.
As we have also seen, the situation of the world is so complex that one can not
fight everywhere at the same time and for everyone. In order to win an urgent
victory, one has to give up the idea, at least temporarily, of serving certain valid
causes; one may even be brought to the point of fighting against them. Thus,
during the course of the last war, no Anti-fascist could have wanted the revolts of
the natives in the British Empire to be successful; on the contrary, these revolts
were supported by the Fascist regimes; and yet, we can not blame those who,
considering their emancipation to be the more urgent action, took advantage of
the situation to obtain it. Thus, it is possible, and often it even happens, that one
finds himself obliged to oppress and kill men who are pursuing goals whose
validity one acknowledges himself.
But that is not the worst thing to be said for violence. It not only forces us to
sacrifice the men who are in our way, but also those who are fighting on our side,
and even ourselves. Since we can conquer our enemies only by acting upon their
facticity, by reducing them to things, we have to make ourselves things; in this
struggle in which wills are forced to confront each other through their bodies, the
bodies of our allies, like those of our opponents are exposed to the same brutal
hazard: they will be wounded, killed, or starved. Every war, every revolution,
demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
And even outside of periods of crisis when blood flows, the permanent possibility
of violence can constitute between nations and classes a state of veiled warfare in
which individuals are sacrificed in a permanent way.
Thus one finds himself in the presence of the paradox that no action can be
generated for man without its being immediately generated against men. This
obvious truth, which is universally known, is, however, so bitter that the first
concern of a doctrine of action is ordinarily to mask this element of failure that is
involved in any undertaking. The parties of oppression beg the question; they
deny the value of what they sacrifice in such a way that they find that they are
sacrificing nothing. Passing dishonestly from the serious to nihilism, they set up
both the unconditioned value of their end and the insignificance of the men whom
they are using as instruments. High as it may be, the number of victims is always
measurable; and each one taken one by one is never anything but an individual:
yet, through time and space, the triumph of the cause embraces the infinite, it
interests the whole collectivity. In order to deny the outrage it is enough to deny
the importance of the individual, even though it be at the cost of this collectivity:
it is everything, he is only a zero.
In one sense the individual, as a matter of fact, is not very much, and we can
understand the misanthrope who in 1939 declared: "After all, when you look at
people one by one, it doesn't seem so awful a thing to make war upon them."
Reduced to pure facticity, congealed in his immanence, cut off from his future,
deprived of his transcendence and of the world which that transcendence
discloses, a man no longer appears as anything more than a thing among things
which can be subtracted from the collectivity of other things without its leaving
upon the earth any trace of its absence. Multiply this paltry existence by
thousands of copies and its insignificance remains; mathematics also teaches us
that zero multiplied by any finite number remains zero. It is even possible that the
wretchedness of each element is only further affirmed by this futile expansion.
Horror is sometimes self-destructive before the photographs of the charnel-houses
of Buchenwald and Dachau and of the ditches strewn with bones; it takes on the
aspect of indifference; that decomposed, that animal flesh seems so essentially
doomed to decay that one can no longer even regret that it has fulfilled its destiny;
it is when a man is alive that his death appears to be an outrage, but a corpse has
the stupid tranquillity of trees and stones: those who have done it say that it is
easy to walk on a corpse and still easier to walk over a pile of corpses; and it is
the same reason that accounts for the callousness described by those deportees
who escaped death: through sickness, pain, hunger, and death, they no longer saw
their comrades and themselves as anything more than an animal horde whose life
or desires were no longer justified by anything, whose very revolts were only the
agitations of animals. In order to remain capable of perceiving man through these
humiliated bodies one had to be sustained by political faith, intellectual pride, or
Christian charity. That is why the Nazis were so systematically relentless in
casting into abjection the men they wanted to destroy: the disgust which the
victims felt in regard to themselves stifled the voice of revolt and justified the
executioners in their own eyes. All oppressive regimes become stronger through
the degradation of the oppressed. In Algeria I have seen any number of colonists
appease their conscience by the contempt in which they held the Arabs who were
crushed with misery: the more miserable the latter were, the more contemptible
they seemed, so much so that there was never any room for remorse. And the
truth is that certain tribes in the south were so ravaged by disease and famine that
one could no longer feel either rebellious or hopeful regarding them; rather, one
wished for the death of those unhappy creatures who have been reduced to so
elemental an animality that even the maternal instinct has been suppressed in
them. Yet, with all this sordid resignation, there were children who played and
laughed; and their smile exposed the lie of their oppressors: it was an appeal and a
promise; it projected a future before the child, a man's future. If, in all oppressed
countries, a child's face is so moving, it is not that the child is more moving or
that he has more of a right to happiness than the others: it is that he is the living
affirmation of human transcendence: he is on the watch, he is an eager hand held
out to the world, he is a hope, a project. The trick of tyrants is to enclose a man in
the immanence of his facticity and to try to forget that man is always, as
Heidegger puts it, "infinitely more than what he would be if he were reduced to
being what he is;" man is a being of the distances, a movement toward the future,
a project. The tyrant asserts himself as a transcendence; he considers others as
pure immanences: he thus arrogates to himself the right to treat them like cattle.
We see the sophism on which his conduct is based: of the ambiguous condition
which is that of all men, he retains for himself the only aspect of a transcendence
which is capable of justifying itself; for the others, the contingent and unjustified
aspect of immanence.
But if that kind of contempt for man is convenient, it is also dangerous; the
feeling of abjection can confirm men in a hopeless resignation but can not incite
them to the struggle and sacrifice which is consented to with their life; this was
seen in the time of the Roman decadence when men lost their zest for life and the
readiness to risk it. In any case, the tyrant himself does not openly set UP this
contempt as a universal principle: it is the Jew, the negro, or the native whom he
encloses in his immanence; with his subordinates and his soldiers he uses
different language. For it is quite clear that if the individual is a pure zero, the sum
of those zeros which make up the collectivity is also a zero: no undertaking has
any importance, no defeat as well as no victory. In order to appeal to the devotion
of his troops, the chief or the authoritarian party will utilize a truth which is the
opposite of the one which sanctions their brutal oppression: namely, that the value
of the individual is asserted only in his surpassing. This is one of the aspects of
the doctrine of Hegel which the dictatorial regimes readily make use of. And it is
a point at which fascist ideology and Marxist ideology, converge. A doctrine
which aims at the liberation of man evidently can not rest on a contempt for the
individual; but it can propose to him no other salvation than his subordination to
the collectivity. The finite is nothing if it is not its transition to the infinite; the
death of an individual is not a failure if it is integrated into a project which
surpasses the limits of life, the substance of this life being outside of the
individual himself, in the class, in the socialist State; if the individual is taught to
consent to his sacrifice, the latter is abolished as such, and the soldier who has
renounced himself in favor of his cause will die joyfully; in fact, that is how the
young Hitlerians died.
We know how many edifying speeches this philosophy has inspired: it is by
losing oneself that one finds himself, by dying that one fulfills his life, by
accepting servitude that one realizes his freedom; all leaders of men preach in this
vein. And if there are any who refuse to heed this language, they are wrong, they
are cowards: as such, they are worthless, they aren't worth anyone's bothering
with them. The brave man dies gaily, of his own free will; the one who rejects
death deserves only to die. There you have the problem elegantly resolved.
But one may ask whether this convenient solution is not self-contesting. In Hegel
the individual is only an abstract moment in the History of absolute Mind. This is
explained by the first intuition of the system which, identifying the real and the
rational, empties the human world of its sensible thickness; if the truth of the here
and now is only Space and Time, if the truth of one's cause is its passage into the
other, then the attachment to the individual substance of life is evidently an error,
an inadequate attitude. The essential moment of Hegelian ethics is the moment
when consciousnesses recognize one another; in this operation the other is
recognized as identical with me, which means that in myself it is the universal
truth of my self which alone is recognized; so individuality is denied, and it can
no longer reappear except on the natural and contingent plane; moral salvation
will lie in my surpassing toward that other who is equal to myself and who in turn
will surpass himself toward another. Hegel himself recognizes that if this passage
continued indefinitely, Totality would never be achieved, the real would peter out
in the same measure: one can not, without absurdity, indefinitely sacrifice each
generation to the following one; human history would then be only an endless
succession of negations which would never return to the positive; all action would
be destruction and life would be a vain flight. We must admit that there will be a
recovery of the real and that all sacrifices will find their positive form within the
absolute Mind. But this does not work without some difficulty. The Mind is a
subject; but who is a subject? After Descartes how can we ignore the fact that
subjectivity radically signifies separation? And if it is admitted, at the cost of a
contradiction, that the subject will be the men of the future reconciled, it must be
clearly recognized that the men of today who turn out to have been the substance
of the real, and not subjects, remain excluded forever from this reconciliation.
Furthermore, even Hegel retreats from the idea of this motionless future; since
Mind is restlessness, the dialectic of struggle and conciliation can never be
stopped: the future which it envisages is not the perpetual peace of Kant but an
indefinite state of war. It declares that this war will no longer appear as a
temporary evil in which each individual makes a gift of himself to the State; but it
is precisely at this point that there is a bit of sleight-of-hand: for why would he
agree to this gift since the State can not be the achieving of the real, Totality
recovering itself? The whole system seems like a huge mystification, since it
subordinates all its moments to an end term whose coming it dares not set up; the
individual renounces himself; but no reality in favor of which he can renounce
himself is ever affirmed or recovered. Through all this learned dialectic we finally
come back to the sophism which we exposed: if the individual is nothing, society
can not be something. Take his substance away from him, and the State has no
more substance; if he has nothing to sacrifice, there is nothing before him to
sacrifice to. Hegelian fullness immediately passes into the nothingness of absence.
And the very grandeur of that failure makes this truth shine forth: only the subject
can justify his own existence; no external subject, no object, can bring him
salvation from the outside. He can not be regarded as a nothing, since the
consciousness of all things is within him.
Thus, nihilistic pessimism and rationalistic optimism fail in their effort to juggle
away the bitter truth of sacrifice: they also eliminate all reasons for wanting it.
Someone told a young invalid who wept because she had to leave her home, her
occupations, and her whole past life, "Get cured. The rest has no importance."
"But if nothing has any importance," she answered, "what good is it to get cured?"
She was right. In order for this world to have any importance, in order for our
undertaking to have a meaning and to be worthy of sacrifices, we must affirm the
concrete and particular thickness of this world and the individual reality of our
projects and ourselves. This is what democratic societies understand; they strive
to confirm citizens in the feeling of their individual value; the whole ceremonious
apparatus of baptism, marriage, and burial is the collectivity's homage to the
individual; and the rites of justice seek to manifest society's respect for each of its
members considered in his particularity. After or during a period of violence
when men are treated like objects, one is astonished, even irritated, at seeing
human life rediscover, in certain cases, a sacred character. Why those hesitations
of the courts, those long drawn-out trials, since men died by the million, like
animals, since the very ones being judged coldly massacred them? The reason is
that once the period of crisis, in which the democracies themselves, whether they
liked it or not, had to resort to blind violence, has passed, they aim to re-establish
the individual within his rights; more than ever they must restore to their members
the sense of their dignity, the sense of the dignity of each man, taken one by one;
the soldier must become a citizen again so that the city may continue to subsist as
such, may continue to deserve one's dedicating oneself to it.
But if the individual is set up as a unique and irreducible value, the word sacrifice
regains all its meaning; what a man loses in renouncing his plans, his future, and
his life no longer appears as a negligible thing. Even if he decides that in order to
justify his life he must consent to limiting its course, even if he accepts dying,
there is a wrench at the heart of this acceptance, for freedom demands both that it
recover itself as an absolute and that it prolong its movement indefinitely: it is
through this indefinite movement that it desires to come back to itself and to
confirm itself; now, death puts an end to his drive; the hero can transcend death
toward a future fulfillment, but he will not be present in that future; this must be
understood if one wishes to restore to heroism its true worth: it is neither natural
nor easy; the hero may overcome his regret and carry out his sacrifice; the latter is
none the less an absolute renunciation. The death of those to whom we are
attached by particular ties will also be consented to as an individual and
irreducible misfortune. A collectivist conception of man does not concede a valid
existence to such sentiments as love, tenderness, and friendship; the abstract
identity of individuals merely authorizes a comradeship between them by means
of which each one is likened to each of the others. In marching, in choral singing,
in common work and struggle, all the others appear as the same; nobody ever
dies. On the contrary, if individuals recognize themselves in their differences,
individual relations are established among them, and each one becomes
irreplaceable for a few others. And violence does not merely provoke in the world
the wrench of the sacrifice to which one has consented; it is also undergone in
revolt and refusal. Even the one who desires a victory and who knows that it has
to be paid for will wonder: why with my blood rather than with another's? Why is
it my son who is dead? And we have seen that every struggle obliges us to
sacrifice people whom our victory does not concern, people who, in all honesty,
reject it as a cataclysm: these people will die in astonishment, anger or despair.
Undergone as a misfortune, violence appears as a crime to the one who practices
it. That is why Saint-Just, who believed in the individual and who knew that all
authority is violence, said with somber lucidity, "No one governs innocently."
We may well assume that not all those who govern have the courage to make such
a confession; and furthermore it might be dangerous for them to make it too
loudly. They try to mask the crime from themselves; at least they try to conceal it
from the notice of those who submit to their law. If they can not totally deny it,
they attempt to justify it. The most radical justification would be to demonstrate
that it is necessary: it then ceases to be a crime, it becomes fatality. Even if an end
is posited as necessary, the contingency of the means renders the chief's decisions
arbitrary, and each individual suffering appears as unjustified: why this bloody
revolution instead of slow reforms? And who will dare to designate the victim
who is anonymously demanded by the general plan? On the contrary, if only one
way shows itself to be possible, if the unrolling of history is fatal, there is no
longer any place for the anguish of choice, or for regret, or for outrage; revolt can
no longer surge up in any heart. This is what makes historical materialism so
reassuring a doctrine; the troublesome idea of a subjective caprice or an objective
chance is thereby eliminated. The thought and the voice of the directors merely
reflect the fatal exigencies of History. But in order that this faith be living and
efficacious, it is necessary that no reflection mediatize the subjectivity of the
chiefs and make it appear as such; if the chief considers that he does not simply
reflect the given situation but that he is interpreting it, he becomes a prey to
anguish: who am I to believe in myself? And if the soldier's eyes open, he too
asks: who is he to command me? Instead of a prophet, he sees nothing more than
a tyrant. That is why every authoritarian party regards thought as a danger and
reflection as a crime; it is by means of thought that crime appears as such in the
world. This is one of the meanings of Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Roubatchov
easily slips into confession because he feels that hesitation and doubt are the most
radical, the most unpardonable of faults; they undermine the world of objectivity
much more than does an act of capricious disobedience. Yet, however cruel the
yoke may be, in spite of the purges, murders, and deportations, every regime has
opponents: there are reflection, doubt, and contestation. And even if the opponent
is in the wrong, his error brings to light a truth, namely, that there is a place in this
world for error and subjectivity; whether he is right or wrong, he triumphs; he
shows that the men who are in power may also be mistaken. And furthermore, the
latter know it; they know that they hesitate and that their decisions are risky. The
doctrine of necessity is much more a weapon than a faith; and if they use it, they
do so because they know well enough that the soldier may act otherwise than he
does, otherwise than the way they want him to, that he may disobey; they know
well enough that he is free and that they are fettering his freedom. It is the first
sacrifice that they impose upon him: in order to achieve the liberation of men he
has to give up his own freedom, even his freedom of thought. In order to mask the
violence, what they do is to have recourse to a new violence which even invades
his mind.
Very well, replies the partisan who is sure of his aims, but this violence is useful.
And the justification which he here invokes is that which, in the most general
way, inspires and legitimizes all action. From conservatives to revolutionaries,
through idealistic and moral vocabularies or realistic and positive ones, the
outrageousness of' violence is excused in the name of utility. It does not much
matter that the action is not fatally commanded by anterior events as long as it is
called for by the proposed end; this end sets up the means which are subordinated
to it; and thanks to this subordination, one can perhaps not avoid sacrifice but one
can legitimize it: this is what is important to the man of action; like Saint-just, he
accepts the loss of his innocence. It is the arbitrariness of the crime that is
repugnant to him more than the crime itself. If the sacrifices which have been
assented to find their rational place within the enterprise, one escapes from the
anguish of decision and from remorse. But one has to win out; defeat would
change the murders and destruction into unjustified outrage, since they would
have been carried out in vain; but victory gives meaning and utility to all the
misfortunes which have helped bring it about.
Such a position would be solid and satisfactory if the word useful had an absolute
meaning in itself; as we have seen, the characteristic of the spirit of seriousness is
precisely to confer a meaning upon it by raising the Thing or the Cause to the
dignity of an unconditioned end. The only problem then raised is a technical
problem; the means will be chosen according to their effectiveness, their speed,
and their economy; it is simply a question of measuring the relationships of the
factors of time, cost, and probability of success. Furthermore, in war-dime
discipline spares the subordinates the problems of such calculations; they concern
only the staff. The soldier does not call into question either the aim or the means
of attaining it: he obeys without any discussion. However, what distinguishes war
and politics from all other techniques is that the material that is employed is a
human material. Now human efforts and lives can no more be treated as blind
instruments than human work can be treated as simple merchandise; at the same
time as he is a means for attaining an end, man is himself an end. The word useful
requires a complement, and there can be only one: man himself. And the most
disciplined soldier would mutiny if skillful propaganda did not persuade him that
he is dedicating himself to the cause of man: to his cause.
But is the cause of Man that of each man? That is what utilitarian ethics has been
striving to demonstrate since Hegel; if one wishes to give the word useful a
universal and absolute meaning, it is always a question of reabsorbing each man
into the bosom of mankind; it is said that despite the weaknesses of the flesh and
that particular fear which each one experiences in the face of his particular death,
the real interest of each one is mingled with the general interest. And it is true that
each is bound to all; but that is precisely the ambiguity of his condition: in his
surpassing toward others, each one exists absolutely as for himself; each is
interested in the liberation of all, but as a separate existence engaged in his own
projects. So much so that the terms "useful to Man," "useful to this man," do not
overlap. Universal, absolute man exists nowhere. From this angle, we again come
upon the same antinomy: the only justification of sacrifice is its utility; but the
useful is what serves Man. Thus, in order to serve some men we must do
disservice to others. By what principle are we to choose between them?
It must again be called to mind that the supreme end at which man must aim is his
freedom, which alone is capable of establishing the value of every end; thus,
comfort, happiness, all relative goods which human projects define, will be
subordinated to this absolute condition of realization. The freedom of a single
man must count more than a cotton or rubber harvest; although this principle is
not respected in fact, it is usually recognized theoretically. But what makes the
problem so difficult is that it is a matter of choosing between the negation of one
freedom or another: every war supposes a discipline, every revolution a
dictatorship, every political move a certain amount of lying; action implies all
forms of enslaving, from murder to mystification. Is it therefore absurd in every
case? Or, in spite of everything, are we able to find, within the very outrage that it
implies, reasons for wanting one thing rather than another?
One generally takes numerical considerations into account by a strange
compromise which clearly shows that every action treats men both as a means and
as an end, as an external object and as an inwardness; it is better to save the lives
of ten men than of only one. Thus, one treats man as an end, for to set up quantity
as a value is to set up the positive value of each unit; but it is setting it up as a
quantifiable value, thus, as an externality. I have known a Kantian rationalist who
passionately maintained that it is as immoral to choose the death of a single man
as to let ten thousand die; he was right in the sense that in each murder the outrage
is total; ten thousand dead - there are never ten thousand copies of a single death;
no multiplication is relevant to subjectivity. But he forgot that for the one who
had the decision to make men are given, nevertheless, as objects that can be
counted; it is therefore logical, though this logic implies an outrageous absurdity,
to prefer the salvation of the greater number. Moreover, this position of the
problem is rather abstract, for one rarely bases a choice on pure quantity. Those
men among whom one hesitates have functions in society, The general who is
sparing of the lives of his soldiers saves them as human material that it is useful to
save for tomorrow's battles or for the reconstruction of the country; and he
sometimes condemns to death thousands of civilians whose fate he is not
concerned with in order to spare the lives of a hundred soldiers or ten specialists.
An extreme case is the one David Rousset describes in The Days of Our Death:
the S.S. obliged the responsible members of the concentration camps to designate
which prisoners were to go to the gas chambers. The politicians agreed to assume
this responsibility because they thought that they had a valid principle of
selection: they protected the politicians of their party because the lives of these
men who were devoted to a cause which they thought was just seemed to them to
be the most useful to preserve. We know that the communists have been widely
accused of this partiality; however, since one could in no way escape the atrocity
of these massacres, the only thing to do was to try, as far as possible, to
rationalize it.
It seems as if we have hardly advanced, for we come back, in the end, to the
statement that what appears as useful is to sacrifice the less useful men to the
more useful. But even this shift from useful to useful will enlighten us: the
complement of the word useful is the word man, but it is also the word future. It is
man insofar as he is, according to the formula of Ponge, "the future of man."
Indeed, cut off from his transcendence, reduced to the facticity of his presence, an
individual is nothing; it is by his project that he fulfills himself, by the end at
which he aims that he justifies himself; thus, this justification is always to come.
Only the future can take the present for its own and keep it alive by surpassing it.
A choice, will become possible in the light of the future, which is the meaning of
tomorrow because the present appears as the facticity which must be transcended
toward freedom. No action is conceivable without this sovereign affirmation of
the future. But we still have to agree upon what underlies this word. - The Present and the Future
The word future has two meanings corresponding to the two aspects of the
ambiguous condition of man which is lack of being and which is existence; it
alludes to both being and existence. When I envisage my future, I consider that
movement which, prolonging my existence of today, will fulfill my present
projects and will surpass them toward new ends: the future is the definite
direction of a particular transcendence and it is so closely bound up with the
present that it composes with it a single temporal form; this is the future which
Heidegger considered as a reality which is given at each moment. But through the
centuries men have dreamed of another future in which it might be granted them
to retrieve themselves as beings in Glory, Happiness, or justice; this future did not
prolong the present; it came down upon the world like a cataclysm announced by
signs which cut the continuity of time: by a Messiah, by meteors, by the trumpets
of the Last judgment. By transporting the kingdom of God to heaven, Christians
have almost stripped it of it, temporal character, although it was promised to the
believer only at the end of his life. It was the anti-Christian humanism of the
eighteenth century which brought the myth down to earth again. Then, through
the idea of progress, an idea of the future was elaborated in which its two aspects
fused: the future appeared both as the meaning of our transcendence and as the
immobility of being; it is human, terrestrial, and the resting-place of things. It is in
this form that it is hesitantly reflected in the systems of Hegel and of Comte. It is
in this form that it is so often invoked today as a unity of the World or as a
finished socialist State. In both cases the Future appears as both the infinite and as
Totality, as number and as unity of conciliation; it is the abolition of the negative,
it is fullness, happiness. One might surmise that any sacrifice already made might
be claimed in its name. However great the quantity of men sacrificed today, the
quantity that will profit by their sacrifice is infinitely greater; on the other hand, in
the face of the positivity of the future, the present is only the negative which must
be eliminated as such: only by dedicating itself to this positivity can the negative
henceforth return to the positive. The present is the transitory existence which is
made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself only by transcending itself toward
the permanence of future being; it is only as an instrument, as a means, it is only
by its efficacity with regard to the coming of the future that the present is validly
realized: reduced to itself it is nothing, one may dispose of it as he pleases. That is
the ultimate meaning of the formula: the end justifies the means: all means are
authorized by their very indifference. Thus, some serenely think that the present
oppression has no importance if, through it, the World can be fulfilled as such:
then, within the harmonious equilibrium of work and wealth, oppression will be
wiped out by itself. Others serenely think that the present dictatorship of a party
with its lies and violence has no importance if, by means of it, the socialist State is
realized: arbitrariness and crime will then disappear forever from the face of the
earth. And still others think more sloppily that the shilly-shallyings and the
compromises have no importance since the future will turn out well and, in some
way or other, will muddle along into victory. Those who project themselves
toward a Future-Thing and submerge their freedom in it find the tranquillity of the
serious.
However, we have seen that, despite the requirements of his system, even Hegel
does not dare delude himself with the idea of a stationary future; he admits that,
mind being restlessness, the struggle will never cease. Marx did not consider the
coming of the socialist state as an absolute result, but as the end of a pre-history
on the basis of which real history begins. However, it would be sufficient, in order
for the myth of the future to be valid, for this history to be conceivable as a
harmonious development where reconciled men would fulfill themselves as a pure
positivity; but this dream is not permitted since man is originally a negativity. No
social upheaval, no moral conversion can eliminate this lack which is in his heart;
it is by making himself a lack of being that man exists, and positive existence is
this lack assumed but not eliminated; we can not establish upon existence an
abstract wisdom which, turning itself away from being, would aim at only the
harmony itself of the existants: for it is then the absolute silence of the in-itself
which would close up around this negation of negativity; without this particular
movement which thrusts him toward the future man would not exist. But then one
can not imagine any reconciliation of transcendences: they do not have the
indifferent docility of a pure abstraction; they are concrete and concretely
compete with others for being. The world which they reveal is a battle-field where
there is no neutral ground and which cannot be divided up into parcels: for each
individual project is asserted through the world as a whole. The fundamental
ambiguity of the human condition will always open up to men the possibility of
opposing choices; there will always be within them the desire to be that being of
whom they have made themselves a lack, the flight from the anguish of freedom;
the plane of hell, of struggle, will never be eliminated; freedom will never be
given; it will always have to be won: that is what Trotsky was saying when he
envisaged the future as a permanent revolution. Thus, there is a fallacy hidden in
that abuse of language which all parties make use of today to justify their politics
when they declare that the world is still at war. If one means by that that the
struggle is not over, that the world is a prey to opposed interests which affront
each other violently, he is speaking the truth; but he also means that such a
situation is abnormal and calls for abnormal behavior; the politics that it involves
can impugn every moral principle, since it has only a provisional form: later on
we shall act in accordance with truth and justice. To the idea of present war there
is opposed that of a future peace when man will again find, along with a stable
situation, the possibility of a morality. But the truth is that if division and violence
define war, the world has always been at war and always will be; if man is
waiting for universal peace in order to establish his existence validly, he will wait
indefinitely: there will never be any other future.
It is possible that some may challenge this assertion as being based upon
debatable ontological presuppositions; it should at least be recognized that this
harmonious future is only an uncertain dream and that in any case it is not ours.
Our hold on the future is limited; the movement of expansion of existence
requires that we strive at every moment to amplify it; but where it stops our future
stops too; beyond, there is nothing more because nothing more is disclosed. From
that formless night we can draw no justification of our acts, it condemns them
with the same indifference; wiping out today's errors and defeats, it will also wipe
out its triumphs; it can be chaos or death as well as paradise: perhaps men will
one day return to barbarism, perhaps one day the earth will no longer be anything
but an icy planet. In this perspective all moments are lost in the indistinctness of
nothingness and being. Man ought not entrust the care of his salvation to this
uncertain and foreign future: it is up to him to assure it within his own existence;
this existence is conceivable, as we have said, only as an affirmation of the future,
but of a human future, a finite future.
It is difficult today to safeguard this sense of finiteness. The Greek cities and the
Roman republic were able to will themselves in their finiteness because the
infinite which invested them was for them only darkness; they died because of
this ignorance, but they also lived by it. Today, however, we are having a hard
time living because we are so bent on outwitting death. We are aware that the
whole world is interested in each of our undertakings and this spatial enlargement
of our projects also governs their temporal dimension; by a paradoxical
symmetry, whereas an individual accords great value to one day of his life, and a
city to one year, the interests of the World are computed in centuries; the greater
the human density that one envisages, the more the viewpoint of externality wins
over that of internality, and the idea of externality carries with it that of quantity.
Thus, the scales of measurement have changed; space and time have expanded
about us: today it is a small matter that a million men and a century seem to us
only a provisional moment; yet, the individual is not touched by this
transformation, his life keeps the same rhythm, his death does not retreat before
him; he extends his control of the world by instruments which enable him to
devour distances and to multiply the output of his effort in time; but he is always
only one. However, instead of accepting his limits, he tries to do away with them.
He aspires to act upon everything and by knowing everything. Throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there developed the dream of a universal
science which, manifesting the solidarity of the parts of the whole also admitted a
universal power; it was a dream "dreamed by reason,25 as Valery puts it, but
which was none the less hollow, like all dreams. For a scientist who would aspire
to know everything about a phenomenon would dissolve it within the totality; and
a man who would aspire to act upon the totality of the Universe would see the
meaning of all action vanish. just as the infinity spread out before my gaze
contracts above my head into a blue ceiling, so my transcendence heaps up in the
distance the opaque thickness of the future; but between sky and earth there is a
perceptional field with its forms and colors; and it is in the interval which
separates me today from an unforeseeable future that there are, meanings and
ends toward which to direct my acts. As soon as one introduces the presence of
the finite individual into the world, a presence without which there is no world,
finite forms stand out through time and space. And in reverse, though a landscape
is not only a transition but a particular object, an event is not only a passage but a
particular reality. If one denies with Hegel the concrete thickness of the here and
now in favor of universal space-time, if one denies the separate consciousness in
favor of Mind, one misses with Hegel the truth of the world.
It is no more necessary to regard History as a rational totality than to regard the
Universe as such. Man, mankind, the universe, and history are, in Sartre's
expression, "detotalized totalities," that is, separation does not exclude relation,
nor vice-versa. Society exists only by means of the existence of particular
individuals; likewise, human adventures stand out against the background of time,
each finite to each, though they are all open to the infinity of the future and their
individual forms thereby imply each other without destroying each other. A
conception of this kind does not contradict that of a historical unintelligibility; for
it is not true that the mind has to choose between the contingent absurdity of the
discontinuous and the rationalistic necessity of the continuous; on the contrary, it
is part of its function to make a multiplicity of coherent ensembles stand out
against the unique background of the world and, inversely, to comprehend these
ensembles in the perspective of an ideal unity of the world. Without raising the
question of historical comprehension and causality it is enough to recognize the
presence of intelligible sequences within temporal forms so that forecasts and
consequently action may be possible. In fact, whatever may be the philosophy we
adhere to, whether our uncertainty manifests an objective and fundamental
contingency or whether it expresses our subjective ignorance in the face of a
rigorous necessity, the practical attitude remains the same; we must decide upon
the opportuneness of an act and attempt to measure its effectiveness without
knowing all the factors that are present. just as the scientist, in order to know a
phenomenon, does not wait for the light of completed knowledge to break upon it;
on the contrary, in illuminating the phenomenon, he helps establish the
knowledge; in like manner, the man of action, in order to make a decision, will
not wait for a perfect knowledge to prove to him the necessity of a certain choice;
he must first choose and thus help fashion history. A choice of this kind is no
more arbitrary than a hypothesis; it excludes neither reflection nor even method;
but it is also free, and it implies risks that must be assumed as such. The
movement of the -mind, whether it be called thought or will, always starts up in
the darkness. And at bottom it matters very little, practically speaking, whether
there is a Science of history or not, since this Science can come to light only at the
end of the future and since at each particular moment we must, in any case,
maneuver in a state of doubt. The communists themselves admit that it is
subjectively possible for them to be mistaken despite the strict dialectic of
History. The latter is not revealed to them today in its finished form; they are
obliged to foresee its development, and this foresight may be erroneous. Thus,
from the political and tactical point of view there will be no difference between-a
doctrine of pure dialectical necessity and a doctrine which leaves room for
contingency; the difference is of a moral order. For, in the first case one admits a
retrieval of each moment in the future, and thus one does not aspire to justify it by
itself ; in the second case, each undertaking, involving only a finite future, must
be lived in its finiteness and considered as an absolute which no unknown time
will ever succeed in saving. In fact, the one who asserts the unity of history also
recognizes that distinct ensembles stand out within it; and the one who
emphasizes the particularity of these ensembles admits that they all project
against a single horizon; just as for all there exist both individuals and a
collectivity; the affirmation of the collectivity over against the individual is
opposed, not on the plane of fact, but on the moral plane, to the assertion of a
collectivity of individuals each existing for himself. The case is the same in what
concerns time and its moments, and just as we believe that by denying each
individual one by one, one eliminates the collectivity, we think that if man gives
himself up to an indefinite pursuit of the future he will lose his existence without
ever recovering it; he then resembles a madman who runs after his shadow. The
means, it is said, will be justified by the end; but it is the means which define it,
and if it is contradicted at the moment that it is set up, the whole enterprise sinks
into absurdity. In this way the attitude of England in regard to Spain, Greece, and
Palestine is defended with the pretext that she must take up position against the
Russian menace in order to save, along with her own existence, her civilization
and the values of democracy; but a democracy which defends itself only by acts
of oppression equivalent to those of authoritarian regimes, is precisely denying all
these values; whatever the virtues of a civilization may be, it immediately belies
them if it buys them by means of injustice and tyranny. Inversely, if the justifying
end is thrown ahead to the farthermost end of a mythical future, it is no longer a
reflection upon the means; being nearer and clearer, the means itself becomes the
goal aimed at; it blocks the horizon without, however, being deliberately wanted.
The triumph of Russia is proposed as a means of liberating the international
proletariat; but has it not become an absolute end for all Stalinists? The end
justifies the means only if it remains present, if it is completely disclosed in the
course of the present enterprise.
And as a matter of fact, if it is true that men seek in the future a guarantee of their
success, a negation of their failures, it is true that they also feel the need of
denying the indefinite flight of time and of holding their present between their
hands. Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be
defined as an escape toward nothingness. That is the reason societies institute
festivals whose role is to stop the movement of transcendence, to set up the end as
an end. The hours following the liberation of Paris, for example, were an immense
collective festival exalting the happy and absolute end of that particular history
which was precisely the occupation of Paris. There were at the moment worried
spirits who were already surpassing the present toward future difficulties; they
refused to rejoice under the pretext that new problems were going to come up
immediately; but this ill-humor was met with only among those who had very
slight wish to see the Germans defeated. All those who had made this combat
their combat, even if only by the sincerity of their hopes, also regarded the victory
as an absolute victory, whatever the future might be. Nobody was so naive as not
to know that unhappiness would soon find other forms; but this particular
unhappiness was wiped off the earth, absolutely. That is the modem meaning of
the festival, private as well as public. Existence attempts in the festival to confirm
itself positively as existence. That is why, as Bataille has shown, it is
characterized by destruction; the ethics of being is the ethics of saving: by storing
up, one aims at the stationary plenitude of the in-itself, existence, on the contrary,
is consumption; it makes itself only by destroying; the festival carries out this
negative movement in order to indicate clearly its independence in relationship to
the thing: one eats, drinks, lights fires, breaks things, and spends time and money;
one spends them for nothing. The spending is also a matter of establishing a
communication of the existants, for it is by the movement of recognition which
goes from one to the other that existence is confirmed; in songs, laughter, dances,
eroticism, and drunkenness one seeks both an exaltation of the moment and a
complicity with other men. But the tension of existence realized as a pure
negativity can not maintain itself for long; it must be immediately engaged in a
new undertaking, it must dash off toward the future. The moment of detachment,
the pure affirmation of the subjective present are only abstractions; the joy
becomes exhausted, drunkenness subsides into fatigue, and one finds himself with
his hands empty because one can never possess the present: that is what gives
festivals their pathetic and deceptive character. One of art's roles is to fix this
passionate assertion of existence in a more durable way: the festival is at the
origin of the theatre, music, the dance, and poetry. In telling a story, in depicting
it, one makes it exist in its particularity with its beginning and its end, its glory or
its shame; and this is the way it actually must be lived. In the festival, in art, men
express their need to feel that they exist absolutely. They must really fulfill this
wish. What stops them is that as soon as they give the word "end" its double
meaning of goal and fulfillment they clearly perceive this ambiguity of their
condition, which is the most fundamental of all: that every living movement is a
sliding toward death. But if they are willing to look it in the face they also
discover that every movement toward death is life. In the past people cried out,
"The king is dead, long live the king;" thus the present must die so that it may
live; existence must not deny this death which it carries in its heart; it must assert
itself as an absolute in its very finiteness; man fulfills himself within the transitory
or not at all. He must regard his undertakings as finite and will them absolutely.
It is obvious that this finiteness is not that of the pure instant; we have said that
the future was the meaning and the substance of all action; the limits can not be
marked out a priori; there are projects which define the future of a day or of an
hour; and there are others which are inserted into structures capable of being
developed through one, two, or several centuries, and thereby they have a
concrete hold on one or two or several centuries. When one fights for the
emancipation of oppressed natives, or the socialist revolution, he is obviously
aiming at a long range goal; and he is still aiming at it concretely, beyond his own
death, through the movement, the league, the institutions, or the party that he has
helped set up. What we maintain is that one must not expect that this goal be
justified as a point of departure of a new future; insofar as we no longer have a
hold on the time which will flow beyond its coming, we must not expect anything
of that time for which we have worked; other men will have to live its joys and
sorrows. As for us, the goal must be considered as an end; we have to justify it on
the basis of our freedom which has projected it, by the ensemble of the movement
which ends in its fulfillment. The tasks we have set up for ourselves and which,
though exceeding the limits of our lives, are ours, must find their meaning in
themselves and not in a mythical Historical end.
But then, if we reject the idea of a future-myth in order to retain only that of a
living and finite future, one which delimits transitory forms, we have not removed
the antinomy of action; the present sacrifices and failures no longer seem
compensated for in any point of time. And utility can no longer be defined
absolutely. Thus, are we not ending by condemning action as criminal and absurd
though at the same time condemning man to action? - Ambiguity
The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare
that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that
it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be
constantly won. Absurdity challenges every ethics; but also the finished
rationalization of the real would leave no room for ethics; it is because man's
condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save
his existence. Thus, to say that action has to be lived in its truth, that is, in the
consciousness of the antinomies which it involves, does not mean that one has to
renounce it. In Plutarch Lied Pierrefeu rightly says that in war there is no victory
which can not be regarded as unsuccessful, for the objective which one aims at is
the total annihilation of the enemy and this result is never attained; yet there are
wars which are won and wars which are lost. So is it with any activity; failure and
success are two aspects of reality which at the start are not perceptible. That is
what makes criticism so easy and art so difficult: the critic is always in a good
position to show the limits that every artist gives himself in choosing himself;
painting is not given completely either in Giotto or Titian or Cezanne; it is sought
through the centuries and is never finished; a painting in which all pictorial
problems are resolved is really inconceivable; painting itself is this movement
toward its own reality; it is not the vain displacement of a millstone turning in the
void; it concretizes itself on each canvas as an absolute existence. Art and science
do not establish themselves despite failure but through it; which does not prevent
there being truths and errors, masterpieces and lemons, depending upon whether
the discovery or the painting has or has not known how to win the adherence of
human consciousnesses; this amounts to saying that failure, always ineluctable, is
in certain cases spared and in others not.
It is interesting to pursue this comparison; not that we are likening action to a
work of art or a scientific theory, but because in any case human transcendence
must cope with the same problem: it has to found itself, though it is prohibited
from ever fulfilling itself. Now, we know that neither science nor art ever leaves it
up to the future to justify its present existence. In no age does art consider itself as
something which is paving the way for Art: so-called archaic art prepares for
classicism only in the eyes of archaeologists; the sculptor who fashioned the
Korai of Athens rightfully thought that he was producing a finished work of art; in
no age has science considered itself as partial and lacunary; without believing
itself to be definitive, it has however, always wanted to be a total expression of
the world, and it is in its totality that in each age it again raises the question of its
own validity. There we have an example of how man must, in any event, assume
his finiteness: not by treating his existence as transitory or relative but by
reflecting the infinite within it, that is, by treating it as absolute. There is an art
only because at every moment art has willed itself absolutely; likewise there is a
liberation of man only if, in aiming at itself, freedom is achieved absolutely in the
very fact of aiming at itself. This requires that each action be considered as a
finished form whose different moments, instead of fleeing toward the future in
order to find there their justification, reflect and confirm one another so well that
there is no longer a sharp separation between present and future, between means
and ends.
But if these moments constitute a unity, there must be no contradiction among
them. Since the liberation aimed at is not a thing situated in an unfamiliar time,
but a movement which realizes itself by tending to conquer, it can not attain itself
if it denies itself at the start; action can not seek to fulfill itself by means which
would destroy its very meaning. So much so that in certain situations there will be
no other issue for man than rejection. In what is called political realism there is no
room for rejection because the present is considered as transitory; there is
rejection only if man lays claim in the present to his existence as an absolute
value; then he must absolutely reject what would deny this value. Today, more or
less consciously in the name of such an ethics, we condemn a magistrate who
handed over a communist to save ten hostages and along with him all the
Vichyites who were trying "to make the best of things: " it was not a matter of
rationalizing the present such as it was imposed by the German occupation, but of
rejecting it unconditionally. The resistance did not aspire to a positive
effectiveness; it was a negation, a revolt, a martyrdom; and in this negative
movement freedom was positively and absolutely confirmed.
In one sense the negative attitude is easy; the rejected object is given
unequivocally and unequivocally defines the revolt that one opposes to it; thus, all
French antifascists were united during the occupation by their common resistance
to a single oppressor. The return to the positive encounters many more obstacles,
as we have well seen in France where divisions and hatreds were revived at the
same time as were the parties. In the moment of rejection, the antinomy of action
is removed, and means and end meet; freedom immediately sets itself up as its
own goal and fulfills itself by so doing. But the antinomy reappears as soon as
freedom again gives itself ends which are far off in the future; then, through the
resistances of the given, divergent means offer themselves and certain ones come
to be seen as contrary to their ends. It has often been observed that revolt alone is
pure. Every construction implies the outrage of dictatorship, of violence. This is
the theme, among others, of Koestler's Gladiators. Those who, like this symbolic
Spartacus, do not want to retreat from the outrage and resign themselves to
impotence, usually seek refuge in the values of seriousness. That is why, among
individuals as well as collectivities, the negative moment is often the most
genuine. Goethe, Barres, and Aragon, disdainful or rebellious in their romantic
youth, shattered old conformisms and thereby proposed a real, though incomplete,
liberation. But what happened later on? Goethe became a servant of the state,
Barres of nationalism, and Aragon of Stalinist conformism. We know how the
seriousness of the Catholic Church was substituted for the Christian spirit, which
was a rejection of dead Law, a subjective rapport of the individual with God
through faith and charity; the Reformation was a revolt of subjectivity, but
Protestantism in turn changed into an objective moralism in which the seriousness
of works replaced the restlessness of faith. As for revolutionary humanism, it
accepts only rarely the tension of permanent liberation; it has created a Church
where salvation is bought by membership in a party as it is bought elsewhere by
baptism and indulgences. We have seen that this recourse to the serious is a he; it
entails the sacrifice of man to the Thing, of freedom to the Cause. In order for the
return to the positive to be genuine it must involve negativity, it must not conceal
the antinomies between means and end, present and future; they must be lived in a
permanent tension; one must retreat from neither the outrage of violence nor deny
it, or, which amounts to the same thing, assume it lightly. Kierkegaard has said
that what distinguishes the pharisee from the genuinely moral man is that the
former considers his anguish as a sure sign of his virtue; from the fact that he asks
himself, "Am I Abraham?" he concludes, "I am Abraham;" but morality resides in
the painfulness of an indefinite questioning. The problem which we are posing is
not the same as that of Kierkegaard; the important thing to us is to know whether,
in given conditions, Isaac must be killed or not. But we also think that what
distinguishes the tyrant from the man of good will is that the first rests in the
certainty of his aims, whereas the second keeps asking himself, "Am I really
working for the liberation of men? Isn't this end contested by the sacrifices
through which I aim at it?" In setting up its ends, freedom must put them in
parentheses, confront them at each moment with that absolute end which it itself
constitutes, and contest, in its own name, the means it uses to win itself. I
It will be said that these considerations remain quite abstract. What must be done,
practically? Which action is good? Which is bad? To ask such a question is also
to fall into a naive abstraction. We don't ask the physicist, "Which hypotheses are
true?" Nor the artist, "By what procedures does one produce a work whose beauty
is guaranteed?" Ethics does not furnish recipes any more than do science and art.
One can merely propose methods. Thus, in science the fundamental problem is to
make the idea adequate to its content and the law adequate to the facts; the
logician finds that in the case where the pressure of the given fact bursts the
concept which serves to comprehend it, one is obliged to invent another concept;
but he can not define a priori the moment of invention, still less foresee it.
Analogously, one may say that in the case where the content of the action falsifies
its meaning, one must modify not the meaning, which is here willed absolutely,
but the content itself; however, it is impossible to determine this relationship
between meaning and content abstractly and universally: there must be a trial and
decision in each case. But likewise just as the physicist finds it profitable to
reflect on the conditions of scientific invention and the artist on those of artistic
creation without expecting any ready-made solutions to come from these
reflections, it is useful for the man of action to find out under what conditions his
undertakings are valid. We are going to see that on this basis new perspectives are
disclosed.
In the first place, it seems to us that the individual as such is one of the ends at
which our action must aim. Here we are at one with the point of view of Christian
charity, the Epicurean cult of friendship, and Kantian moralism which treats each
man as an end. He interests us not merely as a member of a class, a nation, or a
collectivity, but as an individual man. This distinguishes us from the systematic
politician who cares only about collective destinies; and probably a tramp
enjoying his bottle of wine, or a child playing with a balloon, or a Neapolitan
lazzarone loafing in the sun in no way helps in the liberation of man; that is why
the abstract will of the revolutionary scorns the concrete benevolence which
occupies itself in satisfying desires which have no morrow. However, it must not
be forgotten that there is a concrete bond between freedom and existence; to will
man free is to will there to be being, it is to will the disclosure of being in the joy
of existence; in order for the idea of liberation to have a concrete meaning, the joy
of existence must be asserted in each one, at every instant; the movement toward
freedom assumes its real, flesh and blood figure in the world by thickening into
pleasure, into happiness. If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine
counts for nothing, then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have
meaning only ff they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.
The saving of time and the conquest of leisure have no meaning if we are not
moved by the laugh of a child at play. If we do not love life on our own account
and through others, it is futile to seek to justify it in any way.
However, politics is right in rejecting benevolence to the extent that the latter
thoughtlessly sacrifices the future to the present. The ambiguity of freedom,
which very often is occupied only in fleeing from itself, introduces a difficult
equivocation into relationships with each individual taken one by one. just what is
meant by the expression "to love others"? What is meant by taking them as ends?
In any event, it is evident that we are not going to decide to fulfill the will of
every man. There are cases where a man positively wants evil, that is, the
enslavement of other men, and he must then be fought. It also happens that,
without harming anyone, he flees from his own freedom, seeking passionately and
alone to attain the being which constantly eludes him. If he asks for our help, are
we to give it to him? We blame a man who helps a drug addict intoxicate himself
or a desperate man commit suicide, for we think that rash behavior of this sort is
an attempt of the individual against his own freedom; he must be made aware of
his error and put in the presence of the real demands of his freedom. Well and
good. But what if he persists? Must we then use violence? There again the serious
man busies himself dodging the problem; the values of life, of health, and of
moral conformism being, set up, one does not hesitate to impose them on others.
But we know that this pharisaism can cause the worst disasters: lacking drugs, the
addict may kill himself. It is no more necessary to serve an abstract ethics
obstinately than to yield without due consideration to impulses of pity or
generosity; violence is justified only if it opens concrete possibilities to the
freedom which I am trying to save; by practicing it I am willy-nilly assuming an
engagement in relation to others and to myself; a man whom I snatch from the
death which he had chosen has the right to come and ask me for means and
reasons for living; the tyranny practiced against an invalid can be justified only by
his getting better; whatever the purity of the intention which animates me, any
dictatorship is a fault for which t have to get myself pardoned. Besides, I am in no
position to make decisions of this sort indiscriminately; the example of the
unknown person who throws himself in to the Seine and whom I hesitate whether
or not to fish out is quite abstract; in the absence of a concrete bond with this
desperate person my choice will never be anything but a contingent facticity. If I
find myself in a position to do violence to a child, or to a melancholic, sick, or
distraught person the reason is that I also find myself charged with his upbringing,
his happiness, and his health: I am a parent, a teacher, a nurse, a doctor, or a
friend… So, by a tacit agreement, by the very fact that I am solicited, the strictness
of my decision is accepted or even desired; the more seriously I accept my
responsibilities, the more justified it is. That is why love authorizes severities
which are not granted to indifference. What makes the problem so complex is
that, on the one hand, one must not make himself an accomplice of that flight
from freedom that is found in heedlessness, caprice, mania, and passion, and that,
on the other hand, it is the abortive movement of man toward being which is his
very existence, it is through the failure which he has assumed that he asserts
himself as a freedom. To want to prohibit a man from error is to forbid him to
fulfill his own existence, it is to deprive him of life. At the beginning of Claudel's
The Satin Shoe, the husband of Dona Prouheze, the judge, the just, as the author
regards him, explains that every plant needs a gardener in order to grow and that
he is the one whom heaven has destined for his young wife; beside the fact that
we are shocked by the arrogance of such a thought (for how does he know that he
is this enlightened gardener? Isn't he merely a jealous husband?) this likening of a
soul to a plant is not acceptable; for, as Kant would say, the value of an act lies
not in its conformity to an external model, but in its internal truth. We object to
the inquisitors who want to create faith and virtue from without; we object to all
forms of fascism which seek to fashion the happiness of man from without; and
also the paternalism which thinks that it has done something for man by
prohibiting him from certain possibilities of temptation, whereas what is
necessary is to give him reasons for resisting it.
Thus, violence is not immediately justified when it opposes willful acts which one
considers perverted; it becomes inadmissible if it uses the pretext of ignorance to
deny a freedom which, as we have seen, can be practiced within ignorance itself.
Let the "enlightened elites" strive to change the situation of the child, the
illiterate, the primitive crushed beneath his superstitions; that is one of their most
urgent tasks; but in this very effort they must respect a freedom which, like theirs,
is absolute. They are always opposed, for example, to the extension of universal
suffrage by adducing the incompetence of the masses, of women, of the natives in
the colonies; but this forgetting that man always has to decide by himself in the
darkness, that he must want beyond what he knows. If infinite knowledge were
necessary (even supposing that it were conceivable), then the colonial
administrator himself would not have the right to freedom; he is much further
from perfect knowledge than the most backward savage is from him. Actually, to
vote is not to govern; and to govern is not merely to maneuver; there is an
ambiguity today, and particularly in France, because we think that we are not the
master of our destiny; we no longer hope to help make history, we are resigned to
submitting to it; all that our internal politics does is reflect the play of external
forces, no party hopes to determine the fate of the country but merely to foresee
the future which is being prepared in the world by foreign powers and to use, as
best we can, the bit of indetermination which still escapes their foresight. Drawn
along by this tactical realism, the citizens themselves no longer consider the vote
as the assertion of their will but as a maneuver, whether one adheres completely
to the maneuvering of a party or whether. one invents his own strategy; the
electors consider themselves not as men who are consulted about a particular
point but as forces which are numbered and which are ordered about with a view
to distant ends. And that is probably why the French, who formerly were so eager
to declare their opinions, take no further interest in an act which has become a
disheartening strategy. So, the fact is that if it is necessary not to vote but to
measure the weight of one's vote, this calculation requires such extensive
information and such a sureness of foresight that only a specialized technician can
have the boldness to express an opinion. But that is one of the abuses whereby the
whole meaning of democracy is lost; the logical conclusion of this would be to
suppress the vote. The vote should really be the expression of a concrete will, the
choice of a representative capable of defending, within the general framework of
the country and the world, the particular interests of his electors. The ignorant and
the outcast also has interests to defend; he alone is "competence, to decide upon
his hopes and his trust. By a sophism which leans upon the dishonesty of the
serious, one does not merely argue about his formal impotence to choose, but one
draws arguments from the content of his choice. I recall, among others, the
naivete of a right-thinking young girl who said, "The vote for women is all well
and good in principle, only, if women get the vote, they'll all vote red." With like
impudence it is almost unanimously stated today in France that if the natives of
the French Union were given the rights of self-determination, they would live
quietly in their villages without doing anything, which would be harmful to the
higher interests of the Economy. And doubtless the state of stagnation in which
they choose to live is not that which a man can wish for another man; it is
desirable to open new possibilities to the indolent negroes so that the interests of
the Economy may one day merge with theirs. But for the time being, they are left
to vegetate in the sort of situation where their freedom can merely be negative -
the best thing they can desire is not to tire themselves, not to suffer, and not to
work; and even this freedom is denied them. It is the most consummate and
inacceptable form of oppression.
However, the "enlightened elite" objects, one does not let a child dispose of
himself, one does not permit him to vote. This is another sophism. To the extent
that woman or the happy or resigned slave lives in the infantile world of readymade values, calling them "an eternal child" or a "grown-up child" has some
meaning, but the analogy is only partial. Childhood is a particular sort of
situation: it is a natural situation whose limits are not created by other men and
which is thereby not comparable to a situation of oppression; it is a situation
which is common to an men and which is temporary for all; therefore, it does not
represent a limit which cuts off the individual from his possibilities, but, on the
contrary, the moment of a development in which new possibilities are won. The
child is ignorant because he has not yet had the time to acquire knowledge, not
because this time has been refused him. To treat him as a child is not to bar him
from the future but to open it to him; he needs to be taken in hand, he invites
authority, it is the form which the resistance of facticity, through which all
liberation is brought about, takes for him. And on the other hand, even in this
situation the child has a right to his freedom and must be respected as a human
person. What gives Emile its value is the brilliance with which Rousseau asserts
this principle. There is a very annoying naturalistic optimism in Emile; in the
rearing of the child, as in any relationship with others, the ambiguity of freedom
implies the outrage of violence; in a sense, all education is a failure. But Rousseau
is right in refusing to allow childhood to be oppressed. And in practice raising a
child as one cultivates a plant which one does not consult about its needs is very
different from considering it as a freedom to whom the future must be opened.
Thus, we can set up point number one: the good of an individual or a group of
individuals requires that it be taken as an absolute end of our action; but we are
not authorized to decide upon this end a priori. The fact is that no behavior is ever
authorized to begin With, and one of the concrete consequences of existentialist
ethics is the rejection of all the previous justifications which might be drawn from
the civilization, the age, and the culture; it is the rejection of every principle of
authority. To put it positively, the precept will be to treat the other (to the extent
that he is the only one concerned, which is the moment that we are considering at
present) as a freedom so that his end may be freedom; in using this conducting
wire one will have to incur the risk, in each case, of inventing an original solution.
Out of disappointment in love a young girl takes an overdose of phenol-barbital;
in the morning friends find her dying, they call a doctor, she is saved; later on she
becomes a happy mother of a family; her friends were right in considering her
suicide as a hasty and heedless act and in putting her into a position to reject it or
return to it freely. But in asylums one sees melancholic patients who have tried to
commit suicide twenty times, who devote their freedom to seeking the means of
escaping their jailers and of putting an end to their intolerable anguish; the doctor
who gives them a friendly pat on the shoulder is their tyrant and their torturer. A
friend who is intoxicated by alcohol or drugs asks me for money so that he can go
and buy the poison that is necessary to him; I urge him to get cured, I take him to
a doctor, I try to help him live; insofar as there is a chance of my being successful,
I am acting correctly in refusing him the sum he asks for. But if circumstances
prohibit me from doing anything to change the situation in which he is struggling,
all I can do is give in; a deprivation of a few hours will do nothing but exasperate
his torments uselessly; and he may have recourse to extreme means to get what I
do not give him. That is also the problem touched on by Ibsen in The Wild Duck.
An individual lives in a situation of falsehood; the falsehood is violence, tyranny:
shall I tell the truth in order to free the victim? It would first be necessary to
create a situation of such a kind that the truth might be bearable and that, though
losing his illusions, the deluded individual might again find about him reasons for
hoping. What makes the problem more complex is that the freedom of one man
almost always concerns that of other individuals. Here is a married couple who
persist in living in a hovel; if one does not succeed in giving them the desire to
live in a more healthful dwelling, they must be allowed to follow their
preferences; but the situation changes if they have children; the freedom of the
parents would be the ruin of their sons, and as freedom and the future are on the
side of the latter, these are the ones who must first be taken into account. The
Other is multiple, and on the basis of this new questions arise.
One might first wonder for whom we are seeking freedom and happiness. When
raised in this way, the problem is abstract; the answer will, therefore, be arbitrary,
and the arbitrary always involves outrage. It is not entirely the fault of the district
social-worker if she is apt to be odious; because, her money and time being
limited, she hesitates before distributing it to this one or that one, she appears to
others as a pure externality, a blind facticity. Contrary to the formal strictness of
Kantianism for whom the more abstract the act is the more virtuous it is,
generosity seems to us to be better grounded and therefore more valid the less
distinction there is between the other and ourself and the more we fulfill ourself in
taking the other as an end. That is what happens if I am engaged in relation to
others. The Stoics impugned the ties of family, friendship, and nationality so that
they recognized only the universal form of man. But man is man only through
situations whose particularity is precisely a universal fact. There are men who
expect help from certain men and not from others, and these expectations define
privileged lines of action. It is fitting that the negro fight for the negro, the Jew for
the Jew, the proletarian for the proletarian, and the Spaniard in Spain. But the
assertion of these particular solidarities must not contradict the will for universal
solidarity and each finite undertaking must also be open on the totality of men.
But it is then that we find in concrete form the conflicts which we have described
abstractly; for the cause of freedom can triumph only through particular sacrifices.
And certainly there are hierarchies among the goods desired by men: one will not
hesitate to sacrifice the comfort, luxury, and leisure of certain men to assure the
liberation of certain others; but when it is a question of choosing among freedoms,
how shall we decide?
Let us repeat, one can only indicate a method here. The first point is always to
consider what genuine human interest fills the abstract form which one proposes
as the action's end. Politics always puts forward Ideas: Nation, Empire, Union,
Economy, etc. But none of these forms has value in itself; it has it only insofar as
it involves concrete individuals. If a nation can assert itself proudly only to the
detriment of its members, if a union can be created only to the detriment of those
it is trying to unite, the nation or the union must be rejected. We repudiate all
idealisms, mysticisms, etcetera which prefer a Form to man himself. But the
matter becomes really agonizing when it is a question of a Cause which genuinely
serves man. That is why the question of Stalinist politics, the problem of the
relationship of the Party to the masses which it uses in order to serve them, is in
the forefront of the preoccupations of all men of good will. However, there are
very few who raise it without dishonesty, and we must first try to dispel a few
fallacies.
The opponent of the U.S.S.R. is making use of a fallacy when, emphasizing the
part of criminal violence assumed by Stalinist politics, he neglects to confront it
with the ends pursued. Doubtless, the purges, the deportations, the abuses of the
occupation, and the police dictatorship surpass in importance the violences
practiced by any other country; the very fact that there are a hundred and sixty
million inhabitants in Russia multiplies the numerical coefficient of the injustices
committed. But these quantitative considerations are insufficient. One can no
more judge the means without the end which gives it its meaning than he can
detach the end from the means which defines it. Lynching a negro or suppressing
a hundred members of the opposition are two analogous acts. Lynching-is an
absolute evil; it represents the survival of an obsolete civilization, the perpetuation
of a struggle of races which has to disappear; it is a fault without justification or
excuse. Suppressing a hundred opponents is surely an outrage, but it may have
meaning and a reason; it is a matter of maintaining a regime which brings to an
immense mass of men a bettering of their lot. Perhaps this measure could have
been avoided; perhaps it merely represents that necessary element of failure
which is involved in any positive construction. It can be judged only by being
replaced in the ensemble of the cause it serves.
But, on the other hand, the defender of the U.S.S.R. is making use of a fallacy
when he unconditionally justifies the sacrifices and the crimes by the ends
pursued; it would first be necessary to prove that, on the one hand, the end is
unconditioned and that, on the other hand, the crimes committed in its name were
strictly necessary. Against the death of Bukharin one counters with Stalingrad; but
one would have to know to what effective extent the Moscow trials increased the
chances of the Russian victory. One of the ruses of Stalinist orthodoxy is, playing
on the idea of necessity, to put the whole of the revolution on one side of the
scale; the other side will always seem very light. But the very idea of a total
dialectic of history does not imply that any factor is ever determining; on the
contrary, if one admits that the life of a man may change the course of events, it is
that one adheres to the conception which grants a preponderant role to Cleopatra's
nose and Cromwell's wart. One is here playing, with utter dishonesty, on two
opposite conceptions of the idea of necessity: one synthetic, and the other
analytic; one dialectic, the other deterministic. The first makes History appear as
an intelligible becoming within which the particularity of contingent accidents is
reabsorbed; the dialectical sequence of the moments is possible only if there is
within each moment an indetermination of the particular elements taken one by
one. If, on the contrary, one grants the strict determinism of each causal series,
one ends in a contingent and disordered vision of the ensemble, the conjunction of
the series being brought about by chance. Therefore, a Marxist must recognize
that none of his particular decisions involves the revolution mi its totality; it is
merely a matter of hastening or retarding its coming, of saving himself the use of
other and more costly means. That does not mean that he must retreat from
violence but that he must not regard it as justified a priori by its ends. If he
considers his enterprise in its truth, that is, in its finiteness, he will understand that
he has never anything but a finite stake to oppose to the sacrifices which he calls
for, and that it is an uncertain stake. Of course, this uncertainty should not keep
him from pursuing his goals; but it requires that one concern himself in each case
with finding a balance between the goal and its means.
Thus, we challenge every condemnation as well as every a priori justification of
the violence practiced with a view to a valid end. They must be legitimized
concretely. A calm, mathematical calculation is here impossible. One must
attempt to judge the chances of success that are involved in a certain sacrifice; but
at the beginning this judgment will always be doubtful; besides, in the face of the
immediate reality of the sacrifice, the notion of chance is difficult to think about.
On the one hand, one can multiply a probability infinitely without ever reaching
certainty; but yet, practically, it ends by merging with this asymptote: in our
private life as in our collective life there is no other truth than a statistical one. On
the other hand, the interests at stake do not allow themselves to be put into an
equation; the suffering of one man, that of a million men, are incommensurable
with the conquests realized by millions of others, present death is
incommensurable with the life to come. It would be utopian to want to set up on
the-one hand the chances of success multiplied by the stake one is after, and on
the other hand the weight of the immediate sacrifice. One finds himself back at
the anguish of free decision. And that is why political choice is an ethical choice:
it is a wager as well as a decision; one bets on the chances and risks of the
measure under consideration; but whether chances and risks must be assumed or
not in the given circumstances must be decided without help, and in so doing one
sets up values. If in 1793 the Girondists rejected the violences of the Terror
whereas a Saint-just and a Robespierre assumed them, the reason is that they did
not have the same conception of freedom. Nor was the same republic being aimed
at between 1830 and 1840 by the republicans who limited themselves to a purely
political opposition and those who adopted the technique of insurrection. In each
case it is a matter of defining an end and realizing it, knowing that the choice of
the means employed affects both the definition and the fulfillment.
Ordinarily, situations are so complex that a long analysis is necessary before
being able to pose the ethical moment of the choice. We shall confine ourselves
here to the consideration of a few simple examples which will enable us to make
our attitude somewhat more precise. In an underground revolutionary movement
when one discovers the presence of a stool-pigeon, one does not hesitate to beat
him up; he is a present and future danger who has to be gotten rid of ; but if a man
is merely suspected of treason, the case is more ambiguous. We blame those
northern peasants who in the war of 1914- 18 massacred an innocent family
which was suspected of signaling to the enemy; the reason is that not only were
the presumptions vague, but the danger was uncertain; at any rate, it was enough
to put the suspects into prison; while waiting for a serious inquiry it was easy to
keep them from doing any harm. However, if a questionable individual holds the
fate of other men in his hands, if, in order to avoid the risk of killing one innocent
man, one rims the risk of letting ten innocent men die, it is reasonable to sacrifice
him. We can merely ask that such decisions be not taken hastily and lightly, and
that, all things considered, the evil that one inflicts be lesser than that which is
being forestalled.
There are cases still more disturbing because there the violence is not immediately
efficacious; the violences of the Resistance did not aim at the material weakening
of Germany; it happens that their purpose was to create such a state of violence
that collaboration would be impossible; in one sense, the burning of a whole
French village was too high a price to pay for the elimination of three enemy
officers; but those fires and the massacring of hostages were themselves parts of
the plan; they created an abyss between the occupiers and the occupied. Likewise,
the insurrections in Paris and Lyons at the beginning of the nineteenth century, or
the revolts in India, did not aim at shattering the yoke of the oppressor at one
blow, but rather at creating and keeping alive the meaning of the revolt and at
making the mystifications, of conciliation impossible. Attempts which are aware
that one by one they are doomed to failure can be legitimized by the whole of the
situation which they create. This is also the meaning of Steinbeck's novel In
Dubious Battle where a communist leader does not hesitate to launch a costly
strike of uncertain success but through which there will be born, along with the
solidarity of the workers, the consciousness of exploitation and the will to reject
it.
It seems to me interesting to contrast this example with the debate in John Dos
Passos' The Adventures of a Young Man. Following a strike, some American
miners are condemned to death. Their comrades try to have their trial
reconsidered. Two methods are put forward: one can act officially, and one knows
that they then have an excellent chance of winning their case; one can also work
up a sensational trial with the Communist Party taking the affair in hand, stirring
up a press campaign and circulating international petitions; but the court will be
unwilling to yield to this intimidation. The party will thereby get a tremendous
amount of publicity, but de miners will be condemned. What is a man of good
will to decide in this case? Dos Passos' hero chooses to save the miners and we
believe that he did right. Certainly, if it were necessary to choose between the
whole revolution and the lives of two or three men, no revolutionary would
hesitate; but it was merely a matter of helping along the party propaganda, or
better, of increasing somewhat its chances of developing within the United States;
the immediate interest of the C.P. in that country is only hypothetically tied up
with that of the revolution; in fact, a cataclysm like the war has so upset the
situation of the world that a great part of the gains and losses of the past have
been absolutely swept away. If it is really men which the movement claims to be
serving, in this case it must prefer saving the lives of three concrete individuals to
a very uncertain and weak chance of serving a little more effectively by their
sacrifice the mankind to come. If it considers these lives negligible, it is because it
too ranges itself on the side of the formal politicians who prefer the Idea to its
content; it is because it prefers itself, in its subjectivity, to the goals to which it
claims to be dedicated. Besides, whereas in the example chosen by Steinbeck the
strike is immediately an appeal to the freedom of the workers and in its very
failure is already a liberation, the sacrifice of the miners is a mystification and an
oppression; they are duped by being made to believe that an effort is being made
to save their lives, and the whole proletariat is duped with them. Thus, in both
examples, we find ourselves before the same abstract case: men are going to die
so that the party which claims to be serving them will realize a limited gain; but a
concrete analysis leads us to opposite moral solutions.
It is apparent that the method we are proposing, analogous in this respect to
scientific or aesthetic methods, consists, in each case, of confronting the values
realized with the values aimed at, and the meaning of the act with its content. The
fact is that the politician, contrary to the scientist and the artist, and although the
element of failure which he assumes is much more outrageous, is rarely
concerned with making use of it. May it be that there is an irresistible dialectic of
power wherein morality has no place? Is the ethical concern, even in its realistic
and concrete form, detrimental to the interests of action? The objection will surely
be made that hesitation and misgivings only impede victory. Since, in any case,
there is an element of failure in all success, since the ambiguity, at any rate, must
be surmounted, why not refuse to take notice of it? In the first number of the
Cahiers d'Action a reader declared that once and for all we should regard the
militant communist as "the permanent hero of our time" and should reject the
exhausting tension demanded by existentialism; installed in the permanence of
heroism, me will blindly direct himself toward an uncontested goal; but one then
resembles Colonel dc la Roque who unwaveringly went right straight ahead of
him without knowing where he was going. Malaparte relates that the young Nazis,
in order to become insensitive to the suffering of others, practiced by plucking out
the eyes of live cats; there is no more radical way of avoiding the pitfalls of
ambiguity. But an action which wants to serve man ought to be careful not to
forget him on the way; if it chooses to fulfill itself blindly, it will lose its meaning
or will take on an unforeseen meaning; for the goal is not fixed once and for all; it
is defined all along the road which leads to it. Vigilance alone can keep alive the
validity of the goals and the genuine assertion of freedom. Moreover, ambiguity
can not fail to appear on the scene; it is felt by the victim, and his revolt or his
complaints also make it exist for his tyrant; the latter will then be tempted to put
everything into question, to renounce, thus denying both himself and his ends; or,
if he persists, he will continue to blind himself only by multiplying crimes and by
perverting his original design more and more. The fact is that the man of action
becomes a dictator not in respect to his ends but because these ends are
necessarily set up through his will. Hegel, in his Phenomenology, has emphasized
this inextricable confusion between objectivity and subjectivity. A man gives
himself to a Cause only by making it his Cause; as he fulfills himself within it, it
is also through him that it is expressed, and the will to power is not distinguished
in such a case from generosity; when an individual or a party chooses to triumph,
whatever the cost may be, it is their own triumph which they take for an end. If
the fusion of the Commissar and the Yogi were realized, there would be a selfcriticism in the man of action which would expose to him the ambiguity of his
will, thus arresting the imperious drive of his subjectivity and, by the same token,
contesting the unconditioned value of the goal. But the fact is that the politician
follows the line of least resistance; it is easy to fall asleep over the unhappiness of
others and to count it for very little; it is easier to throw a hundred men, ninetyseven of whom are innocent, into prison, than to discover the three culprits who
are hidden among them; it is easier to kill a man than to keep a close watch on
him; all politics makes use of the police, which officially flaunts its radical
contempt for the individual and which loves violence for its own sake. The thing
that goes by the name of political necessity is in part the laziness and brutality of
the police. That is why it is incumbent upon ethics not to follow the line of least
resistance; an act which is not destined, but rather quite freely consented to; it
must make itself effective so that what was at first facility may become difficult.
For want of internal criticism, this is the role that an opposition must take upon
itself. There are two types of opposition. The first is a rejection of the very ends
set up by a regime: it is the opposition of anti-fascism to fascism, of fascism to
socialism. In the second type, the oppositionist accepts the objective goal but
criticizes the subjective movement which aims at it; he may not even wish for a
change of power, but he deems it necessary to bring into play a contestation
which will make the subjective appear as such. Thereby he exacts a perpetual
contestation of the means by the end and of the end by the means. He must be
careful himself not to ruin, by the means which he employs, the end he is aiming
at, and above all not to pass into the service of the oppositionists of the first type.
But, delicate as it may be, his role is, nevertheless, necessary. Indeed, on the one
hand, it would be absurd to oppose a liberating action with the pretext that it
implies crime and tyranny; for without crime and tyranny there could be no
liberation of man; one can not escape that dialectic which goes from freedom to
freedom through dictatorship and oppression. But, on the other hand, he would be
guilty of allowing the liberating movement to harden into a moment which is
acceptable only if it passes into its opposite; tyranny and crime must be kept from
triumphantly establishing themselves in the world; the conquest of freedom is
their only justification, and the assertion of freedom against them must therefore
be kept alive.
CONCLUSION, pp. 156-159 and INDEX
Conclusion
Is this kind of ethics individualistic or not? Yes, if one means by that that it accords to the
individual an absolute value and that it recognizes in him alone the power of laying the
foundations of his own existence. It is individualism in the sense in which the wisdom of
the ancients, the Christian ethics of salvation, and the Kantian ideal of virtue also merit
this name; it is opposed to the totalitarian doctrines which raise up beyond man the
mirage of Mankind. But it is not solipsistic, since the individual is defined only by his
relationship to the world and to other individuals; he exists only by transcending himself,
and his freedom can be achieved only through the freedom of others. He justifies his
existence by a movement which, like freedom, springs from his heart but which leads
outside of him.
This individualism does not lead to the anarchy of personal whim. Man is free; but he
finds his law in his very freedom. First, lie must assume his freedom and not flee it by a
constructive movement: one does not exist without doing something; and also by a
negative movement which rejects oppression for oneself and others. In construction, as in
rejection, it is a matter of reconquering freedom on the contingent facticity of existence,
that is, of taking the given, which, at the start, is there without any reason, as something
willed by man.
A conquest of this kind is never finished; the contingency remains, and, so that he may
assert his will, man is even obliged to stir up in the world the outrage he does not want.
But this element of failure is a very condition of his life; one can never dream of
eliminating it without immediately dreaming of death. This does not mean that one
should consent to failure, but rather one must consent to struggle against it without
respite.
Yet, isn't this battle without victory pure gullibility? It will be argued that this is only a
ruse of transcendence projecting before itself a goal which constantly recedes, running
after itself on an endless treadmill; to exist for Mankind is to remain where one is, and it
fools itself by calling this turbulent stagnation progress; our whole ethics does nothing
but encourage it in this lying enterprise since we are asking each one to confirm existence
as a value for all others; isn't it simply a matter of organizing among men a complicity
which allows them to substitute a game of illusions for the given world?
We have already attempted to answer this objection. One can formulate it only by placing
himself on the grounds of an inhuman and consequently false objectivity; within
Mankind men may be fooled; the word "lie" has a meaning by opposition to the truth
established by men themselves, but Mankind can not fool itself completely since it is
precisely Mankind which creates the criteria of true and false. In Plato, art is
mystification because there is the heaven of Ideas; but in the earthly domain all
glorification of the earth is true as soon as it is realized. Let men attach value to words,
forms, colors, mathematical theorems, physical laws, and athletic prowess; let them
accord value to one another in love and friendship, and the objects, the events, and the
men immediately have this value; they have it absolutely. It is possible that a man may
refuse to love anything on earth; he will prove this refusal and he will carry it out by
suicide. If he lives, the reason is that, whatever he may say, there still remains in him
some attachment to existence; his life will be commensurate with this attachment; it will
justify itself to the extent that it genuinely justifies the world.
This justification, though open upon the entire universe through time and space, will
always be finite. Whatever one may do, one never realizes anything but a limited work,
like existence itself which tries to establish itself through that work and which death also
limits. It is the assertion of our finiteness which doubtless gives the doctrine which we
have just evoked its austerity and, in some eyes, its sadness. As soon as one considers a
system abstractly and theoretically, one puts himself, in effect, on the plane of the
universal, thus, of the infinite. That is why reading the Hegelian system is so comforting.
I remember having experienced a great feeling of calm on reading Hegel in the
impersonal framework of the Bibliotheque Nationale in August 1940. But once I got into
the street again, into my life, out of the system, beneath a real sky, the system was no
longer of any use to me: what it had offered me, under a show of the infinite, was the
consolations of death; and I again wanted to live in the midst of living men. I think that,
inversely, existentialism does not offer to the reader the consolations of an abstract
evasion: existentialism proposes no evasion. On the contrary, its ethics is experienced in
the truth of life, and it then appears as the only proposition of salvation which one can
address to men. Taking on its own account Descartes' revolt against the evil genius, the
pride of the thinking reed in the face of the universe which crushes him, it asserts that,
despite his limits, through them, it is up to each one to fulfill his existence as an absolute.
Regardless of the staggering dimensions of the world about us, the density of our
ignorance, the risks of catastrophes to come, and our individual weakness within the
immense collectivity, the fact remains that we are absolutely free today if we choose to
will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on the infinite. And in fact,
any man who has known real loves, real revolts, real desires, and real will knows quite
well that he has no need of any outside guarantee to be sure of his goals; their certitude
comes from his own drive. There is a very old saying which goes: "Do what you must,
come what may." That amounts to saying in a different way that the result is not external
to the good will which fulfills itself in aiming at it. If it came to be that each man did
what he must, existence would be saved in each one without there being any need of
dreaming of a paradise where all would be reconciled in death.
Index
! Abraham, 138
! Adventurer, the 58-62, 68
! Alencon point, 94
! Alexandria, 76
! Algeria, 101
! Ambiguity, 57, 68, 68, 129, 189, 142, 152-154
! America, 68, 90
! Anti-fascism, 154
! Arabs, the 101
! Aragon, 182
! Arrivisme, 59
! Athens, 75, 76
! Atom, 26
! Barren, 182
! Bataille Georges., 70, 126
! Baudelaire, 58
! Bolshevism, 45
! Breton, 55
! British Empire, the 98
! Buchenwald, 9, 74, 101
! Bukharin, 146 Byzantium, 75
! Carolinas, the 85
! Catholic Church, 132
! Catholics, the 50
! Cezanne, 129
! Childhood, 141, 142
! Claudel, 188
! Cleopatra, 147
! Coimbre, 98
! Comte, 116
! Cortez, 59
! Crevelf 54
! Christ, 66
! Christian charity, 185
! Christian Church, 48
! Christian myth, 71
! Coliseum, 75
! Communist Party, 48
! Cromwell, 147
! Dachau, 101
! Descartes, 28, 35, 105, 159
! Don Juan, 60, 61
! Dos Passos John, 151
! Dostoievsky, 15
! Driev la Rochelle, 56, 57
! Egoism, 70
! Elvira, 60, 61
! England, 124
! Epicurean cult, 135
! Ethics, 23, 32-34, 55, 59, 95,
126, 129, 131, 134, 154, 156
! Ethics of autonomy, 33
! Existentialism, 10, 18, 34, 59, 72,
78,153,159
! Fanaticism, 66
! Fascism, 45, 62, 138, 154
! Fichte, 17
! Florence, 76
! France, 132, 140
! French, the 139
! French Union, the 140
! Future, the 115, 116, 118-120,
123, 124, 126-128, 180-132,136, 144
! Germany, 150
! Germans, the 76, 126
! Gilles, 56
! Giotto, 129
! Girondists, the 149
! Goering, 42
! Goethe, 132
! Greece, 124
! Hegel, 8-10, 17, 18, 22, 46, 62,
69, 70, 84, 103-105, 112, 116,
117, 122, 153, 158
! Hegelian ethics, 104
! Heidegger, 102, 116
! Hitler, 98
! Hitlerians, the 103
! Humanism, 21
! Humanists, the 92
! Husserl, 14
! Hysteria, 25
! Ibsen, 143
! India, 150
! Indians, the 60, 61
! Individualism, 156
! Intelligence, 41
! Isaac, 133
! Italians, the 75
! Italy, 31, 61
! Jew, the 103, 144
! Joubandeau, 53
! Kant, 17, 18, 22, 33, 69, 105, 188
! Kantian moralism, 135
! Kantianism, 144
! Kantism, 33
! Kierkegaard, 9, 46, 138
! Koestler, 110, 132
! Korai of Athens, 130
! Lawrence, 61
! Lenin, 22, 23
! Lespinasse, Mademoiselle de, 66
! Lyons, 150
! Malaparte, 153
! Marx, 18, 20, 21, 84, 85, 87, 118
! Marxism, 18-20
! Materialism, 20
! Mathematics, 79
! Marseilles, 92
! Maurras, 85
! Metaphysics, 34
! Middle Ages, the 92
! Montaigne, 7
! Moralism, 21
! Moscow trials, 146
! Mythomaniac, the 47
! Nazis, the 95, 101, 158
! Nazism, 56
! Nietzsche, 46, 72
! Nihilism, 54, 56, 58, 65, 68, 100
! Nihilist, the 52, 55, 57, 61
! Nirvana, 8
! Nuremberg, 42
! Obidos, 93
! Palestine, 124
! Paris, 76, 125, 150
! Passion, 64, 66, 72
! Passionate man, the 63, 64, 66
! Paternalism, 138
! Philosophy, 46
! Physics, 79
! Pierrefeu, 129
! Pizarro, 61
! Plato, 33, 80, 157
! Pompeii, 92
! Ponge, 88, 115
! Portugal, 93
! Proust, 50
! P. R. L. (Parti Republicain de'la Liberte) 90
! Protestantism, 133
! Rauschning, 56
! Realism, 21
! Reformation, the 133
! Renaissance, the 93
! Revolution, Of 46, 49
! Robespierre, 149
! Rome, 76
! Roque dela, Colonel 163
! Rousseau, 141, 142
! Rousset David, 114
! Russia, 68, 125, 146
! Saint-Just, 108, 111, 149
! Salazar, 93
! Sartre, 10-12, 24, 58, 122
! Scepticism, 58, 59
! Science, 46
! Serious man, the 45-62, 64
! Sickness, 45
! Signification, 31, 41, 71
! Socialism, 154
! Socrates, 33
! Spain, 124, 144
! Spaniard, the 144
! Sparta, 76
! Spartacus, 182
! Spinoza, 33
! Spontaneity, 26, 41
! Stalingrad, 91, 146
! Stalinists, the 125
! Steinbeck, 150-152
! Stoicism, 81
! Stoics, the 29, 144
! Subman, the 43-47, 58, 56
! Surrealism, 54
! Syracuse, 75
! Technics, 79, 80
! Titian, 129
! Tristan Flora, 86
! Trotsky, 119
! Tyrant, the 62, 71
! United States, 151
! Universe, the 121
! U.S.S.R., 146
! Vache, 54
! Valery, 121
! Van Gogh, 29
! Vichyites, the 131
! Vigilantes of America, 60
! War, 45
! Wright Richard, 89
! Yankees, the 90