I thought about continuing the digest format of the first post of the summer, but since the intention of regular posts from the fieldwork locale(s) was not met, I figure the format may as well revert. There are a lot of notes and half written posts that I may come back to and compile into some great Opus on the Colorado Plateau, but that’s for later, if at all.
If you know Sartre’s play No Exit you most likely know its conclusion: that “Hell is other people.” While the line in context isn’t quite as misanthropic as it sounds in isolation, it nonetheless sums up an annoying characteristic I see in existentialism that I think must be at once bad on its own terms and unnecessary for the existentialist project of retrieving human dignity in the post-meaning age.
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No Exit, I was told before reading it, is understood as a literary exposition of the Sartrean concept of ‘bad faith’.
(A tl;dr of the plot is that three damned souls—the cowardly Garcin, the sadistic Inez, and the manipulative Estelle—are put together in Hell (which turns out to be a sort of drab living room where the lights never turn off), and slowly discover that they are all, with their various character flaws, to be one another’s torturers for all eternity.)
‘Bad faith’ refers to self-chosen denial of freedom that Sartre sees as commonly characterizing human interaction. The most obvious demonstration in the play is the point where the door of the room swings open and Garcin, having previously demanded to be let out, now refuses to leave. Antecedent to bad faith, both the concept and its lived manifestation, is the reality that human life is lived under the gaze of the other, under the tyranny of judgement and expectation that blunts realization of the authentic self- Estelle and Garcin (Inez, at least, is not insecure in this way) frequently interrupt themselves to anxiously look in on what their past familiars are now saying about them. The gaze of the other casts each of us as an object, and the resulting struggle to shake it off is therefore a struggle to realize oneself as a subject.
This is illustrated in multiple facets in what I think is the dramatic heart of Sartre’s play, a long sequence where Garcin and Estelle come near to embracing one another yet are undone both by Inez’s scorn and by each one’s mistrust of the other’s motives. Dramatically, even in this moment Garcin’s attention is called away to the conversation of his still-living compatriots, thinking of how they must scorn him. And as their dialogue unfolds we discover the essential myopia that swallows up even this tantalizing chance. Garcin seeks in Estelle only the affirmation that she will not think him a coward, while she seeks to have him for herself only to be reassured of her own value by drawing another’s desire (and also as a play of spite against Inez). So even in the only scene that raises the possibility of redemption in love, it quickly becomes clear that no salvation is on offer, for neither Garcin nor Estelle can act with love except as a power play, an act of self-reassurance that objectifies and uses the other. Inez mocks from the corner but Estelle and Garcin need no help tearing themselves down.
But I don’t think, Sartre’s authorial intent to one side, that it needed to go that way. We can imagine a different path. I don’t think, for example, that Estelle and Garcin are irremediably blocked from the way of the lovers at the finale of Rilke’s fifth Elegy:
Angel! If there were a place we didn’t know of, and there, on some unsayable carpet, lovers displayed what they never could bring to mastery here—the bold exploits of their high-flying hearts, their towers of pleasure, their ladders that have long since been standing where there was no ground, leaning just on each other, trembling,— and could master all this, before the surrounding spectators, the innumerable soundless dead: Would these, then, throw down their final, forever saved-up, forever hidden, unknown to us, eternally valid coins of happiness before the at last genuinely smiling pair on the gratified carpet?
What I’m saying is that existentialism offers no hope, or none worth taking, if its offer of heroic freedom and self-creation in the face of a meaningless cosmos is open only to unattached, buffered selves. I see nothing attractive in the claim that we must be, in every sense of the term, free agents, or else we are simply self-deceived. I find a much truer existential vision in the “ladders … long since standing where there was no ground, leaning just on each other, trembling.” If even love cannot escape (much less-dizzying possibility-transfigure) the gaze of the other to avoid falling into bad faith, then I claim it isn’t clear the gaze is worth escaping. Heroic loneliness, the always-urge to stand apart, is a solipsism attractive to the self-important, not a path to any sort of meaning. And so to whatever extent existentialism can’t conceptualize a renewal of the self in the other, or even a real, non-oppressive relation to the other, I don’t see it has much to offer.
The necessary torrent of disclaimers- This post could be titled ‘Don’t Know Much About Existentialism’ ; I know Sartre’s views somewhat evolved in his later stuff relative to what he was writing in 1944 and I’m ignorant of all of that ; I’m just some jerk who never read nuthin, don’t listen to me.
But if any of you do know much about existentialism and want to leave a comment telling me all the ways that I’m wrong, have at it.
my cursory and uninformed view is that existentialism does not lead to joy, maybe an acceptance as you choose a path to follow, but no inherent joy bc you can just choose another, the self all wrapped up in the self..reminds me of the last scene in Trainspotters. try a paradigm shift, go toward the light.