Existentialism and Sociology

Contribution of Jean-Paul Sartre

Gila Hayim

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351521161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Existentialism and Sociology (originally published under the title The Existential Sociology of Jean-Paul Sartre) is the first work to systematically and critically analyze the existential ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and to demonstrate their importance and connection to central sociological categories found in the theories of Weber, Durkheim, Freud, Mead, and others.Drawing also on sociological and Hegelian social thought, Hayim analyzes key existential concepts of negation, temporality, choice, anguish, and bad faith, and carefully situates them in the different relations of self to the other—relations of indifference and destruction, as well as relations of engagement and pledge. She joins the two orders of being—ontology and sociology—and establishes intellectual and ethical continuity between the phenomenology of Being and Nothingness, Sartre's momentous early work, and neglected sociological categories in his later works: Critique of Dialectical Reason and Notebooks for an Ethics.Hayim makes accessible to the social scientist a rich repertoire of existential motifs and perspectives on community and group interactions and their inextricable bond to the life practice of the individual. Distinguishing among social groups as different orders of social consciousness and organization, Hayim addresses issues of transcendence and inertia, leadership and authority, freedom and bondage, bureaucracy and control, and identifies Sartre's concept of the practico-inert as the radical center of our intersubjectivity today, and its threat to human intelligibility.The author contends that the massive language of a sociology of things instills in the human actor a feeling of helplessness and gross inferiority vis-a-vis the social world. She offers, in contrast, the existential emphasis on the importance of substituting live human experience for mechanistic processes of explanation, and of establishing

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Freedom, anguish and bad faith

This chapter deals with basic concepts in Being and Nothingness. My analysis takes into account various sociological orientations, especially the work of Max Weber. Introducing Sartre in the context of sociological cognition should dispel any apprehension about Sartre's thought. The point which will be made is that Sartre does not primarily deal with "the absurd," "the obscure" or "the irrational" as pects of human life. One should of course pay attention to no tions of the absurd or the irrational, since they are inescapable aspects of every reflective existence, but they are not the specific subject matter of Being and Nothingness. Sartre's goal is intel ligibility, in that he wishes to study the relation between the abstract and the concrete. He reviews conventional themes con cerning human nature, human action and human relations, and he re-evaluates these themes from the point of view of the concrete, acting individual. Sartre identifies existence as action; and existence, for Sartre, precedes those very theories which refer to it. Obscurity arises, in fact, when existence is interpreted from the point of view of theoretical consciousness or essence.

Weber's scholarly pursuits (for instance his studies of religion, modernity and bureaucracy) are not of specific concern to Sartre. Nevertheless, these two scholars share a genuine concern for the human enterprise in the world, and they take great pains in understanding it appropriately. Both take into account temporality as an important aspect of human action, and both are committed to studying the role of choice, values and goals in human life. What is common to both is the conviction that voluntarism is the basic principle of human action and social organization.

The fact that both Sartre and Weber share these orientations does not of course mean that Weber is an existentialist nor does it mean that Sartre is an interpretive sociologist. Instead of imposing such a conclusion, my task in this chapter is to extract the existential component of Weber's work, not as a professed philosophical position but as a tacit aspect of his sociology. At the same time I wish to analyze and elucidate Sartre's existentialism through the eyes of Max Weber.

I shall deal with five issues: (a) human action and time in Sartre and Weber, (b) time and freedom: the existential experience of absence, (c) freedom and anguish, (d) anguish and the spirit of seriousness and (e) voluntarism and the act of valuation. Before proceeding along these lines, however, I briefly discuss existence and existentialism. A more detailed exposition of Sartre' s existentialism appears later in the chapter.

Existence

By refusing to separate thought from life Socrates probably represented one of the earliest forms of existentialism, that is, the philosophical view that knowledge and existence are inextricably bound together. The ancient Hebrew prophet offered another fascinating aspect of existentialism. Through the admonitions exchanged between him and his God, he called for the collapse of the abstract and the sacred into the mundane. While such images, drawn from early times, may provide an intuitive introduction to existentialism, they do not offer a precise, analytical formulation of the term. Still, instead of beginning this chapter with an analytical definition, I shall point to the manner in which Karl Jaspers deals with it. Existence, for Jaspers, is an index; it names properties without alluding to a certain content. Existence encompasses the empirical properties of being, either as matter or as the body, but it also stands for consciousness, in all of its acts of reality-constitution and intersubjective communication. Existence encompasses the labor of my thought and action as well as my total culture. But whether existence is used to refer to my empirical body, to my consciousness or to my culture, "in no case can it [existence] be grasped as though it were something in the world which appeared before us. Rather it is that in which all other things appear to us. In general, we do not appropriately cognize it as an object; rather we become aware of it as a limit."¹

Jaspers deliberately avoids using analytical language which deals with cause and consequence, since in his view too much analytical clarity makes knowledge absolute and authoritarian. While such an attitude toward knowledge is sensitive, it cannot by itself offer a common structure for the term existence which can be agreed upon by other existential writers. Jaspers is influenced by both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and has great admiration for and even a measure of intellectual identification with their types of existentialism. But Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the two major progenitors of modern existentialism, differ from each other in substance and in temper. Though each ques tioned radically the confident rationality of the Western mind, Kierkegaard's existentialism emerged from a religious commitment to the idea of aloneness, while the existentialism of Nietzsche sprang forth from a need to see the end of religion. Neither do Kierkegaard's work and the work of many of the recent exponents of existentialism, such as Sartre, have much in common. Kierkegaard's work was motivated by his passion for subjectivity and by his belief that the human situation can never be completely externalized into action. For Sartre, the opposite is true. For him, a human being is the sum total of his acts; hence, there is no hidden essence or secret subjectivity. In the context of Sartre' s work, existence is defined by and through one's acts. Existence cannot hide behind the pretext of inwardness or potentia. One is what one does.

Most philosophies dealing with human existence contain the theme of duality. We are familiar, for example, with the distinction between being and essence in Plato, with the mindbody duality of Descartes, the noumenon-phenomenon distinction in Kant, to mention only a few. These dualistic positions refer quite simply to the difference between "exterior" and "interior" worlds. Exterior reality is mere appearance, a false picture behind which stands true being, or potentia. Nothing which appears is its truth. Sartre attacks such a position. By his view each human act of expression indicates itself and conceals nothing. There is no difference between the external act and the inner potentia. The act exhausts all capabilities of the acting person who cannot make excuses by referring to the "hidden" capabilities of the self. In fact, description of the real is possible since the person manifests himself wholly. By Sartre's view one cannot speak of "genius" as a subjectively concealed fact, for the genius is that person who actually produces works of genius.²

Obviously there are an infinite number of modes in which personhood can be manifested. No thing can appear multisidedly and all at once. It can appear only in certain ways and it is constantly subject to change. What is revealed is merely one aspect of a plurality of aspects. A series of such revealed aspects of the thing gains synthetic unity by means of a variety of factors. Chief among these factors is, for example, the way in which we perceive an action in light of its aim. Sartre wishes to describe and comprehend human existence as it is manifested through meaningful sets of revealed aspects of the person.

Philosophers have long been puzzled by another duality, namely the separation of consciousness and the external world. Does consciousness (mind, knowledge, subjectivity) precede the world and its materiality or is it a product of the given world? An extreme position was taken by Berkeley, for example, who claimed that a table exists in the outside world because it is first perceived by a mind, that is, that the consciousness precedes the world. Sartre rejects this view and asserts that the independent existence of the world is a fact before consciousness. The existence of a table is not dependent upon one's consciousness of it. In fact, a table cannot exist in one's consciousness: it exists in relation to something other, to the right or left, near a window, and so on.³ A table is not produced by knowledge, it is an object before my knowledge of it. Consciousness is consciousness of something other than itself. But consciousness is not ignorant of itself. It can be self-conscious, or reflective of the fact that it is aware of the table. More importantly, it can view itself as a mere object, as, for example, in the experience of shame or pride, moods which result from an act of passing judgment on ourselves as objects.

When speaking of the relation between consciousness and its object we speak of the relation between individual and world. Consciousness has no meaning by itself since it manifests itself as a desire for some object in the world. The world, in turn, has no intrinsic meaning since it has to be intended by human consciousness or human desire. Consciousness and object are co-constituted.

These statements may give the reader some idea of the diversity of approaches found in existentialism. A thematic unity could probably be deduced but only at the expense of oversimplification. Indeed, existentialists, with the exception of Sartre, are neither authors of technical philosophical systems, nor do they desire to be approached as such. I exclude Sartre from this general statement because in his works on social philosophy he makes a thorough attempt at synthesizing his existential in sights and concepts into a system approaching what Fernando Molina refers to as "technical philosophical methodology."⁴

Human action and time in Sartre and Weber

Sartre attacks the natural scientific emphasis on objective structures as completely deterministic of human behavior. In the social sciences such emphasis has produced a methodology of society and history that is basically a methodology of inert exteriority. It excludes a willed human life developing temporally into human history, and, in fact, human history becomes a special form of natural history. Sartre argues that immediate and lived praxis expresses itself actively in time. The person acts while relating himself to past, present and future, and thereby expresses social action reflectively. Moreover, the fact that a plurality of individual actions may become an institution does not justify neglect of the individual in favor of structural or institutional analysis. Structural analysis is important, but it cannot serve as the critical method which links action to time.⁵ Atomization in analysis, in fact, occurs when we divide the living social reality into fixed and separate categories and structures. Such division is in step with positivistic reason whose end is intellection rather than comprehension.

Intellection is like explanation in the natural sciences—the explanation of the necessary and the inert as embodied in the world of things. "Things" have no intention or desire or temporality. On the other hand, comprehension, as the quality of the critical method, is the clarity one gains when one is involved in a project that is defined by its future goal. Comprehension results from an act intended by oneself or by another human being where there is consciousness of the ends sought. "Whenever a praxis [human action] can be traced to the intention of a practical organism or of a group ... there is comprehension."⁶

In contrast, positivistic sociology emphasizes such concepts as "role," "structure," "external fact" and "process" as conditions relatively independent of the present desires and future goals of acting individuals. Human behavior is considered to be a function of such structural forces, regardless of individual ends or intentions. Human motivation, since it is "abstract," is considered too elusive and subjective a component of action to be necessary for understanding human behavior. This line of thinking can be found in most sociological investigations—from Durkheim to the present—which deal with the structural or institutional aspects of social reality. The explanatory power is assigned to the collective forces which constitute objective structures vis-à-vis human goals. Thus, positivistic sociology, as the allegedly scientific sociology, "is based on an assumption central to Durkheimian thought, the assumption that society is a reality different in kind from individual realities and that every social fact is the result of another social fact and never of a fact of individual psychology."⁷ For Durkheim, it is the structure of the presently given society and its institutions which serves as the object of scientific analysis. Durkheim doubted that analysis of the past and the future is necessary for dealing with the phenomena sociology seeks to explain. Historical explanation, for him, is not true scientific explanation; less scientific still is any resort to the category of the future. This position is consistent with his idea that a social phenomenon is to be explained synchronically by means of the method of concomitant variation. Durkheim states that human needs and behavior are never voluntary or purposive but are the result of external determinations: "[T] he fact that we allow a place for human needs in sociological explanations does not mean that we even partially revert to teleology. These needs can influence social evolution only on condition that they themselves ... can be explained solely by causes that are deterministic and not at all purposive."⁸ Historical developments should not be explained as the realization of prior human intention or "of ends clearly or obscurely felt," but as the effects of social facts independent of human ends. If a social phenomenon happens to serve a huma...