"I have with me in the studio my friend and colleague, Lanier Anderson, professor of philosophy
here at Stanford, who regularly teaches courses on the existentialism of Jean-Paul's
SaaSp, and it's my distinct pleasure to begin our season with a conversation about SaaSp
with Lanier Anderson.
But before I welcome him to the show, let me state for the record that I believe that
our early third millennium age is in dire need of a powerful undiluted dose of existentialist
medicine.
SaaSp famously declared that human being is without excuse, insofar as we are the architects
of our destinies, but we live in a world nowadays where everything conspires to excuse
us from responsibility for the inanities and calamities of which we are inevitably the
authors.
But let me now welcome our guest to the show and get his thoughts about whether the existentialist
SaaSp is as pertinent to our times now as he was in the forties and early fifties when
he was first laying out his existentialist doctrine.
Lanier, welcome to the program.
"Thanks very much Robert, I'm delighted to be here."
So Lanier, my favorite line in SaaSp's entire corpus comes from his existentialist biography
of Charles Bodleir, the French poet, where SaaSp declares, "A pas sancant d'al shacam
me hite la gur l'chil'a."
After fifty years of age, everyone deserves the face he or she has.
I think that if we can come to an adequate understanding of what he means by that statement
by the end of our hour, we will have accomplished a great deal.
Would you kindly lead the way for us?
I'm delighted.
I'm delighted to be here.
Thanks again for inviting me.
It's a fascinating comment that SaaSp makes about having the face you deserve.
We can start in on that from a sort of common sensical point of view by thinking about
the obvious fact that faces are incredibly expressive of our passions and our emotions.
And so you could attribute meaning to his claim by focusing on that and saying we have
the face we deserve in the sense that the ruling passions that have governed our life
over fifty years will by the time we're fifty be etched in our face.
But that's where the problem really starts because after all why should we think that
we actually deserve those passions?
We usually think of passions as something that happened to us rather than something that
we ourselves did.
So he's making a sort of a stark claim for responsibility right there insisting that the
passions that we have really express who we are and that we are responsible for them.
Well, having gone over the age of fifty I am acutely aware of that dictum of his and I think
it's a accumulation of passions as well as demeanor, outlook, even philosophy of life,
everything that defines the kind of attitude I have towards my fellow human beings and
the world at large and so forth.
And is it the case that SaaSp believe that all these things not only are emotions but all
of our fundamental dispositions insofar as we are actors in the world insofar as we are
intersubjective beings and so forth that all these fall under the governance of human
choice?
Every single one he thought.
And it's really quite a remarkably strong position for him to take.
So we ordinarily perform lots of daily actions in a pretty thoughtless way.
So let's say on Sunday I get up early in the morning and go with my wife to the farmers
market and I don't really think about what I'm doing.
I'm hardly conscious of myself at that hour in the day.
But he thinks that that behavior of getting up and getting out early and going to the farmers
market is fundamentally expressive of who I am.
And part of what drives him philosophically to this position is the conviction that every
one of our actions, no matter how simple, really is what it is depending on the meaning
that it has in our broader life and that meaning has broad implications that go beyond
just the action itself.
So to stick with that example of getting up early going to the farmers market, in my case
that has a certain, that's expressive of a certain meaning, a commitment that I'm going
to sacrifice sleeping in to help my wife get the groceries in in the way she wants to
do it.
But if the circumstances of my marriage were totally different, it could have a completely
different meaning.
For example, it could be that I wanted to get up and leave her there and get out or that
I wanted to follow her around to make sure she didn't do something without me in an effort
to control her or something.
So what the action actually is depends completely on the broader context of the relationship
in which it happens.
And that broader context is not something that I just find myself with.
That too is something that I chose to put myself in that I chose to bring about as the framework
within which I do the ordinary everyday actions.
And that's what's so radical about the theory is that any given choice that one makes consciously
as you are suggesting is interrelated to a number of other choices that have been made
in a prior moment or which have been less explicitly embraced but have been implied or
late and resolved upon by an individual.
And that often what sat called the total life choice of an individual is something that
he or she remains to a certain extent unaware of at least at a conscious level.
That's right.
He seems to have, he seems to get at this fundamental choice by a kind of regressive strategy
or arguing out kind of strategy.
So let's go to another example.
I make a choice to do something that I don't particularly enjoy say, grading the papers
of my class.
But that choice has meaning for me because of a broader choice that I made to teach that
class in the first place and to set up the assignments in a certain way.
And that also looks like it's consciously available to me.
But why did I make that choice?
Well, because of some values that I had about that particular class and the pedagogical
aims that I wanted to have.
And that choice of those values makes sense against the background of a choice of a certain
way of life to become a professor and teach classes of a certain sort.
And why did I do that?
Well, because I chose to be a certain type of person for whom that would count as a valuable
life.
And now we're at a level of choice that you don't think about every day but which informs
the basic shape of all the other choices that you make.
And SART's basic argument is, look, if you think that it's in your capacity to choose
to do these lower level things like grade the papers or not, teach the class this way
or not, those things will count as choices.
Maybe if the basic framework within which the action makes sense itself is also something
that you chose.
Well, let me read you from a sentence from existentialism is a humanism that might focalize
a little bit the issue under consideration here.
And here he's saying that he's speaking about the projection of the self.
And I think that what you're talking about is the latent or the implied rather than necessarily
explicit choice that one always precedes particular choices is what he calls this, that one
projects oneself in a voluntary mode.
And he says, "Before that projection of the self, nothing exists, not even in the heaven
of intelligence.
Man will only attain existence when he is what he purposes to be.
Not however what he may wish to be, for what we usually understand by wishing or willing
is a conscious decision taken much more often than not after we have made ourselves what
we are.
I may wish to join a party, to write a book or to marry, but in such a case what is usually
call my will is probably a manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision."
Now, philosophically, and you're in the philosophy department, you know, there are a number
of concepts here which cannot all be reduced to one thing.
So the distinction between will and wish and decision.
So the idea that my will is probably a manifestation of a prior and more spontaneous decision,
that decision that I make when I project myself or I choose who I am or who I'm going
to be, if it's not an act of will, how to understand it.
This is really, I think, gets to the core of his philosophy and one way of understanding
what he's on about is to go back to a line he used as the title of a play.
The chips are down.
He thinks that what's usually called my will is a decision that I make with the chips
already down in what sense.
Well, when I decide whether to marry or to join a party, I decide usually by reference
to values that I think of myself as already being committed to.
And those values in a way fix the outcome.
They determine that, you know, so once I've already committed myself to the idea that God
requires human beings to marry or that I'm the sort of person who wants to marry and
start a family, then my decision to go ahead and get married turns out to follow from that
value that I already endorse.
But it's going to count as a choice of mine, SART says, only if those values themselves
are the products of choice and that's the prior and more spontaneous decision that he's
talking about in the passage.
The prior and more spontaneous decision was the choice that erected those values in the
first place.
But why is S.E. so committed to the notion that that prior decision is free from determination
by external constraints or by tradition which is passed on through family education,
through the community one is born into, through the nation that one is a citizen of.
He seems very, very determined to put all the burden for who I am on myself and to neutralize
the sort of pre-determination that might come from these other sources, no?
He is and it seems to me that they're too different, too fundamentally different kinds
of approaches that you can take to understanding the question why he has that view.
One is sort of internal to his philosophy, his argument for this really starts from this
internal point of view.
The thought is, well look, when I choose to marry, that really is a choice of mine.
But if it were fixed in advance because the chips were already down given the values that
I inherited from my parents or something like that, then it wouldn't really be a choice
of mine.
And so starting from the fact that it's a choice, he insists that that means that the
choice that I make must also encompass these shaping values.
Are you suggesting that there are some choices which are not made but that there are some
actions which are taken without active choice?
Well, it can't be that the choice, the choice of these prior values is a product of
liberation where I sit down and weigh the pros and cons because what's at stake here is what
weight the pros and cons should have.
And I can't decide that question by assessing the weights of the pros and cons on pain of
regress.
So, the only way out, he thinks, is to just assert that it's a spontaneous choice all the
way down.
And just live out those values with those weights and by living them out, I constitute
them as the life that I have chosen.
Well, here, the crucible is the distinction between what hydrogram I call authenticity
and inauthenticity.
Where is there room in the Sartrean framework that you've just outlined?
Where is there room for a distinction between the individual who takes full cognizance
of this unconditional freedom of self-determination and acts on the basis of this unconditional
freedom?
And what, what, heidegger and I think Sath also believed the vast majority of human beings
take flight from the extraordinary burden and anguish that such freedom and therefore they
allow themselves just to do what the they self, the Dasman does, what the inauthentic
self does and therefore they abnigate the role of conscious choice or deliberate choice.
And yet, Sath says they're never less, they're choosing to do that when they're choosing
not to do it, no?
He does.
And so maybe, maybe sticking with an example where I fall back on an appeal to my passions
would help illuminate this kind of situation.
So let's say that my choice is to marry and I might think that in a certain sense I'm
compelled by the world, it's the power of my love for this person that has made me decide
and decide to marry and that power as it were pushes me from within and it's as though
I had no choice.
Sarts point is, well look, you did have a choice in the sense that it was up to you
whether to live your life as one of the people who lets the passion of love dictate whether
marriage is the appropriate course.
Many people after all for many years thought of marriage as something that you did as a contract
based on what your family needed, not at all based on that passion of love.
So it was a choice of yours to attribute that to a tribute force to that passion.
Now we go into bad faith when we insist in spite of this fact about us that Sart has pointed
out.
Normally we flee from that fact.
We insist that we didn't have a choice in some important sense precisely by attributing
so much power, so much weight, so much force to the passion of love that we have chosen
for ourselves.
And I think what's really going on there is that we want for our choice to seem to us
not to be arbitrary, to be something pushed on us by the world.
And so it's anxiety producing to think of it as something that has force only insofar
as we ourselves endorsed it or put it out there.
Well you introduced the term bad faith and that's the crucial concept in his, I don't
know if you would call it his psychology, probably even more his ontology of human subjectivity
and perhaps we should take a few minutes to unpack exactly what he meant by this term of
moviz for a bad faith.
Sometimes it's translated in English as self-deception but of course self-deception is not
exactly what the French moviz for.
It means literally bad faith.
How do you understand the concept of bad faith and then the mechanism by which it operates
in us?
It is true that self-deception is kind of a core example of bad faith and sort
presents it that way.
Although bad faith itself is a much more fundamental structure of which self-deception is
sort of a more obvious manifestation or something like that.
So it is so, but let's focus on self-deception as the obvious manifestation and then we
can dig deeper.
I thought of the problem of self-deception as a really hard problem because what's going
on in self-deception is a kind of paradoxical structure of our consciousness.
After all, we couldn't be deceiving ourselves if we didn't deep down know the truth about
what's really going on in our life.
If I didn't deep down know that it's up to me to count love as the most important thing,
and it wouldn't be self-deception for me to pretend that love is forcing itself on me.
Okay, but if I deep down know that, how can I be deceived?
Many philosophers have been tempted in explaining this phenomenon to just postulate some
kind of fixed, thoroughgoing division within the self.
In particular, people want to make a division between an unconscious part of me and a
conscious part of me and they think that somehow that'll help the duality will somehow help
us explain self-deception because then part of me can know the truth and the other part
of me can be deceived.
SART, I think quite plausibly points out that this really doesn't solve the problem, it
just pushes it around and creates the pretense of a solution because after all, when the
unconscious part of me is supposed to know the truth, it's supposed to know something.
It's supposed to be something like a little quasi-consciousness in me that has attitudes
and expresses its needs symbolically because it realizes that its needs are going to be
repressed by the conscious part of the self.
But if it's already conscious of its needs as to be repressed, then it has to be in something
like bad faith in order for the whole system to work.
And so the real problem of bad faith, SART thinks, is to understand how bad faith could
possibly work in the full light of consciousness, how we could simultaneously be the
deceiver and the deceived.
In fact, some of the most compelling pages of being in nothingness, his major philosophical
opus, it was an existentialist period anyway, for me are the pages in which he engages
in Freud's theory of the unconscious and posits this problem between the unconscious and
he focuses on the very peculiar role that the sensor has in Freud's theory of psychoanalysis,
where the sensor is almost like a border patrol which will admit certain contents of the
unconscious to enter consciousness if it has a proper passport, if it has a proper visas
and so on and so forth.
That the sensor is the agency that knows exactly what the unconscious wants, and that
the conscious.
And therefore, he says that it's in precisely the role of the sensor that free choice and
self-determination are actually taking place, that I am responsible for what I allow
from the depths of my unconscious to enter my consciousness and what I don't allow.
No?
Right, and I love that metaphor of the border control too, so it's like the sensor will
allow the unconscious id to express itself, but only when it falsely presents itself
with false documentation as though it's an ordinary citizen when in fact it's the
emissary of the id.
But the real crux of the critique of Freud here is that the sensor has to know what's
in the id and what needs to be repressed and know that it should be repressed and as
Sarte puts it, the sensor knows that content of the id in order not to know it in order
to make sure that it stays out of consciousness.
But that means that the sensor itself is already in bad faith, and so bad faith, self-deceiving
bad faith hasn't been explained by this theory, it's been presupposed by this theory.
Exactly, yeah.
So I never cease to be astonished at the degree to which bad faith is a almost ineluctible
condition, and it's always tempting to attribute it to others and think that I myself am
the one who's not self-deceiving or I'm in good faith.
But of course, that's even scarier where you start contemplating the degree to which you
may be as much of a victim of bad faith as you think others are because the mind has
such clever resources at its disposal when it comes to making ourselves believe what
we know is not true.
And this is what is so compelling about Satt's existentialism is that he is forever suspicious
of this mechanism by which we willfully cause ourselves to believe something that we know
is not true or vice versa, no?
That's right.
And part of what's gripping and compelling about the theory is that he shows how deeply
we rooted in the fundamental ontology of our selfhood, this capacity to be in bad faith
really is.
So he traces it to two fundamental aspects of being a person.
On the one hand, there's a part of being a person which is to have things that are
factually true about you, ways that you just are.
I have a certain kind of body, I was born in a certain place, I'm a certain age and so
forth.
I have a certain kind of face once I get to be old enough.
These are parts of what Sart called our "facticity."
But at the same time, there's a basic fact about consciousness that consciousness always
has the capacity to, as it were, stand back from these facts and take up an attitude
toward them, showing thereby that consciousness isn't just these facts, it's something
more than they are, it can take up the attitude, for example, of condemning them or wishing
to be otherwise or deciding to make yourself be otherwise.
And what makes bad faith possible is the oscillation between these two basic structural
features of being a consciousness at all.
So he gives the example of being on a date, which I think is a great example of how
omnipresent this possibility of bad faith is.
So let's face it, when you're out on a date with another person, the point of being there
is to come to a decision about whether to have sex with this person.
Now you propose that in the philosophical reading group one day and you got a lot of grief
for that because there are a lot of people who will not agree that the only point of
being out on a date is whether it's going to end up in sex or not.
So what makes it a date?
Well, what the French call "muplesi de consombe" the pleasure of being together, for
example.
In other words, I don't want to rule out possibilities that there might be other agendas,
but go ahead with your example.
That's right.
Okay, so we go out and we enjoy the pleasures of being together, but we do that explicitly
with the people about whom we say, "We are just friends with the little quotation marks."
We don't, when we're on a date, the whole point is to enjoy the pleasures of our company
without being just friends.
Okay, but look, when you're out on a date with somebody, and I guess I'm not so committed
to the idea that it's the prospect of sex and the offering, if you'll grant me that
it's more than being just friends, that's good enough for my purposes.
Because here's where the bad faith comes in.
On the one hand, the whole point of its being a date is that you go out with the person in order
to explore the prospect of being more than just friends.
On the other hand, you don't want to put yourself at risk, and so you constantly maintain
the illusion in the actual behaviors that you engage in with the other person that so far
for all that's been done, it could be that we're still just friends.
And you always want that out, and that's why it sounds so jarring to say that the point of
the date is to decide whether to have sex together, because it's also part of the point
of the date to maintain deniability about that very fact.
And so we're deeply built into bad faith in the whole enterprise.
The way the bad faith works is to trade on what's actually undeniably true about me versus
the future that this interaction is really pointing to.
Yeah.
Well, these, again, examples take on a life of their own, and they can be, you know, we
can argue about the example and what's at stake and whether a date has this underlying
sort of decision that has to be taken, and that whether the people out on a date are
conspiring to suppress that, or whether, you know, a date can be another kind of,
just the sheer aesthetic, a pleasure of flirtation, for example, which could be justification
enough.
But rather than get caught up in the detail, the idea of the coke kits, because you're
referring to that analysis of the coke kit, who tells herself that, yeah, as he's reaching
for my hand, but he's not, you know, he's reaching for it in an affectionate way.
Or he's saying that she has this capacity to lie to herself.
The same way, the waiter who is serving at the cafe and he is dressed in his waiter's
uniform, and he's balancing his tray the way of waiter is he's playing the role, and
he's so identified with the role of the waiter that he refuses to acknowledge the fact
that at any moment he could just go back into the kitchen, throw his, you know, his
coat away, and leave the place in Park on a different life altogether.
Sath later in his life, I think, came to regret the kind of cavalier attitude that he
had towards the actual economic material constraints that most people live under, and was
felt a little bit guilty about this, you know, condemning the waiter who was serving him
at the cafe floor, you know, while he was writing his existentialist reflections, but
nevertheless, what interests me is not only the individual psychology, and I think it's
also a point of interest for you, Lanier, is the way in which a society as a whole can
conspire to lie to itself and can bring about disasters within this fear of political
and social history that we then attribute to some kind of fate and want to say that we
are not actually the architects of the calamities that we fall us, no?
I think that's right.
So, you know, he operates with these trivial seeming interpersonal examples at the beginning
when he's talking about bad faith, but he means to get down to a keep going in quite serious consequence,
and with the waiter, you see the beginning of that, I think you're exactly right.
The beginning of it is that on the one hand, the waiter is sort of toying with the role
of being a waiter and says to himself, "Oh, well, I could always do something else," even
though he doesn't ever do something else and some kind of serious constraining of his life
is taking place and he's conspiring with it without really admitting that to himself.
But Sart wrote this stuff, not only in a certain economic context, but also in a very
stark political context, he wrote these existentialist tracks during the Second World War,
and some of the most outrageous sounding consequences that he draws from this theory of bad
faith have to do precisely with the war.
So he writes in being in nothingness things like, "We have the war we deserve.
There are no innocent victims in war."
So here's a longer quotation that I specialize.
Wait, what's he mean by that now?
There are no innocent victims in war.
There are no innocent victims in war in the sense that we have the war we deserve.
So the core question is what sense we can make of the idea that we actually deserve a
social calamity that seems like this broad event that happens outside of our control.
Here's the long quotation of the longer quotation where you get some sense of what he
meant by that.
He says, "Thus there are no accidents in life.
A community event like the war, which suddenly bursts forth and involves me in it, doesn't
come from the outside.
If I'm mobilized in a war, this war is my war.
It's in my image and I deserve it.
I deserve it first because I could always get out of it by suicide or by diversion.
A desertion.
For lack of getting out of it, getting out of it, I've chosen it.
But in addition, the war is mine and this is, I think, the deeper point.
The war is mine because of the soul fact that it arises in a situation which I cause to
be and that I can discover the war there only by choosing to engage myself for it or against
it.
So I think that the thought is something like this.
The war breaks out.
A war is broken out in our life, too.
The war breaks out and then it's up to us to take up some attitude or other toward it.
But if we choose to abandon other projects and make it our aim to get rid of this war or
to endorse this war and fight it, then the war becomes central to us.
If we choose that these other projects are more important and that it's just fine for us
to go along as if there were no war happening, that too is a way of choosing this war
and the kind of war it turns out to be will be what it is because people made those choices.
So in that sense, we have the war we deserve and whoever the victims are, they were part
of the set of choices that brought about a war of that sort.
And so they aren't completely innocent.
The more one knows about the origins and causes of World War II, and I've been reading
a lot about it of late, also for some shows that I did in the fall, the more horrifying
is, comes to the realization that the war did not just break out, the war began as the
consequence of an untold number of discrete or nondescript decisions and choices that were
made by individuals at all levels, from presidential, political figures to bureaucrats,
to military, industrial establishment, to actual citizens themselves and so forth.
And that in a certain sense, the notion that there is a tragedy involved in things like
60 million dead thanks to World War II, that it's not a tragedy in the classical sense
of something that was decreed by the gods and that human beings are powerless against
and have to suffer in a passive-passive-passionate mode, that rather, I think there's an overwhelming
amount of evidence to support such basic doctrine that we have not only the war we deserve,
but we also have the world we deserve.
And it says true now, as it was in his time, and I think it was as true in his time as
it was in Danthis time.
And the reason I bring up Danthis, because strangely enough, you know, sat called himself
an atheist existentialist and there was nothing more alien to sat than the concept of a
providential god, but if you read the divine comedy, for example, Patadizo III, Danthis
in the circle of the moon, of the incons, of the souls were saved, but they were incons
in their vows.
And he meets there a woman named Pikardha, who was a Florentine woman, who wanted to devote
her life to God, went into the convent.
Her brother went there and violently and forcibly drew her out of the convent and forced
her to get married through sheer coercion and violence.
And yet she has this blemish of inconscency, because Danthis says there that she could always
have resisted, she could have allowed herself to die rather than be taken away from the
convent.
So, as you said, suicide is always an option.
Not to believe in very much the same way, the unconditional freedom of human agency to
create the world we deserve.
And if there is a tragedy, it's not that things happen by the degree of God.
The tragedy is that human beings screw it up time and again through their own choices.
And this was Danthis despair.
And I think we jump us out to get a little bit of the same pathos.
I think that's right.
And so, in a way, the one way to put it might be that the tragedy is not classical Greek
type tragedy, but showpanharian tragedy where it's the human will itself that drives
us into this situation.
And I guess to come back to a little bit of a more abstract philosophical way of putting
the same basic point, Sart's position seems to be that the fundamental project, that basic
underlying more spontaneous and primordial decision that we were talking about before, the
fundamental project and the situation in which we make our choices are kind of interdefined
for him.
What the fundamental project is from the inside, the way the person chooses to be herself,
that's the same thing viewed from the outside as the situation that she finds herself in.
So let's go back to that situation of citizens in a circumstance where the war is breaking
out.
Well, it's true if we think about our own war.
It's true that it kind of gradually crept up on us how big this war is.
So yes, there is a catastrophic event that is the beginning of it.
But was it the beginning of a war or was that just a grave criminal act?
Well, choices were made that turned that event into the beginning of an ongoing war.
Absolutely.
And we all took up some stance in our lives toward the fact that those choices were made.
And since we did, we helped contribute to the way the world experiences that war and that
forms the situation within which everybody else makes the choices that they make.
Well, obviously in the case of the Iraq war, there is no more overt example of a chosen
war because there were so many reasons contrived for engaging it that it seems highly
obvious that this was as will the wars you can get.
So it's not even a challenge to analyze it from an existentialist point of view.
It seems more challenging from an existentialist point of view to maybe even see the initial,
all the causes that proceed even the September 11th attacks and so forth.
And the way in which things take shape out of a process of a numberless individual local
choices and then higher synthetic forces that are always somehow choosing the shape that
the future is going to take for us.
That's right.
And a good way, I think, to think about, I think you're totally right to contrast, the
Iraq war has a clearly chosen enterprise versus the war on terror, which many people do
and it seems reasonable to think of as something that was foisted upon us by the outside circumstances.
But Sart's point is even these things that we think of as foisted upon us, they're
really choices too.
So it was up to us to decide whether to take this action in the way we took the first
world trades on a attack as a grave criminal, criminal enterprise that needs aggressive prosecution
or to take it as the act as an act of war with a non-state enemy.
And a series of choices were made by the political establishment, but also by the body
politic to take it in the second way.
Yeah, this is what interests me the most is the body politic is also us and it's the
citizens and it's the sheer, a cowering fear of the American citizenry after 9/11 that led
a vast majority of Americans to hand over, to surrender all decision-making process to
the powers and be keep us safe at any cost.
That was the mandate from the people, keep us safe at any cost.
And we have the government that we deserve.
So the Bush, I mean those of us who voted or didn't vote for, you know, it's not the issue
whether I voted for it or I didn't vote for it, otherwise for the war against the war.
The fact is that history, in this case, as in most other cases, turns out the way some
kind of will, which is a combination of individual and collective will, works its way out.
Yeah, and part of what makes it a challenging, part of what makes the sartrean existentialist
analysis of this sort of thing, such a challenging way of approaching questions about your
own life is trying to come to grips with the implications of that fact.
So in one way, you might think this philosophy is an especially useful philosophy for
thinking your way through times of crisis.
On the other hand, it's always a question for you whether the time that we are in, the
situation that I confront right here and right now is the time of crisis.
Is this the time when it's important for me to drop everything that I'm doing and devote
my entire energies to stopping this large-scale sociopolitical pattern of events from unfolding?
Many of us, including some people who were in favor of characterizing things as a war on
terror and many people who were opposed to it, many of those people decided, "Well, no,
this isn't really the time of crisis.
The government has it under control.
It's okay if I just go to a few protests or if I just endorse the overwhelming demand of the
people to keep us safe at any cost or whatever it was."
People were willing to go along and let that pattern of events unfold.
And so they made the world that they find themselves in now, and in some sense they're
importantly, in some important sense, we are all responsible for that world.
On the flip side, it is worth wondering in any given case whether this time is the emergence
of a crisis, whether it is worth it for me to abandon everything and reject all my other
commitments and devote myself to ending this war or whatever the case may be.
If you're abandoning your commitments to your family and your friends and your profession,
the people that you're letting down might think that you're unbalanced in your assessment
of how grave the risks are.
Well I have two questions in the few minutes that remain.
One is do you think such existentialism is a philosophy that is particularly pertinent
to moments of crisis and not so compelling in moments that are not as critical as the
war or the Second World War or in existential moments of extremity?
And then finally, if we have enough time left over, I wanted to ask you about human
consciousness and the irreducibility of human consciousness to the status of an object.
I don't know if you can relate those two questions, but the one about the crisis I think
is the first one to go with.
Yeah, I'll try.
So it seems as though this is a good philosophy for times of crisis because it forces attention
on the responsibility that we need to take for whatever course of action one chooses.
Of course, it could be that what your circumstances call for is a broad balanced approach
and that you should put your full existential commitment behind a life in which you balance
the needs of your family and your profession and the public claim on your citizenship
and so forth.
But it's nevertheless true that existentialism seems appropriate to crisis moments because
of the way it encourages a wholesale commitment and that wholesale commitment can look
if you're sacrificing other values that you actually care about, your wholesale commitment
to one thing can look like it's unbalanced unless it is the appropriate response to a
situation of genuine crisis.
Part of what drives that, I think, is the way the philosophy undermines the standard excuse
that we give to other people in ourselves for choosing a more balanced life in which trade-offs
between our various commitments are really necessary.
When we're in those situations of trade-off and we have to say no to somebody, what we
typically say is, well, I can't do that because of some external pressure.
And what SART does is take that excuse away from you and point out that the external pressure
really is your choice to put a certain value on the other commitment that's interfering with
the thing that you're giving up.
So it can seem to be more appropriate to modes of crisis although it's not only proper
to that.
And I think this answers a little bit the second question to a certain extent, only in
the sense that if you're in consciousness is not of the order of things, if it's something
that is a nullity, if it's that whole, that is place at the center of the world in which
out of which one can negate what is, one can imagine alternate worlds, it would become
the source of freedom from determination.
And that if consciousness were not this thing of a completely different order than
the existence of freedom and a human action and self-determination would not exist.
And it seems that SART is always calling us back to this sort of empowerment on the one hand,
responsibility on the other.
And finally, there is room for tragedy in his view because he knows that consciousness
suffers from its own nullity and is always going to look for ways to deny its intrinsic
transcendence and freedom and to reduce itself to the order of things.
And it is doomed to failure in all of those attempts but it seems that history is a long
endless series of repetitions of this futile attempt for the in itself to, for the for
itself to reduce self to this, that is of the in itself.
Right.
And our bad faith works.
The the transcendence that we have that enables us to stand back from the situation and
take up one or another attitude toward it, that transcendence wishes to flee from the responsibility.
It wishes to say, well, no, I was forced into that.
And precisely by doing that, it slides into bad faith.
But to quote another famous slogan of SART's philosophy, we are in his view condemned to be free.
And however much we pretend to ourselves in our bad faith that we can evade the responsibility
for these actions, whatever we do in electably counts as the response that we made to the
circumstances in which we find ourselves.
Yes.
And likewise he said, people who presume to object to our pessimism are actually objecting
to the sternness of our optimism.
So we'll leave it there.
We've been speaking with Professor Lanier Anderson from the philosophy department here at
Stanford on entitled opinions.
I'd like to thank Harris Feinstein, who's back with us as production manager.
Thanks also to Christy P. Keekaro for impersonating Miss Ratchet at the start of our show.
And thanks again Lanier.
We'll have you on another time on entitled opinions.
Thank you.
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