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13 (“Lack” of) Fathers and Sons
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230 13 Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness and dies by chance. —Sartre The moment a man questions the meaning and value of life, he is sick, since objectively neither has any existence; by asking this question one is merely admitting to a store of unsatisfied libido to which something else must have happened, a kind of fermentation leading to sadness and depression. —Freud Sartre is a spectacular example of a philosopher who employed the notions of “apprehending” and the “inaccessible” in a dialectical tension throughout his philosophical career. He both spoke of nothing as hidden in human experience—as our having access to everything—and yet asserted that a great deal of that which is, is “inapprehensible.” Early in his philosophical career, in the early sections of Being and Nothingness, Sartre made clear his position that with regard to human experience “nothing is hidden.” He concurred with Nietzsche’s repudiation of “the illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene.”1 In line with Hegel’s rejection of the Kantian noumenal realm, Sartre held “what [the phenomenon ] is, it is absolutely, for it reveals itself as it is . . . it is absolutely indicative of itself.”2 Being is not concealed in some way behind the phenomena, but rather “is simply the condition of all revelation.”3 And yet, as such, “Being will be disclosed to us by some kind of immediate access.”4 Immediate access, for Sartre, included experiences such as boredom, nausea, and so on. These are the phenomena of being as it is manifested. For Sartre, there are also those features of human experience which are accessible to us but have been hitherto unapprehended. The for-itself (“Lack” of) Fathers and Sons: Sartre and Freud is a hidden reality insofar as it remains unreflected upon; my original choice is typically unrevealed as a manifestation of my pursuit of the fundamental project of being the in-itself-for-itself.5 However, Sartre went much further and spoke of the unknowable or inapprehensible throughout Being and Nothingness. Even though the being of the phenomenon is coextensive with the phenomenon, it is not subject to the condition that it exists only insofar as it reveals itself. Hence being surpasses the knowledge which we have of it and provides the basis for such knowledge.6 There are many other features of human experience that are inapprehensible as well: (1) when another person looks at me, I experience the inapprehensibility of the subjectivity of the Other as this subjectivity experiences itself—such apprehension of the Other is an ontological impossibility ;7 (2) “I am inaccessible to myself”8 because I cannot make myself an object for myself;9 (3) my senses are inapprehensible; (4) my body, or my flesh,10 is inapprehensible; (5) it is impossible for me to apprehend the evanescent contingency which the for-itself has derived from the initself (facticity)—it is impossible to grasp facticity in its brute nudity11 or as it happens;12 (6) it is impossible to apprehend the in-itself-for-itself as a metaphysical being;13 and (7) freedom assumes death as the inapprehensible limit of its subjectivity.14 This dialectical tension in Sartre’s position is clearly demonstrated by considering two examples. First, Sartre developed his account of existential psychoanalysis in order to reveal how original choices manifested an individual’s fundamental pursuit of being: such original choices were not immediately accessible and required some assistance in accessing them. Second, Sartre’s analysis of the for-itself included “an apprehension of being as a lack of being.”15 Sartre wrote, “the fissure within consciousness is a nothing except . . . that it can have being only as we do not see it.”16 Nothingness is apprehended as a “rupture” in being, as such it “does not refer us elsewhere to another being; it is only a perpetual reference of self to self.”17 As illustrated by this example, Sartre’s approach was quite self-consciously, transcendentally circular in nature—he was simultaneously speaking of what it is we apprehend, while noting that he was identifying (in this case, nothingness) that which makes possible our capacity for apprehending in the first place. To do so, he believed, was to establish the connection of consciousness with the world. In Sartre’s view, if there were no such thing as consciousness, there would be no distinctions or differentiations within the realm of being. Borrowing from Spinoza’s and Hegel’s basic principle that “all determination...