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Four. Sartre: Hyperbolic Responsibility
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121 four Sartre: Hyperbolic Responsibility The Phenomenological Origins of Responsibility Existential Responsibility Sartre’s philosophy of responsibility is marked by a constitutive paradox, as it develops a post-metaphysical sense of responsibility while leading the metaphysicaltraditiontoaparoxysm.Indeed,Sartre’sthoughtreflectsthe peculiar merging of a phenomenological and post-theological account of responsibility with the Cartesian paradigm of subjectivity and will.1 I will attempt in the following pages to highlight the phenomenological and ontological origins of responsibility as Sartre thematizes them—existence as priorto,andindeedwithoutessence;originalfreedomandoriginalchoice asopposedtofreewill;responsibilityasidentifiedwithexistenceitself;the determinative role of the nothing in Sartre’s concept of responsibility; the invention of law in ethical decision, i.e., in a decision that takes place withoutnorms ;theabsolutizingofresponsibilityandtheovercomingoffacticity ; the problematics of authenticity and bad faith—in short, an original or ontological responsibility. But it will also be necessary to mark the hermeneuticallimitsofthisaccountofresponsibility ,duetoSartre’sdependence ontheCartesiantradition.ResponsibilityinSartrederivesfromtheunique hermeneutical situation of his philosophy, and thus relies on existential phenomenology (in the wake of the Nietzschean thought of the death of God) no less than on a Cartesian stress on subjectivity and the primacy of theegoanditswill.Sartrethusmarksasortofturningpointinthehistory 122 · the origins of responsibility ofresponsibilitywearefollowing,inwhichthemoderntraditionofwillful subjectivity—and the motif of authorship, in Sartre’s thinking of responsibility —isbroughttoaparoxysm,whileatthesametimenewpossibilities come into the open. That is, Sartre both prefigured and announced, if he did not fully exploit, a situation clearly described by Derrida in this way: To take up the question of responsibility again, even if one does not agree with the Sartrean metaphysics of freedom, there is nonetheless, in his analysis of decision, of a responsibility left to the other without criterion, without norm, without prescription, in the undecidable alone (cf. L’existentialisme est un humanisme), there is something there that can be separated from a Cartesian metaphysics of freedom, of free will.2 These new possibilities, explored and developed in his phenomenological ontology, remain limited by Sartre’s heavy dependency on Cartesianism and his insufficient distance from this inheritance. Nowhere does this tension appear more clearly than in his thinking of responsibility. On the one hand, Sartre takes a phenomenological approach to philosophical questions, that is, emphasizes a new attentiveness to the givenness of phenomena , by turning away from the metaphysical and theological constructsdismantledbyNietzsche .Attendingtothestructuresofanessencelessexistence ,Sartrerenewsourunderstandingofresponsibilitybygiving us access to its phenomenological origins. On the other hand, he relies on the traditional motifs of authorship, subjectivity, and will. Sartre thus undertakes to develop an ontological analysis of responsibility, based on original freedom and a post-theological analysis of existence, and yet he still retains a very classical definition of responsibility based on willful subjectivity and authorship. As one can read at the beginning of the chapter on freedom and responsibility in Being and Nothingness, Sartre is still relyingonthattraditionalsensewhenheprovideshisdefinitionofresponsibility , the only definition he ever gave: “We are taking the word ‘responsibility ’ in its ordinary sense as ‘consciousness (of) being the incontestable author of an event or of an object.’”3 Certainly, as we will see, that sense of authorship differs from the traditional accountability for one’s actions (and is even paradoxical as it includes not only what I have not done but also perhaps what exceeds my capacities), since we are dealing here with an authorship with respect to my being, and to the whole world as a way of being. But in a sense this [3.229.124.236] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 03:01 GMT) Sartre: Hyperbolic Responsibility · 123 is precisely the problem, as the classical definition of responsibility is thus brought to a paroxysm, becoming a hyperbolic responsibility. Nonetheless, a paroxysm is always paradoxical, exceeding itself, and this hyperbolic inflation of responsibility as accountability will in fact lead to the exceeding of that tradition, opening onto other senses, if one understands that Sartre extends the scope of authorship so far that he ends up deconstructing it.4 For instance, Sartre’s philosophy retrieves existential origins of responsibility that are distinct from the mere authorship of an agent-subject. Responsibility arises out of that event named ‘the death of God,’ and Sartre attempts to draw the most radical consequences of this event, explaining that by existentialism, “we mean only that God does not exist and that we have to face all the consequences of this.”5 This is why Sartre states that the existentialist “thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him” (HE, 40). By stating that God is dead, one is no longer able to justify one...