Philosophy: Sartre on Love (with Kantian and Buddhist rejoinders)

Monday we covered Sartre’s section Concrete Relations With Others in “Being and Nothingness”. It paints an apparently dreary picture of love, and indeed, all of our relationships. But, perhaps one can find truth in its pessimism and acceptance of its apparent prescriptions for life. Or one can seek convergences with Kant and Buddhism that may help rescue Sartre from his own deep malaise.

The chapter proceeds in three parts: Love, Language, Masochism; Indifference, Desire, Hate, Sadism; and “Being-With” (Mitsein) and the “We”. We’ll look now at the first two of these. An important thing to note to begin with is that Sartre takes our relations with others (he uses the Hegelian notion of ‘Others’) are fundamental to our very being. To call them ‘others’ would suggest that they are incidental – ‘Other’ expresses that they are essential. We are who we are only when we have interacted and because of our interactions with Others.

The first section describes our basic relationship of attraction. We are attracted to an Other because we are fundamentally a ‘lack’ and need to be made whole, to be grounded. Love is the first, and perhaps most natural, way we seek to ground ourselves. However, we want this grounding to be a certainty, we fear grounding ourselves, our lives, in anything that could at any moment wrench away and leave us to fall apart. So we implicitly want to objectify our lover, to limit his/her freedom. But if we’re successful, we have simply won obedience or compliance, we don’t have the love of a free being.

This moves us to language, whereby we seek to fascinate the Other, to make his/her freedom express itself upon our facticity, our history and life. We tell stories, show our wit, speak lovingly, and so on in order to make ourselves the center of the Other’s universe. This is a mutual activity, I want the Other to see the world through my eyes (my history, my way of thinking), but she wants the same of me.

Each of us will win/give victories to the Other, hopefull that the Other will reciprocate. If the Other does not reciprocate, but ignores my story, refuses to take my perspective, he/she will have expressed his/her power over me. As this happens, I am likely to move to masochism, which is not necessarily a sexual term here. It refers simply to one’s attempt to make him/herself an object for the Other, to throw oneself fully to the feet of the Other, with the hope that they will use you. When the Other complies, I have won a small victory, I have imposed myrself upon the freedom of the Other. By throwing my whole body at the Other, I may win where language had failed me.

Conversely, at any moment, a second way of relating to others may take over. This is the way of aversion, and begins with simple indifference. Indifference is our attempt to cut off the power of the Other at the very first look. We give a cold, unconcerned look at the Other and casually look away, as if we had seen nothing at all. We attempt here to objectify the Other, to deny that we are looking at a free being; but in the process we objectify ourselves, we deny our own freedom from interacting with the other, we turn ourselves into a body with eyes, with no subject behind them. But in objectifying ourselves in front of the Other, we implicitly recognize his/her freedom, and likewise, our self-objectification is only a free choice we make and moments later our freedom, the very fact that we are not a mere object, reasserts itself.

Thus we move to desire, since we cannot deny the freedom of the other, we attempt to possess the Other’s freedom by possessing his/her body (or objectivity). This is an important stage for Sartre; he feels that desire is an ontological, fundamental, aspect of life. It is an immediate response to the first Others we recognize in life, our parents. Youth and maturity is a process of losing that possession and trying to replace it with Others. Sexual relations here represent the culmination of our attempt to possess the Other, but even in friendships and/or work relationships we can see subtle grabs for possession, power-plays, etc. But, though we may succeed in possessing the body of the Other, we cannot possess his/her freedom. Our desire is thwarted.

To deal with this we move to sadism, the attempt to feel nothing, to deny one’s own freedom in an attempt to deny the freedom of the Other. This seems to be an almost exclusively sexual category, one obscenely attempts to deny the freedom of the other by withdrawing, becoming mechanical, unresponsive. I think in modern parlance this is refered to as ‘angry sex’. But, as with indifference, our freedom inevitably exerts itself again – we look into the eyes of the Other and realize his/her freedom and immediately realize our own freedom. The more we can avoid our freedom, the more ‘angry sex’ works to distract us from the reality of our relationship, but it cannot succeed indefinitely.

If this is not dealt with, it inevitably leads to hate, open hostility toward the Other. How many relationships go this route? This building upward of intensity, of denial of one another’s freedom, and the culminating hatred when the denial inevitably fails.

Sartre suggests that we are trapped in these motions, though not necessarily rising up to the levels of sadism, masochism, or hate. It is simply inevitable because our basic nature is one of uncertainty that we can’t help but want to overcome. The upshot seems to be that when we accept this and learn to recognize our own moments of trying to deny the freedom of the Other, we can keep our relationships on acceptable levels, and perhaps (though Sartre doesn’t say it) cultivate an attitude of acceptance of the Other’s freedom.

The Kantian analogue is found in Kant’s distinction betwen the phenomenal realm, wherein our drives, desires, and inclinations reign supreme, and the noumenal realm, where morality, dignity, and freedom are found. Sartre would suggest that the phenomenal realm goes ‘all the way down’ and that there is no separate realm, that morality and dignity are merely constructs of our drives, desires, and inclinations. I side with Kant here though. And in doing so I would say that while many, if not most, of our relationships in life will fall into the Sartrian cycle of domination, there is the possibility to see the Other on the level of his/her dignity and freedom and accept that fully. In fact I think this very realization or acceptance of another way of dealing with Others is pivotal to actually finding love. If we believe that we are doomed to power-plays with our lovers and can hope only for a sort of mutual acceptance of this, we create a self-fulfilling prophesy of dissatisfaction.

Our Buddhist response would be to likewise agree, to a limited extent. Within ignorance follows greed and hatred, desire and aversion. So its not surprising that we often fall within this cycle that Sartre describes, but, as with Kant, there is in Buddhism a way out of the cycle. We can think of the Sartrian cycle as our relationships skirting back and forth on the surface of a calm pond. As long as we’re dashing back and forth, we remain on the surface (in superficial relationships). But we can calm this back/forth action. We can cultivate contentment as an antidote to greed/desire; loving-kindness as an antidote to hatred/aversion. As our mental flittering back and forth begins to calm, we naturally begin to ‘sink in’; the intensity of desires and aversions softens, but the feelings gain depth instead. One also begins to see the depth of the Other, as so much more than a freedom to be objectified.

This depth is the antidote to ignorance, it is progress on the path, steps toward living fully and loving wholly, something I’m afraid Sartre would deny is even possible.