April 2007

"Sartre and Intersubjectivity" (vol. 1. issue 4)

Recently I voiced to some colleagues the observation that the more psychologically astute our culture grows, the more removed from others in the world we seem to become. It is a foundational principle of the School of Holistic Studies that self-comprehension can never be fully achieved in isolation. Our human essence emerges from engagements with others in the world. So it is true that our holistic programs value field practicums, externships, and cohorts, wherein students and faculty develop personally and collectively through projects of experiential learning. This application of information through social engagement with others provides an existential thread to the fabric of holistic studies, whose weave includes consciousness studies and integral theory, as well and somatic and transpersonal psychology. Jean Paul Sartre has much to say on this topic of self-understanding through encountering others.

In his essay Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, maintains that self-realization is a social process. Because we realize ourselves by interacting with others, others are as real and necessary to us as our own self. According to Sartre, "I can obtain any truth at all about myself only by way of some other person. The other is indispensable to my own existence, and so is he just as much regarding my knowledge of myself." We can understand this intersubjectivity if we recognize that in order to be courageous or loving, we must act courageously and lovingly toward others. That is, if we are to be honest, we must display honesty in our personal and public life. It is not enough that we should think that we are courageous or loving or honest. Realization of our self-consciousness is not a result of abstract reasoning or philosophical thought but a product of our freely chosen activities and commitments. We are the sum total of actions and commitments in the world. Self-realization is always a matter of action, a way of living -- in struggle or in complicity -- the concrete human relation which unites self and other.

In the process of discovering the other person, we discover our inner being at the same time. Comprehension of the self for Sartre is the process of placing ourselves in the position of another, thereby assuming his role. "Our roles," according to Sartre in "The Progressive-Regressive Method" essay, "are always future." They appear to us as acts to be carried out, problems to be solved, decisions to be faced, or talents to be realized. By assuming new roles, we engage ourselves in a transformative process of surpassing our past, a future to be created. Selected roles of others are projects of "an oriented life," an affirmation of our human essence through action."

The nature of our intersubjectivity is manifest by what Sartre refers to in his book Search for a Method as the Progressive-Regressive Method. In the process of living, we necessarily project ourselves outward into the world, temporarily alienating ourselves from the private realm of our inner subjectivity. We invest our emotional, intellectual, and creative energies into our work projects, which Sartre calls praxis. By praxis, we realize in and through our work a certain revelation of the other. We are subjects insofar as we consciously direct our own projects, and objects, insofar as we submit to the action and nature of the other.

The word "project" is to be understood both as a verb and as a noun. As a verb, "to project" oneself into the other means we move away from our private selves and progress toward the social world. This other could be a job (teaching), art form (painting), institution (JFKU), activity (soup kitchen), cause (pro-life/free choice), or person (spouse/friend). As a noun, one's "project" is one's work. Sartre states, "Man defines himself by his projects." By projecting ourselves outward into some other, we temporarily leave behind (i.e., alienation) the contradictions in our existence; we unveil them for clearer observation and self-assessment. We view our strengths and talents objectively from a distance; we see them as others see them.

Our comprehension is simultaneously progressive toward objectification and regressive toward ourselves. This progressive moment of fusion with another consciousness is not permanent, however. Within moments, we regress, or come back to ourselves. This is essential since not doing so is a form of pathology, like an actor believing that he is the character he plays. We return to ourselves, but with a difference. Having lived in and through the other, however momentarily, we have changed ourselves by having new thoughts, goals, strengths, and weaknesses. We have enlarged our consciousness and expanded our potentials. It is as if we have looked through another's eyes, or walked in their shoes through the concrete activities, gestures, and commitments of our work. We can now consider who we are and who we are becoming.

The process continues. Within seconds we again project our mind, body and spirit into the other, and again return. This ongoing dialectic of progressing toward the other and returning to ourselves results in the continual re-creation of who we are and who and what others are. While this may sound abstract and overly academic, this process is nothing more than our life as we live it in its total movement and arc, gathering our neighbors, ourselves, our environment and history into a unified experience. The progressive-regressive method is a matter of our "past surpassed," a process of "past-surpassing." The fusion of self and other produces a new self and a different other.

This last statement needs explanation. The immediate juxtaposition of self and other possesses great transformational potential not only for our self but also for the other. For example, say that over the course of a semester, a teacher projects himself with great energy into his students' learning process. He learns how the students think, how they learn and fail to learn. He strategically uses this knowledge to devise pedagogical techniques and opportunities with which to engage his students. The cumulative effect of the dialectical give-and-take between teacher and students is the slow transformation of the students. This assumes, of course, an ideal process wherein the teacher's energy of commitment is greater than the students' possible indifference or unwillingness to learn.

Conversely, the teacher can be affected by students' ongoing progressive-regressive realization of their own self-consciousness. Consider as an example, a new assistant professor who places himself in the learners' role of his students over many months, or even years. If the students are consistently hostile, bored, or simply indifferent to instruction and the material, the professor's praxis will likely be shaped along the same attitudinal lines. As such, the professor loses energy and commitment to purpose. He no longer diligently prepares his classes; he is indifferent to his students' learning-needs. He has become the other, and it is unbecoming of him as a professional. He either continues teaching as such, transcends his condition by engaging enthusiastic students in the future, or, perhaps, leaves higher education altogether.

Students and teachers are bound together in the process of their engagement. Ignorance confers on the students a strong connection with the professor when they desire to learn. At the same time, the professor is dependent on students for his own existence. If he does not know himself as a teacher through his students, he does not know his students and, therefore, cannot help them learn. The professor needs students in order to fulfill his project and realize himself. It is by fully recognizing himself in his students that he realizes himself as "free" and "self-determined."

In the progressive-regressive process of committed living, we perpetually go beyond the condition of our lives by becoming a variety of others. We determine our life situation by transcending it, objectifying ourselves through our work, relationships, gestures, and commitments. We comprehend ourselves through projects which bring about the objectification of our inner subjectivity: our abstract inner lives become concretely real. Our projects, say for example writing a novel, or book of poetry, concretize our ideas, feelings, and materials. Ideas and feelings are who we are as authors, externalizing our expressive subjectivity in the material of language. Through the project of writing, our aims, aspirations, and ends take objective form and produce consequences in society. It is through this writing that our unformed potentials become substantially real. By objectifying our subjectivity, we overcome isolation from others and creatively realize ourselves as self-conscious beings. The consequence of self-comprehension is creativity.

Creativity unfolds from the dialectic of our experience and the experience of the other. This is why the other is indispensable to our existence. The objects, relationships, and events we create as projects are signs of our creative formation of ourselves. Significations reveal to us the nature of people and their relations across the fabric of society. We can learn about others and the nature of their goals by studying their projects. Sartre believes in a radical teleology (i.e., purposefulness) that is social rather than cosmic. That is, we can give our life meaning and purpose by productive engagements with people. We are the product of those engagements. Sartre lays emphasis on human freedom and choice, rejecting, therefore, the Marxist "big laws of history" hypothesis that reduces human acts and art to symbolic manifestations of unyielding universal laws. On the contrary, we freely determine and transcend ourselves over a lifetime by choosing the roles of others whose natures fulfill our needs and compensate for our deficiencies.

So, for example, Sartre himself took on the project of writing a multi-volume biography of Flaubert. Why Flaubert? Because Flaubert was everything Sartre was not. Flaubert was an aesthete, feminine taciturn, fearful of death, and self-conscious. Easily humiliated by the success of his fellow students and his brother's academic success, Flaubert was an average student. Fastidious by nature, he could spend weeks writing and rewriting the same sentence of his fiction. Sartre, on the other hand, was gregarious, opinionated, and energetic. For him, death was an absurdity. He was a gifted intellectual of the highest stripe. An energetic activist, Sartre ostensibly would call on colleagues to join him marching with striking workers at the local factory. My point here is that by choosing to become the other with qualities we ourselves lack, like Sartre, we consciously decide to expand our mental and emotional possibilities. The realization of what is possible in life comes not from dreaming or conceptualizing, but from the creation of an object/event in the social world.

As such, I see Sartre's progressive-regressive method as a possible antidote to racism, sexism, and all forms of xenophobia. The synthesis and imagination required by our projects are conducive to morality. By becoming others who we do not easily understand or appreciate, we can learn to see as others see, pushing back the limits of our sense perception, expanding our consciousness. We may learn to appreciate what is good, beautiful, and true in other races, genders, nationalities, and religions. When Flaubert said "I myself am Madame Bovary," Sartre saw him trying to artistically "metamorphose himself into a woman," and thereby refusing to become a petit bourgeois, in favor of larger human possibilities. Insofar as Sartre's biography project utilizes the creative imagination, it is an assertion of human freedom. Sartre's project is an integration of critical and disciplined feeling with heartfelt reason. His comprehension of Flaubert involves an artistic form of thinking displaying empathy and personal warmth.

The perpetual recreation of oneself is what makes an intellectual like Sartre an "artist." Just as an artist transforms the world around him by the realization of his creative vision, so the artist-intellectual must constantly form and transform his mind in the spirit of what can be. The artist-intellectual's greatest weapon against the banality and cruelty of the world is his progressive-regressive reach toward that which is possible and preferable in life. Marx stated, and Sartre agrees, that everything that exists must be subjected to ongoing criticism. Criticism which doesn't degenerate into cynicism assumes a position that refuses to settle for anything less than what might be. It is the artist-intellectual, therefore, who creates objective events and relationships as signs of life's rich possibilities. Sartre argues in "Existentialism," that because our behavior creates values and relations which others may live out, we are "obliged to perform exemplary acts." We must choose our projects with artful integrity in accordance not with some abstract moral geometry, but in accordance to a personal vision of a preferable world.

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