Berghahn Books

Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge

Author(s): Karsten Harries
Source: Sartre Studies International, Vol. 10, No. 1 (2004), pp. 25-38
Published by: Berghahn Books
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23513030
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 Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge

Karsten Harries

The phrase 'Spirit of Revenge' is taken from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke

Zarathustra, where it names the deepest source of human self-alien
ation. In Sartre - but perhaps I should be more precise and say in
- as I will
Being and Nothingness try to show, the spirit of revenge
finds paradigmatic expression.1
No philosopher in the United States has as profound and
informed an understanding of Sartre as Ron Santoni, as even a brief
look at a list of his publications will suggest. By contrast, Sartre is
not a philosopher to whom I have given a great deal of thought in
the past two decades. Other philosophers, such as Heidegger, Kant
and Nicholas of Cusa have mattered more to me. Indeed most of the
philosophical discussions I have had in recent years that touched in
some way on Sartre were with Ron Santoni, discussion that helped
me clarify my own thoughts. An echo of these discussions can be
heard in Santoni's recent book, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authen
ticity in Sartre's Early Philosophy.2 In that book he explicitly
addresses and takes issue with some of the critical points I had made.
I shall return to some of these. At this point I only want to say that
what then mattered and now matters to me is not so much to deter

mine what Sartre really meant. I wonder indeed whether that is the
sort of question that permits a definitive answer: do we not always
construct caricatures of the philosophers to whom we turn to clarify
our own thoughts? We can only hope that these will be illuminating
caricatures. But what matters to me is not so much Sartre, as the

question: what does it mean to live responsibly? What kind of

responsibility is demanded of us? Or, in the terms of the title of San
toni's book: What would it mean to exist authentically?

Volume - 25 -
Sartre Studies International, 10, Issue 1, 2004

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 ICarsten Harries

The Demonization of Seriousness

But before returning to what is at issue in our disagreement, let me

say a bit more about what Sartre has meant to me. I pointed out that
in recent years Sartre has not figured much in what I have written.
That was not always so. Being and Nothingness thus figured impor
tantly in my dissertation on nihilism,3 which located the origin of
nihilism in the inability of freedom to bind itself. Is there anything in
experience that provides a transcendent guarantee of values, other
than the subject itself?

But instead of seeing that the transcendences there posited are main
tained in their being by my own transcendence, people will assume them
upon my surging up in the world; they come from God, from nature,
from my 'nature,' from society ... These abortive attempts to stifle free
dom under the weight of being (they collapse with the sudden upsurge
of anguish before freedom) show sufficiendy that freedom in its founda
tion coincides with the nothingness that is at the heart of man ... Human
nature cannot receive its ends, as we have seen, either from the outside or
from a so-called 'inner' nature. It chooses them and by this very choice
confers upon them a transcendent existence as the external limit of its
projects. From this point of view ... human reality in and through its very
upsurge decides to define its own being by its ends. It is therefore the
positing of my ultimate ends which characterizes my being which is iden
tical with the sudden thrust of freedom which is mine.4

As Sartre knew all too well, life becomes precarious when values
are determined by the choice with which the individual determines
him- or herself. If I am truly free, what lets me fix value to this rather
than to that? So understood freedom has to lead to an understand

ing of the world as it is in itself as a mute, meaningless desert that is

transformed into a meaningful world by the upsurge of freedom. But
just that upsurge, that embodiment of freedom or descent into an
inevitably particular situation, remains unintelligible.
Despite such unintelligibility, I did feel that Sartre offered me a
key to the spiritual situation of modern man and more to
especially
an understanding of modern art. In my first book, The Meaning of
Modern Art, I tried to apply this key. Every work of art, I pointed
out, is a matter of choice and intention:

To choose, man must possess criteria to guide his choice. Imagine having
to decide between two courses of action. Either there is a reason to
choose one over the other or there is no such reason. In the latter case
we cannot choose at all: if we are not to stand paralyzed before the alter
natives, like the ass of Buridan before the two piles of hay, we must
'choose' without reason, a 'choice' which cannot be from
distinguished
accident, spontaneity, inspiration, nature - call it what you will. If, on the

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 Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge

other hand, there is a good reason, one can ask what makes it so: is it

good because we chose it, or is its validity independent of our choice?

Can the reason be freely chosen? Why this alternative and not another?
Was this a rational choice? The original problem reappears. Freedom is

possible only where it is limited. To affirm himself and his future man
must at least believe that he is given criteria, which he can use to arrive at
decisions. He may be mistaken in this; his belief may be unwarranted and
in bad faith. Still, without such belief there is no choice.5

I went on to point out that such criteria may not pull us in

incompatible directions, that they must fit together to form what
may be called an ideal image of man, some understanding of what
constitutes the good life. Appealing to Sartre, I suggested that such
an image is the goal of a fundamental project that can be uncovered
in all human activity. Sartre's understanding of the fundamental pro
ject, I thought, gave me a key to the riddle that is modern art. Here
is what I wrote:

I agree with Sartre that this fundamental project is a project to become

like God, i.e., 'fundamentally man is the desire to be, and the existence of
this desire is not to be established by an empirical induction; it is the
result of an a priori description of the being of the for-itself, since desire
is lack and since the for-itself is the being which is to itself its own lack of

being.'6 This description of man remains empty as long as we are not told
how man seeks to be like God. Different conceptions of God correspond
to different interpretations of man's fundamental project. Which inter

pretation is accepted depends, according to Sartre, on the free choice of

the individual. (MMA xiii, fn. 3)

Even then that seemed to me to overburden freedom. And so I

claimed that Sartre 'misinterprets the human situation when he "rec
ognizes nothing before the original upsurge of human freedom."
Man's interpretation of the fundamental project is conditioned by
what he is, and what he is, is determined in part by his place in his
tory'(ibid.).
Here already there is an insistence that freedom be situated and
bound in a way that Sartre's opposition of In-itself and For-itself
prevents him from doing. My dissatisfaction with Sartre gained
sharper focus in a chapter I called 'The Demonization of Sensuous
ness'. That chapter began with the familiar distinction between
'naked' and 'nude'. I quoted Kenneth Clark: 'To be naked is to be
deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embar
rassment most of us feel in that condition. The word "nude", on the
other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone.'7

Given that distinction it is only to be expected that Christian art

should have been suspicious of the nude, for to present human

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 Karsten Harries

beings as nude is to present them as at ease with their bodies. But

this, as St Augustine reminds us, is denied to fallen humanity: 'By

the just retribution of the sovereign God whom we refused to be
subject to and serve, our flesh, which was subjected to us, now tor
ments us by insubordination.'8 According to Augustine human
beings discover their bodies to be shameful when they recognise that
they shatter their dreams of freedom. Subject to sexual desire we
recognise our distance from divine autonomy. In our shame we taste
the failure of our project of pride. By positing the autonomy of the
free spirit as the highest value, pride posits the body and its claims as
something to be suppressed. Pride necessarily leads to an experience
of my flesh as an independent demonic force, as, yes, myself, but not
really me. Sartre moves explicitly in this orbit:
Shame is the feeling of an original fall, not because of the fact that I may
have committed this or that particular fault, but simply that I have 'fallen'
into the world in the midst of things and that I need the mediation of the
Other to be what I am.

Modesty and in particular the fear of being surprised in a state of naked

ness are only a symbolic specification of original shame; the body symbol
izes here our defenseless state as objects. To put on clothes is to hide
one's object-state; it is to claim the right of seeing without being seen;
that is, to be pure subject. This is why the Biblical symbol of the fall after
the original sin is the fact that Adam and Eve 'know that they are naked'.
(BN 288-289)

How Christian the atheist Sartre here sounds, so Christian in fact

that one has to wonder whether his ontology and are
anthropology
not unduly burdened by an all too uncritically assumed Christian
inheritance. Like Augustine, Sartre makes pride the foundation of
shame. Pride indeed gains an even greater significance, for while
according to Augustine pride rules fallen humanity, Sartre makes
pride constitutive of human being. There can be no redemption
from its rule, if pride does indeed constitute our fundamental pro
ject. That is why for Sartre there can be no reconciliation of spirit
and flesh, no full incarnation of spirit in flesh, no escape from shame.
And this much I think we must grant Sartre: to the extent, and I
want to underscore the conditional, to the extent that human beings
remain subject to pride, they will be prevented from giving sensu
ousness its due. Pride has to lead to a disturbed, ambivalent relation
ship to all that threatens what Sartre calls 'the right of seeing
without being seen; that is, to be pure subject'. We may well ask how
'right' here is to be understood. What is the ground of this supposed
right? The answer can only be: a freedom that refuses to be bound.

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 Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge

That this refusal has to lead to such a disturbed relationship is born

out in embarrassing detail by Sartre's writings. Consider the follow
ing passage: 'The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything
which "gapes open." ... Beyond any doubt her sex is a mouth and a
voracious mouth which devours the penis - a fact which can easily
lead to the idea of castration. The amorous act is the castration of
the man' (BN 613-614). We should always be on our guard when
anyone, and especially a philosopher, uses the expression 'beyond
any doubt': what really is beyond any doubt does not need to be
signalled in that way. It would be odd to say, 'beyond any doubt
2 + 2 = 4'. The very expression invites us to question what is said to
be beyond any doubt, invites us to inquire into just what it is that
must be presupposed to speak this way. Sartre here presupposes what
I would consider a caricature of human being. But I also find it an
extraordinarily illuminating caricature. Sexist as it no doubt is, it yet
captures something essential about our modern situation and I do
not think that I was mistaken when I found in this caricature a key to
much modern art.
Especially revealing in this connection is what Sartre has to say
about the slimy, which he discusses as an 'antivalue', a discussion
that carries him to extraordinary rhetorical heights. Sartre seems to
have experienced what he is speaking of. Just listen:

Throw a slimy substance; it draws itself out, it displays itself, it flattens

itself, it is soft, touch the slimy; it does not flee, it yields ... The slimy is

compressible. It gives us at first the impression that it is a being which

can be possessed Only at the very moment
.... when I believe that I pos
sess it, behold, by a curious reversal, it possesses me. Here appears its
essential character: its softness is leechlike .... I open my hands, I want to
let go of the slimy and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at me ... . It is
a soft, yielding action, a moist feminine sucking, it lives obscurely under

my fingers, and I sense it like a dizziness; it draws me to it as the bottom

of a precipice might draw me. Here is something like a tactile fascination
in the slimy ... (BN 608-609)

We should note not only the disgust, but also the fascination. An
adequate understanding of human being has to do justice to both. If
the human project were adequately described by the desire to pos
sess, there could only be disgust, but not this fascination, this desire
to surrender, to let go. The appeal of the slimy thus demonstrates

that Sartre's understanding of the fundamental project fails to do

justice to what human beings most deeply want.

At this instant I suddenly understand the snare of the slimy: it is a fluidity
which me and which compromises
holds me; I cannot slide on this slime,
all its suction cups hold me back; it can not slide over me, it clings to me

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 Karsten Harries

like a leech. The sliding, however, is not simply denied as in the case of a

solid; it is degraded. The slimy seems to lend itself to me. It invites me;
for a body of slime at rest is not noticeably distinct from a body of very
dense liquid. But it is a trap. The sliding is sucked in by the sliding sub
stance and it leaves its traces upon me. The slime is like a liquid seen in a

nightmare where all the properties are animated by a sort of life and turn
back against me. Slime is the revenge of the In-itself. A sickly-sweet, fem
inine revenge which will be symbolized on another level by the quality

'sugary.'(BN 609)

The word 'revenge' demands special attention. What sense does it

make to speak of the revenge of the In-itself? Revenge is taken by
someone who feels slighted or dealt with unjustly. It presupposes
that what has been violated in some way partakes of spirit. But does
Sartre not understand the In-itself in opposition to the For-itself,
and thus to spirit? Talk of slime as 'the revenge of the In-itself' ani
mates or spiritualises it. Sartre does indeed speak of slime as 'ani
mated by a sort of life'. There is the suggestion that the very project
of wanting to possess the In-itself, to render the human being, to use
the Cartesian expression, the master and possessor of nature, has to
do an injustice to nature, especially to our own nature. There is also
a suggestion that the For-itself may not be placed in such simple
opposition to the In-itself, that they are inextricably entangled.
Unlike God, the human being cannot be his own foundation. To
demand this is to become alienated from our own human nature. It
is precisely the one-sidedness of Sartre's understanding of the funda
mental project that elevates the slimy into a key symbol and endows
it with a demonic fascination:

To touchthe slimy is to risk being dissolved in sliminess. Now this disso

lution by itself is frightening enough, because it is the absorption of the
For-itself by the In-itself, as ink is absorbed by a blotter. But it is still
more frightening in that the metamorphosis is not into a thing
just (bad
as that would be), but into slime ...

The horror of the slimy is the horror that time itself might become slimy,
that facticity might progress continually and insensibly and absorb the
For-itself which exists it. It is the fear, not of death, of the
pure In-itself,
not of nothingness, but of a particular type of being, which does not
actually exist
any more than the In-itself-For-itself and which is only rep
resented by the slimy. It is an idea which I reject with all my strength and
which haunts me as value haunts my being, an ideal in which the founda
tionless In-itself has priority over the For-itself. We shall call it an Anti
value. (BN 610-11)

The slimy is a symbol of Sartre's devil, and as such it shadows a

beauty that is a symbol of that God, who, if Sartre is right, is the self

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 Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge

contradictory goal of our deepest striving. What we most deeply

want, according to Sartre, is to be our own foundation. From this it
follows that value 'can be revealed only to an active freedom which
makes it exist as value by the sole fact of recognizing it as such. It
follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and that
nothing, absolutely nothing, justifies me in adopting this or that par
ticular value, this or that particular scale of values. As a being by
whom values exist, I am unjustifiable' (BN 38). Every human being,
according to Sartre, seeks to lose himself as man in order to become
God. Were that possible, freedom would determine my being. That
is the ideal we vainly pursue. And just the recognition of such vanity,
the recognition that to become God we would have to lose ourselves
as man, strengthens the call of a counter-ideal that tempts us by
beckoning us to give up vain dreams of autonomy, dreams of laying
foundations firm enough to support us and buildings that might
provide shelter. The counter-ideal, too, tempts us to lose ourselves as
man, but not now to become God, but to allow ourselves to sink
back into that chaotic life from which we emerged. But this, too,
means to lose ourselves as the human beings we are. A full self-affir
mation demands that we renounce both Value and Antivalue, both
ideal and counter-ideal. This is to say, a full self-affirmation demands
that we free ourselves from what Sartre calls the fundamental pro
ject. But this demand makes sense only if we reject the claim that
this project is indeed fundamental, i. e. constitutive of human being.
I pointed out that in Sartre's understanding of the fundamental
project I found what I took to be a key to the meaning of modern
art. But that book concluded by calling for an art beyond modern
art, for a postmodern art, if you will, although in 1968, when that
book was published' the term 'postmodern' was still in the future.
But how could I hold out the possibility of such a postmodern art,
if, as I had claimed, I agreed with Sartre when he made the project
to be God constitutive of human being? So when the book was
translated into Japanese a few years later I felt it necessary to include
the following qualification in the Preface to the Japanese edition:

In this connection I would like to take back one assertion made in the
book: in the Preface I express agreement with Sartre's thesis that the fun
damental project of man is the project to become I should
like God. not
have spoken of man, but of Western man, and even that is a caricature,
but one that captures something essential. The project to become like
God is born of an exaggerated demand for security that in turn presup

poses an inability to accept man as he is, vulnerable, and mortal. With the
death of God that desire must go unfulfilled. Nihilism and modern art
are essentially post-Christian phenomena. If in modern art the tradition

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 Karsten Harries

of Western art is coming to an end, the necessity of this ending has its
foundation in the development of the West.9

Full self-affirmation demands that we give up the project of being

like God. But that means that we must substitute for Sartrean authen
ticity an understanding that recognises that we are truly ourselves only
if we are able to discover rather than to create meaning in the world,
and that means first of all, when we are able to recognise the other.
Spirit without must answer spirit within. But if there is to be such an
answer spirit must be encountered in the world. Logos must incarnate
itself. We experience such incarnation whenever we recognize another
person; also when we experience beauty. In our increasingly objecti
fied world both experiences open windows to transcendence, in
Sartrean language, windows to the For-itself-In-itself.

Can Reason Bind Freedom

In our discussions Santoni insisted that my reading does violence to

what Sartre thought. And he may well be right. Sartre thought a
great deal and what he thought was not always consistent, although
what I admire about Being and Nothingess is precisely its systematic
coherence. That is why it provided me with a useful lens with which
to look at modern art. But is my Sartre not a misleading caricature?
Is Sartre not in fact much closer to the position I advocate than this
caricature suggests? In Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in
Sartre's Early Philosophy, at any rate, Santoni attributes a position to
Sartre that appears not to be so very different from the one I have
just advocated:
Sartre's 'unveiling' of authenticity in Notebooks for an Ethics makes abun
dandy clear ... that for Sartre it is possible to deliver oneself from the tor
menting ontological 'hell' of consciousness's original (bad faith) project of
attaining, self-coincidence, identity, from the project to be Causa Sui or
'God.' In spite of some recalcitrant and misleading passages in Sartre's
writings, it is a misreading of Sartre to conclude, as too many
interpreters
do, that Sartre's philosophy condemns us irreversibly to bad faith and
Sartrean hell. Notebooks for an Ethics makes this unequivocal. Although, for
Sartre, authenticity may not give us the security and foundation for which
we may be looking, it gives us an exit from the torment that comes from
the futile attempt to secure ourselves in being, things, objects, and the
world. We may not be able to suppress our tendency to want this ground
ing, but we can free ourselves from the hell of pursuing it. (BFGF 189)

Did I make too much of certain 'recalcitrant and misleading pas

sages' in Being and Nothingness? That there are passages in that book

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 Sartre and the Spirit of Revenue

that 'clearly suggest' 'an abstract, unsituated freedom, completely

independent of facticity or givens' Santoni grants. But he also insists
that a more comprehensive understanding shows us a Sartre who is
much closer to the position I advocated. I readily grant this point. I
accept Ron's argument that in Notebooks for an Ethics especially we
find an account of authenticity that recalls what Heidegger had to
say about authenticity as the resolute acceptance of Dasein\ essential
guilt, that is, of its acceptance of its inability to be its own founda
tion. I, too, would consider this a presupposition of authenticity.
Sartre, too, Santoni suggests, is led by the futility of the project to
become God to a renunciation of this impossible project and to a
'genuine self-recovery', consistent with its being an 'unstable,
evanescent freedom on which all meaning and values depend'
(BFGF 156-57). I accept further that, despite my charge that
Sartre's freedom remains empty and abstract, Sartre moves towards a
Kantian moral imperative that, so Santoni claims, 'more than Kant's
can provide measure and guidance for free action in concrete situa
tions.' (BFGF 168). Crucial here is the claim that 'in recognizing,
grasping, willing, adopting, freedom as "my" end during purifying
- if I am to remain
reflection, I cannot logically and existentially con
sistent - but will and value the Other's freedom and end, and posit,
affirm, and value freedom as her highest and primary value' (BFGF
170). This amounts to a quasi-Kantian attempt to bind freedom by
pure practical reason. Be logical? Be existentially consistent? But
why? Why not celebrate with Dostoevsky's man from the Under
ground Twice-two-makes-five as the ultimate refuge of a freedom
that refuses to let reason bind it? If we follow Sartre, must not the
value of consistency, like all value, have its ground in my freedom?
But if so, consistency cannot be appealed to, to bind that freedom
without surrendering central claims made in Being and Nothingness.
I am prepared to grant that it is necessary to abandon these claims,
that by moving beyond them Sartre arrived at a position that is easier
to But the seems to be the systematic power that made
accept. price

Being and Nothingness such an exciting work that helps to illuminate

our spiritual situation as few others.

Pride and Responsibility

Let me try to clarify this by addressing in more detail Santoni's

understanding critique of certain claims I had made, especially in an
article 'Authenticity, Poetry, God', in which I argued that Heideg

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 ICarsten Harries

gerian authenticity demands God, just as morality did for Kant, even
though theoretical reason cannot know anything of His existence. In
that essay I was concerned with Heidegger, but in passing I did raise
the question: 'Is the appeal to resoluteness as understood in Being
and Time any more intelligible than Sartre's closely related attempt
to make an abstract freedom the foundation of value?'10 Santoni sug

gests that I have misunderstood Sartre although his book is said by

him not to be the place to 'try to show my', and of course not only
my 'misunderstanding'. Santoni does, however, go on to suggest
that his discussion of the moral dimension of Sartre's authenticity in
the book's final chapter provides an indirect answer to my claim.
(BFGF 158-59)
I have already expressed agreement with Ron's argument that in

Notebooks for an Ethics we find an account of authenticity that seems

close indeed to Heideggerian authenticity. But Ron puts his finger
on what leads me to the charge that Sartre leaves us with an overly
abstract freedom when he has this to say about the conversion that,
according to Sartre, is to lead to 'a genuine self-recovery': 'that con
version involves a willed renunciation of appropriation (which gov
erns only human reality's relationship with things), a reflective
refusal to define myself as a what, a thing, or an Ego (alienation) in
favor of my acceptance of myself as gratuitous and unjustifiable free
dom, and my radical decision to make the freedom to which I am
condemned my life's project' (BFGF 157). Santoni is quite right to
point out that on my reading Heidegger 'does not share Sartre's
emphasis on the "non-appropriativeness" of the authentic attitude.
Harries not only characterizes Heidegger's "understanding of
authenticity" as "self-possession" but also refers to Heidegger's
authenticity as, for example, "appropriating our mortality", "appro
priating our own being", "appropriating ourselves as we are", and as
a "resolute appropriation and affirmation of our essential mortality"'
(BFGF 235-36, note 114). Much depends here on how the Sartrean
'non-appropriativeness' of the authentic attitude is to be understood.

Heidegger, too, insists that we should not understand ourselves as

some sort of thing, say a Cartesian res cogitans. But as is presupposed

by talk of 'a genuine self-recovery', or simply of my self, we have to

give some account of what is meant here by 'self', and that account
furthermore has to show in just what sense this self can be said to be
'my' self. To speak of an 'acceptance of myself as and
gratuitous
unjustifiable freedom, and my radical decision to make the freedom
to which I am condemned my life's project' offers no answer, since
the being of the self is here already presupposed. How are we to

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 Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge

understand this 'I' or 'selF that can, but also can fail, 'to make the
freedom to which I am condemned my life's project'? Heidegger
answers this question with his analysis of Daseiri1 s being-towards
death. Our sense of self, according to Heidegger, is inseparably
linked to a sense of our mortality. Sartre explicidy rejects this claim:
'Death can not therefore belong to the ontological structure of the
for-itself ....Thus we must conclude in opposition to Heidegger
that death, far from being my peculiar possibility, is a contingent fact
which as such in principle escapes me and originally belongs to my
facticity' (BN 545). Given Sartre's understanding of the for-itself,
must not death in principle escape me? And must the same not be
said of the self? Just as Sartre has to reject Heidegger's analysis of
being-towards-death as giving us a constant self,11 he has to reject
whatever belongs to facticity as binding my freedom in an essential
way. This leaves us only with a freedom so abstract that, far from
generating what one might call moral imperatives, it does not even
allow for a robust sense of self. But I can make sense of freedom only
as my, or rather as someone's freedom. Sartre's understanding of the
ontological structure of the for-itself does not meet that condition.
To insist, as Sartre does, for example, in 'Existentialism Is a
Humanism', that 'We will freedom for freedom's sake in and
through particular circumstances,' does not help at all unless we can
show how particular circumstances demand that we do one thing
rather than another.12 What here obligates us cannot be sought in
our freedom, nor in a mute in-itself but must be able to join for
itself to in-itself in some fashion, must be a third.
And this leads me to a final point of disagreement with Sartre. To
- as for
quote Santoni, 'Harries argues that for Sartre Heidegger in
- freedom is in need of criteria,
important places grounds, "some
authoritative measure to guide actions" and "integrate life". Eventu
ally Harries argues that the "Godhead" serves this function in Hei
- a
degger position that would, of course, be totally unacceptable to
Sartre, for it would exhibit "the spirit of seriousness"' (BFGF 231,
note 184), which 'considers values as transcendent givens indepen
dent of human subjectivity' (BN 626). But Heidegger's Godhead
cannot be considered as such a given. It haunts human being as a
never to be possessed source of meaning. And does Sartre not end

up in Being and Nothingness saying something rather like that? He,

too, appeals in this connection to God, even as, given his ontology,
he has to declare the idea of God to be 'contradictory' and man,
ruled as he is by the fundamental project, a 'useless passion' (BFGF
615). Santoni, to be sure, and as we have seen, reminds us of pas

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 Karsten Hurries

sages that suggest that man is not condemned to be such a useless

passion, that the authentic self finds the strength to renounce the
impossible project to be God. But, given Sartre's ontology, would
the price of such renunciation not be a loss of self?
Given Sartre's ontology we gain such a self only by appropriating
what is in a particular way (BN 602). And that means also, by appro
priating the fundamental project in a particular way. Sartre calls such
appropriation the individual's original project, where such appropria
tion is said to be itself chosen. Recalling Kant and Schopenhauer,
Sartre speaks in this connection of the 'choice of an intelligible char
acter,' which names 'the total relation to the world by which the
subject constitutes himself as a self (BN xxx). I find such an essen
tially groundless choice unintelligible. But if unintelligible, in Being
and Nothingness it yet appears as the ground of all value and every
human pursuit:

Ontology has revealed to us, in fact, the origin and nature of value; we
have seen that value is the lack in relation to which the for-itself deter
mines its being as a lack. By the very fact that the for-itself exists, as we
have seen, value arises to haunt its being-fbr-itself. It follows that the var
ious tasks of the for-itself can be made the object of an existential psycho
analysis, for they all aim at producing the missing synthesis of
consciousness and being in the form of value or self-cause. Man makes
himself man in order to be God, and selfness considered from this point
of view can appear to be egoism; but precisely because there is no com
mon measure between human reality and the self-cause which it wants to
be, one could just as well say that man loses himself in order that the self
cause may exist. (BN 626)

It was in such passages that I thought I had found a key to the

meaning of modern art.

Doesthat mean that with his ontology and the existential psycho
analysis based on it, Sartre, too, is subject to the 'spirit of serious
ness'? That Sartre should invoke Nietzsche's 'spirit of seriousness'
here invites comment, for if anyone would have had little patience
with Sartrean freedom it is Nietzsche, for whom freedom is a name
for the body-based will to power, where what Nietzsche means by
body once again straddles the abyss that Sartre's has
ontology
opened up between For-itself and In-itself, an existential counterpart
to the divide between res cogitans and res extensa.13 It is to
easy
imagine what fun Nietzsche would have had with Sartre's descrip
tions of the slimy.
I suggested at the very beginning of my talk that in Sartre's Being
and Nothingness what Nietzsche called the spirit of revenge finds
paradigmatic expression. How did Nietzsche understand this 'spirit

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 Sartre and the Spirit of Revenge

of revenge'? Here the definition we are given by his Zarathustra:

'This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is. The will's ill will against
time and its "it was".' The spirit of revenge is Nietzsche's name for
the power that presides over our deep-rooted tendency to turn on
ourselves in the name of some impossible ideal or other, such as
Sartre's God. It is the ground of the spirit of seriousness. In it Niet
zsche locates the deepest ground of our self-alienation.
What would it mean to overcome the spirit of revenge? We are
given a hint in Zarathustra's sermon 'On Those Who are Sublime',
where he offers us the following remarkable definition of beauty:
'When power becomes gracious and descends into the visible - such
descent I call beauty.' To understand this definition we should keep
in mind that while Schopenhauer understands the will first of all as a
will to live, a formulation that suggests that it is in the end self-asser
tion aiming at self-preservation that is our deepest concern, Niet
zsche understands it firstof all as will to power, where the latter may
aim at what lies beyond the limits of my personal existence. But
every human will to power has to recognise limits to its power. If
Nietzsche is right and we are indeed will to power, then we surely
have to add, but we lack power: we are will to power, lacking power.
And because we will power, yet lack power, we find it difficult to for
give ourselves our lack of power. Here we have the origin of the
spirit of revenge that supports the project to become God or what
the tradition had called pride. Pride prevents us from being open to
the claims of others. But at this point we also glimpse what would be
necessary to overcome the spirit of revenge: we would have to learn
to accept that lack which is constitutive of our being, without
renouncing our will to power. This is to say, the will, without turn
ing against itself, must learn to become gracious, i.e. must learn to
forgive itself its lack of power. Only such forgiveness, only such
grace, will allow the will to power to make its peace with the earthly,
the sensuous, to embrace reality, to really be open to the other, to be
able to respond to the other and to be in this sense responsible.
Authenticity requires that freedom become in this sense responsible.
The ontology of Being and Nothingness, it seemed to me, has no
room for such responsibility. That explains why in the past two
decades or so I have not given very much time to Sartre.

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 Karsten Harries

Notes

1. This lecture was given on 6 October 2002 as part of the symposium 'Philosophy,
Freedom, and Action,' in honour of the retirement of Professor Ron Santoni,
Denison University, Ohio.
2. Ronald E. Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith, and Authenticity in Sartre's Early Phi

losophy, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995. (Hereafter: BFGF).

3. Karsten Harries, In a Strange Land: An Exploration of Nihilism, dissertation, Yale

University, 1961.
4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans, and intro. Hazel E. Barnes, New
York: Philosophical Library, 1956, pp. 440-43. (Hereafter: BN). See Harries, In
a Strange Land, pp. 16-17.
5. Karsten Harries, The Meaning of Modern Art, Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1968, p.xii. (Hereafter: MMA).
6. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p.565.
7. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form, Garden City: Doubleday,
1959, pp.23,400-6.
8. Augustine, The City of God, XIV, 15. 17, trans. M. Dods, New York: 1950,
pp.463,465.
9. Japanese translation of The Meaning of Modern Art by Takeo Narukawa: Gendai

Geijutsu e no shisaku-Tetsugakuteki Kaishaku' Tokyo: Tamagawa University Press,

1976, 288 pp. Preface for the Japanese edition added.
10. Karsten Harries, 'Authenticity, Poetry, God', From Phenomenology to Thought,

Errancy, and Destre, Amsterdam: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995, p.23.

11. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 7th ed., Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1953, p.322. See
also Karsten Harries, 'Death and Utopia: Towards a Critique of the Ethics of Sat

isfaction', Research in Phenomenology, 7, 1977, pp. 138-52.

12. See Santoni, Bad Faith, Good Faith p.233, note 215.
13. Friedrich Nietzsche, 'Aus dem Nachlass der Achtziger Jahre', Werke, ed. Karl
Schlechta, vol. 3, Munich: Hanser, 1966, p.857.

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