Among the comments on my last, Ellie referred to some words by Jean-Paul Sartre. I have expanded her quotation a little, for its context:
“We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does.”
It comes from a provocative 1946 lecture, “Existentialism is a Humanism”, short enough at 10,000 words to read in a single session. I call it provocative because he challenges the normal unconsidered views about freedom, responsibility, good and evil. You can certainly call it dated, that is to say, of its time, when France in particular was trying to recover from the Nazi occupation, sweeping up a chaotic litter of moral compromises and insidious betrayals. Some called the collaborators culpable for aiding and abetting the murderous invaders. But for every German soldier killed by a member of the secret Resistance, ten French hostages might be lined up and shot by way of reprisal. Who then had clean hands? The Catholic Church wasn’t able to provide guidance on this point, and in any case, Sartre was an atheist. He had been interested in Marxism, but saw that the Communists in practice were a hierarchy, with Machiavellian strategists at the top and no regard for moral principles at any level.
Sartre called himself an Existentialist, claiming that in the case of human beings, “existence precedes essence”. For him there is no God to define our “essence”, i.e. our true nature and purpose in life. We create it ourselves, each individually. It follows that he is the enemy of unthinking conformity.
Thus, there is no human nature, because there is no God to have a conception of it. Man simply is. Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing—as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself.
It’s a strenuous philosophy.
What provokes me first is that like most philosophers and the doctrines of most religions, he separates man from the rest of nature. To Sartre, you sense that the rest of nature is little more than a painted backdrop. He’s only interested in the actors strutting the boards.
Equally provocative is his absurd-sounding claim that there is no inbuilt human nature, nothing till we make a “leap towards existence”. So how does he see humanity? Foundlings left on the church steps, or in the bulrushes along the Nile, with no known forebears? Sartre sounds like a real city-boy, who thinks eggs are harvested from egg-plants, and philosophy comes from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. He was first attracted to philosophy as a teenager, after reading Bergson, who had attended that same university 45 years before he did. Bergson was first attracted to philosophy by the Theory of Evolution, which Sartre appears to ignore in his later thought.
For myself, I’ve become convinced of a unity between all of nature; man being just one species of many, just one bundle of genes that can reproduce itself, if you will. My conviction arises not so much from the Theory of Evolution, Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian, but a series of intuitions, mystical revelations, call them what you will. If I were to try and debate with Sartre on his own terms, I’d posit a universal essence, which is both one and many. Does essence precede existence, or vice versa? I don’t care. If I am anything, I’m an animist. Every existence contains its own essence, call it soul if you like. This I feel with all six or seven senses, when I step outside this study into the fresh air, under the sky.
Is there such a thing as human nature? Despite his own denials, Sartre does accept the idea, as in this further excerpt from his lecture:
Good, so we agree thus far. And just as he was aroused to concern after the traumas and moral dilemmas of the war which in 1946 had just ended, I’m aroused to concern today about human behaviour. It’s a topic as big as the world, so I’ll narrow it down to “good and evil”, or even more narrowly to “deliberate killing”, specifically “massacre”.
What is “evil”? It’s a moral judgement, once defined by reference to the Ten Commandments, or “The Law and the Prophets” as Jesus put it, speaking as a Jew to other Jews. Even when such religions have been swept from popular consciousness, the concept of evil, “pure evil”, hangs in the air, especially in popular media for whom it is an invitation to the readers’ sense of blood-lust; a legitimate target to be hunted down and made extinct. What else is a “war on terror”? What else are all the violent movies?
Officially a war on terror would be a politically-inspired, Government-sponsored purge of suspects. Most of us are grateful that we can continue walking safely in our streets because of it. In 1965-66, death squads in Indonesia killed at least half a million citizens on the basis of their being communists. You can read about it here or discover it through a documentary made with the assistance of surviving perpetrators, in a film called The Act of Killing. I don’t want to see the movie, merely point out that there was widespread approval of the killings in the West: see a summary in Wikipedia here, where you will find no mention of “evil”.
Pic: Death-squad member Herman Koto re-creates his fatal acts against fellow Indonesians via the lavish song-and-dance number in the documentary “The Act of Killing
Fifty years later, in a largely atheist & progressive United Kingdom, the most unavoidable accidents can arouse mass mourning, floral shrines, soul-searching, the hunt for culprits, special Cathedral masses and headlines like “Archbishop cried with relatives of victims of Glasgow bin lorry tragedy”. Most noticeably of all, there was a rush by leading politicians of every party, however small, to express their own grief and condolences on behalf of just about everyone. (The vehicle went out of control after the driver’s suspected heart attack.)
My point here is not to blame politicians, media or a conformist public. I agree with Sartre that “In every purpose there is universality, in this sense that every purpose is comprehensible to every man”; except that I would use the word “behaviour” rather than “purpose”. His existentialist manifesto, expressed in the 1946 lecture, stresses the responsibility implicit in being “condemned to freedom”, that each one of us must will ourselves into existence, decide how we will behave. And so I call him “city boy”, who doesn’t understand that in nature, there is only behaviour, much of it instinctive, uncontrolled by will. In humans it is theoretically controllable, but freedom does not grow on trees.
According to the theory of evolution, nature is not controlled by purpose. Creation does not proceed by design, but a continuous process of natural selection, which has produced cats and Man. A cat doesn’t create itself by an act of will: it merely follows its nature. Man has the additional faculty of reason, which allows it to establish and pursue its purposes. Such is human nature.
What then is Evil: apart that is from the content of sermons, political speeches and popular sentiment as exploited by the media? It’s a moral judgement, as I’ve said. But why do we distance ourselves from it, and half-believe it’s a force in its own right, like a deadly virus? Fear, of course. It resembles the virus in that we must protect ourselves from massacre, genocide, stray bullets, passionate violence in the home or street?
But why do they, the perpetrators, do it? Are they vermin, to be exterminated by any means without trial or respectful burial? I ask the question not rhetorically, not to arouse emotions one way or the other. We are all blinded by fear and politics so much that we don’t take the trouble to answer the question properly. I think the answer is not very complex.
Firstly, the human race has always been warlike. Genocide has always occurred. Tribes have fought other tribes, and since agriculture was started, wars over land have never ceased. It is in the blood of young men to train themselves, test themselves competitively, and seek victory; and also to find fellowship in tribe or regiment, in the sacred bond of mutual defence.
Secondly the tribal instinct values conformity. Individual scruples are sacrificed to the leader, who takes on the moral responsibility.
Finally, and most significantly I think in the lands from the Levant east to Pakistan, the common factor in chronic violence is not Islam, but humiliation. This is an emotion stronger than the fear of death. On reflection I would not call it an emotion, for that implies a temporary state. Let’s call it a malady, for in the sufferer’s eyes, it can be cured by revenge. They say revenge is sweet, but the only sweetness is in the way it miraculously cures the sufferer of humiliation: not just when it is carried out, but from the moment when it is planned.
With this new understanding, we connect Raskolnikov, in Crime and Punishment, with every suicide bomber, every young man from a good family who goes off to join ISIL, every youth who goes into a school armed, and takes out as many as he can before turning the gun on himself, or being taken out himself by a SWAT team.
I discover that I don’t need a theory of evil. “Every purpose is comprehensible to every man.”
At this point we may say, as we think beyond mere senseless murder to other, darker crimes, “But what about such-and-such? I can’t understand that. I don’t even want to think about it. If the perpetrator wasn’t utterly insane, then what?” And we work ourselves up into a froth of speechless outrage. But again, I think the answer is straightforward, and explicable with aspects of human nature we can recognize within ourselves, from experience. Without being a diagnosed psychopath, we need only desensitize ourselves to the suffering of others, by invoking our personal or communal sense of righteousness. Or we can say, “There are things I prefer not to know about.”
Meanwhile, we live in a world ruled by power (political & brute force), commerce and the media. For most of us they, and the laws they have helped create, decide the sensitivities, and what is fair game.
a wayfarer’s notes 
I find this post a most interesting piece of work, but not one with which I can totally agree. Or is it perhaps that it raises questions which I cannot answer with any confidence?
It seems to me that man cannot be separated from the rest of creation, but that he can be seen from two different points of view. If it be true that the outer world takes on the aspect of illusoriness whose perceived existence is based on assessments made by the mind, as an autonomous or even independent force, then there is a case to be made that Man-as-you is different from Man-as-me. Man-as-you belongs to the uncertain, and therefore illusory, world; Man-as-me is the only reality that I can know……unless there is another way of 'knowing'!
What is evil? You claim that it is (if I understand you correctly) a moral judgement. If so then good, and the base from which that stems, viz. love, is also nothing more than a moral judgement. I do wonder why, therefore, a spiritually developed person such as Jesus would exort us to love. It seems to me that Love is the transfigured form of that spectrum of qualities that we assess as being 'good'. The other side of that coin, and inseparable from love, is Evil, the transfigured spectrum of all the qualities we assess as 'bad'. It is wonky thinking to accept the existence of one without the other.
It appears to me that in an age where we are told by popular psychology to “get in touch with our feelings”, all that we are doing ( rather than make legitimate assessment) is to de-transfigure love into a swill of emotionalism which you call mawkishness. Unfortunately (yes, we have reached a point of agreement) we are not allowed to speak out against such trends. If we do we trigger the letting loose of a torrent of hateful abuse, even death threats. The emotional mob continues to rule, as it does elsewhere amongst, for example, militant religionists.
Finally, and I can only assume I have missed a point you were making, why do you limit humiliation as the common factor in chronic violence rather than Islam? The notion of humiliation, loss of face, is surely highly prevalent in all Asian countries. It is pure and blatant egoism! Limiting the geographical region to the Middle East, as far as Pakistan, is more likely to favour the idea that the appalling violence is Islam-based. But are we not going off at a tangent here?
Is not the root cause of chronic violence – wherever it is found – somewhere inside humanity, regardless of the appropriated cause, in the region where lives the very reality of Evil?
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Taking on Sartre, eh? Had to rub my eyes to believe it.
“Equally provocative is his absurd-sounding claim that there is no inbuilt human nature, nothing till we make a 'leap towards existence'. So how does he see humanity? Foundlings left on the church steps, or in the bulrushes along the Nile, with no known forebears?”
Have to pretty much agree with you here. It's silly to say that there's nothing innate driving human behavior. Strikes me as a case of trying to crudely simplify human beings to make them fit a theory. Reminds me of that old joke where the cop finds a severed head on the road on he kicks it into the ditch because he can't think of how to spell “interstate” and it'll be easier to write “ditch”, so he adjusts the facts accordingly.
Human beings can be messy creatures (even with their heads still attached.) I think it would be better put to say that human beings have more creative latitude in their behavior than animals do. Whereas a bird builds a nest by its nature, and certain birds only build certain nests, a human being can live in a variety of domiciles from house to hut to apartment, or even forsake the comfort of a domicile altogether and push all his earthly belongings around in a shopping cart. In short, the human being can explore all the possible living arrangements under the sun in a way that the birds cannot. As so it is with a great deal of human behavior. However, the other side of that is that we laugh, we cry, we bond, we yearn to stay or go, we rebuke our parents at certain ages, we fret for our children, all with such patterns of recognizable regularity that clearly suggests some kind of natural drives and instincts, to the point even the rare aberrations from these things seem to be the exceptions which prove the rule. And from that view, the line between our behavior and the animals' is a thin one.
As far as that creative latitude goes, and as far as it extends, and so much as we're concerned with whatever “meaning” our existence come to have, I'm all for the idea that we mint our own coin in that realm. But I also agree that we shouldn't completely forsake the fact that we are of nature and from nature and carry on as though we were left on the church steps of existence.
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I'm an animist, too. But people I know don't believe so I keep it to myself. I figure if they can't see or feel the spirits then maybe they aren't suppose too.
There's a Lakota saying; “When man moves away from nature his heart hardens”. Native Americans don't talk much about evil. They understand like you do that they way a person acts one day may not be the way he acts the next:
“All things in this world are two. In our minds we are two good and evil. With our eyes we see two things, things that are fair and things that are ugly. We have the right hand that stikes and the left hand full of kindness near the heart. One foot may lead us to an evil way, the other foot may lead us to a good. So are all things two, all two.” – Eagle Chief, Pawnee.
I guess all a person can do in this day and age when it is so hard to tell evil from good, is to -listen-.
Native American writer, Linda Hogan says beautifully;
“Walking, I am listening to a deeper way. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say, watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.”
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In anticipation of your reply, I'd like to mention a debate I had with someone about a year or so ago on the subject of free will. I saved some of the transcript of that debate and I meant to send it to you some time, as it was a fairly interesting discussion, one that brought up aspects of the issue that I was surprised I hadn't considered before.
My opponent was arguing against free will strictly on the grounds that it was physically impossible. The idea was that if our bodies are driven by physical, chemical, and electrical processes which are subject to the same physical laws and causality as everything else, then at what point in these processes does a will that originates in the mind intersect with the physical plane and take control? In other words, for free will to work, it seems that you would have to postulate some sort of “ghost in the machine” that can reach in and touch off a chain of causality, that can pull the appropriate strings and levers, without itself being subject to physical causality. For instance, suppose I were to voluntarily raise my hand. From my standpoint, I decide to do it, and then I take control of my arm and raise it. But suppose someone on the outside were to trace the genesis of this act. They would start with the muscles which were triggered by the nerve impulses from the brain, which in turn were triggered by such and such and so on. At what point, if any, would this person run into a dead end where they would have to say, “this is where the will got the ball rolling”?
Once I wrapped my head around the ramifications of this, it was quite a blow. I felt like there was some flaw in this argument, but I couldn't figure it out. Instead, I argued for free will on psychological (even subjective) grounds. I said that free will was as indispensable a part of our experience as consciousness itself. Even if someone sat you down and showed you that consciousness was physically impossible, you'd still believe in it, because you experience it directly. Even an “illusion” of consciousness would require consciousness to be experienced, to the point that calling it “illusion” is rendered meaningless. And so it is with free will. Someone can't just stop believing in free will, chuck it over their shoulder, and then coast along through the rest of their life on auto-pilot. They can't abdicate the choices they're faced with. Even if you convince them that the “ghost in the machine” is an absurdity, they STILL have to be that ghost and they still have to take control of that machine. We are, as you quoted above, doomed to be free.
I'm not sure how relevant this is, but it seemed relevant enough.
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Oh, and by the way, the term wasn't “philosophy of mind”, but rather “theory of mind”, although you certainly have the gist of it. It's not a theory in the sense that the “theory of evolution” or the “theory of relativity” are theories, which is to say that it isn't some particular person's brainchild or the product of some particular school of thought. It's a theory in the sense that we ALL formulate this theory. We extrapolate from our experience and implicitly presume that other people are conscious beings like ourselves rather than just animated objects going through the pre-programmed motions of appearing human without thought or awareness, since as Tom points out, we really don't KNOW this for certain. Still, it's a reasonable conclusion that we all eventually reach, a “theory” that we settle on that you are like me and I am like you and so on. The salient point, when it comes to a child's development, isn't really about any doubts on this score, of course. It's about opening up and seeing these other dimensions to people, where heretofore they were just flat figures against the backdrop of the child's world.
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To Blake I think that 'condemned' and 'free' would be contraries not opposites. They would be seen as parts of the process through which man experiences life in the material world. When the essential man enters the field of time and space he experiences constraints and opportunities. The clarity of Eternity would fade as matter began to obscure ones vision and the five senses became the avenues of perception.
Becoming subject to error or 'blindness to the Divine Vision' is the fall which leads to the Last Judgment when error is cast out and the return journey begins. Unfortunately we become preoccupied with removing the speck from our neighbor's eye without removing the log from out own. This is a sense in which we are condemned: being assigned the task of sifting out the matter which obscures our vision, from the vision itself which is hidden in matter.
To Blake the removal of error is a continual process of cleansing the doors of perception. Freedom is the ability to see everything as it is: Infinite. Without the process there would be no product.
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Excellent blog post, thoroughly researched and well argued. Because of the influence of Hannah Arendt on my own thinking, herself a thinker who disliked Sartre's universalist philosophy, I can offer an alternative perspective to the question of what or who is Man in the singular. For Arendt, who saw herself as a political theorist rather than a philosopher, there are only men, in the plural, (and women too but she was old-fashioned in that way) and plurality and genetic diversity would lend itself to that claim. The more I grow up – I turn thirty this year – the more I make the realization that there is no 'Man-species' as such, except perhaps from a strictly biological and abstract viewpoint, but a variety of types and sub species of human beings who all have to, somehow or rather, cohabit on this planet, peacefully or not. Politics deals with human plurality whereas Philosophy, Psychology and the Sciences to an extent deal with man in the singular. This in my view is Sartre's main shortcoming as I believe he failed to appreciate the importance of plurality as an ever active and philosophically sensitive phenomenon in life as it has been given and handed to us.
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