Advanced search Subscribe to our newsletter and you'll continuously be informed about our new books, series and journals. You can customize this e-mail newsletter to your particular needs and interests. Newsletters include special discount codes. To subscribe or change existing preferences press the subscribe button	French Existentialism. Consciousness, Ethics, and Relations with Others. GILES, James, Editor Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA, 1999, VI, 219 pp. Pb: 978-90-420-0488-7 / 90-420-0488-6 € 39 / US$ 53 Series: Value Inquiry Book Series 87 Nordic Value Studies This book is a critical appraisal of the distinctive modern school of thought known as French existentialism. It philosophically engages the ideas of the major French existentialists, namely, Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Marcel, Camus, and, because of his central role in the movement, especially Sartre, in a fresh attempt to elucidate their contributions to contemporary philosophy. Contents: Editorial Foreword. Acknowledgements. James GILES: Introduction ONE Elizabeth MURRAY MORELLI: The Duality in Sartre's Account of Reflective Consciousness TWO Edmond WRIGHT: Merleau-Ponty and the Sensory THREE Matthew KIERAN: French Existential Ethics and the Creation of Value FOUR Terry KEEFE: The Ethical Concept of "Assuming" in the Existential Philosophy of Sartre and Beauvoir FIVE Margaret A. SIMONS: The Origins of Beauvoir's Existential Philosophy SIX Juliette SIMONT: Sartre's Critique of Humanism SEVEN Philip STRATTON-LAKE: Marcel, Hope, and Virtue EIGHT James GILES: Sartre, Sexual Desire, and Relations with Others NINE Thomas JONES: Useless Passions? TEN Christine MARGERRISON: Struggling with the Other: Gender and Race in the Youthful Writings of Camus About the Contributors Index ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS JAMES GILES is Acting Lecturer at the University of Copenhagen, and Tutor at Madingley Hall, University of Cambridge. He has also taught at the Hawaii College of Kansai Gaidai University, Japan, Aalborg University, and the University of Edinburgh. He is author of No Self to be Found: The Search for Personal Identity (1997), A Study in Phenomenalism (1994), A Theory of Sexual Desire (forthcoming), and editor of Kierkegaard and Freedom (forthcoming). THOMAS JONES was awarded his PhD from Lancaster University, England in 1995 for a thesis entitled The Phenomenology of Love. He has taught Indian Philosophy at the same university, later worked in the sales team of a Buddhist Right livelihood business in Cambridge, and is now working on a novel. He has published poetry, articles, and reviews in the Buddhist arts magazine Urthona and elsewhere, and has had his fiction read on British national radio. TERRY KEEFE is Research Professor of French at Lancaster University. His publications include a general study of all of the writings of Simone de Beauvoir (1983), a book on existentialist fiction (1986), a monograph on two of Beauvoir's later works (1992), and a Macmillan "Modern Novelists" volume on Beauvoir (1998). He has also co-edited books on Zola and on existentialist autobiography. MATTHEW KIERAN is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Leeds, England. He has published articles on aesthetics, ethics, and social philosophy, is the editor of Media Ethics (1998), and author of Media Ethics: A Philosophical Approach (1997). CHRISTINE MARGERRISON has degrees in both Sociology and French Studies and was recently awarded a PhD by Lancaster University for her thesis on woman, race, and origins in the imaginative writings of Albert Camus. She is currently tutoring in French literature at the same university. ELIZABETH MURRAY MORELLI is Professor in the Philosophy Department at Loyola Marymount University, California. She is the author of Anxiety: A Study of the Affectivity of Moral Consciousness (1986). With her husband Mark Morelli she co-edited Lonergan's Understanding and Being (1980/1990) and The Lonergan Reader (1997). MARGARET A. SIMONS is Professor in the Department of Philosophical Studies and Co-ordinator of the Women's Studies Program at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, and was editor of Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy from 1985 to 1990. She is co-editor of Hypatia Reborn: Essays in Feminist Philosophy (1990), editor of Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir (1995), and author of Beauvoir and The Second Sex: Feminism, Race, and the Origins of Existentialism (1998). She is currently co-editing (with Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir) a series of Beauvoir's philosophical texts in English translation. JULIETTE SIMONT is Researcher at the National Fund for Scientific Research, Belgium. She is author of Essai sur la quantité, la qualité, la relation, chez Kant, Hegel, Deleuze (1997) and Jean-Paul Sartre. Un demi-siècle de liberté (1998). She has also published various articles about Sartre's philosophy, mostly in Les Temps Moderns. PHILIP STRATTON-LAKE is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Reading, England. He has also taught at the University of Essex and at Keele University. He has published articles on Kant, Marcel, ethical intuitionism, and moral motivation, and is the Section Editor for German Idealism in the Edinburgh Encyclopedia of Continental Philosophy. EDMOND WRIGHT has degrees in both Philosophy and English, is an honorary member of the Senior Common Room of Pembroke College, Oxford, and has recently been a Fellow at the Swedish College for the Advanced Study of the Social Sciences, Uppsala. He is the editor of The Ironic Discourse (1983), New Representationalisms: Essays in the Philosophy of Perception (1993), co-editor of The Zizek Reader (1997), and has published over forty articles on language, perception, and the philosophy of science, in Mind, Philosophy, Synthese, and other journals. He has also published two volumes of poetry. EDITORIAL FOREWORD Existentialism in France is one of the most sustained attempts made by philosophers of that country to find an alternative to the objective idealism of Hegel on the one hand and naturalistic objectivism on the other. Yet all three of these movements are initiated by a desire for concreteness of one sort or another. The concreteness of Hegelianism is that of concresence, growing together. Itself motivated by a drive to overcome opposition, the Hegelian dialectic progresses by the absorption of dualities into higher-level unities. The concreteness of naturalism is paradigmatically that of tangible solidity, of the stone which Dr. Johnson kicks in order to refute Bishop Berkeley. But this sensory concreteness lends itself to conceptualization in ever more general abstract forms and structures. The claims to fundamentality either of this concrete experience or of the ideas of the so-called primary qualities adduced to explain it are challenged by both Hegelian phenomenology and by the phenomenology of Husserl. Sartre draws on both of these phenomenologies, the phenomenology of spirit and the phenomenology of perception. This is what gives rise to the tension distinctive of his account of the human condition. The end toward which the Hegelian dialectic aspires is compared by Hegel himself to the thinking of thinking which Aristotle ascribes to divinity. This would be the absolution from a history conceived as the interiorization and remembering of something which is in the first place external. Sartre retains this ideal in which the in-itself and for-itself would become one. But whereas Hegel's self-styled philosophical Christianism sees the Passion achieving its ideal with the individual subject "realizing" itself-in the gnosiological, ontological and, indeed, financial senses of that word-as Self, the passion as described by Sartre is bound to suffer frustration. This is because Sartre, while endorsing Hegel's formal characterization of the end of human existence as "for-itself-in-itself," endorses also Husserl's principle of intentionality to the effect that all consciousness is objective consciousness of something other than itself, even if at the same time it is non-objective consciousness (of) itself: self-consciousness. The identity of this self-consciousness is no more than that which it borrows from its determining itself as other than the object of which it is conscious. The total transparency of Aristotelian noêseôs noêsis and of Hegel's adaptation of this is replaced by a partial transparency of a for-itself noetico-noematically "othering" itself against an in-itself which is totally opaque. The concreteness which Sartre and other French existentialists and existentialistes seek to save is that of the inhabiting of a world with others which Husserl calls the Lebenswelt; Sartre's and Merleau-Ponty's approaches here are the basis for the discussions in Chapters One and Two of the present volume. Phenomenological existentialism purports to show how the way of ideas pursued either rationalistically or sensualistically deviates and derives from the ways of being in the world as "existed," where this verb is transitively parsed. This transitive and transcending syntax of existence follows from the intentionality signified by the hyphenation of noesis-noema. Now Husserl's descriptions of the many ways of consciousness-paving the way, along with Brentano and again Aristotle, for Heidegger's analyses of the many ways of being-are Cartesian meditations. For they inherit Descartes's double use of the words cogitatio and pensée to refer both to reflective cognitive thinking and to any of the states of consciousness upon which one may reflect: states of intellectual awareness, but also imaginings, willings, feelings, and so forth. The liberation from intellectualism which existentialism in France effects is facilitated by the most intellectualist philosopher of that land. This is an irony that would have delighted the Danish ironist Kierkegaard, whose attempt to subvert Hegelian and any other kind of systematicity is a further inspiration for philosophers of existence in France, thanks in particular to the transmission through Heidegger of Kierkegaard's notion that truth dwells in "subjectivity." How do you transmit such a notion? How do you share it with someone? How do you propound it? How can the attempt to express it in philosophical propositions not be as self-defeating as the desire to unite consciousness and its object? Is it surprising that on the eastern side of the Rhine Heidegger finds himself having recourse to an idiom which is essentially poietic or a meditation on poetry and that on the other side Marcel, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, as pointed out in the Introduction, supplement their more recognizably philosophical treatises by writing novels and plays and biographies-or supplement these latter by writing philosophy? The Kierkegaardian ancestry of French existentialism-which itself makes the study of French existentialism also a study of Nordic thinking-manifests itself too in the manner in which its preoccupation with salvation differs from that of Hegel. One may mention only Marcel's soft spot for British Hegelianism to begin to understand why his "Christian existentialism" (a title he repudiated for his own thinking anyway) was eclipsed and rendered unfashionable by the "atheistic" version of Sartre. During and in the aftermath of the Second World War any kind of totalism was suspected of carrying a threat of totalitarianism. Even Kantian humanism could seem to risk an idolatry of a moral law under which human beings are cases, albeit with equal indefeasible rights. Once more the concreteness and uniqueness of this and that human being are endangered. But the existentialist road to the protection of human singularity and freedom all too often begins and ends with the first person singular, whether as the mig, mig, mig of Kierkegaard fixated on the salvation of his soul, or as an egologism, if not egoism, where I am required to assume within the circle of my own projecting the contingency of my being hurled into existence alongside others, and where this assuming is a subjective-existentialist rejigging of objective-idealist and objectivist-materialist aufheben. But by what or by whom or by Whom is this assumption required? By nothing other than myself who, on Sartre's account at any rate, am nothing but nothingness. As shown in Chapter Three, there are obvious difficulties with this view. So the preoccupation with saving myself has to be qualified by the rider that any essential content possessed by this self is due to the self's own existing of what it thus transitively exists. The essentiality is accidental. The self, as Nietzsche says, is no more than a grammatical fiction. I, as Rimbaud says, am another-Je est un autre-down there in the past sedimented by my choices, choices which cannot be justified by appeal to any ground that is not in principle itself a ground on which one has chosen to stand and which one could in principle choose to quit. In principle, essentially, necessarily, necessity, essence, and principiality or firstness come second. Here, repeating what Kierkegaard's one-time hero Schelling did to Hegel, necessity is made contingent upon contingency. And contingency is subjected to the necessity of each singular person's being condemned to be free. Decision is contaminated by undecidability. Contaminated and leavened by it. For French existentialism, far from being a philosophy of despair, and becoming in Marcel (as Chapter Six makes clear) and in Sartre's later Marxist version of it a philosophy of hope, is a declaration of the dignity of woman and of man, not simply under the moral law, as that dignity is defined by Kant, but, in both senses of the preposition, before the law. One could therefore say that a "deconstruction" of essentialism takes place both in phenomenological existentialism such as one finds in the writings of Sartre, where homage is still paid to the dialectical negativity operative in the methods of Hegel and Marx, and too in existential phenomenology such as is practiced in the writings of Merleau-Ponty, where the ambiguity of incarnation (see Chapter Two) is more pivotal than opposition and where Descartes's answer to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia blunts the edge of his dualism. At least, one could say what I have just said if the word that I scare-quoted in saying it is taken to mark a work of mourning which, neither reifying the past or the passed nor expecting the future to be logically or causally deducible from it, recollects what it lets go pour mieux sauter. Especially at the passing of the millenium it is gratifying to have that service performed as attentively and comprehensively as it is by the studies contained in this volume. John Llewelyn Formerly Reader in Philosophy University of Edinburgh SAMPLE PAGE (Note: text only, the lay-out of the page is not reproduced) Four THE ETHICAL CONCEPT OF "ASSUMING" IN THE EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHY OF SARTRE AND BEAUVOIR Terry Keefe What might reasonably be understood by the "existential" philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir is the early philosophy associated with the period up to the end of the 1940s; that is, before it begins to be reasonable to call them in some sense Marxists. This is part of the period that has recently come to be seen as that of Sartre's first ethics, for French and American commentators now commonly refer to Sartre's two ethics, and in many cases to a third that was emerging at the end of his life. His second ethics, however, is seen as dating from the early to mid 1960s, whereas his "existential philosophy" refers to positions adopted much earlier in his career-positions, essentially, that either lead up to Being and Nothingness in 1943, or develop more or less directly out of it. Many aspects of, and questions about, Sartre's first ethics-not least the way in which it is complemented, completed, or modified by the writings of Beauvoir-are by now familiar, some of them having been extensively and almost continuously discussed, in one form or another, from the mid-1940s onwards. But the concept of "assuming" has been badly neglected, although it plays an extremely important, even crucial, role in the moral thinking of both Sartre and Beauvoir from late in the 1930s until at least the end of the 1940s. In a general way, "assuming" might, in any case, be thought to be a key existentialist concept, linked with the injunction to assume responsibility for ourselves rather than handing it over to others, or to fate. Or, again, expressing the idea of facing up to reality rather than escaping from it into some kind of mauvaise foi or bad faith. The crucial terms in French-the verb "assumer" and the noun "assomption"-are obviously just two of a whole cluster of expressions used by Sartre and Beauvoir in this area, some of which do the same and related work, and others of which serve as points of contrast. These expressions include "bonne foi" and "mauvaise foi," "sincérité," "authenticité" and "inauthenticité," and so on. Two specific preliminary points about the terms "assumer" and "assomption" themselves are worth making. First, the noun "assomption" has little currency in non-technical French (except in its religious sense), yet Sartre uses it fairly commonly in his particular way. Second, dictionaries commonly give the verb "assumer" as having the basic meaning of "taking on," or "taking up"-as in taking on responsibilities or a particular role or office-then go on to refer to a second sense categorized as a neologism, and one that they often associate with Sartre himself. In other words, there is already a kind of prima-facie case for believing that Sartre and Beauvoir may be doing something special and distinctive with the terms as such, something that involves forging for themselves what I call a "concept of assuming."	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