Sartre’s work “Being and Nothingness”is a thorough description of humans’ place in the world, both relative to objects and relative to his relations with other humans, as viewed through the existentialist looking-glass. In his account, Sartre describes criteria for existence, shows how beings come to be for themselves and how they interact with others. Specifically, he writes on relations between lovers in a section entitled “Concrete relations with others.” It is here that he appears either to deny or omit an important part of love relations. He asserts, essentially, that the relationship between lovers can only exist in bad faith. That is, he describes only the failed or deficient modes of loving. It is the goal of this work to provide a description for that which is lacking in his account.
The goal of this analysis is not an attempt to deny that bad faith love relations exist or even that such relations are uncommon. This analysis is an attempt to provide a framework in which good-faith love relations can be viewed as possible. Sartre himself identifies three factors that permit the destructibility of love:
In the first place, [love] is, in essence, a deception and a reference to infinity since to love is to wish to be loved, hence to wish that the other wish that I love him. … The amorous intuition is, as a fundamental-intuition, an ideal out of reach. The more I am loved, the more I lose my being, the more I am thrown back on my own responsibilities, on my own power to be. In the second place the Other’s awakening is always possible; at any moment he can make me appear as an object: hence the lover’s perpetual insecurity. In the third place love is an absolute which is perpetually made relative by others. One would have to be alone in the world with the beloved in order for love to preserve its character as an absolute axis of reference, hence the lover’s perpetual shame(or pride, which here amounts to the same thing). [B&N p491]
The goal then, is to attempt to resolve these issues without sacrificing the nature of the lovers as human beings-for-themselves or by denying any of the essential characteristics of Sartre’s framework for the development of love.
Sartre’s conception of love is as a flaw. He begins with an analogy to Hegel’s master-slave dialog and ends with neither lover satisfied with the situation. They find themselves ungrounded and wanting. Each lover wants the other to love (give Hegelian recognition to) him, and thus ground him in his or her facticity. Because this is a dynamic system, with both parties attempting this simultaneously, both end up failing. One can only be grounded by a being-for-itself, not by an object, a being in-itself. Attempts to regain the objectivity granted ideally, but not specifically, by the lover result in the adoption of an attitude of masochism or sadism. The lover is playing at either being an object or denying his objectivity, and thus is in bad faith. Love for Sartre can only exist as these deficient modes.
Essentially, we are going to attempt to fill a hole in Sartre’s philosophy of love relations through an extension of his analysis. The primary feature of this resolution is the determination that love must be viewed not as a feature of consciousness, but as a being-for-itself. It must be a consciousness granted many of the same features as human consciousness, which it is, in that it is constituted by human consciousness. But we are getting ahead of ourselves here. Let us start with a look at how love comes to be, and proceed from there.
Love grows in a similar fashion to care. Care manifests a hermeneutic circle, or, more accurately, a spiral toward itself. That is, care begins at a point and grows toward further caring, adding to itself to the extent that the being-for-itself remains interested. When one catches sight of an interesting object, a beetle, perhaps, while on a walk in the woods, one initially has only a passing curiosity that one might satisfy by moving closer and getting a closer look. If the beetle resolves itself to ones consciousness as a normal black beetle, ones interest fades and one continues on the walk. If it resolves itself, however, as a complex biological machine, composed of myriad components, one’s interest may grow, and one may desire to know more. The walk grows less important as one’s interest in the beetle grows. One learns a little bit about the beetle, and that little bit reveals a large area of unknown knowledge. Perhaps the limit of this example would be that one becomes an entomologist and never finishes one’s walk in the woods. The initial interest toward the beetle leads to more interest. It is a spiraling toward itself.
Love grows in a similar fashion, but not from a single individual. It is a cooperative effort by both lovers. Both individuals manifest some interest or care in the other and this leads to further interaction with the other and so on in a spiraling toward love. This is the foundation upon which love as consciousness, as for-itself, is born. How is it that a consciousness, a for-itself, can grow from two individuals: According to Sartre, “Consciousness is born supported by a being which is not itself.”[B&N p23] For humans, the beings which support consciousness are beings in-themselves. “Consciousness is Consciousness of something.”[B&N p23] The rocks, trees and all other beings-in-themselves that constitute the world are impressed upon consciousness by the senses and we become conscious-of them. In the instance of love, the beings that are not love, that is, which have some distance from love, are the lovers. They alone are the being on which love is born. It is not, however, the case that they are separate from it. There is not, in Sartre’s words, “a for-itself on the one hand and a world [the lovers] on the other as two closed entities for which we must subsequently seek some explanation as to how they communicate. The for-itself is a relation to the world.”[B&N p405] In the case of love, the world is constituted by the lovers.
There are several features of a for-itself that are essential. We can gain some insight into the nature of love by taking a closer look at how these factors are manifest. The being of a consciousness, of a for-itself, is defined by its distance from itself. A being in-itself simply is. Its existence is of infinite density. “The distinguishing characteristic of consciousness, on the other hand, is that it is a decompression of being.”[B&N p121] There is some space within a consciousness. For a human consciousness, that room is for introspection, the room to doubt ones existence and gain perspective on the self. For love, the room is distance between the lovers and their ability to critically examine their relationship. It is critical that a for-itself be able to question itself. “The being of consciousness is a being such that in its being, its being is in question.”[B&N p120] The space granted by the distance of the lovers from the love is what permits it being-for-itself, that is, consciousness.
What, however, is it conscious of? Sartre makes it abundantly clear that a consciousness is only a consciousness of something, and that a consciousness with nothing present to it is not a true consciousness. A consciousness can only be present to things in the world, and love’s world consists of the lovers. Therefore love must be a consciousness of the lovers as such. The contents of love are the lovers.
One might ask when the love came to be. A being-for-itself does exist temporally. The for-itself grows from (and beyond) a past. “There is not first one universal time where a for-itself suddenly appears not yet having a past. … [Rather, ] for-itself rises to being beyond an unalterable which is … the Past.” [B&N p199] This past may be represented as a friendship spanning years which gradually grew into love, or it may represent a whirlwind weekend romance that blossomed overnight into a fully formed love. Regardless, this past relationship is not the love. The “for-itself can in no case be reduced to this being [the past], [and] represents an absolute newness in relation to it.”[B&N p198] There is therefore some time, some event, which birthed love from its past existence as a simple content of consciousness to a consciousness proper.
The event that leads to the birth of love is best understood in the context of the master-slave dialectic, as modified by Sartre into a dialectic relating two lovers.
In the standard master-slave dialectic, there is a fight (potentially to the death) between two beings over recognition. Of the possible results of this conflict, one yields particularly juicy philosophical fruit. In the case where one of the beings is willing to fight to the death and the other yields before death, the one willing to fight all the way becomes master over the other. Unfortunately for him, this means that he has reached the limits of his potential. His goal was to achieve recognition, and he has destroyed that possibility by turning a man capable of granting recognition into a slave. The recognition granted by the slave is unfulfilling because it is forced, not given. Furthermore, because he ‘won’ the fight, the master has no incentive to change or attempt to become anything other than what he is.
The slave, however, can overcome/transcend his nature, and does, thanks to work. He has impetus to transform his conditions. The slave, in doing work for another, is performing an unnatural act. It is ‘natural’ only to work sufficiently for ones own life. The slave works to change the world, and thus, as a content of the world, he changes himself. The master changes only as a result of the slave’s work.
To understand the modified dialectic, one must understand Sartre’s Look. One of the examples Sartre gives will work well enough as a description of the effects of the Look. Imagine walking in a park. One can perceive the trees, bushes, benches and other objects as simply physical instances at particular locations with particular characteristics. The light post is twenty feet away and about fifteen feet high. The trash can is ten yards distant and just to the left of the path. It is painted brown. One can also perceive these objects intentionally. The light post is there to give me light on my path. The trash can is there for me to discard my candy wrapper or cigarette butt. However, if a man sitting on the bench looks at me, the world is suddenly thrust into disarray. The light post must be seen as not just for my illumination. The trash can is not my personal waste receptacle. He forces upon my world a reintentionalization. These things are for him. Furthermore, he has transformed me from a subjective being to an object. He interprets me not as a being-for-itself, but as a being in the world, that is, a being-in-itself. This is the power of the Look. It grounds a being-for-itself in its objectivity. This can either shame or exalt the one Looked at. One can be made to be ‘only’ an object, or one can be made a fantastic being in the world, a superfluity of amazingness.
The Look is perceived as being given by an Other. That Other need not be physically present. A video camera can represent the Other. Even a creaking in the branches might represent an Other hiding there, watching. The Look is real in both cases, as a reinterpretation of the world in the context of the other is immediately forced upon one, even if one eventually smashes the camera, or sees that it was simply a cat in the tree.
According to Sartre, when one person loves another, what they desire is nothing less than the desire of the other. All of it. They desire the freedom of the other, freely given. They want the other to desire them and to fill their world with that desire. They want to be desired as an object by the other. If their desire is granted, the other will Look at them, and ground their being in the world by exalting them. Unfortunately, this cannot truly come to pass. As soon as the other loves them back, the other desires to be grounded, to be exalted as an object in the world. This can only be done by an intentional consciousness, a for-itself, not by a being-in-itself. There is a struggle between the lovers, a fight to determine who will ground the other. As one possible result, one lover might attempt to “project causing myself to be absorbed by the other and losing myself in his subjectivity in order to get rid of my own.”[B&N p491] The goal is to be engaged solely as an being-in-itself. By forcing his facticity to be the only aspect visible, the masochist hopes the other will not attempt to be grounded by him, but rather to ground him.
This is not a healthy love relationship. The ‘lovers’ are struggling over the aspects of their existence to each other. Unable to both ground and be grounded, the lovers are apparently at an impasse. There is something missing. Love. If, rather than thinking of themselves as objects needing grounding, they consider themselves the grounding for their love, a resolution to this problem is possible.
In the context of the master-slave dialog, the fight for recognition between two beings breaks down when looking at the being of love and the beings of the individual lovers. Love is constituted by the individuals in it. There can be no fight for recognition, as the lovers have already given their recognition to love. Love comes to exist only in the recognition granted by the lovers. Love accepts their recognition as it is defined by it. Love has reached the limits of its potential in simple existence. It does not have a chance to become a Hegelian slave to another master. It is defined by its mastery. Further, since the recognition given to love is given freely by the lovers, love can be satisfied by their recognition, unlike the master who forces recognition from the slave.
What happens to the lovers in this situation? Firstly, they are both conscious of having granted recognition to their love. They therefore both see themselves as part of something greater than, or beyond, themselves, which grounds them in themselves. They do not need the other to provide their grounding. They can be given the Look by love, rather than their beloved. This essentially resolves the first element that Sartre described as destroying love, namely the reference to the infinite regression of loving required of the lovers. It takes the amorous intuition and draws it from the infinite to the immediately present. The ideal of love is replaced by its actualization in a specific context. The lover becomes capable of looking at the beloved not as someone from whom to gain recognition or grounding, but as another lover, another constituent element of the love they share.
Both lovers, in their presence to love, are made immediately aware of their subjectivity. They are the subject of the love they have made/been. There is no apprehension regarding whether they will suddenly be reduced to an object by the other, as their subjectivity is grounded not only in themselves, but also in their love. They doubt and are apprehensive regarding their subjectivity only to the extent that they doubt love. The second element of Sartre’s destruction of love, the apprehension of objectification, has therefore been resolved.
The third element requiring resolution is that love is constantly being made relative by others. One would have to be “alone in the world with the beloved in order for love to preserve its character as an absolute axis of reference.”[B&N p491] Love as a being-for-itself constituted by the lovers satisfies this criteria as well. The lover and beloved are the total contents of the world for love. There are no others directly perceivable. Love can see others only indirectly in their effects upon the objects within its world, namely the lovers. Similarly, others can see (this particular instance of) love in their world only as its indirect effects upon the lovers. The lover can at any time look to love for guidance, secure in the knowledge that it is immutable in its essence so long as its constituent being is unchanged, that is, so long as the lover and beloved still love.
Sartre dismisses good-faith love relations for what seem to him to be good reasons and proceeds to give a thorough examination of bad-faith love relations. Having shown that it is possible to avoid the traps that lead to bad faith love relations, the question naturally arises as to what the features are of good faith love relations.
Fortunately we are not forging into completely unknown territory. Hegel wrote a description of love in “Theologische Judenschriften” that parallels the description herein. Specifically, he writes (translated by Kojeve):
Lovers can distinguish themselves from one another only in the sense that they are mortal, that is, in the sense that they think this possibility of separation, and not in the sense that something may really be separated, not in the sense that a possibility joined to an existing being (sein) is a reality (Wirkliches). There is no raw or given matter in Lovers as Lovers, they are a living [or spiritual] Whole; that lovers have an independence or autonomy, a proper or autonomous vital-principle, means only that they can die. A plant has salts and earthy parts, which bring with them their own or autonomous laws for their action; a plant is the reflection of a foreign entity and one can only say: a plant can be corrupted or rot. But love tends to overcome dialectically even this possibility taken as pure possibility, and to give unity to mortality itself, to make it immortal… This results in the following stages: a single independent unit, beings that are separated from one another, and those that are again made into a unit.[ITTRH p242]
Hegel certainly seems to be describing a synthesis of the lovers and the love similar to the one proposed above. Unfortunately Kojeve then embarks on a discussion of death and mortality in Hegel, rather than focusing on the love that is left so tantalizingly undescribed. Hegel apparently explored the concept of love as recognition early in his work, but abandoned it in favor of the master-slave dialectic. He had a different project than the one currently embarked upon.
What does it mean for love relations to be in good faith? First we must really understand what it means for love relations to be in bad faith. Bad faith is a flight from the authentic present into the facticity of the past or the transcendence of the future. A criminal, that is, a person who has committed crimes, is in bad faith to the extent that he relies on his transcendence to negate his facticity as criminal. That is, a criminal who says “Well, I may have held up that convenience store, but that’s not the real me. I’m a painter and a father. I just need to get some brushes and paint and get married and have some kids. Then the true me will emerge,” is in bad faith through a flight into transcendence. He denies his being-as-object, that is, his existence as a being with a past and factual aspects. It may be true that he can be a painter and a father, but to deny his criminal past in preference to an unfulfilled future is in bad faith.
On the other hand, a criminal who acts as such, denying his transcendence, is also in bad faith. A criminal who says “What’s the point in getting a job? I’m a criminal… I hold up convenience stores. What more do you want?” is denying his ability to reform, to change. He is denying the mutability of the future in preference to the unalterable facticity of his past. He flees his transcendence for his facticity and ends up distant from his self as for-itself. He sees himself as an object in the world, incapable of changing. This leaves him in bad faith.
In love relations, the flight into facticity can be viewed as the attitude masochism, and the flight into transcendence can be viewed as sadism. For the masochist, the struggle in love relations results in the loss of grounding. The masochist’s desire to be grounded in objectivity leads him to adopt the attitude of an object. He denies his transcendence and attempts to force the other to view him as object. Sartre writes that masochism is “a perpetual effort to annihilate the subject’s subjectivity by causing it to be assimilated by the Other.”[B&N p493] This may be made concrete by the masochist paying another to view him as object though physical abuse, which emphasizes his manifestation as object and denies his status as a being-for-itself, his subjectivity.
The bad-faith flight into transcendence in love relations can be viewed as sadism. For the sadist, the failure of love relations leads to giving the other the Look. That is, asserting transcendence over the others objectivity. The goal of this interaction, according to Sartre, would be “to bring into the open the struggle of two freedoms confronted as freedoms.”[B&N p494] This goal is immediately disappointed because by giving the other the look, the sadist is viewing them as already transcended. They cannot have any meaning as a free being-for-itself. The sadist has obliterated for himself their subjectivity; their objectivity is all that remains. Afflicted by this blindness to the other-as-subject, the sadist has abandoned, by a flight into his transcendence, any possibility of being grounded by the other in his objectivity. He views others only as objects, which is manifest in his physical abuse of others. They have no transcendence for him, and he cannot understand them as being other than objects in the world. To do so would be to grant them the ability to Look at him, and thus push him back into his objectivity, which is intolerable for the sadist, as he defines himself in subjectivity.
These modes of flight lose meaning when the lovers are in love. They are no longer understood in their relations to each other, but to their love. They are not fighting to be grounded, they are understood as being ground to their love. They are its constituent essence and can best be understood as such.
A being-in-itself in the world is irrelevant as it’s in-itself when compared to its being viewed as the contents of a consciousness. The door is not just a piece of wood, it is a mechanism to beings-for-themselves for coming and going. The ball is not just a lump of rubber, it is a plaything. This is not a denial of the existence of the objects, it is a recontextualization of them relative to an intentional consciousness. Similarly, the lovers in love may indeed individually flee into bad faith on occasion, but love keeps them in context. A graphical representation of this recontextualization may aid understanding. We initially view the lovers as independent entities, capable of manifesting their natures as subjective or objective. That is, they are capable of viewing themselves as subject or object. The natural give and take of their relationship may cause one or the other to assume a more subjective or objective role at any given time.
After they enter a love relationship, however, their distinctions become irrelevant. As Hegel said above, “Lovers can distinguish themselves from each other only in the sense that they are mortal.”‘ Their instantiation in the world is unique, but it is irrelevant to view them as separable entities. Graphically, this would be represented by replacing the two lovers with a single unity of being.
The lovers themselves assume this identity. We are all familiar with the lamentations of ‘the guys’ who essentially lost their friend when he got ‘whipped’ by love. Their friend re prioritized his life in the context of the being he saw and became, that is, in the context of love. Similarly, we can see the unity of action and thought when a member of a couple speaks in the plural. “We’re very excited to be able to attend your party,” one of them might say. This human individual is speaking of another’s excitement as his own. He can be excited for another, in the way that he might dig a hole for another or pick up groceries for another. This emotional and psychological for-other-ness is one of the key aspects of good-faith love relations, and it is completely absent in bad-faith relations. A masochist has lost his subjectivity to the point that there is no way for him to be emotionally for-other. A sadist has lost his objectivity so much that he is incapable of viewing others as subjects that might want someone to be emotionally for them.
Good-faith love resolves many of issues regarding freedom in love relations. The masochist and sadist find themselves desiring constantly freedom of some sort. The masochist desires to have the other’s freedom made manifest in its for-itself, and for that freedom to choose him. He wants to be witness to the other’s freedom and for that freedom to ground him as an object. The sadist desires to appropriate the other’s freedom, to enslave it. He desires that the freedom freely associate itself with the possessed objective flesh of the other. Of course, these attempts are in bad faith and are doomed from the outset. For a lover in love, there is no struggle for freedom. Love has already been freed to choose its objects, and they are it. A lover cannot desire the freedom of his beloved be given to him from her, as he is conscious of it already having been given to love. He himself cannot even desire it, as his freedom to select the object of desire has been freely given to love. The love itself constitutes the free choice of the lovers, and their distance from it is what permits it to desire them. That is, the lover is free only to choose whether to constitute love or not. Once the decision to be in love, that is, to grant recognition to love, its freedom is the lovers’.
Suppose that, for some reason, a lover is dissatisfied with love (or that love is dissatisfied with a lover, which is the same thing). Is it possible to break good-faith love relations? Because the lovers are granted the same distance from love that they are granted from themselves, that is, at least enough distance to permit internal reflection and critical self-analysis, we must conclude that the answer is yes. Lovers can doubt love, and work to destroy it. Leaving love by simply denying it, revoking recognition, constitutes a sort of suicide, as it destroys the lover as lover, leaving him as a for-itself thrown into the world. It also destroys the love by destroying the world that constituted it, namely the two lovers.
Another attempt to change or leave love might be constituted by an attempt to involve another in love relations. That is, if a lover attempted to love one other than his beloved. This would bring into being another love with him as a constituent element. Because the primary love was defined by the two beings to the exclusion of all others, this attempt to bring another into love constitutes a change in the nature of that love, that is, a destruction of it and, potentially, a recreation of a different love in its place.
Ultimately the greatest benefit granted by good-faith love relations is temporal. Bad-faith love relations are frustrating in their constant failure. They represent vice and are generally viewed as being socially reprehensible. With these factors against them, they seldom endure between two specific individuals for any substantial time. Good-faith love relations, however, are satisfying. They permit the lovers a degree of control over the nature of their relationship while maintaining balance. This allows the love to endure through time and despite hardships. The end result is embodied by the grandparents who smile at each other over a cup of tea, or those who somehow manage to keep the ’spice’ in their relationship while celebrating their 50′th anniversary together. Clearly there are many benefits from an analytic point of view to granting love being. It permits the analysis of ideal love relations formerly denied by Sartre and provides a practical goal in love. While this analysis does not constitute a complete description of all possible modes of good-faith love relations, it is hoped that it provides a substantial enough platform to permit the reader to stand apart from Sartre’s existential cynicism toward love. It may permit the reader to view his or her own relationships not only as either masochistic or sadistic, but potentially as a genuine love created mutually and providing grounding in the world. Essentially, it is hoped that this work provides a patch over the holes left by Sartre in his ‘concrete relations with others.’
