Sartre had some very interesting ideas of sex and love in Being and Nothingness, that are quite philosophical and revolutionary if taken in opposition to Freudian and modern psychology. Drawing upon Heideggers Dasein, and his own conception of consciousness, Sartre posits love, this closest fusion of two persons, is doomed to failure, as love (and even friendship) is not so much about sexual desire, as it is about having the other person accept and define one as a being/an object:
" I live shamefully and through blushing my recognition that I am as I appear before you. In shame "I recognize that I am as the Other sees me [Sartre, 1956, p. 222]." The other's look is threatening to me because he or she can see what I am now doing and how I am responsible for what I am. If I want to take away his or her capacity for this, I will try to stare down the other, I reduce the other to a role, take away his or her capacity to objectify me. On the other hand, I, may want to preserve the other's freedom enough to win through him or her recognition of what I supposedly am. I am utterly dependent upon the other, for I am nothing unless another consciousness recognizes me as such. As I "can not be an object for an object [Sartre, 1956, p. 257]." I must preserve the other consciousness, and yet I just as much want to destroy it for threatening me with judgment. Human relationships, then, will consist essentially in conflict. The impossible objective of the struggle will be to take away the consciousness of the other so that it cannot threaten, while preserving it so that it can give me a being I cannot give myself."
And as this is impossible, all relationships and loves are doomed essentially to failure.
There is much in this following article to discuss; from sex to love, to sadism. I know personally, the greatest horror of love/romance, especially in the beginning, is this feeling of either despair or elation of whether or not said madchen, understands and accepts me in all of my splendor. The attraction is very important as well, but it never transcends (in love at least, not lust) this basic impetus for the other, to accept and define my being.
Here are selected excerpts from the article by Prof J. Michael Russell, Sartre and Sexuality. There is also some very interesting ideas contained in the following paragraphs on all matters of sex that I think would make for very fruitful discussion.
My sexuality is a kind of undertaken conduct and not just a passively undergone state. And the moment I say that I am horny, I either cease to be horny or else I am actively choosing to be horny; I cannot simply be horny. So when we think about our own sexuality it is unsatisfactory to view it as most theories do, as a drive or force or state which we undergo and which is not our doing. Of course it is easy to see how comforting it is to portray myself as possessed by need. The attempt is to treat being horny as like having an itch. Yet the comparison fails. If sexual "need" were like a nagging itch, then anything which would serve to scratch would do. (One wouldn't scratch one's back with an object one found repulsive, but it would be of little consequence that the object be attractive.) The same person who would excuse his or her conduct on the grounds of being possessed by this supposed need would be quick to dismiss the option of some means of physical release that was mechanical, or self produced, or nonhuman, or unattractive. People who turn to these alternatives will in many cases tell us that their attitude according to which they needed physical release was an attitude of resignation which manages to delay problems of sexuality rather than dealing with or releasing them. How are we to account for this sense of defeat where the supposed pressure of the drive has been released? Such theories "fail to explain how we desire a particular woman and not simply our sexual satisfaction [Sartre, 1956, p. 384]."
According to Sartre (1956) we have not been careful enough in our thinking about the nature and objective of sexual desire. Because we have found through experience that having sex suppresses the desire, and also, that this is pleasurable, we have hastily concluded that the object was pleasure.
Thus the average man through mental sluggishness and a desire to conform can conceive of no other goal for his desire than ejaculation. This is what has allowed people to conceive of desire as an instinct whose origin and end are strictly physiological since in man, for example, it would have as its cause the erection and as its final limit the ejaculation. But desire by itself by no means implies the sexual act. ..[p. 385].
Sexuality in infants, eunuchs, old men, people who are unable to "make use of a sex organ to fertilize and to procure enjoyment [Sartre, 1956, p. 383]" should lead us to question whether this is somehow the fundamental aim of sexuality.
Sartre (956) poses his challenge this way:
Man, it is said, is a sexual being because he possesses a sex. And if the reverse were true? If sex were only the instrument and, so to speak, the image of a fundamental sexuality? If man possessed a sex only because he is originally and fundamentally a sexual being as a being who exists in the world in relation with other men? [p. 383]
In other words, perhaps our sexuality does not result from our having sex organs. Perhaps instead we only discover and learn to use our sex organs because of being in some broader sense sexual. And perhaps our sexuality, rather than being the source of a variety of interpersonal relations, is merely one form which our more basic concern for inter-personal relations takes. We must now turn to examine why Sartre believes that human relations are characterized by conflict, and then we will be able to see how sexuality is a form of that conflict.
According to Sartre, l would like to have a sense of who I am without ceasing to be that person. That sort of consciousness of myself cannot be had, since I must make myself other than what I am conscious of in order to be conscious of it. But another person can be conscious of what I am doing without there being this problem of my automatically being altered. Another, but only another, can be conscious of what I am and thus other people hold the key to a consciousness of me which I would so much like to have. Sometimes we recognize ~is in dramatic ways. You suddenly apprehend me while I am peeping through a keyhole, or having just done something vulgar, and in a decidedly embodied consciousness, I live shamefully and through blushing my recognition that I am as I appear before you. In shame "I recognize that I am as the Other sees me [Sartre, 1956, p. 222]." The other's look is threatening to me because he or she can see what I am now doing and how I am responsible for what I am. If I want to take away his or her capacity for this, I will try to stare down the other, I reduce the other to a role, take away his or her capacity to objectify me. On the other hand, I, may want to preserve the other's freedom enough to win through him or her recognition of what I supposedly am. I am utterly dependent upon the other, for I am nothing unless another consciousness recognizes me as such. As I "can not be an object for an object [Sartre, 1956, p. 257]." I must preserve the other consciousness, and yet I just as much want to destroy it for threatening me with judgment. Human relationships, then, will consist essentially in conflict. The impossible objective of the struggle will be to take away the consciousness of the other so that it cannot threaten, while preserving it so that it can give me a being I cannot give myself.
Perhaps it is becoming clear why the structure of human relationships is the promise of failure. In the first place, any attempt to take away the consciousness of others is a tacit recognition that there are others, and that, as the other may see, I am responsible for what I am. Since attempts to deny this other consciousness through violence, sadism, murder, or more typically, indifference, are recognition of that consciousness, such efforts fail. Either I will fail to control how the other sees me, in which case I fail to control the key to what I am, or I will succeed, in which case, having come to treat this other as an object, the other no longer is a viable means for winning recognition of myself. In love, for example: Either I will be loved not enough, or too much. The objective of love, according to Sartre, is to be valuable through the other's recognizing me as such. Here I willingly make myself an object so that the other will look at me, value me, and give me a being. If she remains free to look at another, then it is true that the fact that she looks at me gives me worth, yet I am perpetually threatened by her no longer finding me attractive. But then suppose I succeed in , winning her love, so that she is fascinated with me, "can't live without me," "can't help but love me." Who wants to be loved by an automaton? Now I experience her as incapable of being the foundation of my worth. Between uncertainty and boredom one can only expect dissatisfaction from love.
The point can be put in a different way: To want the other to bestow a value on me is to want the other to look at me. Now according to Sartre, you can either look at the other or be looked at, but not both. Seduction is the project of making myself an attractive object for you to look at and desire [Sartre, 1956, p. 371 ]. As seductive, if I look at you it will be coyly. I want to be a fascinating object. But see how absurd this is. For insofar as love wants to be loved in return, and insofar as I succeed, the other will want for me to love her. This will mean that she will make herself into an attractive object for me. But by her assuming this object role she ceases looking at me, and therefore ceases to be capable of giving me the value of being her object of love [Sartre, 1956, p. 376]. Some people will respond to this dilemma by throwing themselves into a more extreme form of identifying themselves through another's treating them as an object, namely masochism.
.
The other option, with its extreme form being sadism, is the attempt to dominate the other's consciousness and strip away its capacity to transcend me. This is where Sartre locates sexuality and desire. The aim of desire, he tells us, is "to make the Other's freedom recognize my freedom [Sartre, 1956, p. 393]." In sexual desire, "I make myself flesh in the presence of the Other in order to appropriate the Other's flesh [Sartre, 1956, p. 389]." According to this account, one doesn't want just to employ the other person's body. Sartre would reject the sometimes popular idea that what men are generally out to get is just a woman's body. Rather, I will want to ensnare the other's consciousness by making her identify with and experience her own body, because then I will be exercising a kind of control over her consciousness. (Sartre's text does not suggest that this role will always fall to one sex rather than to the other.) The way I do this is by allowing myself to be compromised by a sort of immediate awareness of my own body, not with the objective of loosing myself in a consciousness of my own body, but with the objective of using my aroused body to arouse the other and ensnare her in a consciousness of her body. Then I will be in control of her consciousness.
In a caress, for example, we do not just want contact with the other's body. (1) This is because the caress is not a simple stroking; it is a shaping. In caressing .the Other I cause her flesh to be born beneath my caress, under my fingers. ...The caress causes the Other to be born as flesh for me and for herself. I make her enjoy my flesh through her flesh in order to compel her to feel herself flesh (Sartre, 1956, p. 390,391].
Sartre thinks sexual desire is doomed to failure. Remember, it has the impossible objective of winning over the other's consciousness, so as to remove its capacity for judging or scorning or making an object of me, and yet simultaneously preserving that consciousness sufficiently for it to acknowledge my consciousness as having "transcended" it. "Such is the impossible ideal of desire: to possess the Other's transcendence as pure transcendence and at the same time as body. ..[Sartre, 1956, p. 394]."
Here I shall take some latitude in interpreting what Sartre means. In the first place, I want the other to be conscious of my exciting her. .But to exactly the extent that I succeed in getting her lost in her own excitement, she loses sight of me! In the second place, there is a problem analogous to that we discussed with love. If I desire her I want her to desire me. And even though this is exactly what I want, since it is proof of my having excited her, it is also just what I don't want, since insofar as she is conscious of my body, and has the objective of trapping my consciousness in an awareness of my own body and excitement, she ceases to have been ensnared by me in a consciousness of her excitement. Just insofar as I win, I lose.
Finally, desire fails because "coitus, which ordinarily terminates desire, is not its essential goal [Sartre, 1956, p. 396]." It is true that I have to make myself be flesh in order to fascinate the other's flesh. The penis is not like a sort of prehensile organ which one can just use dispassionately. The erection of the penis or the clitoris or the nipples cannot be obtained in, using Sartre's special sense of the word, a "voluntary" manner (i.e., with a sort of explicit deliberation, detachment, and calculative-ness). After all, one doesn't become excited on the occasion of saying, "I think I'll have an erection now!" Insofar as my aim in sexuality is to be a good lover in the specific sense of being involved in my body just so that I can, as body, be an efficient instrument for exciting the other, I have to let myself go with my own feelings. To oversimplify: Either I am going to be such a good lover (an efficient instrument) that I am not turned on, or so turned on that I am not a good lover. For since I must be flesh in order to incarnate the other's flesh, I am liable to have my consciousness turn away from the concern with the responsiveness I was aiming at eliciting from the other, to a consciousness of my own pleasure.
...Consciousness by incarnating itself loses sight of the Other's incarnation, and its own incarnation absorbs it to the point of becoming the ultimate goal. In this case the pleasure of caressing is transformed into the pleasure of being caressed. ...[Sartre. 1956, p. 397].
The pleasure of the orgasm is the "death and failure of desire (Sartre, 1956, p. 397)." In the case of the male it happens that the erection ceases with ejaculation. But for both sexes pleasure ends desire because what was a consciousness of the other is transformed into a consciousness of pleasure (i.e., of oneself). Even the knowledge that the other experiences
pleasure also, does not keep me from sensing that I am cut off from appreciating that outcome since my attention is fundamentally involved now with myself. What was a project of human interaction turns into a satisfaction which is a substitute for that interaction. Consequently, that satisfaction carries with it the sense of failure.
As with the failure of love, this failure might provoke one's abandoning oneself to masochism, but it also can lead to sadism. Both masochism and sadism fail. Masochists want to lose their own freedom and preserve the freedom of the other, but they act freely in pursuing this and they use the other as an instrument. Sadists want to preserve their own freedom and win from the other a consciousness of having been reduced to an object, but to do this sadist must use themselves as instruments. Furthermore, they tacitly acknowledge that the other is a free consciousness whom they are hoping to win. Besides, to the extent that I succeed, "when I have indeed before me a panting body, then I no longer know how to utilize this flesh. No goal can be assigned to it. ..(Sartre, 1956, p. 405]." If I have cut myself off from my own possible pleasure in order to be an effective instrument with her, then in victory I am defeated by having nothing to use her for, since I cannot even use her for my pleasure!
" I live shamefully and through blushing my recognition that I am as I appear before you. In shame "I recognize that I am as the Other sees me [Sartre, 1956, p. 222]." The other's look is threatening to me because he or she can see what I am now doing and how I am responsible for what I am. If I want to take away his or her capacity for this, I will try to stare down the other, I reduce the other to a role, take away his or her capacity to objectify me. On the other hand, I, may want to preserve the other's freedom enough to win through him or her recognition of what I supposedly am. I am utterly dependent upon the other, for I am nothing unless another consciousness recognizes me as such. As I "can not be an object for an object [Sartre, 1956, p. 257]." I must preserve the other consciousness, and yet I just as much want to destroy it for threatening me with judgment. Human relationships, then, will consist essentially in conflict. The impossible objective of the struggle will be to take away the consciousness of the other so that it cannot threaten, while preserving it so that it can give me a being I cannot give myself."
And as this is impossible, all relationships and loves are doomed essentially to failure.
There is much in this following article to discuss; from sex to love, to sadism. I know personally, the greatest horror of love/romance, especially in the beginning, is this feeling of either despair or elation of whether or not said madchen, understands and accepts me in all of my splendor. The attraction is very important as well, but it never transcends (in love at least, not lust) this basic impetus for the other, to accept and define my being.
Here are selected excerpts from the article by Prof J. Michael Russell, Sartre and Sexuality. There is also some very interesting ideas contained in the following paragraphs on all matters of sex that I think would make for very fruitful discussion.
My sexuality is a kind of undertaken conduct and not just a passively undergone state. And the moment I say that I am horny, I either cease to be horny or else I am actively choosing to be horny; I cannot simply be horny. So when we think about our own sexuality it is unsatisfactory to view it as most theories do, as a drive or force or state which we undergo and which is not our doing. Of course it is easy to see how comforting it is to portray myself as possessed by need. The attempt is to treat being horny as like having an itch. Yet the comparison fails. If sexual "need" were like a nagging itch, then anything which would serve to scratch would do. (One wouldn't scratch one's back with an object one found repulsive, but it would be of little consequence that the object be attractive.) The same person who would excuse his or her conduct on the grounds of being possessed by this supposed need would be quick to dismiss the option of some means of physical release that was mechanical, or self produced, or nonhuman, or unattractive. People who turn to these alternatives will in many cases tell us that their attitude according to which they needed physical release was an attitude of resignation which manages to delay problems of sexuality rather than dealing with or releasing them. How are we to account for this sense of defeat where the supposed pressure of the drive has been released? Such theories "fail to explain how we desire a particular woman and not simply our sexual satisfaction [Sartre, 1956, p. 384]."
According to Sartre (1956) we have not been careful enough in our thinking about the nature and objective of sexual desire. Because we have found through experience that having sex suppresses the desire, and also, that this is pleasurable, we have hastily concluded that the object was pleasure.
Thus the average man through mental sluggishness and a desire to conform can conceive of no other goal for his desire than ejaculation. This is what has allowed people to conceive of desire as an instinct whose origin and end are strictly physiological since in man, for example, it would have as its cause the erection and as its final limit the ejaculation. But desire by itself by no means implies the sexual act. ..[p. 385].
Sexuality in infants, eunuchs, old men, people who are unable to "make use of a sex organ to fertilize and to procure enjoyment [Sartre, 1956, p. 383]" should lead us to question whether this is somehow the fundamental aim of sexuality.
Sartre (956) poses his challenge this way:
Man, it is said, is a sexual being because he possesses a sex. And if the reverse were true? If sex were only the instrument and, so to speak, the image of a fundamental sexuality? If man possessed a sex only because he is originally and fundamentally a sexual being as a being who exists in the world in relation with other men? [p. 383]
In other words, perhaps our sexuality does not result from our having sex organs. Perhaps instead we only discover and learn to use our sex organs because of being in some broader sense sexual. And perhaps our sexuality, rather than being the source of a variety of interpersonal relations, is merely one form which our more basic concern for inter-personal relations takes. We must now turn to examine why Sartre believes that human relations are characterized by conflict, and then we will be able to see how sexuality is a form of that conflict.
According to Sartre, l would like to have a sense of who I am without ceasing to be that person. That sort of consciousness of myself cannot be had, since I must make myself other than what I am conscious of in order to be conscious of it. But another person can be conscious of what I am doing without there being this problem of my automatically being altered. Another, but only another, can be conscious of what I am and thus other people hold the key to a consciousness of me which I would so much like to have. Sometimes we recognize ~is in dramatic ways. You suddenly apprehend me while I am peeping through a keyhole, or having just done something vulgar, and in a decidedly embodied consciousness, I live shamefully and through blushing my recognition that I am as I appear before you. In shame "I recognize that I am as the Other sees me [Sartre, 1956, p. 222]." The other's look is threatening to me because he or she can see what I am now doing and how I am responsible for what I am. If I want to take away his or her capacity for this, I will try to stare down the other, I reduce the other to a role, take away his or her capacity to objectify me. On the other hand, I, may want to preserve the other's freedom enough to win through him or her recognition of what I supposedly am. I am utterly dependent upon the other, for I am nothing unless another consciousness recognizes me as such. As I "can not be an object for an object [Sartre, 1956, p. 257]." I must preserve the other consciousness, and yet I just as much want to destroy it for threatening me with judgment. Human relationships, then, will consist essentially in conflict. The impossible objective of the struggle will be to take away the consciousness of the other so that it cannot threaten, while preserving it so that it can give me a being I cannot give myself.
Perhaps it is becoming clear why the structure of human relationships is the promise of failure. In the first place, any attempt to take away the consciousness of others is a tacit recognition that there are others, and that, as the other may see, I am responsible for what I am. Since attempts to deny this other consciousness through violence, sadism, murder, or more typically, indifference, are recognition of that consciousness, such efforts fail. Either I will fail to control how the other sees me, in which case I fail to control the key to what I am, or I will succeed, in which case, having come to treat this other as an object, the other no longer is a viable means for winning recognition of myself. In love, for example: Either I will be loved not enough, or too much. The objective of love, according to Sartre, is to be valuable through the other's recognizing me as such. Here I willingly make myself an object so that the other will look at me, value me, and give me a being. If she remains free to look at another, then it is true that the fact that she looks at me gives me worth, yet I am perpetually threatened by her no longer finding me attractive. But then suppose I succeed in , winning her love, so that she is fascinated with me, "can't live without me," "can't help but love me." Who wants to be loved by an automaton? Now I experience her as incapable of being the foundation of my worth. Between uncertainty and boredom one can only expect dissatisfaction from love.
The point can be put in a different way: To want the other to bestow a value on me is to want the other to look at me. Now according to Sartre, you can either look at the other or be looked at, but not both. Seduction is the project of making myself an attractive object for you to look at and desire [Sartre, 1956, p. 371 ]. As seductive, if I look at you it will be coyly. I want to be a fascinating object. But see how absurd this is. For insofar as love wants to be loved in return, and insofar as I succeed, the other will want for me to love her. This will mean that she will make herself into an attractive object for me. But by her assuming this object role she ceases looking at me, and therefore ceases to be capable of giving me the value of being her object of love [Sartre, 1956, p. 376]. Some people will respond to this dilemma by throwing themselves into a more extreme form of identifying themselves through another's treating them as an object, namely masochism.
.
The other option, with its extreme form being sadism, is the attempt to dominate the other's consciousness and strip away its capacity to transcend me. This is where Sartre locates sexuality and desire. The aim of desire, he tells us, is "to make the Other's freedom recognize my freedom [Sartre, 1956, p. 393]." In sexual desire, "I make myself flesh in the presence of the Other in order to appropriate the Other's flesh [Sartre, 1956, p. 389]." According to this account, one doesn't want just to employ the other person's body. Sartre would reject the sometimes popular idea that what men are generally out to get is just a woman's body. Rather, I will want to ensnare the other's consciousness by making her identify with and experience her own body, because then I will be exercising a kind of control over her consciousness. (Sartre's text does not suggest that this role will always fall to one sex rather than to the other.) The way I do this is by allowing myself to be compromised by a sort of immediate awareness of my own body, not with the objective of loosing myself in a consciousness of my own body, but with the objective of using my aroused body to arouse the other and ensnare her in a consciousness of her body. Then I will be in control of her consciousness.
In a caress, for example, we do not just want contact with the other's body. (1) This is because the caress is not a simple stroking; it is a shaping. In caressing .the Other I cause her flesh to be born beneath my caress, under my fingers. ...The caress causes the Other to be born as flesh for me and for herself. I make her enjoy my flesh through her flesh in order to compel her to feel herself flesh (Sartre, 1956, p. 390,391].
Sartre thinks sexual desire is doomed to failure. Remember, it has the impossible objective of winning over the other's consciousness, so as to remove its capacity for judging or scorning or making an object of me, and yet simultaneously preserving that consciousness sufficiently for it to acknowledge my consciousness as having "transcended" it. "Such is the impossible ideal of desire: to possess the Other's transcendence as pure transcendence and at the same time as body. ..[Sartre, 1956, p. 394]."
Here I shall take some latitude in interpreting what Sartre means. In the first place, I want the other to be conscious of my exciting her. .But to exactly the extent that I succeed in getting her lost in her own excitement, she loses sight of me! In the second place, there is a problem analogous to that we discussed with love. If I desire her I want her to desire me. And even though this is exactly what I want, since it is proof of my having excited her, it is also just what I don't want, since insofar as she is conscious of my body, and has the objective of trapping my consciousness in an awareness of my own body and excitement, she ceases to have been ensnared by me in a consciousness of her excitement. Just insofar as I win, I lose.
Finally, desire fails because "coitus, which ordinarily terminates desire, is not its essential goal [Sartre, 1956, p. 396]." It is true that I have to make myself be flesh in order to fascinate the other's flesh. The penis is not like a sort of prehensile organ which one can just use dispassionately. The erection of the penis or the clitoris or the nipples cannot be obtained in, using Sartre's special sense of the word, a "voluntary" manner (i.e., with a sort of explicit deliberation, detachment, and calculative-ness). After all, one doesn't become excited on the occasion of saying, "I think I'll have an erection now!" Insofar as my aim in sexuality is to be a good lover in the specific sense of being involved in my body just so that I can, as body, be an efficient instrument for exciting the other, I have to let myself go with my own feelings. To oversimplify: Either I am going to be such a good lover (an efficient instrument) that I am not turned on, or so turned on that I am not a good lover. For since I must be flesh in order to incarnate the other's flesh, I am liable to have my consciousness turn away from the concern with the responsiveness I was aiming at eliciting from the other, to a consciousness of my own pleasure.
...Consciousness by incarnating itself loses sight of the Other's incarnation, and its own incarnation absorbs it to the point of becoming the ultimate goal. In this case the pleasure of caressing is transformed into the pleasure of being caressed. ...[Sartre. 1956, p. 397].
The pleasure of the orgasm is the "death and failure of desire (Sartre, 1956, p. 397)." In the case of the male it happens that the erection ceases with ejaculation. But for both sexes pleasure ends desire because what was a consciousness of the other is transformed into a consciousness of pleasure (i.e., of oneself). Even the knowledge that the other experiences
pleasure also, does not keep me from sensing that I am cut off from appreciating that outcome since my attention is fundamentally involved now with myself. What was a project of human interaction turns into a satisfaction which is a substitute for that interaction. Consequently, that satisfaction carries with it the sense of failure.
As with the failure of love, this failure might provoke one's abandoning oneself to masochism, but it also can lead to sadism. Both masochism and sadism fail. Masochists want to lose their own freedom and preserve the freedom of the other, but they act freely in pursuing this and they use the other as an instrument. Sadists want to preserve their own freedom and win from the other a consciousness of having been reduced to an object, but to do this sadist must use themselves as instruments. Furthermore, they tacitly acknowledge that the other is a free consciousness whom they are hoping to win. Besides, to the extent that I succeed, "when I have indeed before me a panting body, then I no longer know how to utilize this flesh. No goal can be assigned to it. ..(Sartre, 1956, p. 405]." If I have cut myself off from my own possible pleasure in order to be an effective instrument with her, then in victory I am defeated by having nothing to use her for, since I cannot even use her for my pleasure!
) for a time.
