The Notion of Collective Authenticity in Early Sartrean Works

There is hardly any original thought in the strictest sense of the word. Any new thought is most often either a development of a previous thought or a reaction to one. Such pseudo-dialectical phenomena hold true with Sartre. We can say that the Sartrean notion of collective authenticity is both a development of and a reaction to his earlier thesis on individual authenticity. As will be mentioned in the concluding chapter of this thesis, Sartrean collective authenticity is a development of his earlier thesis in the sense that even in his earlier writings, we can already find traces of such thought. On the other hand, such notion is likewise a reaction to his earlier thesis in the sense that he in fact realized that any argument for individual authenticity devoid of a favorable situation is pure nonsense.

Traces of Sartre's notion of collective authenticity are implied, if not evident, in his earlier writings. However, there is a need to point out that early Sartrean works do not directly talk about collective authenticity. The things we find in those writings, however, suggest that even in such writings, there is already a trace of the evolution of Sartrean thought from individual to collective authenticity. Such a phenomenon occurs in two ways. First, the fact that Sartre considers the Other as a threat to individual authenticity is de facto an evidence that the assistance of the Other is necessitated in the realization of collective authenticity. Second, Sartre argues in his early writings that while the Other may obstruct the realization of individual authenticity, that same Other in fact helps in the realization of collective authenticity. To clarify these two points, let us then turn back to his earlier writings.

A hermeneutical reading of Sartre's Nausea will reveal the concept of collective authenticity in the way Sartre presents the role of freedom both in adventures and in temporality. The struggle towards authenticity, whether individual or collective, is a struggle towards freedom. Sartre tackles in the Nausea the existential notion of freedom when Roquentin starts to introspect about adventures. The void brought about by a meaningless existence usually prompts man to long for freedom through adventures. An adventure does not happen to one's life; it is something one makes happen. As Roquentin states:

The privileged situation, slowly, majestically, comes into other people's lives. Then the question on whether you want to make a great moment out of it.

Still, what merits our discussion is the fact that an adventure cannot be considered as one without reference to the Other. Roquentin succinctly points it out:

This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell.

An adventure then becomes itself an occasion for bad faith. For collective authenticity to happen, society must be restructured so much so that one need not live his life as if he were telling a story. This happens when society favors the multiplicity of personalities by granting freedom to each member to actualize himself in the best possible way for that individual. Since the freedom of the individual is of utmost importance in such an endeavor, the attainment of this freedom through the avoidance of adventures thus becomes a necessity. Still, Sartre falls back to his earlier thesis when he suggested that authenticity is achieved when one learns to turn against the tide. While doing so seems insignificant, Sartre asserts, "In your most insignificant actions, there is an enormous amount of heroism."

In the case of temporality, freedom comes through the acceptance of the reality that all that exists is the present. Sartrean thesis states that the past and the future do not exist and only the present does. This tenet is reiterated in Nausea when Roquentin says:

The true nature of the present revealed itself: it was what exists, and all that was not present did not exist. The past did not exist. Not at all. Not in things, not even in my thought.

Roquentin believes that freedom consists not in the abandonment of the past, but in the acceptance of the fact that the past is no more, and that one must dare to live with the present:

The past is a landlord's luxury. Where shall I keep mine? You don't put your past in your pocket; you have to have a house. I have only my body: a man entirely alone, with his lonely body, cannot indulge in memories; they pass through him. I should not complain: all I wanted was to be free.

The concept of collectivity is found in the realization of the need to assist others in their dealings with their past. However, early Sartre remains pessimistic as to whether one is able to do so. As Roquentin laments, "How can I, who have not the strength to hold to my own past, hope to save the past of someone else?"

Ironically, however, there is no vivid description of collective authenticity in Sartre's play No Exit. We recall that it is in this play that Sartre laid down the foundations of his tenets on individual authenticity. The possible explanation for this may be the fact that Sartre is concerned primarily in this play to portray how other people become one's hell, and as such, an affirmation of intersubjectivity would destroy the whole paradigm. Still, we cannot deny the fact that the very negation of intersubjectivity is itself a support of his later tenet that in the absence of a society conducive for authenticity, such an ideal is in vain.

Still, we cannot but be observant of what Garcin suggests in the middle of the play:

Why not? We might, anyhow, be natural… Do you know, I used to be mad about women? And some were fond of me. So we may as well stop posing, we've nothing to lose. Why trouble about politeness, and decorum, and the rest of it? We're between ourselves. And presently we shall be naked as - as newborn babes.

Indeed, it is only when the society favors an environment that does not admit of hypocrisy that collective authenticity is achieved. It is only when society desists from rewarding acts of bad faith that collective authenticity is realized. It is only when society starts to provide an uncorrupted environment that collective authenticity is attained.

As is found in most of Sartre's early writings, what is evident in The Condemned of Altona is the notion of collective inauthenticity. Reminiscent of Sartre's early childhood experiences with his grandfather, the play revolves around the reality that one's life is not always one's own. The influence of others in the formation of one's personality is significantly evident. In the play, we find Franz lamenting the sad fact of his upbringing:

The first thoughts that are born are his. Do you know why? He created me in his image - unless he has become what he created.

Earlier in the play, we likewise have a taste of the inauthentic bourgeois mindset of Leni when she tries to view the role imposed on her by society as her sole justification for living:

Johanna: You believe neither in God nor the Devil.

Leni: That's true. But we go to Church, and we swear on the Bible. I've already told you - this family has no longer any justification for living, but it has kept its good habits.

It is in the Anti-Semite and Jew that we find Sartre's first comprehensive treatment of the notion of collective authenticity. Such notion is discussed vis-ŕ-vis the treatment of the situation of the Jew in the face of anti-Semitism.

That early, Sartre was already aware of the fact that individual authenticity is hard to achieve in a society that does not favor it. As if this work is the precursor of the Critique, Sartre argues that collective authenticity can only be realized in an authentic environment. Let us then commence a discussion of collective authenticity in the Anti-Semite and Jew.

While it is argued that certain Jewish characteristics do exist, Sartre likewise emphasizes the reality that the Jew is a Jew because society takes him for being a Jew. As Sartre says, "The Jew is one whom other men consider a Jew: that is the simple truth from which we must start."

Sartre seems to double his effort in emphasizing such a point when we once again find Sartre arguing for the same point later in the book: "Thus the Jew is in the situation of a Jew because he lives in the midst of a society that takes him for a Jew."

Moreover, Sartre singles out Christians as the ones who are at the forefront in taking the Jew as Jew:

Thus it is no exaggeration to say that it is the Christians who have created the Jew in putting an abrupt stop to his assimilation and in providing him, in spite of himself, with a function in which he has since prospered.

It is almost impossible for the Jew to achieve authenticity because of the fact that society fails to recognize that the Jew is a man before anything else; he must thus be treated as a man and not merely as an object. Moreover, the Jew has been chosen by society to act as a Jew:

Whatever he does, his course has been set for him. He can choose to be courageous or cowardly, sad or gay; he can choose to kill Christians or to love them; but he cannot choose not to be a Jew. Or, rather, if he does so choose, if he declares that Jews do not exist, if he denies with violence and desperation the Jewish character in himself, it is precisely in this that he is a Jew.

Because of this situation, the Jew thus loses the sense of spontaneity and lucidity which characterize authenticity. Faced with the enduring challenge to prove his belonging to society, the Jew loses the very self that he has - his being a Jew. Sartre has this to say:

This perpetual obligation to prove that he is French puts the Jew in a situation of guilt. If on every occasion he does not do more than everybody else, much more than anybody else, he is guilty, he is a dirty Jew - and one might say, parodying the words of Beaumarchais: To judge by the qualities we demand of the Jew if he is to be assimilated as a "true" Frenchman, how many Frenchmen would be found worthy of being Jews in their own country?

Furthermore, what makes anti-Semitism disastrous to the Jewish cause for authenticity is the fact that such horrible reality is espoused by a great number of people. With this situation, the Jew cannot but be carried away by the movement in society: "But it is of no importance that this is an erroneous notion; the fact is that it is a group error."

To cap his discussion of the fact that the inauthenticity of the Jew is due to a great part to the treatment he receives in society, Sartre laments that "it is we who force the Jew to flee." Confronted with a situation that does not favor authenticity, the Jew is thus encouraged to escape from his situation through acts of bad faith.

This said, Sartre commences to describe collective authenticity. This he does first via negativa and then by a direct description of authenticity. Sartre defines the inauthentic Jew as one who, faced with the disturbing situation of his being labeled and treated as a Jew, seeks to destroy the Jewishness in him. As Sartre says:

It is not the man but the Jew whom the Jews seek to know in themselves through introspection; and they wish to now him in order to deny him… The Jew, because he knows he is under observation, takes the initiative and attempts to look at himself through the eyes of others. This objectivity toward himself is still another ruse of inauthenticity: while he contemplates himself with the "detachment" of another, he feels himself in effect detached from himself; he becomes another person, a pure witness.

Sartre would later say that the inauthentic Jew lives a life of contradiction. To specify this more clearly, we can even say that the inauthentic Jew is a living contradiction:

What stamps the inauthentic Jew is precisely this perpetual oscillation between pride and a sense of inferiority, between the voluntary and passionate negation of the traits of his race and the mystic and carnal participation in the Jewish reality.

On the other hand, the authentic Jew is one who, faced with the same disturbing situation of being labeled and treated as a Jew, accepts the reality and starts to project himself in view of the society that threatens his very project of authenticity. As Sartre says:

Jewish authenticity consists in choosing oneself as Jew - that is, in realizing one's Jewish condition. The authentic Jew abandons the myth of the universal man; he knows himself and wills himself into history as a historic and damned creature; he ceases to run away from himself and to be ashamed of his own kind.

The problem that confronts us now is one of distinguishing individual from collective authenticity. We might say that there is basically no difference between individual authenticity and collective authenticity in the Anti-Semite and Jew. It seems at first glance that there is not any. However, a more careful reading of the text will reveal that in contrast to individual authenticity, collective authenticity in the Anti-Semite and Jew is a project in view of a society that tends to restrict the freedom of the individual. As will be elaborated on later, collective authenticity in this work does not consist in simple declaration of one's Jewishness, but in a revolt against a society that fails to recognize the reality of the Jew:

Authenticity manifests itself in revolt, and is not to be achieved merely by the admission that they are Jews; they [inauthentic Jews] seek only to be made Jews by the looks, the violence, the disdain of others, by having qualities and a fate attached to them - to be Jews as a stone is a stone: thus for a moment they can find relief from that bewitched freedom which does not permit them to escape from their condition, and which seems to exist only in order to impose upon them a responsibility for what they reject with all their strength.

We will better understand this point when we reread the text and discover that Sartre is referring to collective authenticity when he speaks of authenticity. The proof behind this is the fact that such authenticity is one which is achieved through a revolt against the occasions of inauthenticity that society offers. We recall that individual authenticity prevalent in Sartre's other early writings deal specifically with consciousness and one's relation to the Other. On the other hand, the discussion of collective authenticity in the Anti-Semite and Jew focuses on society and one's relation to others. To better elucidate on this point, let us quote what Sartre says about collective authenticity:

Most members of the middle class and most Christians are not authentic, in the sense that they refuse to live up to their middle class or Christian condition fully and that they always conceal certain parts of themselves from themselves. When the Communists set down as part of their program "the radicalization of the masses," when Marx explains that the proletarian class ought to be conscious of itself, what does it mean if not that the worker, too, is not at first authentic? And the Jew does not escape this rule: authenticity for him is to live to the full his condition as Jew; inauthenticity is to deny it or to attempt to escape from it. Inauthenticity is no doubt more tempting for him than for other men, because the situation which he has to lay claim to and to live in is quite simply that of a martyr… Thus the authentic Jew is the one who asserts his claim in the face of the disdain shown toward him.

To summarize the preceding discussion, let us posit two major considerations as to collective authenticity. Collective authenticity primarily manifests itself in the formation of a group whose cause is manifested in a revolt against an inauthentic society. Collective authenticity secondarily manifests itself as the output of such a revolt - the situation of a classless society. This point is easier to understand when we recall that Sartre singles out the division of society into classes, with its accompanying labeling and role-playing, as the root of inauthenticity.

Before proceeding further to the discussion of collective authenticity in The Problem of Method, let us iron out one more problem that flows from the preceding discussion. Is collective authenticity the solution to the Jewish problem? Sartre's answer to this question in the Anti-Semite and Jew is the only factor that distinguishes his early and late discussions of collective authenticity. Although believing that an inauthentic environment is a hindrance towards the achievement of authenticity, the Sartre who wrote the Anti-Semite and Jew is not yet willing to assert that collective authenticity is itself a solution to the social question of the Jew. Before proceeding any further, it is important to point out that Sartre has already started to turn his back from his ontological discussion of authenticity. This we find when we see him treat the Jewish problem as a social problem:

The disquietude of the Jew is not metaphysical; it is social. The ordinary object of his concern is not yet the place of man in the universe, but his place in society.

Despite such evolution of thought, Sartre categorically asserts that collective authenticity can never be a means for the achievement of individual wellbeing:

The choice of authenticity is not a solution of the social aspect of the Jewish problem; it is not even an individual solution. No doubt authentic Jews are today much more numerous than one may suspect. The suffering that the Jews have undergone during the past few years has done much to open their eyes, and it seems to me even probable that there are more authentic Jews than authentic Christians. Yet the choice they have made of themselves does not smooth their way as individuals, rather the contrary.

In fact, Sartre holds that the project of authenticity is not a political but a moral project:

Thus authenticity, when it leads to Zionism, is harmful to the Jews who wish to remain in their original fatherland, since it gives new arguments to the anti-Semite… Thus the choice of authenticity appears to be a moral decision, bringing certainty to the Jew on the ethical level but in no way serving as a solution on the social or political level: the situation of the Jew is such that everything he does turns against him.