[Marxism-Thaxis] Sartre on Thaxis
Charles Brown charlesb at cncl.ci.detroit.mi.us
Fri Aug 15 10:56:22 MDT 2008
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M-TH: Life Is Beautiful
Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Wed Mar 3 07:07:16 MST 1999
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I'm thinking that as between Sartre and Althusser, Sartre. Sartre was
in the Resistence and in a concentration camp. He was in the struggle
for real. The theoretical basis I see for his emphasizing Hegelian
subject, "early" Marx, perhaps reflected below, is that we are no longer
in the period when Marxists treat political economy as "a process of
natural history". Rather we must be activating working class subjects.
The beauty in life in the ennui, alienation, unhappiness even as in a
Nazi concentration camp ! enough beauty to have enthusiasm for fighting
back, as Sartre did. This is the type of activation of the working class
subject we need. I wonder if a lot of the other French intellectual
confusion at that time was not aimed at covering up Sartre's
revolutionary elan and anti-fascism.
Charles Brown
>>> "James Lawler" <james.lawler at sympatico.ca> 02/28/99 05:20PM >>>
Here is a review of the film I wrote for the Sartre listserve. Sartre,
I
think, would say that Marx would agree with this.
--Jim Lawler
I just saw the amazing film, "Life Is Beautiful." Such a title for a
film
centered on life in a Nazi concentration camp. And yet, it is
convincing.
Life can be beautiful even in the horrors of the death camp.
One of my favorite passages in Sartre's Being and Nothingness is from
his
discussion of the nature of values. "Ordinarily . . . my attitude with
respect to values is eminently reassuring. In fact I am involved in a
world
of values. The anguished apperception of values as sustained in being
by my
freedom is a secondary and mediated phenomenon. The immediate is the
world
with its urgency; and in this world where I engage myself, my acts
make
values spring up like partridges."
In the middle of a thick book of disturbing philosophy, Sartre gives
us
partridges. I thank him for that.
Ordinarily, we don't realize that we cause the values to spring up,
wonderfully, like partridges. We take our values as reassuring, rigid
facts
of life. Existential anguish arises when one discovers that the values
one
accepts only work as values because of one's own free, creative
complicity
with them. We don't want to have to ask ourselves whether these are
the
values we want to live by, whether this the kind of life we want to
create.
There must however be a step, or many steps, beyond the initial
experience
of anguish. Such a recognition opens up the possibility of creating
values
freely, like an inspired artist.
Guido is the existentialist Master, a person who is able consciously
to
make the values of his choice spring up like partridges. He is a moral
magician, who sees and creates beauty in the worst ugliness.
Why does the sign say, "No Jews or Dogs Allowed"? his five or
six-year-old
son asks him. Guido, a Jew, tells his Jewish son that nobody likes
everybody
or everything. The son says that he doesn't like spiders. *There, you
see?
And I don't like . . . Visigoths! So let's put a sign on our store: No
Spiders and Visigoths Allowed.*
Those who know Sartre's book may find special significance in Guido's
occupation. He is . . . a waiter. Guido's performance of
being-a-waiter
would make a wonderful film clip to accompany Sartre's description of
the
waiter whose "being a waiter" is inevitably a playing at being a
waiter. The
waiter creates himself as a waiter. But the ordinary, at least
Parisian
waiter takes his waiter values very seriously, thinking of them as
stern
facts rather than as creative fictions. Guido creates himself as he
goes
along, in all the roles he is forced to play as well as the ones he is
free
to make up himself, as when he plays prince to his beautiful princess.
Central to Sartrean existentialism is the idea that individuals
freely
create their own values. This does not mean that all values are equal.
It's
not relativism. There are two kinds of freely created values: those
that
are freely created but in the *bad faith* that they are determined by
outside forces--nature, tradition, a god, the Leader. And there are
the
values created by people who know they are creating values, and whose
values
must therefore reflect this knowledge.
Guido sees and exposes the ridiculousness of the ordinary, conformist
majority who have fallen under the self-induced spell of the first type
of
values. He asks the new employer of a friend what his politics are. The
man
is momentarily distracted by his twin sons, rough-housing rudely
nearby.
"Adolfo, Benito, stop that. Now, what were you asking?" Guido
tactfully
drops his question. He had just seen the values of that other person
jumping
up and down, almost partridge-like, in the form of two very large
round
boys.
The absurdity of the Nazi values is demonstrated by Guido when he
takes on
the guise of a school inspector, in order to get another meeting with
Dora,
his *princess.* After going through a ludicrous inspection to Dora*s
amusement, he finds that he has to give a lecture on the superiority of
the
Aryan race. By the time the real inspector has arrived, Guido has
stripped
down to his underwear to display the superiority of the Aryan belly
button.
The school authorities ridiculously force themselves to maintain their
roles
of admiring audience for the supposedly higher wisdom they are
receiving.
The power of human freedom, in the form of bad faith or
self-deception,
apparently knows no bounds. Why then not also the opposite use of such
power
on behalf of honesty and freedom?
Sartre's formulated his theory of existentialist freedom under the
Nazi
occupation. We are free even in prison, he said. This concept of
"absolute
freedom" has frequently been criticized as indicating a problem with
this
philosophy. Life Is Beautiful demonstrates that we can indeed be
meaningfully, creatively, effectively free even in a concentration
camp.
Even there we can cause beautiful values to spring up around us like
partridges.
The film suggests the question: if there can be such a possibility of
creative freedom in under the worst conditions of human degradation,
what
are we not capable of in better conditions?
Naziism has helped us to see how far down the human being can go when
the
idea of egotistical power over others is taken to its ultimate
conclusion.
Sartre's existentialist theory of the free creation of values explores
the
crevasses and caverns of this underground world of self-imposed
darkness. He
takes us on a modern tour of Plato's cave where people take concocted
images
seriously even though they have disturbing glimpses of their delusion.
But
the point of this is not a pessimistic idea that the cave is all that
exists. It is to show us that if we can put ourselves in this
condition, we
can also take ourselves out of it.
Life Is Beautiful shows what an individual can do in the dankest
depths of
the cave, thanks to an awareness of human beauty and the recognition
that it
is up to us to create, cultivate and protect it.
_______________________________________
Dr. James Lawler
Philosophy Department
SUNY at Buffalo
Buffalo, NY
USA 14260
Base e-mail: jlawler at acsu.buffalo.edu
forwards to: james.lawler at sympatico.ca
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