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Arachne: A Literary Journal. No. 1

(III:2) Twilight Of The Gods

(III:2) Twilight Of The Gods

There are, of course, as many 'abortive gods' in Sartre's world as there are individuals. These gods live in continual 'conflict' with one another stabbing and piercing one another by means of a fearful 'look' which 'posits' the rival god as part of one's own world deftly turning him from a subject into an object. This 'look', however, is not deadly. It can be returned with the result that the parts will page 20 be reversed. This makes for complete instability. Whenever another appears on the horizon, my whole world is in danger including myself who am the god of this world. Sartre compares this appearance of the other with 'a kind of landslide of the universe, or with a shifting of its centre which undermines the centralisation operated by myself. It is as if the world had a sinkhole in the middle and were continually emptying itself through that hole'.5 This is what Sartre calls 'the scandal of the plurality of pour-soi's'. All this is rather puzzling, but a shrewd remark occasionally made by Gabriel Marcel will help us on the right track. This astute but by no means unsympathic critic of Sartre suggested that "Sartre's world is the world as seen from the terrace of a cafe."6 This is not a mere witticism. All philosophies have what Gunkel called their 'seat in life'; if you can discover this 'seat' a flood of new light falls on their purely verbal formulations. In other words, philosophers are always tempted to generalise from some concrete situation of limited applicability to universality. This undoubtedly is the case with Sartre, and Marcel has given us a valuable hint as to the situation from which Sartre deduces his generalisations. It is the cafe. The crowded terrace of a cafe provides ample opportunity for looking around. Since you have not much else to do you pass your time in looking at the others who frequent the cafe and in 'sum-ming them up'. Of course, you are not the only one who plays this game; the others are similarly occupied. This naturally makes you somewhat self-conscious. You start to act. You try to be what your consciousness tells you are not. This is a precarious situation, for the next moment somebody may look at you and sum you up. And that is the end of you, at least for the moment. Of course, you do not know exactly what label the other has put on you, but this makes the situation only the worse. On the other hand, you can always retaliate by defiantly looking at the other and summing him up in turn. To any one who has spent some hours in a continental cafe, this game is only too familiar. Now, it is Sartre's contention that life is just like this. And it is only with this fact in mind that we are able to follow Sartre's discussion concerning the relation of the one individual to the other. The existence of the other is no problem for Sartre. The other's existence is given as part of my own existence. 'The other is always there.' Or, 'to be seen by the other' (that is, to be conscious of the other's presence as 'other') is sufficient evidence that I see the other. He is given with the enexplicable and completely contingent fact of my own conscious existence. Or to put it still differently, the être-pour-soi is in its very structure always also être-pour-autrui. The latter term has, of course, nothing to do with the Christian notion that everyone is there 'for the other' viz., to serve him. All that it means in this context is that each individual is continually exposed to the 'look' of the other and that it is only for the other that the pour-soi is what it is and so can assume the nature of l'en-soi from which, in its own consciousness, it is for ever barred. Consequently, the secret of my being lies buried in the consciousness of the other. I wish to get hold of it, but such desire is doomed to end in frustration. For the moment I wish to wrest the secret from him, I 'act upon' him and his person 'collapses' under my 'look' into mere objectivity burying the secret with him. Or, as Sartre puts it also, the moment I wish to get hold of the other, he escapes me and leaves nothing but his coat in my hands. I am like Tantalus, to quote still another metaphor that Sartre uses. I know where my true being lies, but I cannot get hold of it. So we have here another 'impasse' or 'check-mate'. The reason for this lies in, so Sartre would have us believe, the fundamental fact that soul cannot meet soul. In other words, that there are no true personal relationships. Where two people come together the one is bound to reduce the other to the state of an object. From this there is no escape, anly the parts can be exchanged. This is the 'single one' in his inexorable exclusiveness. Even the Sartrean gods, though only 'dieux manques', are jealous gods.