I watch the news every evening while I eat dinner. I see the same scenes always; war in Eastern Europe, famine and disease in Africa and South America, fall fashions, and the dancing dolphins in Sea World. I am not impressed. The events are familiar. Horrendous deaths, hunger, high fashion, hectic capitalism, and happy animals are now essential components of my dinner. I question my awareness and my sense of commitment. I talk to my friend a little bit about it. There is awe in our faces, but not for too long. I stop my self-criticism and accuse myself of being silly. "It's always the same." "People are all the same." Since, as my friend often says, "political conversations do not lead anywhere," we will go shopping tomorrow to make up for our indiscretion. We are the best of friends, like sisters, and we live in Tallahassee where people are civilized. I lie to myself. Now I am in complete possession of the truth I am hiding. I turn off the television set and rush to class.

I attend my graduate seminar. I do not want to be there. There is too much to read in that class. Everything is too fast. I do not have time to ponder ideas. I am an intellectual. I have to question everything. I am the spirit of seriousness. I would rather stay home and read Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Yet, I attend out of fear that something interesting could be said about literature and society, and I would miss it. I do not like being ignorant about literature and society. It is important to me to look as if I know something. I am intellectually vain. I go to class out of greed and vanity. What if someone came up with a really good idea and I missed listening to it? How humiliating! I do not know who that someone could be. I do not know my classmates' names. They are ideas. I question my awareness and my sense of commitment. I am a being-in-itself, when I am truly a being-for-itself I raise my hand and ask "my intellectual superior" to send me in an intellectual mission to awareness and commitment. I want to do research on engaged literature. I believe everybody should be committed, especially readers and writers. How vain!

I want to write about literature and commitment in Sartre. But commitment is a matter of ethics. Then, I will write about Sarteran ethics, but in Being and Nothingness Sartre says that although "ontology itself cannot formulate ethical precepts...it does, however, allows us to catch a glimpse of what sort of ethics will assume its responsibility when confronted with human reality in situation." (Sartre 362). I want to catch such a glimpse. I will begin with ontology. Yet, it seems that Sartre's attitude towards the relationship of ontology and ethics is problematic.¹ This difficulty has to be addressed before the journey to ontology.

The Tension Between Ontology and Ethics.

Sartre is not consistently worried about the relationship between ethics and ontology. The experience of the Second World War and Sartre's admiration for the communists members of the French Resistance make him sympathetic towards Marxist historical materialism. Some time around 1943, the year of the publishing of Being and Nothingness, Sartre changes the focus from subjectivity to objectivity or from the being-in-itself to being-in-the world. Ontology gives way to social philosophy and politics. However, Sartre's shift should be construed as an ontological realignment, a movement from the subjective to the objective, and not as a major conceptual break. In an interview given to Madeline Chapsal in 1959, Sartre explains in an "autobiographical" fashion, the relationship between his early onto-philosophical works and his later socio-philosophical writings. Sartre says that his experience as a prisoner of war, his "personal myth" of the heroes of the French Resistance, and his intellectual reaction towards Marxism , account for the change of perspective from subjective ontology to objective social and political issues.

Sartre claims, that right after the war he has a "true experience of society" (Sartre, 34). Yet, he also admits that he never abandoned the ideas of intersubjectivity, responsibility and freedom. These notions are, paradoxically the determinants of human beings. Thus, a human being that is not free is like a soluble fish, a metaphysical absurdity; and an isolated human being is like a fish without a school, an ontological absurdity. The metaphysical equation of absolute freedom plus absolute intersubjectivity has as an ethical product, unavoidable responsibility. The existential operation performed over responsibility is commitment. He or she who is absolutely responsible is existentially and logically also committed.

In 1969, Sartre gives an interview to the New Left Review in which he reaffirms that the two factors which add up to commitment, freedom and responsibility, are constant themes in his work.

The relationship of ontology, ethics, politics, and commitment is not resolved or dissolved by the Second World War or any other historical event. These notions are theoretical constructs, not facts, which need to be examined within the context of Sartre's philosophy. For this reason, it is necessary to follow Sartre through the concepts of being, nothingness, consciousness and responsibility. These concepts lead, philosophically, to freedom and responsibility, that is, to commitment.

The realm of commitment is located in the path of ethics which intersects with politics. The gate to ethics is guarded by the mysterious sphinx of ontology. It is necessary to unravel and reveal its secret. She who does it will soon find herself in the kingdom of ethics and will have to face responsibility.

The sphinx holds the secret that in the midst of Consciousness there is Nothingness. Consciousness is an activity of revealing, and intending being, that is to say of unraveling and displaying being.

The main characteristic of Being is its conscious activity. Consciousness introduces differentiation in the heart of Being and by doing so it also introduces nothingness. Being becomes what it is not.

Differentiation is equivalent to focusing on something at the expense of something else, and becoming aware of my awareness as different from the object. Consciousness surrounds objects with nothingness because it is always a point of view for and of an object. For Sartre, "consciousness is consciousness of itself insofar as it is consciousness of a transcendent object" (Sartre 51).

Being can be analyzed as either being-in-itself or being-for-itself. Being-in it-self is conscious being, being-for-itself supports the intentional, negating activity of consciousness. Being-for-itself is, so to speak, a nothing maker. Consciousness is thus, "a being such that in its being, its being is in insofar as this being implies a being other than itself." ( Sartre 137 question,⁵). Or, in another formulation, "consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being" (Sartre 137). It follows that consciousness is not a substance but an "act of detachment that brings into being a signifying nothingness" ( Barnes, 18).

If consciousness is an activity, it is through its doing that it should be examined. It should be understood through a phenomenological "how", rather than a metaphysical "what". To be conscious is to be intentional, that is, to be directed toward some object. It is also to reveal being through, reflection and nihilaton.

Sartre separates from the substantialist-dualist tradition initiated by Descartes, that is, the tradition of the chose qui pense. Thus, Consciousness is made neither of biological protoplasm, nor of angelical ectoplasm. It is not a thing made out of "stuff". Sartre regards consciousness as intentional activity.

To be intentionally aware of an object is to separate it from its background, to see the wounded body of a Bosnian man, rather than an undifferentiated group of people with blood stains. There are no schisms in the activity of consciousness, since it is temporal. Consciousness is always aware of itself as a movement from past to present, and for this reason it is a chain or succession of nihilations. Moreover, to be aware implies that consciousness performs a double movement; it is to be positionally aware of the object, and aware of itself as awareness.

Although all my awarenesses are accompanied by the presence of the for itself, self-consciousness is always intersubjective. The realm of self-consciousness is the realm of the intersubjective "I ". When I am non-positionally aware of something --as looking a the landscape without really focusing in anything-- the self is not in its biographical position or mode. Thus, as I look at that greenery in front of me, I am not Maricarmen, but as soon as I become aware of a particular tree, that is, when a nihilation is performed, my biographical self or ego, takes over.

The chief role of the ego "is to mask from consciousness its very spontaneity" ( Sartre, 55). Consciousness seems "hypnotized by the ego" which makes it into its "guardian and law". Also, the ego allows me to distinguish between the possible and the real. There are cases in which the patrolling of the ego stops and consciousness "suddenly produces itself on a reflective level." (Sartre 55). Its monstrous spontaneity produces anguish, and in extreme cases of spontaneous solipsism, a pathological state.

Moreover, the "I". or "Me" is contemporaneous with the world, or as Sartre puts it: "the World has not created the Me, the Me has not created the World." ( Sartre, 57). Both are objects for a consciousness, that is, by definition pure freedom. Consciousness as pure freedom or being-in-itself, is not personal . It is not an "I" or "Me".

The personal world is the world of the "I" with and for the "Other." The Other is to Me and I am to the Other. Yet, I do not always recognize this. I turn off the television set for I do not want to be pressured by this sophocating intersubjectivity. I cannot help it. I have this abrasive Martinez-Puerto Rican character. I am not responsible. It is simply the way I am. It is my ego.

My ego is the shelter I use to hide from responsibility . This is a game played by intellect since my intellectual denial of intersubjectivity is nothing but "impure reflection". It is not original sin, or racial pollution. It is bad faith (mauvaise foi). I chose to get up from the dinner table and turn off the television set. I am free to do otherwise, yet I do not want to assume the consequences of this action. I am not predetermined. My freedom frightens me. I could have exercised it by at least paying full attention to the news. In bad faith, I lie: "I am going to class and tomorrow we'll go to the mall."

Maybe, in spite of ourselves, we are all committed. But that is here, in the world of the "I" which is also the world of the "Other", and not in the world of art and literature. I study art and literature because I want to escape. In the world of imagination I do not have to acknowledge that I am morally responsible and therefore, committed. I am, with Nietzsche and Don Quixote, beyond good and evil.

However, Sartre does not hold an escapist theory of art. His ontology and ethics constitute a logical cage that leads to being-in-the world. Besides, Sartre believes that language reflects the intentional character of consciousness. Words link existentially the "I" with the "Other". Writers cannot avoid being committed because they know that words are actions. Besides, writers know that to reveal is to change, and that one cannot reveal unless one has some kind of project of change (Goldthrope, 14).

To reveal means here to intend, to be directed out of the sphere of pure consciousness, or the spontaneity of the for-itself. The writer remains within his subjectivity as he writes, but the object created is disclosed to the reader. In any case, one has to have a project of change. I feel again slightly embarrassed.

Shame arises when others judge me. The representation that the "Other" has of me and the representation that I have of myself conflict. I am many others, especially my comrades of the Spring of 1968. "Free Puerto Rico Now!"; "Stop the draft of Puerto Rican men to Vietnam!"; !Viva Fidel Castro y la revolución!" My bearded Marxist comrades want me to be committed. So does my grandfather.

My grandfather was a catholic farmer. Love thy neighbor, Pray to Santísima Virgen María Madre de Jesús, and Our Señora of the Poor and the Oppressed. My grandfather and the church want me to be committed. And the church is powerful!

But that was a long time ago. Marxism is dead and so is God and my grandfather. I am not sure about the church. In any case, we are all playful postmodernists children of Our Blonde Lady, Madonna of the Material World. There is no subject, and no truth, ergo there is no morality. Yet, I still feel embarrassed. What is shame?

Shame is the presence of the Other(s), dead and alive, modern and post modern, and the gaze of my roommate. I am not totally free. As soon as the Other looks at me I become an object for him. I change from having a non-cognitive relation with myself, to being known and judged by someone. My ego emerges. Then I feel shame.

Sartre gives an example of shame. I look through a keyhole out of jealousy. My attitude is totally subjective. I am an absorbed in my curiosity Suddenly, I hear footsteps. Someone might be standing behind me. I feel shame. Then, what is shame?

I am ashamed because the Other, living or dead, is looking at me as a self with a consciousness, that is as another human being. In the gaze of the "Other" I discover both my singularity and my humanity. Thus, if when walking by Lake Ella I see a man, at a distance, sitting on a bench, he is nothing but part of the landscape. For all I know, he might be a puppet. But as soon as I take him to be a human being, my perception of the surroundings changes, and the relationship that I perceive among the objects in the lake is totally altered. His humanity has stolen my space. Now I become vulnerable to his look. I abandon the comfort of the being-in-itself, which is pure consciousness, and become vulnerable to an intentional consciousness. I, myself, become another intentional consciousness. Thus I am a being-for itself, an "I" in the world with the "Other" , and for the "Other". I am a being-in-the-world, for it is here in the world that I encounter the other.

The wounded man in the television is the image of a puppet. But I know that he is human. Like God, I am, subjectively, in a privileged position in relation to him. He is my object but I am not his. This is the way I reason while my roommate stares at me. So do my comrades, my dead grandfather, and the Almighty God, Santísima María, Madre de Jesús, Queen of the Poor and the Oppressed, saints, angels , the Pope, archbishops, bishops, priests the populated heaven of the Catholics and their patriarchal church.

I also become aware that I am a human being for the man in the bench whose humanity I now recognize. I am afraid of his judgment. Yet, I confront my humanity by facing the gaze of the Other. The wounded man cannot look at me. Therfore, I am not for him and he is not for me. A picture and an image are never like a real gaze. Yet, I know that behind the image there is a wounded man. Now I feel his gaze.

Sartre believes that in spite of this unavoidable intersubjectivity that produces multiple reflections of the ego, each individual is seriously and profoundly free. Thus, as moral agents, we are free to choose who we are and to remake ourselves constantly by creatively rehearsing alternative ways of life.

I am not a just a result of my gene pool or my culture. In spite of these determinants, I am free to choose, and exercising my freedom is my fundamental commitment. Furthermore, I am also committed to helping others advance or create the conditions of possibility for their existential choice. In order to render my commitment, I have to become aware of freedom as an essential part of the definition of a human being. This might lead to joining a freedom political party, writing an existentialist play, or philosophizing about commitment in a graduate seminar. My awareness of freedom can make me pay attention to the image of the wounded man. I can also cancel my trip to the mall.

Human beings are essentially different from other creatures because their question their facticity and wonder about possible choices of life. Thus, our identities are constantly in the making. Our moral life is goal oriented or teleological. Sartre believes that our identities as persons and moral agents are chosen as a kind of ultimate end. The project of choosing who we are and becoming who we are is best characterized in teleological terms. Our identities are always a project, that is to say ,"a long term endeavor of making ourselves who we are" ( Jopling, 111).

The project of change is not deducted, a la Kant, from moral reasoning, rather, any moral reasoning presupposes this commitment of choosing a way of life. That project of freely and authentically becoming who we are is human being's fundamental commitment. Committed writers take this human project very serious. They are committed to it.

In spite of the subjectivist language of Being and Nothingness, Sartre's emphasis on the intersubjective "I" and his conception of the inescapable presence of freedom in human existence, imply the idea of commitment with the Other with oneself. The shift from ontology to more objective matters, that is to say, from the language of consciousness to the idea that "the individual internalizes his social relations" (Sartre, 35), does not abolish Sartre's concern with "assuming responsibility".

The committed writer invites the reader to reflect critically upon his situation as a free and always responsible being-in-the-world. Prose can perform this task better than poetry since its language is free from the affective opacity that characterizes poetic discourse. Prose provides the most adequate access to the sphere of signification.

The committed writer needs prose to call things by their name in an active, propositional, and hence, intentional way. He needs to "call a spade a spade" The poet remains a "bearing witness" of the "unlivable" character of bourgeois society. "Poetry is the looser winning". The genuine poet chooses to die in order to win." ( Sartre, 370)

In effect, historically poets had the role of creating the myth of the luminous man, but in the bourgeois society the poet's white magic becomes black magic. If he is to be authentic and successful in bourgeois society, he has no choice but to declare the death of man. The poet, however, does not arbitrarily introduces defeat and ruin into the course of the world but rather declares the objective world inessential by an act of immersion in her subjectivity. He becomes what Hegel calls a Schone Seele, that is to say, he declares the triviality of the world by not paying attention to it.

According to Sartre, artistic creation stems from the need of experiencing ourselves in relation to the world. The object created is separated from the creative activity. The created object is a privileged mirror for the subjectivity of its author.

A writer cannot read its work as a shoemaker can wear the shoes he makes, or an architect lives in the house he builds. The writer is too familiar with the procedures, emotions and criteria that make up his work. The created object lacks concreteness. It is pure subjectivity. In the written work, "the subject seeks the essential in creation and succeeds, but then it is the object which becomes inessential." ( Sartre, 374) .

The written work gets its objectivity from the act of reading, and it exists as long as it is read. Since familiarity with the text does not allow the writer to occupy the position of the reader, it is the task of the reader to bring the discoveries and insights of the writer into objective existence. Thus, a "sufficient reason for the appearance of the aesthetic object is neither in the book in itself, nor in the writer whose subjectivity is only known to him, but in the reader".(Sartre, 371) . It is precisely the freedom of the reader, in the act of reading, that gives existence to the text. ( Sartre, 371).

There is a dialectical relationship between the writer and the reader. The writer recognizes the freedom of the reader to give objective existence to his creation. The reader, recognizes in the text he is reading, the creative freedom of the writer. Both reader and writer are committed to allow freedom to manifest itself. Hence, the work of art can be defined as "an imaginary presentation of the world in so far as it demands human freedom" ( Sartre, 376). The author convokes the reader and they both congregate to bring about "a world impregnated with more freedom" (Sartre 376).

Since the very nature of the work of art presupposes the interplay of the freedom of at least two subjectivities, the committed writer is he who cannot logically and ethically sponsor or foster any state of affairs which attempts to jeopardize the freedom of human beings.

The encounter of the freedom of the writer and the freedom of the reader also presupposes "unleashing generosity." Thus, any novel that invokes such freedom is a good novel. A novel can be gloomy or cheerful, pessimistic or optimistic, symbolic or realistic, but it cannot be prejudiced. Therefore, any "literature" that advocates for, or approves of, human slavery and oppression is a contradiction in terms.

Since the writer recognizes, by the very fact that he takes the trouble to write, the freedom of his readers, and since the reader, by the mere fact of his opening the book, recognizes the freedom of the writer, the work of art from whichever side you approach it, is an act of confidence in the freedom of men.... It would be inconceivable that this unleashing of generosity that the reader could enjoy his freedom while reading a work which approves the enslavement of man by man. ⁷ (Sartre, 376).

This dialectic of the writer and the reader shows intertextuality with the Hegelian dialectics of the master and the slave. For Hegel, the slave develops as consciousness through his work, but the work of the slave belongs to the master. The master wants to own the slave to sustain his identity as master. There is no master or slave in the Sartrean dialectic of reading but a co-ownreship. Reader and writer share the artistic wealth.

Moreover, as free beings, humans actively search to manifest their freedom either by choice or by desire. Sartre believes that the desire to make and to create are as fundamental as the desire to own. The object I create is my property in two senses: first as an object for my use or pleasure, and second as my own work. ( Sartre, 306). This desire of possession should not be confused with owing as luxury, since the latter has to do with possessing and the first with a quality or value assigned to the object. The desire to posses the object comes from acknowledging its value.

Sartre compares this desire to have with a man who wants a woman, not because of the wanting itself, but because he sees in her a quality he would like to posses . In the same fashion, the artist wants to own his work because it carries within it his subjectivity. Yet, he still creates it out of his desire to make. Furthermore, the author resigns to his work in an act of non-Cartesian generosity. He surrenders his work to the freedom of the reader. The writer is no longer the Hegelian master, the reader is not ensalved by the writer's creation.

If I create a picture, a drama, a melody, it is in order that I may be at the origin of a concrete existence. This existence interests me only in the degree that the bond creation which I establish between it and me gives me a particular right of property over it..... But in another sense, it must be radically different from myself- in order that it may be mine but not me. Here as in the Cartesian theory of substances, there is a danger that the being of the created object may be reabsorbed in my being because of lack of independence and objectivity; hence it must if necessity exist in itself, must perpetually renew it existence by itself. (Sartre, 306).

The passage quoted is from Being And Nothingness. This is the book of the sphinx, the ontological book. Yet, it already contains the idea that the act of creation demands the liberation of the text from the hegemony of the author. The author resigns to the right of property over his creation. The text now exits in itself and becomes, paradoxically both known or "translucent" and unknown or "opaque" to its author. These two sides of the opposition author-text turn into a synthesis in the Other-reader, who freely establishes through the act of reading his legitimate ownership of the work.

The written work of the author is a gift to the reader. When I give a gift I commit myself. The commitment is deeper if I give away something that I, myself have carefully made or created, and which reflects my subjectivity. My mother gives me a rag doll that she made when she herself was a child, that very same doll that has now been with her for sixty years. A gift of this type is a "destruction" or nihilation since she suppresses from the, object given away the quality of being hers. Yet, giving is a free, pleausrable act which produces a keen and brief, almost sexual enjoyment. To give a gift is to share a passion (Sartre 327).

But the created gift "cast a spell" over me as its recipient; and obliges or commits me to have a part of her that she no longer wants. Her generosity ethically enslaves me, "Generosity then is a feeling structured by the existence of the Other..." (Sartre, 327).

The writer creates both by desire and choice. He freely gives away his creation, as a generous gift, but by doing so, he commits himself to and with the reader. The reader is morally committed to recreate and preserve the creative gift of the writer. The realm of mutual reciprocity which leads to moral commitment begins with ontology. A writer like Sartre, who arrived to commitment by unraveling and revealing the ontological mysteries of the sphinx has to remain, like Oedipus, morally and politically committed. The other alternative is to blind himself and not write at all.

Therefore, Sartre is not saying that a writer is committed to condemn oppression and enslavement, but arguing that it is logically, ontologically and ethically impossible to write against the quality that makes all human endeavor possible: freedom.

The wounded man in the news is a free man.

Works Cited

Barnes, Hazel E. " Sartre's Ontology: The Revealing and Making of Being". The Cambridge Companion to Sartre . Ed. Cristina Howells. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Goldthrope Rhiannon. "Understanding the Committed Writer". The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. Ed. Cristina Howelld. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Jopling, David A. "Individuality in Sartre's philosophy. The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. Ed. Cristina Howelld. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992..

Sartre, Jean Paul. The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. Ed. Robert Dennoon Cumming. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.

maricarmen@resourceful.com

---

Back To Maricarmen's Cultural Studies Web Page