Abstract
What Natanson is considering in this passage from The Journeying Self is that antiblack attitudes and some pro-black attitudes may be forms of bad faith. Natanson’s conception of bad faith in that work is “That which threatens the self by fixing and desiccating the subject.... Bad Faith consists in the individual’s moving from subject to object in social roles which have congealed consciousness into routine expectancy and which have made of intersubjectivity a masked and masking reality” (45). Bad faith threatens every dimension of human reality, including the existential impact of history: “The binding of time in Bad Faith is a way of denying the possibilities of the self, of stripping the individual of his involvement in history” (92).
As a limiting constant, the color of a person might be thought of as, in paradigm cases, an unalterable, objectively given absolute. However a distinctively black Negro may think himself racially, it would seem that he cannot change the fact of his color. In physiological terms, he is a black man. In situational terms, the matter is far more complicated.... One thing is clear: race in some color-wheel sense has little to do with the reality of being black, white, or anything else in the present world. It is in the situation of the individual that race categories have significance, and that means that the definition of the situation by the actor on the social scene establishes the meaning which ‘objectivity’ and the constants have for social reality. Definition in this sense is a modality of choice.
—Maurice Natanson2
I would like to thank Steven Crowell, Phyllis Morris, Martin Matustík, Gary Schwartz, and Eric Ramsey for their valuable, constructive criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper.
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Notes
Natanson and Alfred Schutz have criticized Sartre for committing forms of methodological or practical solipsism. See Natanson, “The Problem of Others in Being and Nothingness,” in The Library of Living Philosophers, Volume XVI, The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1981), 341; and Schutz, Collected Papers, Volume 1, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. Maurice Natanson (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 203. On this matter, see our discussion below of Sartre’s ontology as an examination of human reality from the standpoint of bad faith. The methodological or practical solipsism of which Natanson and Schutz speak is a function of bad faith attitudes towards human relationships. But such an attitude depends, ultimately, on the possibility of authentic attitudes—or a practice that is not solipsistic. The problem is comparable to Freud’s problem of the scope of sexuality in the interpretation of human reality; he needed a non-sexual standpoint from which to make the sexual aspects meaningful.
See Sartre, Being and Nothingness: A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square Press, 1956), 533–534.
Ibid., Part 3, chapter 2.
For a developed discussion of this formulation of bad faith, see Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1995), esp. Part I. For similar discussion, see also Debra Bergoffen, “Casting Shadows: The Body in Descartes, Sartre, De Beauvoir, and Lacan,” Bulletin de la Société Américaine de Philosophie de Langue Française IV, nos. 2–3 (1992), 232-243.
The literature is extensive, but for general discussions of gender categories, see Women and Philosophy: Toward a Theory of Liberation, ed. Carol C. Gould and Marx W. Wartofsky (New York: Perigee Books, 1980), and for race categories, see Anatomy of Racism, ed. David Theo Goldberg (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1990). For a study of the use of gender categories to undermine resistance to Western colonial/racist onslaughts, see Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove Weidenfield, 1965), chapter 1, “Algeria Unveiled.”
See Angela Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981), and Jacqueline Grant, White Women’s Christ and Black Women’s Jesus (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989). The argument predates the feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the Womanist movement in the academy in the 1980s. For example, women’s causes on the part of colonizers in the supposed interests of colonized women took the form of European female identity and served as a means of breaking down the anti-European identity of colonized people—particularly in regards to their family structures. See Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism, 37-42.
An example of the exoticizing of black women is the mania around black female literature in the academy. For discussion, see Hazel V. Carby, “The Multicultural Wars,” in Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michele Wallace, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle: Bay Press, 1992), 192–193.
For a discussion of Manichæism, see R. McL. Wilson’s article, “Mani and Manichæism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 5, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company and the Free Press, 1967), 149–150.
The literature on racists’ identification of other races with sexual promiscuity and rape is extensive. Angela Davis and bell hooks have already been mentioned. Consider also Fanon’s “The ‘North African Syndrome,’” in Toward the African Revolution, op. cit., esp. 11-12; Black Skin, White Masks, op. cit., passim; and Calvin Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Grove Press, 1965).
See “Preface,” 7-31; The Words, esp. 247, 254. See also Simone De Beauvoir’s account of his meeting with Fanon in Rome, where Fanon argued that Sartre is ultimately “guilty” of being French. Simone de Beauvoir, The Force of Circumstances, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Putnman, 1965), 592.
See Hegel’s Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 107, and Part III; and Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), esp. 51. See also Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modem Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 100-101.
“Black Orpheus,” trans. John MacCombie, in “What is Literature?” and Other Essays, ed. Steven Ungar (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988), 326–330.
Notebooks for an Ethics, op. cit., 42. For a discussion of Sartre’s conception of progress, see Ronald Aronson, “Sartre on Progress,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sartre, ed. Christina Howells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 261–292. Sartre’s efforts to articulate history as lived took on more complex form in his discussion of the relationship between interiority and exteriority in the later Critique of Dialectical Reason, Volume 1, Theory of Practical Ensembles, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith and ed. Jonathan Rée (London: Verso, 1991), passim. He writes, for example, “If History is totalisation and if individual practices are the sole ground of totalising temporalisation, it is not enough to reveal the totalisation developing in everyone, and consequently in our critical investigations, through the contradictions which both express and mask it. Our critical investigation must also show us how the practical multiplicity (which may be called ‘men’ or ‘Humanity’ according to taste) realises, in its very dispersal, its intériorisation” (64).
David Caute, Frantz Fanon (New York: Viking Press, 1970), 33.
This is not the place for a discussion of the meaning, and social-scientific and phenomenological validity of “class.” The literature on the concept is vast, and here I only hint at some of Sartre’s interpretations. But Sartre’s most sustained analysis of the concept can be found in his Critique. For commentary, see William L. McBride, Sartre’s Political Theory (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), esp. 78-79, 164-166.
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Gordon, L.R. (1995). Sartrean Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism. In: Crowell, S.G. (eds) The Prism of the Self. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 19. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8408-1_8
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