Existentialism and Revolution: “Bad Faith” Rhetorical Politics In The Obama Era

In recent years, even months, there has been a radical shift in the direction of mainstream politics from the status quo of the past two decades. In the early 1990’s it was unimaginable to believe that the then Vice President would be leading the charge against Global Warming and Environmental destruction for mainstream Middle America. It seemed a battle to even get one’s neighbors to recycle, or to explain what words like “Vegan,” “Free Range” or “Organic” meant at the Supermarket (or worse, to one’s Grandparents!).

The 2000’s came and radical environmentalists, such as author Derrick Jenson , aptly noted that for all the mainstream “inconvenient truths,” the average citizen was being blamed (and invested with the false hopes), relevant to their individual consumerism. In fact, Corporate Industrial Polluters were and are the problem. Individual consumer habit changes, en masse, would do almost nothing to reverse the Environmental Crisis. Politicians just didn’t get it, or so it seemed…

Then along came Barack Obama saying that these very same huge industrial polluters should and would be targeted under his hypothetical Administration. He seemed like such a long shot that no one looked seriously at him, until he had virtually seized the nomination from Hillary Clinton. With increasing popularity, antipathy towards Obama on the Far Left grew. Howard Zinn critically acknowledged this in an article written for “l’Humanité in Paris.” The psychoanalysis of such a jaded perspective is essentially a formulaic rationalization that goes something like this:

• I have not witnessed my desired changes achieved through mainstream means.
• I have taken another course of action to achieve said change.
• My course of action can be historically presumed to effect more rapid change than legal or above ground means.
• [However] my course of action has produced negligible results.
• [Thus] if my efforts achieve little to no lasting results, then the above ground avenues must inherently be even more ineffective. That is, if I take a short-cut and make little progress on the back roads, then the highways – notoriously backed up – must always fail to an even greater extent than the back roads.
• Anyone appearing to achieve change through such avenues is in fact investing us with false hopes.
• If they could effect such change through their means, then I would have effected the equivalent or greater amount of change through my presumably more effective means of catalyzing change.

The same types who had excitedly forwarded Guerrilla News Network articles on the anti-Iraq war statements of Obama years prior, now viewed him with suspicion. It seemed that he was proverbially damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. If he lost, it would prove the sincerity of his positions. Certainly no one espousing such views could be “allowed” into a position of power. If he won, it would “prove” that it was all part of an elaborate plot on behalf of the Power Elite.

From an Existential point of view, such a perspective is born out of “Bad Faith.” Indeed the founding father of Existentialism, Jean-Paul Sartre, and his lover Simone de Beauvoir were quite concerned with socio-politically relevant issues. Both were members of the Communist Party, agitators of dissent and revolt alike, accused of treason, and supporters (both in word and deed), of the Algerian insurgency against French occupation. Issues concerning thinkers on the far left today were not remotely alien to the great Existentialist thinkers of the previous generation.

Existentialism and Revolution?

Existentialism is a branch of philosophy most commonly known from associated French writers during the 1940’s and 50’s. Particularly, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus are most widely known, with Sartre accredited with its foundational philosophical formulations. The school is primarily concerned with notions of freewill, the meaning and limits – as well as the concepts in and of themselves – of existence. The school regards human existence as being devoid of any inherent, predetermined “essence.” Each individual is free to (and should); determine their own destiny, through personal freedom of action and interactions in the world.

The roots of Existentialism emerge from the soil of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. The school is often associated with rebukes of Hegelian and Kantian philosophical notions. This, however, is somewhat paradoxical, as the rebuke occurs from quite close proximity. It is worthy noting that, both Sartre and Beauvoir reference Hegel in humanistic, sociological laudations.

Like Nietzsche before her, Simone de Beauvoir focused on concepts of human joy and anxiety alike, rejoicing in shedding old world concepts of morality and the dynamic creation of value. Nevertheless, Beauvoir herself claimed many significant differences between her own ethic and that of Nietzsche’s. Nietzsche spoke of freedom in the sense of the “death of God,” at the hands of the burgeoning post-Enlightenment thinkers (presenting something of a crisis which continues into the school of Existentialism). Explicitly rejecting what he termed reactionary “slave morality,” Nietzsche promoted a new (and to some, frightening), sense of human freedom; “if God is dead then all is permitted.” While free, the burden remains for the individual in discovering, revealing and creating or choosing meaning of the world.

Simone de Beauvoir and Sartre

Simone de Beauvoir’s Existentialism was primarily and practically concerned with problems of human oppression. As an intellectual, she considered her work to be one of social commentator, yet one whose tools for analysis were philosophical. Beauvoir was brought up in a middle class family. Her realization that she had been privileged with class position of higher social strata in comparison to the majority of French women provided the catalyst for her writing of “The Second Sex.” Concluding with a quote from Marx in “The Second Sex,” Simone de Beauvoir purported the need for truly equal relationships between men and women so that women could flourish as human beings not as (or in), predefined gender roles. She famously stated therein that, “One is not born a woman, but becomes one.”

In the work “Ethics of Ambiguity,” Simone de Beauvoir penetrated to the central ethical problems of modern man: what should he do, how should he go about making values, in the face of this awareness of the ambiguity of his existence?

The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.

Beauvoir forces the reader to face the absurdity of the human condition (thought not existence itself), and then, having done so, proceeds to develop a dialectic of ambiguity which enables co-creation with the chaos of absurdity.

Initially supporting herself as a teacher, Beauvoir became a full-time writer during the early 1940’s. Her novels were also often illustrative of her own political evolution, engaging topics relevant to Resistance and the Cold War. During the mid-1940s she and Sartre helped to found the left wing journal, “Les Temps Modernes” (Modern Times).

So close was their relationship that some scholars have revealed commentator assumptions that Beauvoir’s writing was purely influenced by Sartre. Sadly Beauvoir is often only mentioned within the context of her relationship with Sartre. There is no question that Sartre’s work was extremely influential on Beauvoir’s. Beauvoir repeatedly commented that Sartre was the creator of philosophical systems, suggesting even that she was his disciple. Still, Beauvoir ultimately represented their relationship as a philosophical partnership.

Current scholarship tends to argue that Beauvoir’s work differs significantly from Sartre’s and that her idea of freedom differed substantially from Sartre’s radical freedom in “Being and Nothingness” by the time “The Ethics of Ambiguity” was composed. Indeed, the unique elements of her perspective on freedom are what relate most particularly to the prefaced issue at hand.

Still, the reader is able to detect Sartre’s presence within “The Ethics of Ambiguity,” even insomuch that it has been said that “Beauvoir is here trying to provide the promised (but never delivered) sequel on ethics to Sartre’s Being and Nothingness. However, it was after giving a lecture in 1945, that Beauvoir found herself claiming it possible to base an ethic upon the foundations of Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness.” The “Ambiguity of Ethics” about which Beauvoir writes clears up some inconsistencies that many, including Sartre, have found in “Being and Nothingness.”

Socio-Politically, during the 1960’s and 70’s Beauvoir was also developing her own interests and her work on behalf of women. She worked with Sartre on the Russell War Crimes Tribunal, an international body named after the British philosopher Bertrand Russell, set up to investigate US actions in Vietnam. As anti-colonialists, the two were also involved in campaigns against the French occupation of Algeria. In 1962, Beauvoir received death threats as a result of speaking out against the abuse of an Algerian woman by French forces. Retaliation is often the gauge of authenticity in activist circles. Indeed, both would prove their sincerity and authenticity, if from nothing else, than by the sheer level of opposition mounted against them.

Jean-Paul Sartre and “Third World” Uprising

The 1966, the film “The Battle of Algiers” (La battaglia di Algeri) by Gillo Pontecorvo, was based upon the actual events during the 1954-1962 Algerian War against French rule. The film highlighted the morally ambiguous actions of the Jabhatu-t-Tahreeru-l-Watani (FLN) insurgency and the French counterinsurgency; including the respective methods of each side (“collateral” targeted terrorism and torture). The film depicted the character of French counterinsurgent commander, “Colonel Mathieu,” as a composite of several French soldiers, in particular Jacques Massu. One of the most relevant passages of the script involved a small group of European reporters questioning Colonel Mathieu about the status of the counterinsurgency measure. In passing, one notes that Sartre had just released another editorial about the war. Colonel Mathieu, frustrated, exclaimed “Why do the Sartres always have to be born on the other side?” To which the reporters excitedly replied “then you like him!” Colonel Mathieu quickly retorted, “No! But I like him even less as a foe!”

This peripheral comment about the French atrocities and the cut-throat methods of the FLN insurgency (and the philosophical dilemmas posed by each), could not better have summarized the far reaching impact that Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir had in ending the torture of Algerians; as well in providing a European frame of reference for understanding of the Algerian revolutionary perspective. A bold personality, by dint of sheer intellectual authority, Sartre engaged his bitter adversary Charles de Gaulle as an equal, even though de Gaulle was head of state. Upon arrest the General said of him: “One does not imprison a Voltaire,” knowing that the French position would be worsened by his continued imprisonment.

Sartre took up agitating in the streets of Paris and before the gates of suburban factories. Often his quest for the liberation of the so-called “Third World” was in conflict with his support of those we now know to have been ruthless oppressors as well. In championing Algerian liberation, he wrote in his preface to Franz Fanon’s infamous book, “The Wretched of the Earth” that for an African “to shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone, to destroy an oppressor and the man he oppresses at the same time.” His words could at times be reactionary and without qualification. Indeed, he himself was a European, speaking of the justification of unqualified killing of Europeans in Africa, where he would himself visit.

Sartre broke with his one time friend, and fellow Existentialism author Albert Camus over such extreme stances and because the latter denounced the Communist Party. He was silent on the crimes of Stalin and later Chairman Mao. However, like many revolutionaries of the era, such as the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, such figures provided examples of resistance to what had previously been perceived as the virtually omnipotent world hegemony of the West. Indeed, Sartre wrote in 1972 about the May 68 strike on the Paris uprising, Sartre commented that Vietnam had extended “the field of the possible” for Western militants. He commented upon the previously perceived impossibility that the Vietnamese could take on the American military machine and succeed

All militants know that the ideas they had in their heads during the May combats came for the most part from the practice of the Vietnamese people.

It was often easy enough for Sartre to write off claims of Communist oppression to Western bias, propaganda, or simply as necessities that we could not comprehend (nor judge), so far away from the immediate context of these decisions. When the defector Victor Kravchenko published “I Chose Freedom,” the first inside account of the horrors of Stalin, Sartre wrote a play directly insinuating that Kravchenko was a creation of the CIA. The saying indeed goes that “Hindsight is 20/20.” Such defensiveness of clearly flawed regimes seems, to the informed reader, naivety at best, and at worst, oppressive double standards. Sartre’s Existentialism, like Simone de Beauvoir’s, was intricately interwoven with political activism and agitation.

Prior to first hand witness of the French atrocities in Algeria, Simone de Beauvoir would be pronouncedly less militant than Sartre. Following a period of radicalization, from 1956, when reports of French torture of Algerians began to circulate in France, until 1962 when independence was finally won, Beauvoir and Sartre waged one of their most sustained campaigns on behalf of liberation. They wrote articles, they broadcasted, they protested on public platforms and they marched in demonstrations. Their activities earned them accusations of treason and of demoralizing the nation.

Actions Not Intentions

The political implications of Beauvoir’s Existentialism are highlighted in her explicit rejection of nihilism. Far from a “nothing matters” response to Existential human freedom, Beauvoir ascribed enormous responsibility to the individual. According to Beauvoir, each person “bears the responsibility for the world, which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed and his victories as well.” It is the individual’s responsibility to create meaning through their choices. Thus, the individual burden of freedom allows for the potential to both freely create meaning and freely fail to create meaning to liberate as well as oppress. Individuals are responsible for the consequences of their actions, both the successes and failures thereof.

The value found in the world is resultant of actions, choices and interactions with others. There is meaning to life. However, that meaning must be uncovered in some cases and created in others. For Beauvoir, others are both the obstacles to and the vehicles for freedom. A major theme of Sartrean Existentialism, and clearly built upon by Beauvoir, is self-deception or “Bad Faith.” Bad faith is: “believing in something about yourself or the world even in the face of blatant counterevidence.”

Beauvoir’s understanding of “Bad Faith” did not restrict itself to the realm of the theoretical or speculative, but to the very practical, real world revolutionary situations she witnessed (and engaged in to some extent), first hand. “Bad Faith” was not merely a specter of one’s past which would have been overcome or succumbed to. It was an ever-looming challenge, a philosophical-thanatopic force of regression and stagnation which could, at any time, over take the unsuspecting (complacent), individual; who may indeed have once been acting in “Good Faith.”

In “The Ethics of Ambiguity” Beauvoir argues that each person needs the freedom of others for their own freedom to be realizable. Akin to Sartre’s notion in “Being and Nothingness,” that we choose for ourselves what we ultimately believe to be right for the whole world, Beauvoir writes, “every man needs the freedom of other men and, in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant; the only thing he fails to do is to assume honestly the consequences of such a wish. Only the freedom of others keeps each one of us from hardening in the absurdity of facility.” Thus, in denying the freedom of others, we deny what is true, that others are Existentially free. Accordingly, Gothlin argues that “The Ethics of Ambiguity” employs a phenomenological method by starting with the idea of the significance of the individual consciousness and from there developing a critique of the social idea that the end can justify the means.

Freedom is inescapable for the individual in the sense that one cannot escape one’s own freedom, but also in that one cannot escape the freedom of others. Accordingly, Beauvoir regards freedom as relational and reciprocal. The very act of denying the freedom of others is to live in bad faith, just as denying your own freedom is to live in bad faith. For Beauvoir, the persistent seduction of bad faith must be constantly defied. Complacency in this sense was, for the activist or revolutionary, an ever-present threat; complacency not merely in the sense of inaction and philosophical apathy, but more importantly in the sense of ineffectiveness in achieving one’s ends. Change, not action, not intention, is what matters to Beauvoir. No matter the intentions, no matter the actions of the individual, if the aim is not achieved and the individual persists in the same course of action (which creates only hypothetical change), they are acting in bad faith. It is at this point we stand at the crossroads of Existentialism and revolution.

Applying Beauvoir to the Obama Era in Leftist Politics

All too often, since the sudden rise to prominence of President Elect Barack Obama, the “Extreme” political Left Wing has chattered with notions of imagined ineffectuality of the aforementioned. Almost instantaneous to his landslide victory the activists and self-styled revolutionaries left their mark on Internet blogs, zine articles, Facebook status updates and so on; expressing rabid discontent with the man.

Many white and tan children of privilege were quick to say what virtually no African-descended children of disenfranchisement thought; that Obama was actually a “House Negro.” In fact, Al-Qa’ida’s so-called “Second in Command,” Ayman al-Zawahri lagged only a couple of weeks in arguing the same; employing the `Arabic equivalent of the word “Nigger” (`Abid). Historical realities that “House Slaves” were neither respected by the “Field Slaves,” nor did they kick the slave owner out of the “Big House,” fell on deaf ears to the children of privilege. For Obama to succeed at all, he proved that he must be corrupt, lest the responsibilities of the self-professed revolutionaries’ failures fall at their own feet.

It was assumed that in order to achieve change, Obama must inherently be on the side of the oppressor. Every remark that he stated to soften his previous comments on issues ranging from the suffering to the Palestinian people to the obsolescence of the Coal Industry under his Administration were instantly drudged up and paraded around in something of an anarchistic intellectual circle jerk.

The relevance to Beauvoir highlights, as the Ecclesiastical truism stated, that “there is nothing new under the sun.” The liberationists and revolutionaries of Sartre and Beauvoir’s day were no different than people interested in the same objectives today. Yet Beauvoir warned us that “good intentions” were simply not enough. Contrary to the ALF/ELF sloganeering, although “Actions Speak Louder Than Words,” their simple manifestation into enaction do not necessarily guarantee success, progress or any semblance of achieving one’s stated goals. To this end, the activist and revolutionary (or simply Leftist thinker), can easily fall into the entanglement of “Bad Faith” relative to their attempts at change (and complicity with engagement in mere counter-culture, underground or illegal attempts).

Indeed, the slippery slop of justifiable homicide, acts of insurgent terrorism, collateral death and even targeted collateral were all issues being grappled with in the Existentialist context. But Beauvoir warned that philosophically rationalizing a matter was not the end of debate. The issue at hand must be constantly and vigilantly self-monitored. Not only must we question the legitimacy of a thing, we must take a quantifiable look at whether or not the means are actually achieving the stated ends. If they are not, then the enactor of these loud-speaking actions is living in as bad of faith as anyone more typically fitting the bill under Sartrean examples.

In rebut and rebuke of such rhetoric, one need not present the activist résumé of the new generation of remarkable politicians – from community activist Barack Obama to Cynthia McKinney and “Hip-Hop Ambassador” Rosa Clementé – they need only ask “are they achieving their stated means,” and further, “am I tangibly achieving mine.” While many on the Far Left will happily concede shared points of Agenda with such politicians, they will portray them as ineffectual, while lauding themselves as somehow more effective, at least in potentia (as if this matters).

The proof, is in the proverbial pudding. Is one acting in good faith or are they deceiving themselves with an exaggerated, imagined notion of the effectiveness of their actions. Are they achieving more or less through their means than those they decry as sell outs and conformists? Is there quantifiable evidence to back up the conclusions of their imagination or are they acting in the face of blatant counterevidence?

Existentially, they are not wrong in their ineffective actions, but neither are others. They are not wrong in any absolute sense, only wrong in believing that they are doing something which they are in fact not. If the goal is change, then change can be directed through many means; both legal and illegal as in the case of the contexts which Sartre and Beauvoir found themselves exploring. Yet no singular method has the corner on effectiveness, and neither does the more radical, method by definition, inherit a preeminence of effectiveness simply due to its shocking or detestable nature to the oppressors. Just as the generation of hippies grew complacent with their acceptance into the system which they never dreamed they could influence – often stating to the subsequent generation that change should be sought “through the system” – neither should that same subsequent generation’s activists and revolutionaries imagine it impossible to capitalize upon the legitimization of the hard fought (and won), victories of an era past. Neither approach is effective by default, nor is effectiveness certain forevermore simply because of past performance.

Works Cited

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