"Search for a Method."

My book is now available in Germany and may (someday) be translated into German. http://www.bol.de/shop/home/mehr-von/buch/fqba/juangalismenendez.html

October 11, 2010 at 6:16 P.M. "Errors" were inserted in this essay which had been left alone for a while. I have made all of the necessary corrections. My computer's cable signal was obstructed, again, this afternoon. I have rebooted my computer.

au castor,

If Michel Foucault was correct to suggest -- as he walked in Sartre's funeral procession -- that Jean Paul Sartre was the "conscience of his age," then the struggles of this extraordinary thinker, Sartre's very public agonizing over social justice issues and his daily quest for personal freedom must be considered exemplary, but also symbolic.

"A man is defined by his project," Sartre tells us in his final great work, The Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre came to understand that his freedom was dependent upon the freedom of his neighbors, even distant neighbors, and that their pain was also his agony. This led him to the "supreme philosophy of the twentieth century, Marxism." Sartre says:

From Marxism, which gave it a birth, the ideology of existence inherits two requirements which Marxism itself derives from Hegelianism: if such a thing as a truth can exist in anthropology, it must be a truth that has BECOME, and it must make itself a TOTALIZATION.

Sartre was even willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, placing existentialism on the altar of the proletarian revolution, so long as there was the slightest hope of a "totalization" of this shared quest for freedom from poverty and misery through political revolution. As Sartre's life drew to a close, Marxism -- as embodied in concrete historical experiments and not as a system of ideas -- was increasingly seen as a disappoinment, even a failure. Marxism was the god that failed.

The hopes for a fully just society and optimism about the trajectory of history led only to the Gulag and atrocities of Cambodia's civil war, to a hideous realization of the worst nightmares in history. Yet a return to the Sartrean project leads to HOPE and not to despair, for in his "Search for a Method" and in the many pages of the Critique, one also discovers a much richer and more complex theory than any standard Marxist diatribe.

If it is true that Sartre's late work is indebted to Marx, then it may be no less true that it is also heavily indebted to Kant, and even more to Hegel. I am aware of Sartre's rejection of idealism, even as he adopts its vocabulary and "problematic," together with a personal dialectical method. There is a "spiritual hunger and adventure" outlined in Sartre's pages and not just a program for collectivist politics. "But the principal characteristic of individual praxis," Professor Thomas R. Flynn writes, "from the viewpoint of Sartre's overall strategy in the Critique is doubtless its self-luminosity."

It is with regard to that spiritual project of "self-luminosity" that one finds Sartre's late work amenable to reconciliation with a vast literature in theology and philosophy, drawing on Western religious traditions and secular ethical reflections. Hazel Barnes -- Sartre's American translator and one of his best readers -- says of the late work, especially "Search for a Method," which was intended to serve as a preface or addendum to the Critique:

The title, Critique of Dialectical Reason, suggests both Kant and Hegel. Like Kant in Critique of Pure Reason, Sartre is concerned with the nature, possibilities, and limitations of human reason. But there the resemblance ends, for Sartre's interest is not primarily epistemological or even metaphysical. The greater debt is to Hegel, and Sartre acknowledges it in his preface. Through Marxism, he says, existentialism has inherited and retains two things from Hegel: First, the view that if there is to be any Truth in man's understanding of himself, it must be a Truth which BECOMES; Truth is something which emerges. And second what Truth must become is a TOTALIZATION. "In 'Search for a Method,' " Sartre says, "I have taken it for granted that such a totalization is perpetually in process as History and as historical truth."

Sartre's late work takes us in one direction all the way to Marx, Frankfurt School theory, Guevara and Castro, but in the other direction it leads to Sartre's great contemporary Simone Weil, Edith Stein, Thomas Merton and Martin Buber, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and to our contemporaries Paul Ricoeur, Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Cornel West. For the religious believer, the end-point of Sartre's atheistic search for meaning in community is simply Christ, that is to say, love. Rightly understood, love requires no religious belief or ideological litmus test and it is available to all.

At this point, the great Catholic theologian and philosopher Hans Urs Von Balthazar must be mentioned, including his collaboration with the current Pope on a work detailing the importance of Mary and femininity in Christian thought. Love is "grace" and indestructible "quiet strength" against all forms of oppression in this tradition, which is identified with woman's contribution to the Church. (See my short story "Pieta" at Critical Vision.)

To discover a tortured and beaten human being, covered in shit and blood, defying totalitarianism and State power anywhere, for Sartre, is to find oneself at his or her side. It is to insist that each of us must be Orwell's Winston Smith or we may become O'Brian. It is to choose to share in that tortured person's pain so as to make it one's own, in opposition to power. And by sharing in suffering, there is an immediate and ultimate "totalization" that is defined simply as "the human condition." I plan to write soon about Hannah Arendt. ("What is it like to be tortured" and "Freedom for Mumia Abu-Jamal.")

To see a child being led to a concentration camp is to be compelled to join in his or her fate. Both Edith Stein and Dietrich Bonhoeffer made that choice as a requirement of their Christian faiths. I have no doubt that, under similar circumstances Cornel West would make the same decision, but so would Angela Davis. Professor Davis would do so strictly on the basis of her own Marxist and African-American cultural traditions of resistance to unjust power. Among the executed in Hitler's camps were thousands of Catholic priests, who prayed with and served their Jewish brethren, hundreds of thousands of socialists joined them, along with millions of gays, gypsies and others deemed "marginal" or "undesirable." (See my essay "R.D. Laing and Evil" at Critical Vision.)

... love is the analogue of reason, [Hegel writes in his early religious writings,] insofar as it finds itself in other men [and women]; or rather, forgetting itself, finds another self in whom it lives, feels, and energizes -- in the same way that reason, as the principle of universal laws, recognizes itself again in every rational being.

The sight of workers' misery in France led Simone Weil to insist on experiencing the factories and living the humility of poverty. Rather than being indifferent to imprisonment and torture, bored by executions (and there are many ways of executing someone) of so many of our mostly African-American young men and women -- and Latinos or Latinas -- we must stand with all victims (yes, criminals are victims too) and share in their fate. ("Abuse and Exploitation of Women in New Jersey" and "Foucault, Rose, Davis and the Meanings of Prison.")

This is to make clear the revulsion that dehumanization of any person should produce in all of us. That dehumanization makes the "crime of punishment" sometimes far worse that the "crimes that are punished" by a legal system, which is too often racist and biased against the weakest and poorest members of our society, especially women. If a person is led to these insights, then whether it is Marx or Jesus (Kant or Hegel) who gets him or her there may be less important than the insight itself.

For this reason alone -- the criminality in punishment by the State in racist society -- we must oppose the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal (who is innocent of murder) or anyone's execution. Racism and bias simply cannot be removed from a death penalty system that is reflective of deep and pervasive (if subtle) racism in society. Punish, by all means, but do not become worse than what you seek to punish. Society must be better than the convicted killer. Society must never murder. Society must never torture.

As I worked in the factory, Simone Weil writes, indistinguishable to all eyes, including my own, from the anonymous mass, the affliction of others entered into my flesh and my soul. Nothing separated me from it for I had really forgotten my past and I looked forward to no future, finding it difficult to imagine the possibility of surviving all the fatigue. What I went through there marked me in so lasting a manner that still today when any human being, whoever he may be and in whatever circumstances, speaks to me without brutality, I cannot help having the impression that there must be a mistake and that unfortunately the mistake will in all probability disappear. There I received forever the mark of a slave, like the branding of the red hot iron which the Romans put on the forehead of their most despised slaves. Since then I have always regarded myself as a slave.

Simone Weil leads us to the realization of community in loving. Love is not a dreamy, wishy-washy emotion for expression in greeting cards. I have seen powerful men laugh at the suggestion that love is at the heart of ethics and politics. "What are you some kind of a fag?" I am told that it is all about "power" or "money is the meaning of life." Marx's point is that money is NOT the meaning of life, but that it has a lot to do with alienation. Love is said to be too feminine or "vague" an "emotion."

There is a not-so-subtle sexism underlying such attitudes, a feeling that -- in a law school sense -- we must be "rigorous" at all times. The Freudian implications of this overused word "rigorous" should be obvious. We are told to become tough-minded, realistic pragmatists and "men and women of the world." These attitudes to the administration of law and political power are especially tragic when they are uttered by women.

Sartre's work leads us to Weil, as I say, but also to other "spiritual revolutionaries" (Cornel West) immersed in worldly struggles. James Baldwin's conversation with Bertrand Russell (there is a famous photograph of the two men having tea) must have been fascinating. For it was Baldwin who articulated, beautifully and elegantly, Lord Russell's life-long quest for a "share in the suffering of humanity," something acquired by Mr. Baldwin as a birth right. James Baldwin was what Russell wished to be: an aristocrat of suffering. Describing the place which provides the shared territory of Sartre and Russell, James Baldwin writes an Africanized and Americanized version of Hegel's dialectics of Spirit:

But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helplessly and forever, contains the other -- male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are part of each other. Many of my countrymen appear to find this fact exceedingly inconvenient and even unfair, and so, very often, do I. But none of us can do anything about it.

Baldwin is restating Sartre's argument, spiritualized, explaining human being-in-the world as a call to share in suffering through a totalization, which is simply love. The works of these writers come together in what is described as a "praxis-consciousness" or an awareness of the responsibility to overcome the distance between self and other, value and fact (Sartre's "practico-inert" as the grim reality against which we must struggle), by constructing Paul Ricoeur's "Ogival crossing" that takes us to the other in his or her moment of pain. Think of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "salvific mission." Dr. King not only accepted, but willed his own death as the price for his people (which is all of us) to reach the "promised land." Hegel's work is inescapable at this point, especially his early life of Jesus and Phenomenology of Spirit:

There is a higher way [to combat injustice,] the way of Christ, and of all who have been called "beautiful souls." Such souls follow the path of suffering, in so far as they abandon all their personal claims, and refuse to contend for them; but they pursue also the path of valor, in so far as they rise above this loss of particular ... interest, and feel no pain in it. Thus they save their lives in losing them, [think of Edith Stein or Dietrich Bonhoeffer,] or assert themselves just when they let go of everything with which immediately their life seemed to be identified. Fate cannot wound such spirits, -- for, "like the sensitive plant they withdraw at a touch into themselves," and "escape from the life in which they could be injured." So Jesus demanded of his friends that they should "forsake father and mother, and all that they had, in order that they might not be bound by any tie to the unhallowed world, and so be brought within the reach of fate." ... Forgiveness of sins, therefore, is not the removal of punishment, [no justice, no peace] for punishment cannot be avoided; nor is it the removal of the consciousness of guilt, for the deed cannot be undone; it is "fate reconciled by love."

In my moments of despair that my via cruxis will not end, that I cannot expect to be heard or recognized, to be SEEN by the powerful in my woundedness and anger -- along with many millions or billions more persons, like me, in the world -- I am reminded of Roberto Mangabeira Unger's closing prayer in Knowledge and Politics, so as to continue to struggle and hope:

Desirous of faith, touched by hope, and moved by love, men look unceasingly for God. Their search for Him continues even where thinking must stop and action fail. And in their vision of Him they find the beginning and the end of their knowledge of the world and of their sympathy for others. So is man's meditation on God a final union of thought and love -- love which is thought disembodied from language and restored to its source.

But our days pass, and still we do not know you fully. Why then do you remain silent? Speak, God.

Do we need ideals?

R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), $10.00.
Adam Phillips, Equals (New York: Perseus, 2002), $15.95.
Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist's Autobiography (New York: Vintage, 1988), $12.00.

"Every moment of pure compassion in a soul is a new descent of Christ upon earth to be crucified."

Simone Weil, The New York Notebook (1942). (See my story "Pieta.")



During much of the twentieth century and into the new millennium there has been an unfortunate tendency to undermine some of our loftiest ideals merely to replace them with the absence of ideals -- that is, to substitute for positive values the negative or utter absence of values of an increasingly nihilistic society.

This tendency has been accompanied by a snide, insulting rudeness on the part of persons who know "very well" those few things that they know very well, and have decided that neither they nor anyone else needs to know much more. Most of these persons, for some reason, subscribe to the Nation magazine and eat organic rice. I will not say a word about black Converse high tops (which I love) or nose rings. I think that this disdain for high culture and lofty, time-honored ideals is a mistake. I also suspect that this effort to "start" anew, to dispense both with what is good and bad in our heritage, cannot succeed.

In the first place, it may be impossible to live without ideals of some sort. Those who dismiss all ideals -- whether aesthetic, ethical, romantic, political or other -- have simply adopted one set of ideals over others. In other words, they favor the ideal of a life of brutal "factuality." (I call this the "Joe Friday" view of life: "Just the facts, mam.") Needless to say, there are many kinds of facts. Whether ideals are truly believed may also be a fact. The question whether an ideal is "true" may be factual, for example, depending on how it is understood or discussed. It is also the case that exalting facts over "wishy-washy" values is a "value judgment."

Time for a disclaimer: I am fully in sympathy with those whose motive is to liberate sexual mores. "Let's all have sex and forget the world's troubles!" This is a rallying cry which I fully endorse and to which I subscribe. As the politicians say, "I am for that." Yet such freedom about sexuality, ultimately, also depends on time-honored ideals of respect for personal autonomy and self-determination, and is hardly a celebration of nihilism.

The impoverished conception of life without higher ideals seems excessively bleak, to me, and is bound to be unsatisfying. The debunking mentality and "anti-ideals" attitude is based on one set of subjective and arbitrary ideals, I think, which are no more sophisticated or true than the, allegedly, unrealistic and impractical values of the nineteenth century's Romantic poets. In fact, today's trendy contempt for high culture and designer anarchism is shallow and insincere. It reeks of the Left Bank and Madison Avenue, of that sentiment captured by Oscar Wilde's observation of a hat in a chi-chi London shop: "With this hat, the mouth is worn slightly open ..."

Today's popular dismissiveness towards values and ideals may well be a symptom of our diminished emotional lives, not to mention indicative of a lack of imagination and intelligence. It is certainly symptomatic of a poverty of feeling that I find distressing. It is the attitude of the college sophomore who discovers that his first love has been disappointing. Real love deepens with pain, including the pain of loss and betrayal. Ideals do not exist to make us happy, but rather to guide us in the task of being human. Our trendy cynicism, I think, is an attitude that should be worn "with the mouth slightly open."

If life is correctly described as a movement towards death, then it does not necessarily follow that death is the purpose or meaning of life. The assumption that "death is what life is about" is a version of the post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy. By the same token, all romantic love between a heterosexual man and woman may have an underlying physical explanation and a corresponding possibility of fulfillment (you think?), but this does not make the love of men and women (or of any two adults) something which is reducible to copulation, or worse, to a matter of genitals only.

The same may be said of sex -- sex is not (and this should be on the obvious side of things by now) always about "love." By the same token, eroticism is about much more than the sexual act. But when spiritual love finds its perfect physical expression, then in the words of that great poet Don Juan De Marco, "Wow, there is nothing like it." Nancy Malone, a Catholic theologian and writer says: "I am concerned ... to reclaim the erotic for spirituality and to reclaim the part that the erotic in literature may play in our spirituality." Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading (New York: Penguin, 2003), p. 154. Ms. Malone has led me to an important theological work, which is only mentioned briefly in her book, Elizabeth Johnson's She Who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse. (p. 197.)

If this celebration of eros is dismissed as a mere "protest against death" by the Freudian cynics, then that is fine by me. I like to protest against death as much as the next guy. I wish that I might do more than that, since death is "really depressing" (in the words of Woody Allen) and love is just the opposite.

It has been suggested that a "cynic is a disappointed idealist." Oscar Wilde again. Perhaps the currently fashionable cynicism in Western culture may be explained as the result of disillusion: it has followed upon the collapse of nineteenth-century Romanticism (existentialism has been described as Romanticism for the twentieth century) in the hyper-industrialized and technological "postmodernist" societies that contain such things as computer blogs and something called an "I-Pod."

Humanism and the optimism of the Enlightenment -- which I like to defend -- ran headlong into two world wars and the experience of Hitler and the Holocaust, giving rise to a sense of moral exhaustion, which is still with us. Yet to abandon the highest values of our civilization in the relatively affluent and successful period that has followed upon these wars is to give the victory to the enemies who were responsible for those horrors in the first place -- enemies who were defeated, with great effort and sacrifice, in the struggles of the last century.

It is the view of persons as "things" -- or "meat puppets," as someone once said to me -- to be used and discarded, to be thrown away, and the "ideologies of power" to which such views of the person give rise (which are certainly not scientific), along with their religious-fundamentalist counterparts, that have led to more wars and genocides. They are what lies behind the forms of terrorism that we now struggle against.

According to newspaper accounts, in the terrorist incident in Beslan, Russia -- and you can't make this up -- several of the children who were hostages were made to witness the murders of their fathers and then made to dance afterwards, for no particular reason, by persons claiming to protest, in this exemplary way, Russian and Western "cultural hegemony." I do not envy the inner lives or emotional level of the people who did those things. I shudder to think of what "cultural hegemony" under such persons might be.

Beyond what Freud called "ordinary unhappiness," is the emptiness and lack of meaning that characterizes the lives of so many of today's aging, would-be hipsters, who remain much "too cool" for values of any kind, for whom others are either chumps or sexual objects. (This is aimed at you, Alex.) The idea of self-sacrifice is "an idiotic illusion," they yawn, while the lack of taste or joy in their lives is just "the way things are," they add with a shrug, rather than the obvious result of this morbid and false philosophy of anti-idealism or nihilism which they advocate.

There is certainly no shortage of horror and suffering in the world, but (if you search for them and hang on to them) there are also beauty and generosity, joy and meaning. Most of all, there is love. Any human being who has never felt an ideal or passion for which he or she would make the ultimate sacrifice -- a loved-one, an idea, a value, or the safety of a child -- is a deeply impoverished and sad excuse for a human being.

For such a person one feels not so much anger or an inclination to engage in debate, but only pity and disgust. This is true regardless of the faults and -- to use Monica Lewinsky's term -- "issues" that we all know ourselves to have to struggle against, as individuals, in our lives.

People say that love is an illusion, but is it more of an illusion than wealth or power, or any of the other baubles that we pursue to avoid coming to terms with the fate that awaits us? I doubt it. In his recent novel entitled The Dying Animal, Philip Roth has examined these themes with a level of sophistication and artistry that I cannot hope to achieve, so read that book if these thoughts intrigue you. Better yet, wait until my novel is written. (It may not be as good, but I need the money more than he does.) These lines are nearly a century old:

In every dream thy lovely features rise;

I see them in the sunshine of the day;

Thy form is flitting still before my eyes

Where'er at eve I tread my lonely way;

In every moaning wind I hear thee say

Sweet words of consolation, while thy sighs

Seem borne along on every blast that flies;

I live, I talk with thee where'er I stray: