Dušan Arsovski

Jean Paul Sartre – No Exit

Overview
Sartre
Sartre (1905–1980), as one of the most important figures in the twentieth century,
is relevant for not just philosophical but also political and literal works. He often
used literary form to convey his philosophy (for example philosophical novel
Nausea (1938) where he anticipated ideas for Being and nothingness).
Existentialism,freedom, consciousness, individuality, authenticity, responsibility,
apsurdity, imagination, negation.
Opposition to Descartes, Cartesian epistemology and notion of Self understood
in the terms of Cogito. Influences from Husserl – Intentionality (an idea that
Husserl inherited from Brentano).

No Exit
GARCIN. This bronze. [Strokes it thoughtfully.] Yes, now's the moment; I'm looking at
this thing on the mantelpiece, and I understand that I'm in hell. I tell you, everything's
been thoughtout beforehand. They knew I'd stand at the fire-place stroking this thing of
bronze, with all those eyes intent on me. Devouring me. [He swings round abruptly.]
What? Only two of you? I thought there were more; many more. [Laughs.] So this is
hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-
chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burningmarl." Old wives' tales! There's no need
for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people! (No Exit, p.26.)
Characters: Valet, Joseph Garcin, Inez Serrano, Estelle Rigault.
The play is happening in hell (a room with a bronze ornament. Without mirrors,
windows, and instruments of torture). Every character has a previous idea of how hell
should be or function (Garcin - eternity without sleep, in one's own company; Inez -
torture by separation..) All of them did something that deserves moral condemnation.
Soon, they realize that hell is precisely the situation in which they are forced to be
directed to one another. They are the worst judges of each other and they will constitute
themselves through others.
Choice – Sartre was preoccupied with the problem of choice (The Roads to
Freedom, Dirty Hands..) We are convicted to always make a choice -Les Temps
modernes – September 1945 (end of the war) – Idea of a committed literature
(series of essays - What is Literature? (1947)– If one is not political in his
writing he is supporting the status quo. Garcin is a pacifist newspaper who did
nothing in the time of war. Similar to Kierkegaard and his ethical stage where
the individual is not playing with possibilities and makes a choice in a sense of a
principle. For Sartre, this is an existential choice. If we do not come to this
position we are constantly in a state of bad fate, which is a type of self-deception.
No exit – There is no escape from social relations, from others. We are always
present in others and others are always present in us. Others constitute me and
without the others, there is no “I“ in the first place.
Categories of being:
Being in-itself – is what it is – world, world of objects.
Being for-itself - “is what it is not” and “is not what it is” –
consciousness.
Being for-others - being as it exists in the consciousness of the Other.
My world, center of my world. Other is doing the same. Struggle for
being the center of the world. I am responsible for my actions, but I do
not know how I am constituted in the consciousness of the Other. So,
what am I is hidden in the Other.
In any case, this recognition of another consciousness, and its recognition of me,
is the conceptual translation of the literary mot ’Hell is other people’, and it is
going to be the basis, in Sartre’s curiously morbiy psyhology, of all my relations
with others: I shall always seek to make objects of them and they of me. And all
of us shall fail. (Danto, p.116)

Consciousness is transparent
There is no escape from the light. When Garcin asks the Valet “where’s
the light-switch“ he answers: “There isn’t any“. Everything is visible to
consciousness, so there is no such thing as unconsciousness.

Shame
In,fact no"matter,what results one·can obtain in -solitude by the religious
practice of shame, it is in its primary structure shame before somebody.
(Sartre, p.221)
I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other. (Sartre, p. 222)
I can be ashamed only as my freedom escapes me in order to become a
given object (Danto. p. 118)
Bibliography
Danto, Arthur (1975). "Chapter 4: Shame, or, The Problem of Other Minds".
Jean-Paul Sartre. Penguin Books; 1st Edition.
Flynn, Thomas, "Jean-Paul Sartre", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Fall 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/>.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1966). Being and nothingness; an essay on phenomenological
ontology. New York: Washington Square Press.