Source: Selected from The Choice Beyond Life: Essays of the Thinker (Sartre Volume)
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Am I a homosexual?
Whenever Jill showed me tenderness—he always treated people with such a discreet and charming gesture—I felt so embarrassed, as if a homosexual was making obscene demands on me.
Once the relationship with a man is no longer superficially friendly and turns into deep intimacy, it always embarrasses me. I didn't like to confide in him my secrets, nor did I like him to tell me his heart. I'm not completely closed off from myself, on the contrary, I sometimes talk about my own life, including some details. The other person may think that this is trust, but I don't see it that way. I mean, I'm willing to tell anyone what I'm going to say, not just one.
I don't like to be trusted, and here I'm mostly referring to its form rather than its content. I really don't mean to do this, I think it's a tearful indulgence, a constant desire to beg for understanding. If a man trusts me, I'll get as cold as ice.
I do have feelings for Berett and Portel, and I do have feelings for Nizan. But that was in my teenage years, the sexual characteristics had not yet been determined, and my feelings must have contained a platonic element of love.
A man's moral or physical nakedness shocks me beyond measure. Jill was naked in front of me, and he himself may not have been hurt in any way, but as far as I was concerned, I was so shocked that I didn't know where to look.
What I'm writing in my notebook now may be repressed homosexuality.
About women
Many men. Most of the men we know. It is not that they are not really men; but that in conversation and in everyday life they have a code of equality, and it can be said that their masculinity does not apply this criterion, but masculinity is not something that men like to boast about, at least not what men I know like to boast about. Obviously we should look elsewhere, somewhere else.
I feel very protective. So it's also authoritarian. You often blame me for this, not for you, but for women I know other than you. But not always, I have an equal relationship with most of them, and they can't tolerate things of a different nature. Let's get back to the question of what I'm looking for in women. I think this is first and foremost an atmosphere of feelings, emotions. Strictly speaking, this is not called a sexual atmosphere, but a feeling of having a sexual background.
It is not masculinity that dominates my relationship with these women. Of course everyone has to play a certain role in this relationship, and my role is more active and rational; the woman's role is mainly on the emotional level. This is a very common situation of love, and I do not think that the sensible side is lower than the rational practice and experience side. It's just a matter of different temperaments. It's not that women can't experience reason the way men do, or that a woman can't be an engineer or a philosopher.
This is just to say that most of the time a woman has emotional value and sometimes sexual value; that's how I see it, and I think having a relationship with a woman is somehow possessing her feelings. Try to make her feel this, feel it deeply, possess her feelings – that's what I'm going to do myself.
They had to love me because they felt like something that belonged to me. When a woman gives herself to me, I see this feeling on her face, in her expression; and seeing it in her face is tantamount to possessing it. Sometimes in notebooks, sometimes in books, I expounded—and I still think so—that feeling and understanding are inseparable, that feelings produce understanding, or rather, understanding, and that the man who later rationalized took it as a theoretical conundrum, which was abstracted.
I think that a person has a feeling that becomes more abstract, integrated, and more confusing as I get older, and it transforms into a man's rationality, an understanding that has an impact on the conceptive conundrum.
They can do things exactly like men; but first because of their upbringing, and then from their feelings, they have a tendency to put feelings first. Because their status is not usually elevated, because of the material and social relations they form and maintain by society, they retain their undiminished sensibility, which contains an understanding of others.
So, from a rational point of view, what is my relationship with women? I talk to them about what I think about. I am often misunderstood, and at the same time I am understood by a sensibility that enriches my mind.
Later, I mean when I was thirty-five or forty, I thought that understanding and sensibility represented a phase of individual development. At the age of five or six a man is incomprehensible and perceptual – not yet endowed with sensibility, he has emotional sensibility and intellectual sensibility, but not lasting. Later his sensibility may still be very strong and his comprehension may gradually develop, or perceptuality overwhelms comprehension, or sensibility does not increase and comprehension is entirely self-developing. Perceptuality produces understanding, and it is still there in itself, and it is naturally unthinking.
Thus this sense of domination is a model, a social symbol, and it makes no sense to make me, though I have tried to establish it. I don't think I'm more understanding than my partner. But in reality I do it again because I have a tendency to do so and I want to get a woman with whom I have a relationship. So I dominate them. Fundamentally, my main concern is to infiltrate my understanding into another person's sensibility.
I love having relationships with beautiful women because it can develop my sensibility. Beauty, charm, etc. – none of these have rational value. You can also say that they are rational, because you can give them an explanation, a rational explanation. But when you love a person's power, you are in love with something irrational, even though thoughts and concepts can explain charisma to a considerable extent.
In my opinion, women always have a romantic in the Stendhal sense. There would be no such thing without this romanticism. It can be said that once a man loses his sensibility by developing his own understanding, he will demand the sensibility of another person, the woman, to possess a sensitive woman so that he can become a woman's sensibility.
I think a normal life involves a continuous relationship with a woman. A man is determined by what he does, by what he becomes, and by the woman who is with him.
Now, I think back to the women I came into contact with, and I always remember the image of them dressed, never naked, although I was very happy to see them naked. No, what I see is the image of them dressed, and nudity is a very special kind of intimacy that you have to go through certain processes to get it.
When she dresses, it is not more real, but more like a social being, more approachable. A person can only achieve a state of unobstructedness through multiple nudity in both physical and mental aspects. Here, I am the same as other women who love women. In short, I live with them in a kind of history, a special world.
I generally don't pay much attention to whether there is another man who has an affair with a certain woman, the point is that I should be the first to come. If it's a triangular relationship in which there's me and another person who's confirmed to be better than me – that's a situation I can't tolerate.
Looking back on my own life, for me, women have given me many things. Without women, I wouldn't have been able to get to the point I've reached now.
Women are the presence of a particular emotion
I think that women are a being in a certain way and a presence in a certain emotion, and I can find such a thing in myself. It is for this reason that I feel that it is easier to talk to women than to talk to men.
When talking to men, the conversation often gets bogged down in certain professional issues. Depending on who you are as a shopkeeper or professor, your conversation is either about current economic issues or about Greek tyrannical politics. You rarely sit in a café with a man and talk about the weather, pedestrians passing by, or street views. And I communicate these questions with women on a regular basis; at the same time, it makes me feel that women are equal to me, although I am often the facilitator of this conversation. I lead the conversation because I want to do it.
Everyone has to play a certain role in the relationship between men and women, and my role is more open-minded and rational; the role of women is mainly on the emotional level. This is a very common situation in love, and I don't think that the emotional side is lower than the rational practice and experience side. It's just a matter of different temperaments.
The relationships I maintain with women are exactly what men of our time usually do, and I see it as the superiority of being an individual. But, I have to admit that I'm sure I'm much superior to men my age – in other words, I'm superior to many other men.
It is this kind of relationship that makes me realize that in the relationship between men and women, a true gender equality can be expressed. I don't feel like I'm superior, smarter, or more energetic than you, so I put myself on the same starting line as you. We are equal. What's even more interesting is that this has in some ways increased my sense of power, because it has made me rediscover my sense of power in my dealings with other women. However, the equality between you and me is not a special equality between two individuals, but a manifestation of true equality between the sexes.
Yes, usually I feel a little smarter than the women I have a relationship with. But I think intelligence is a kind of development of sensibility, and they have not reached my level of development due to the social environment. Fundamentally, their sensibility is the same as mine.
My relationship with women has always been quite good because the narrow sense of sexual relationship makes it easier for us to give the object and the subject together. Relationships with women – even if you haven't slept with her, it's richer than a man's relationships; but if you've slept with her, or you can do that– it's richer. First of all, there is a language, which is not speaking, but gesture language and facial language. I don't mean sexual language in the narrow sense. As far as language is concerned, it comes from something deep, and if it is a love relationship, it comes from the meaning of sex. When they are with women, they give their whole child to them.
Love is a career
Love is a cause, an organic totality that is plotted toward my inherent possibilities. However, this ideal is the ideal of love, the motive and purpose of love, and the true value of love. Love as a primitive relationship with others is the totality of my plot to realize this value.
These schemes placed me in a direct connection with the freedom of others. It is in this sense that love is conflict.
In fact, we have pointed out that the freedom of others is the basis of my existence. But precisely because I exist through the freedom of others, I have no sense of security, I am under the threat of this freedom; this freedom combines my existence with "making me exist", it gives me value and cancels my value, and my existence is forever passively escaped from the self because of freedom.
This ever-changing freedom in which I intervene, but irresponsibly and unattainable, in turn enables me to intervene in a thousand different ways of being. My plan to restore my existence will not materialize unless I control this freedom and only if I reduce it to a free existence that is subordinate to me.
At the same time, this is the only way I can interfere with the negation of inner freedom, and it is through this negation that others constitute me as someone else, that is, I can use this negation to prepare to open up a way for others to be one with me in the future. Perhaps the problem is clearer if one thinks about the purely psychological aspect of why lovers should be loved.
In fact, if love is a purely physical possession of lust, in many cases it is easily satisfied. For example, Proust's protagonist placed his mistress in his house, he could see her and possess her all day, and had been able to place her completely in a material subordinate position, and he must have seemed to be carefree. Yet it is known that he, on the contrary, was very worried.
Albertine escaped from Marsel's hands precisely because of his consciousness, even when he was beside her, and that was why he could only breathe a sigh of relief only by staring at her while she was asleep. Love must have a "consciousness" of conquest. But why should it have a sense of conquest? And how to conquer?
The concept of "possession" of love, which is so often used to explain, cannot in fact be the most fundamental. If it is only others who make me exist, why do I want to take others into my own? But this involves a certain way of self-ownership: we want to possess the freedom of others.
This is not out of a desire for power: the tyrant does not care about love, he is content with fear. If he had sought the love of his subjects for him, it would have been through politics, and if he had found a more economical way to enslave them, he would have adopted it long ago. On the contrary, those who want to be loved do not want to enslave the beloved being. He didn't want to become an exposed, mechanical object of emotion. He did not want to possess an automaton, and if people wanted to humiliate him, it was enough to show him an emotion of the beloved, like the result of psychological determinism: the lover felt that he had devalued in his love and his existence.
If Tristan and Isenlt are enchanted by the drug, their interest in each other is diminished, and the existence of love, if completely enslaved, sometimes kills the lover's love. The purpose is transcended: if the beloved is transformed into an automatic puppet, the lover is again in loneliness. Thus, the lover does not want to possess the beloved as if he were possessing an object; he prays for a special type of conversion to himself. He wants to possess a freedom as freedom.
But, on the other hand, he could not be satisfied with the superior form of this freedom as a free and voluntary obligation. Who can be content with the kind of love that is considered to be purely faithful to the Sea Oath Mountain Alliance? So who wants to hear, "I love you, for I am free to love you by promises and I do not want to repent; I love you for being faithful to myself"?
So the lover asks for the vow and is angered by the vow. He wants to be loved by a freedom and prays that this freedom is no longer free. He wants the freedom of others to decide on its own to become love—not just at the beginning of love, but in every moment—and at the same time wants this freedom to be captured by itself, to return to freedom itself, as in times of fanaticism, in times of dreams, in order to expect it to be conquered.
And this conquered freedom in our hands should be a free resignation, and at the same time a kind of imprisoned thing. What we expect from others, from love, is not emotional determinism, nor freedom beyond reach, but a freedom that makes emotional determinism work and play its role. For himself, the lover does not wish to be the cause of this radical change of freedom, but rather hope to be the only, fortunate occasion of freedom.
In fact, he could not have hoped to be the cause of freedom without at the same time submerging the beloved as a tool that people could surpass, immersing him in the world. The essence of love is not here. Instead, in love the lover wants to be "everything in the world" to the beloved.
If I should be loved by others, I should be free to be chosen as the beloved. It is known that in the popular term of love, the beloved is represented by the term elected. But this choice should not be relative and accidental: when the lover thinks that the beloved has chosen him among many others, he is provoked and feels degraded.
"So, if I don't come into this city, if I don't interact with so-and-so very often, you won't know me, won't you love me?" This thought makes the lover sad: his love becomes the love among many, at the same time limited by the contingency of encounters: it becomes love on earth.
In fact, what the lover asks is that the beloved has made him an absolute choice. This, therefore, is the real purpose of the lover, for his love is a cause, that is, its own scheme. This scheme should give rise to a conflict.
In fact, the beloved person is considered to be an object mixed with some other person—someone else, that is, he perceives the lover on the basis of the world, transcends him and uses him. The beloved is gaze, and therefore it is impossible to use his transcendence that determines the last limit of his transcendence, nor can it use his free self-capture. The beloved cannot wish to love. Thus the lover should seduce the beloved; and his love and the cause of seduction are the same thing.
If we begin by revealing others as gazes, from this point of view, we should admit that we are experiencing my uncontrollable existence for others in the form of possession. I am possessed by others, and the gaze of others processes my naked body, which gives birth to my body, sculpts my body, makes my body what it is, and sees it as something that I will never see.
Others have a secret: the secret of what I am. He made me exist, and it is for this reason that he possessed me.
All love is against God
The world is obviously absurd, and for us, it all ends in death. It was precisely because people were afraid of this unjustified existence, and because they were sure that they would receive some kind of compensation in the afterlife, that they invented God. However, for those of us who are facing life squarely, there is no need to bother with these illusory things. When you accuse me of being against God, you are mistaken, how can I oppose something that does not exist at all? I have no God and I am proud of that.
In my own script, I tried to portray a character who, like the protagonist of Dirty Hands, The Young Bourgeois Hugo, was out of place with the masses of his time, and was therefore very distressed. His name was Getz, and he was miserable because as the illegitimate son of a nobleman and a peasant, he was ostracized from both sides. The question is how he later abandoned "right" anarchism and took part in the Peasants' War.
But I would like to point out that Goetz, the free-time shooter, the evil anarchist figure, thinks he has destroyed a lot of things, but in fact he has destroyed nothing.
He destroyed human life, but did not destroy society and its foundations. Everything he did ended up being exploited by the bishop, which made him extremely angry. His attempt to exercise an absolutely pure goodness is equally pointless. He gave the land to the peasants, but this caused war, and the land was taken back after a great war.
Therefore, he wants to do good or evil absolutely, but all he can do is destroy human life... The whole play explores man's relationship with God, or man's relationship with the absolute.
Goetz found that God was completely indifferent and never appeared when he did what he did. So when the disillusioned Heinrich brought this to his attention, he had to conclude that God did not exist. So he became enlightened and returned to the midst of humanity. Morality built on God necessarily leads to anti-humanism, but In the final play Goetz embraces a relative and limited morality suited to the fate of mankind: he replaces the absolute with history.
The devil and God are the same thing... And I chose people.
When man believes in God, he is just a very pitiful thing: he must abandon God to get out of the ruins. When two people fall in love, they immediately oppose God.
In conclusion, I would like to say that first of all love is against God, and when two people fall in love, they immediately oppose God. All love is against the absolute, because love is the absolute itself. Second, if God exists, then man does not exist, and conversely, if man exists, then God does not exist.
Since Marx, philosophy has been a concrete social activity, an intervention. There must be some connection between a philosopher's ideas and his attitude as a citizen. Some people say I want to argue that God doesn't exist, that I've failed. But I'm a multi-genre writer like all writers, and if I want to argue that God doesn't exist, I can use argumentative writing. ...... I don't want to prove anything. ...... I want to explore the question of man without God, and the question is important not out of some attachment to God.
It's an urgent question, but people in the 20th century were only vaguely uneasy about it and didn't think about it. There were similar problems with those who thought about God in the 16th century. I want to move this question to the experience of a person, and The Devil and God is the history of a person.
Some have accused me of poisoning youth, and their real meaning is to cover up the social causes of this depravity. They are influenced by the culture of bourgeois individualism, they are looking for an individual who combines all the universal causes, they regard a writer as a scapegoat, while ignoring the collective factor.
I would be honored to believe that a writer can cause suicide, and that means he can also prevent suicide. However, I cannot believe both claims. In our society, at least in our present society, a book cannot have such a direct effect. Writers can only produce an impact that takes a long time to see and has been greatly compromised...
If we talk about the body and its most humble functions, it is because we cannot ignore that the spirit goes directly into the body, in other words, the mental thing is related to the physical thing. ...... I'm not talking about these things for fun, but in my opinion, a writer should be in charge of the whole. ...... Gender and thought are mutually influential, and as psychoanalysis tells us, psychoanalysis has greatly expanded the scope of psychology, but it is not well known today.
Lust is the exhortation of lust
Man, why do you have lust?
We should first abandon the idea that lust is lust for pleasure and lust that puts pain to rest. One cannot see how the subject emerges from this inner state in order to tie his lusts to an object. All subjective and intrinsic theories fail in explaining the fact that we are a woman of desire and not mere desire for our satisfaction.
It should therefore be defined by the transcendent object of lust. Nevertheless, it is completely inappropriate to say that lust is to "physically possess" the lust of the desired object, if here possession is understood as having sex with the desired object. Perhaps sex loses lust at some point, and may in some case it be explicitly presented as the desired result of lust – when, for example, lust is painful and tiresome.
Undoubtedly, the person of desire is me, and lust is a form peculiar to my subjectivity. Lust is consciousness because it can only be consciousness of non-positionality in itself.
However, they indicate the original truth of lust: in lust, consciousness chooses to make it loose on another level. It no longer escapes simplicity, it seeks to submit to its own contingency, i.e., it holds the power of superiority in grasping — the individual body , that is, the contingency of an individual .
In this sense, lust reveals not only the body of others but also my own body.
It is in this sense that lust for other bodies can be described as a lust for the body. In fact, it is the desire for the body of others that is experienced as the dizziness of facing one's own body: and the presence of lust is the consciousness that is turning itself into a body.
Happiness is the death and end of lust. It is the death of lust because it is not only the completion of lust but its end. The eternal danger encountered in the attempt of lust to be fleshed out is that the incarnate consciousness can no longer see the incarnation of others, and its own incarnation absorbs others until it becomes its final purpose.
In this case, the contact is suddenly interrupted, and lust loses its goal. The failure of lust can even often be a motivation for the transition to masochistic.
Lust does not assume any prior and deliberate plan to be experienced, but it contains in itself its meaning and its interpretation.
There is no essential difference between the body and consciousness
For us, there is no essential difference between the body and consciousness.
We give our bodies to people beyond the relationship between the sexes, and it can be achieved through eye and contact. You give my body to me, I give mine to you; we both exist for each other, and that's in terms of our bodies. But as consciousness, as ideas, we do not exist in the same way, even if ideas are some variation of the body.
If we really want to exist for the sake of others, as a body, as a body that can always be stripped naked— even if in fact it does not — then the ideas we express to others will appear to come from the body. Speech is the result of the movement of the tongue in the mouth, and all ideas appear in this way, even those that are the most vague, the most ethereal, the most difficult to grasp. There should be no more such secrecy, the secrecy that has been treated for centuries as being in keeping with the honor of men and women, which is very stupid to me.
Thus in one sense the body is a necessary property of the self; in reality it is not the product of the creator's arbitrary decision, nor is the unity of the soul and the body an accidental union of two completely different entities, but, on the contrary, the body must come from its own nature as a body, that is, the self-nihilistic escape from existence, which takes place in the form of intervention in the world.
In another sense, however, the body reveals my contingency, and it is even just this contingency: the Cartesian theorist deserves to be struck by this property; in fact, the body shows the individualization of my intervention in the world. Plato set the body as something that individualizes the soul, and there is nothing wrong with that.
It is only in vain to suppose that the soul can be separated from the body by death or pure thought, because the soul is the body, just as it is the individualization of itself.
Only in one world can there be a body, and a primitive relationship is essential for the existence of this world. In one sense the body is what I am directly; in another sense I am separated from it by the infinity of the world, which manifests itself to me through the backward flow of the world to me, and the condition of this eternal reversal is eternal transcendence.
I make my body exist: this is the first dimension of physical existence. My body is used and recognized by others, and this is the second dimension of it. But because I am for him, others present to me as the subject of the object to whom I am. We see that the key here is my basic relationship with others. So I exist as something that is known to others—especially in my simplicity itself. I am my being as something that is known to others as a body. This is the ontological third dimension of my body.
I have an idea of what a person should be, and that kind of thinking doesn't contain any relaxed thoughts. Broadly speaking, I think my body is fundamentally something of activity. And everything that is related to withdrawal or general body sensations is not noteworthy; my body should stretch out, outside of my consciousness. It is worth mentioning the activities I completed – the activity of walking or the activity of grabbing an object.
I remember when I was a child, I imagined my body as a center of activity, ignoring the perceptual and passive side. Of course, this passivity exists, and everything I do contains this ingredient. But what I emphasize in doing so is the objective reality, an activity that I do—putting sand in a bucket, and using it to build a castle or a house, in short, what is worth mentioning is activity.
And that's always because I'm aware of certain components of my body. For example, these hands of mine, they always exist as hands that I realize they are in activity. Obviously one should always look at things this way, the hand is something that moves, and it may also be something that endures pain—for example, by the friction of rough clothes or by something hard. But for me, it was completely secondary, and the first thing that came to my mind was the activity.
This is my physical entity, and it is transcended by something that is consistent with my image; it is not my image, but it is consistent with my image.
Editor: Aero
Typography: Mo Yi
Audit: Yongfang
Artist/VI: Little Week
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