Sartre and the Perennial Virgin
by Anu Selva-Thomson
At the heart of existentialism, lies the claim that ‘existence precedes essence’. It was born as a response to the metaphysical theory that identifies essence as key to existence. This famous dictum has been attributed largely to the French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre – it is the idea that the self ought to refrain from identifying with a singular essence and instead, exist within a constant awareness of future possibilities, that is, a self that is continually ‘becoming’.
A useful way for us to understand this idea would be to link it to the concept of virginity. Taken as a noun in its literal sense, a virgin refers to a man or woman who has not engaged in sexual intercourse. Used an adjective – metaphorically – virginity suggests not having experienced something before. For example, I might say, if it is my first attempt at sky diving, that it is a “virgin” experience; a new or initial experience. We also often hear people talk about “born again virgins.” What they are referring to is someone who has ‘lost’ their virginity (by engaging in sexual intercourse) deciding to, from the point of that decision, to abstain from further sex. This makes them a ‘reborn’ virgin. Obviously this is not truly the case, and we should understand this phrase symbolically rather than literally. I want to suggest here, that we link the Sartrean notion of ‘becoming’ with this sense of virginity. When Sartre suggests that existence precede essence, he means that the self ought to be in a constant state of concurrently losing and regaining its virginity; the perpetual act of being ‘reborn’ a virgin. This he seems to suggest, is the authentic way for a person to live.
To better understand the link we must look at some of the foundations of Sartre’s thinking. We begin by discussing the differences between being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Then, I’ll try to show how the being-for-itself experiences negation and a sense of lack, which together with its existence within temporality (or time), affects its quest for freedom and authenticity.
The main questions to be answered are:
1. What exactly is this ‘born again virgin’ philosophy?
2. Is it the most authentic way of living?
In order to evaluate the authenticity of the ‘born-again-virgin’ philosophy, we must first consider what Sartre means by ‘person’. To explain his conception of personhood, he creates two groups. The first group is what he terms being-in-itself . Being-in-itself is a description of object-hood. It is that which is part of the material world and is neither active nor passive. It simply is. It cannot be anything that it is not, in the same sense that a book cannot become a mug, and consequently we may say it does not possess possibility.
Ilham Diman writes in his book Free Will, that, “the being-in-itself is what it is by virtue of the properties it possesses, including its causal properties. These give it a positive being.” What Dilman means by positive, is a mode of being given to us by something external and that is fixed in the sense that it does not will anything for itself. The being-in-itself succumbs to externalities acting upon it and has no control, choice or opinion on what happens to it. Sartre, in Being and Nothingness, relates this kind of being to something he calls facticity.
Facticity is a term that was first used by Martin Heidegger. It refers to aspects of ‘our ‘world’ that we have no control over. These would include things like race, gender, environment, family background and even chance. These elements, though a large influence on our existence and our futures, were not freely chosen. Heidegger refers to the involuntary push into this situation as ‘throwness’.
Facticity is also described in Being and Nothingness as “the coefficient of adversity of things.” Gary Cox points out in Sartre: a guide for the perplexed, that this coefficient refers to “ the world around a person in so far as it presents a constant resistance to his actions and projects – difficulties, obstacles, entanglements, snags, distances, heaviness, instability, fragility, complexity, and so on.” In summary, facticity is that which is unchangeable – be it circumstance or physical attributes.
Sartre’s second group, is the being-for-itself (for-itself for short). The for-itself is transcendent; it is the facet of the human being that goes beyond the physical and material, including, the above-mentioned resistance, or facticity.
Dilman explains, “…man is capable of thinking, appraisal and judgment about his surroundings and the situations in which he acts, about himself and his actions, about his past and the future. He is therefore capable of making choices, forming intentions and projects, and so of determining the direction of his life.”
For-itself is characterized by consciousness and in order to count as for-itself, one must embrace freedom and create one’s own meaning. The for-itself also possesses reflexivity, it reflects on itself and its situation. Because it has no fixed essence, it also experiences possibility because it can become something that it is not.
The idea that we can become something that we are not brings us to the concept of negation. Alfred Stern says in his book Sartre: His Philosophy and Existential Psychoanalysis that for Sartre, to negate is to deny. For-itself must deny to itself that its essence is fixed and must realize that it may choose to be something that it is not at present. Sartre writes that the for-itself “… Is a being which is not what it is and which is what it is not.” This means that being-for-itself by denying what it is can become what it is not. We may say that such a being is always reinventing itself.
Sartre says that a person is both facticity (being-in-itself) and transcendence (being-for-itself). But how is this possible given that they seem so different? Mary Warnock in The Philosophy of Sartre, attempts to explain how we can be both facticity and transcendence. She argues that facticity is the platform upon which we build our free choices. What does this mean? We know we are part of the natural world and embody characteristics that we did not actively choose. This acceptance is the acceptance of ourselves as being-in-itself. According to Warnock, Sartre does not say that there are no such things as physical limitations but rather even though there are some things limited by physical constraints, it is only when we acknowledge these constraints that we can choose to live with them in way or another; that is, make free choices based on our facticity.
Let’s for a moment go back to the analogy of the ‘born again virgin’. We’ll consider it literally to start with. Facticity in the case of the born again virgin, is that he/she has engaged in sexual intercourse. This is not something that can change in so far as we cannot go back in time to undo the virgin act of sex which took place. What Warnock argues in lieu of Sartre is that one can embrace the loss of virginity and choose freely how to interpret and deal with it. The loss of virginity therefore becomes a condition for reinventing the self rather than an impediment. Sartre writes, “There is freedom only in situation and there is situation only through freedom”. Alfred Stern bolsters this argument by saying, “Nobody can escape from a jail in which he has not been imprisoned…we are only free with respect to, and in spite of, a given situation”; the given situation in this case being the loss of virginity. However, we should not limit the scope of this argument to only virginity in the literal sense; it should merely be an example that can be applied to show that any mode of being can be transcended and the self can be ‘reborn’.
Apart from the acknowledgement of one’s facticity, another condition necessary for the process of reinvention is the acknowledgement of a lack. Cox says, “ Every situation is understood not in terms of what is but in terms of what it lacks, and what every situation lacks is precisely the for-itself.” By this he means that the for-itself makes of the lack, whatever it wants to – it interprets and engages it based on its own desires, expectations and determinations.
To further illustrate this suggestion, Sartre offers the example of the crescent moon. He writes, “For example, if I say that the moon is not full and that one quarter is lacking, I base this judgment on full intuition of the crescent moon … In order for this in-itself to be grasped as the crescent moon, it is necessary that a human reality surpass the given towards the project of the realized totality – here the disk of the full moon – and return toward the given to constitute it as the crescent moon.” He then goes on to say, “It is the full moon which confers on the crescent moon its being as crescent; what is not determines what is. It is in the being of the existing, as the correlate of a human transcendence, to lead outside itself to the being which it is not – as to its meaning.” Sartre means that the lack felt by the for-itself is a lack of itself. It is, at any given time, what it is. But also, what it is lacking. The for-itself must go beyond its current mode of existing (“lead outside itself”) to fulfill this lack. As Cox writes, “The lack that the for -itself has to be is revealed by desire and the fact that desire per se can never be satisfied.” The for-itself has to ensure this constant state of lack through the correct awareness of what desire entails. When speaking of the satisfaction of desires, he suggests that the achievement of any desire is ”immediately surpassed” by another, extended desire. In this way, the lack is never fulfilled. He writes, “As the negation of being it (the for-itself) must surpass any particular obtained object of desire towards a further unobtained object of desire.”
Again at this point, let’s stop to make the connection to virgin experience. Sartre’s position then seems to suggest that the for-itself, ought to never be fully satisfied with achieving any desire and as such constantly engage in the cycle of desiring, achieving the intended and desiring further. This cyclical existence means the for-itself is constantly engaging in virgin experience; remaking the ‘old’ self in lieu of a never experienced before encounter with the next intended or further extended ‘object of desire’.
As I mentioned earlier, in working towards these projected desires/self-created lacks, the self aims to mesh facticity with transcendence in the attempt to engage in this process authentically. Sartre refers to this as the “desire to be God” and claims it is the rudimentary project of man’s existence. He writes, “It is as if the world, man, and man-in-the-world express an abortive attempt to become God. It is as if the in-itself and the for-itself reveal themselves in a state of disintegration with respect to an ideal synthesis. Not that the integration has ever taken place, but precisely on the contrary because it is permanently suggested and permanently impossible … the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain: man is a useless passion.”
Gary Cox aims to clarify this point when he writes, “By choosing itself as a particular kind of lack it (for-itself) hopes to make sense of its being by overcoming that lack; as though in a final act of complete overcoming it could establish an ultimate raison d’être for its otherwise contingent being.” He goes on to say that this desire for a determinate self is not actually achievable without destroying the self. We conclude then, that in order to be authentic, the desire to overcome the lack cannot ever be fulfilled, and the self must be in constant search for virgin experience.
We’ve begun to touch on what the self needs to do in order to embrace freedom and exist authentically. A look at temporality and some of the problems with Sartre’s conception of freedom might offer deeper insight as to whether the born-again-virgin philosophy is an ideal model to adhere to.
Sartre’s notion of temporality is largely based on Heidegger’s. Temporality refers to the situatedness of the self within time – exactly how does the for -itself engage and exist within the past, present and future? Heidegger argued that Dasein (the indeterminate self) exists temporally, in the sense that it is neither here nor there; its meaning and position are never fixed. Cox explains temporality like this, “ … an object in motion never occupies an exact location … if it occupied an exact location at any particular moment as it moved then it would be at rest. Therefore an object in motion must be neither here nor there.” He goes on to point out that though this example is spatial in nature, the general idea applies to the concept of temporality.
It is evident that Sartre draws from Heideggarean ideas – the for-itself can be said to experience the past, present and future simultaneously. He writes, “the for-itself…can and must at the same time fulfill these three requirements, (1) to not be what it is, (2) to be what it is not, (3) to be what it is not and to not be what it is – within a unity of a perpetual referring. Here we are dealing with three ekstatic dimensions; the meaning of the ekstasis is distance from self … the for-itself is a being which must simultaneously exist in all its dimensions.” What Sartre is arguing here is that there aren’t technically separate ekstasies (or temporal dimensions); they should be looked at as unified. The for itself continually leaves the present for the future, never coinciding with the present or what is present in the future.
In light of virgin experience, there is no real moment of ‘losing one’s virginity’ or ‘regaining’ it. Now that we have come this far in our analysis, it seems more correct to say that the concept of born again virginity is actually moot for someone who wants to exist authentically, because there isn’t actually a moment of losing or regaining – virgin experience is perpetual and never ending – a flight of the self from the self, towards the self.
Cox points out that a useful way to understand Sartrean freedom is to consider the relationship between past and future. He writes, “certainly it is Sartre’s view of temporality, his view of the for-itself as essentially temporal, which renders plausible his view of the for-itself as necessarily free … the freedom of the for-itself consists in the opening up of the possibilities of being. That is, the for-itself perpetually discovers itself in a world of possibilities which it realizes by virtue of its being a temporal surpassing towards the future.”
For Sartre, all human beings are necessarily free. He writes, “… my freedom is … not a quality added on or a property of my nature. It is very exactly the stuff of my being.” And again he writes, “… we are not free to cease being free” and “… freedom … is ours as a pure factual necessity … one which I am not able not to experience.” Sartre says that there is no question that one is free. We can say then that one has freedom by default. The interest for Sartre is in whether we embrace our freedom or flee from it.
In embracing our freedom, we must be able to choose a course of action. Our motives, which, we shall assume, are freely formed, help us pick the virgin experience to undertake. Mary Warnock argues that a motive must include thoughts about the future. The ability to conceive of alternate future outcomes, a range of virgin possibilities, is essential to our capacity for freedom. If we do not conceive of alternative future outcomes, there is a strong likelihood that we will be unaware or forget that we are free to be constantly reborn, to keep inventing ourselves.
Sartre writes, “For a human being, to be is to choose himself; nothing comes to him from without or from within himself that he can receive or accept (or better: that he has to receive or accept). He is wholly and helplessly at the mercy of the unendurable necessity to make himself be … This freedom … is the being of man, that is to say his non-being.” Freedom, is clearly, choice. And this could well include a radical change in one’s values and consequently, projects.
One of the problems with Sartre’s theory of freedom is that he has often contradicted himself on what he believes it to entail. Dagfinn Follesdal writes in The Philosophy of Sartre, “… Sartre himself seems to have great difficulty setting a steady course with respect to human freedom. We have seen how on the one hand, he compares man to a God who creates freely and, on the other hand talks about a ‘coefficient of adversity” in things.” So, he seems to suggest that we are free to keep reinventing and creating ourselves or rebirthing our virginity but also he talks about our factual nature of being and how it stands in the way of us acting on what we truly want to be.
I don’t think this necessarily poses a problem for our task here. While it may be true that unobstructed free choice is not possible, I showed earlier, that choice can exist even within the constraints of facticity. Moreover, what we need to take away from this is not a fool proof guide to being authentic but more an intuitive sense of what it means to exercise freedom in the quest to live fully.
In fact, the Sartrean perception of authenticity is one that we cannot define certainly. No where in his writings does he actually give a precise explanation of what it is to be authentic, we only come to an understanding of it through the suggestions he makes for the best way of ‘being’.
In War Diaries, Sartre argues with the example of Paul, the soldier claiming to be a “civilian in disguise,” that authenticity is taking responsibility for one’s choices. In not accepting his choice to be a soldier and convincing himself and others that he is a civilian in disguise, Paul has not responsibly embraced his choice; he is attempting to escape the “being-in situation.” When one makes a choice, invents oneself, throws oneself in the face of a virgin experience, one must take responsibility for this way of being. Sartre writes, “ to be authentic is to realize fully one’s being-in situation, whatever this situation may happen to be, with profound awareness that, through the authentic realization of the being-in situation, one brings to plenary existence the situation on the one hand and the human reality on the other. This presupposes a patient study of what the situation requires, and then a way of throwing oneself into it and determining oneself to ‘be-for’ this situation.”
Sartre’s point here is that Paul should embrace his choice to be a soldier and be the best soldier he can be. This does not mean that Paul should ‘act’ at being a soldier, adopt what he believes to be soldierly behavior and mannerisms. Instead he should avoid sidestepping responsibility for his choice, avoid making excuses as to why he is not engaging with his choice to be a soldier (that is, suggesting he is a civilian in disguise) and start embracing his ‘being-in’ situation consciously and with a desire to not make excuses and not regret his choice.
The problem with Sartre’s philosophy, some may argue, is that the notion of constantly being reborn a virgin means one does not have to take ownership over any mode of being, any role or choice. In fact, the opposite is true: being authentic means taking full responsibility for the fact that we are free to reinvent ourselves. The example of Paul, as well others that Sartre raises in Being and Nothingness clearly indicate that a self in denial, a self not wanting to react to situation or making excuses for choices they have made in an attempt to circumvent responsibility are guilty of bad faith, (the self attempting to deceive itself).
Some critics have argued that authenticity isn’t achievable practically – that it is solely an intellectual project; that we can only assess our mode of being, be aware that we ought to exist as an amalgamation of being-in and being-for-itself, reflect and posit, but not actually ever attain authenticity. Some others have argued that desiring to be authentic is not even possible in Sartrean philosophy because if we are free by default, then we are authentic by default. Any attempt to become authentic and actually achieve it would be to objectify the self.
If we were to take this to be true, if authenticity is not anything we can actually acquire, it may seem pointless to adhere to this notion of constantly seeking out virgin existence. However, it may not be necessary that authenticity be a final goal to be grasped at the end; it could well be a goal that one works towards, where the process, the quest for authenticity, is what is more authentic than achieving the goal. If this is the case, then the impetus for recreating the self, constantly rebirthing the virginal self, is indeed substantial, at least because it allows us to exercise our freedom, explore potential and possibilities, reflect and recreate in a way that gives meaning and direction to our existence.
***
Anu Selva-Thomson is a graduate student in philosophy at the University of York, with a penchant for french philosophers, spanish poets, british bands, nubian princesses and thai food. A version of this essay was first published in One Imperative — Virgins, which can be found at http://www.oneimperative.com/2009/03/issue-one-virgins/
The featured image is a still from ‘The Sri Lanka Diaries’, a short film by Tan Jingliang, which can be found here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdU3x49akmA