This essay is concerned with Jean Paul Sartre’s notion of ‘responsibility.’ It will consider this as it appears in Sartre’s most famous work, ‘Being and Nothingness.’ After giving a short explication of the idea and the importance which it has to Sartre’s work in general, I will consider how the notion is worked through and problematised in the writing of Franz Fanon. In particular, I will pay attention to the ways in which Fanon’s writing on embodiment and being in the world serves to problematise a conception of responsibility predicated on the a subject who is self – creating and existentially free.
Sartre’s conception of responsibility is closely connected to his conception of freedom and the constitution of the human subject. According to Sartre, to be in the world is to be necessarily free. This freedom is ‘proven’ in the early stages of ‘Being and Nothingness’. By claiming that ‘existence precedes essence’, Sartre insists that at each moment a subject creates itself anew and is therefore entirely free in terms of how to behave in each situation which confronts it. Sartre writes in the books closing sections that; ‘the essential consequence of our earlier remarks is that man, being condemned to be free carries the weight of the whole world on his shoulders; he is responsible for the world and for himself as a way of being.’ (Sartre, 2003. 553)
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"Black Skin White Masks Summary".
Crucial to an understanding of Sartre’s conception of responsibility is the idea that the subject exists at the centre of the world and that such world cannot be understandable without the subject. This subject-orientated ontology places a directly responsibility on the subject from whom the world emerges. Sartre writes that the ‘responsibility of the for-itself is overwhelming since he is the one by whom it happens that there is a world; since he is also the one who makes himself be, then whatever may be the situation in which he finds himself, the for-itself must wholly assume this situation with its peculiar coefficient of adversity, even though it be insupportable.’ (Sartre, 2003. 554) The subject, according to Sartre’s ontology is always purely subject and as such encounters responsibility for absolute freedom in the face of an objective world in which it is placed and which it itself constitutes.
The centrality of the subject in relation to subject-object relations is severely problematised in Fanon’s writing. In his chapter ‘The Lived Experience of the Black Man,’ Fanon takes this objectness as the starting point of his ontology. The embodiment of the ‘black man’ is presented as being fundamentally incommensurable with white society, however at the same it is defined in opposition to it and held in place by it: ‘Ontology-once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside- does not permit us to understand the being of the black man. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.’ (Fanon, 2008. 110) The social relations which hold the black person in their identity serve to actively exclude them from being fully assimilated into them. The autonomy which ‘responsibility’ takes as its determining moment is shown to incomplete for the non-white subject.
The lived experience of the black person is one of complete determination. Subjectivity cannot come from within as in the case of a Sartrean existentialism, but rather, it is aggressively imposed on those who must suffer it. Fanon describes the experience of sitting on a train and uses the words: ‘I am overdetermined from without. I am the slave not of the “idea” that others have of me but of my own appearance.’ (Fanon, 2008. 116) This experience of being a slave to appearance is directly contrasted to an emancipatory mode in which one is able to act towards one’s body as if it is an enabling rather than a retarding presence in one’s life.
Fanon then suggests that this mode of being and of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion has a historical root which calls into question many of the transcendental claims of Western philosophy. Fanon describes the historical imposition of slavery and black subjectivity as being commensurate with the violent removal of other possible ontological relationships to the world and to objects. In this sense the visceral nature of bodily experience in the present reveals a historical truth about the nature of the world and the processes by which it came into being. Fanon writes;
‘I embrace the world! I am the world! The white man has never understood this magic substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself alone. He finds himself predestined master of this world. He enslaves it. But here exist other values that fit only my forms. Like a magician, I robbed the white man of a “certain world, forever after lost to him and his.’ (Fanon, 2008. 128)
It is possible to understand Sartre’s conception of responsibility as stemming from the conception that the subject is self creating and existentially free. This conception relies on a world in which the subject is primarily only subject. By focusing his writing on the lived experience of objectness, Fanon is able to problematise this conception. In conclusion, I would argue tha ultimately Fanon’s writing not only problematises the conception of existential responsibility, but goes as far as to suggest that the a-historical claims of philosophy, in particular a philosophy which posits essential characteristics to a subject which must necessarily be historically conditioned, can be questioned and even disproved via the lived phenomenological experience of those who fall outside of its paradigm.
- Fanon, Franz. Black Skins, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. Verso, 1998.
- Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology.
