Ep. 211: Sartre on Racism and Authenticity (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 211 is something like, how can we best understand the psychology of racism and reactions to it? And we read two essays by Jean Paul Sartre, Anti Semite and Jew, An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate, from 1946, and Black Orpheus from 1948. For more information, please visit harshlyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer employing the logic of passion for good, not evil, in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:31 Seth: This is Seth Paskin, Jew.

0:37 Mark: You're not even in a location. You're just. You're all Jews.

0:40 Seth: I'm the eternal Jew, the wandering Jew.

0:44 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, not a Jew, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:50 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:53 Wes: Remember that Saturday Night Live sketch? You not a Jew?

0:55 Seth: Yes.

0:58 Mark: So this grew out of our last episode on Frantz Fanon, that these were two texts by Sartre that he reacted to explicitly. He quoted a couple places at length. We're always open to reading more Sartre because he's just a wonderful writer, kind of a nut, but. Yeah. What do you guys think of these as a reading experience here?

1:17 Wes: I think he's great. We should just do nothing but start maybe for a year until we read everything. What's great about him is his ability to, I guess, be a phenomenologist and to analyze what's going on politically in social and psychological terms. So in this book, I think his explanation of anti Semitism, which is really great, although I know there'll be objections, especially the part that was our official reading, he will, in a way, a seed to certain negative characterizations of Jews that sound anti Semitic, and then give explanations for them, or it sounds like that we can discuss that.

But in general, especially his description of the antisemite in the first chapter and the reasons for that, I think it's really enlightening. You know, we hear lots of very facile explanations about the demonization of the other today politically. But this is a deep, deep reflection on the psychology of the antisemite and I think more generally the psychology of the bigot and really, really how it works and why it's so attractive to people. So I'll leave it at that for now.

2:26 Seth: I agree. And Wes and I had a little back and forth prior to this, so we should mention, Mark, that Black Orpheus was actually an introduction to a collection of poetry by poets from former French colonies. So it's his preface to collection of poetry and trying to give his take on some kind of thematic thing, which is called Negritude, that can essentially tie the different poets together. We've talked many times in the past about how important it is for philosophers to be good writers and that the greatest philosophers are also great writers, great stylists.

This essay is without parallel that I can think of as concise, insightful, weaving threads of philosophy, psychology, sociology, political theory. It's a tour de force. I mean, it's truly amazing thematically for me. What will be interesting is since both treat, you know, an other in antisemite and Jew, he's talking about the Jew as Other. In Black Orpheus, he's talking about the black man specifically, but black skin and colonized peoples as others that are defined in a certain way by the colonizers. It'll be interesting to see whether you guys think the mechanics of the way he describes that positioning in both works out exactly the same, and the remedy against them seems to be different as well.

But I'm interested in getting into that.

3:56 Dylan: I'm with Wes about the phenomenology of Sartre. That's the part that I resonate with and I find so captivating. I enjoyed reading the essay. I just listening to Seth, I. I wasn't as bowled over as he was with Black Orpheus, but maybe I just didn't read it carefully enough.

4:17 Mark: So the connection between the two, you know, we were originally just going to do Anti Semite and Jew because Fanon talks about that more frequently and earlier in the essay. Although actually Black Orpheus is obviously more directly related in terms of actually being about black issues. Although he's specifically talking about black poetry there. Right. He's not even talking about sort of black experience in general. But you know what he's gotten out of those very poets. They're a lot of the same poets that Fanon quotes and also poetry itself.

4:44 Dylan: And the whole issue about there being black poetry is part of what's at issue and discussed in the essay.

4:51 Mark: Yes. So it's a way of talking about race that is, I don't want to say outdated because it's so idiosyncratic, but just the way that Nietzsche would talk about race or about a certain Geist. It's not supposed to be a generalization that every member of this group thinks this way. It's that this is a. A sentiment that I can describe, and it amounts to a social movement. It amounts to one of the family of ideas that is floating around out there. And so Based on that, Nietzsche feels like he can critique that. Well, I think Sartre is working in a tradition that's descended from that.

And he says right off, look, not all anti Semites are going to be captured by what I'm saying here. In fact, Fanon says the same thing at the beginning of his book. It's fine if I haven't captured your particular experience. What I'm describing is sort of a common malady and how I want to address it. Well, Sartre is doing the same thing. The way he discusses anti Semitism, you know, he's really discussing the virulent, actively hating Jews, actively wanting Jews to be dead. He does get on the people that if there was no nobody else was an anti Semite, they wouldn't be an anti Semite either, who just are going all along.

This is immediately post war where the Jews are kind of coming back into the country. He says that anti Semitism and just the presence of the Jews in general is kind of not even being discussed so much in France. But he thinks this is still like a pathology that just like it was there before the war and gave rise to the things it did in Germany. This is still out there and he really feels he needs to address it. And then his description of Jewish folks themselves, he wants to distinguish between authentic Jews and inauthentic Jews. And he gives all these different ways of being inauthentic.

And if you think this is picking on Jews, he says, well, actually the rate of authenticity is much higher among Jews, even despite how hard it is to be an authentic Jew because of all the anti Semitism than among Protestants. So if you remember our past episodes on Sartre, he accuses pretty much everybody of bad faith. Like it's really easy to not be authentic. In fact, I think in our last discussion we thought maybe it was very problematic like that nobody could be authentic. But here he seems to lay out that if you acknowledge the situation of antisemitism and react according to that, then you're being authentic.

If you deny it, if you pretend to be in a post racial society when there's all this virulent anti Semitism going around, then that is in bad faith. If you are a Jew and you pretend not to be a Jew, or he describes various other things that we'll go into. Okay, so jumping to Black Orpheus, he. He's not doing that. He's not saying some of these poets are in good faith, some are in bad faith, but he is talking about the spirit, he's talking about the black soul. As he's seeing it through this poetry. And he acknowledges, he even says, look, the actual editor, Léopold Sédar Senghor, in his introductions, is treating some of these poets as more encompassing, more embodying the black soul than others.

So he kind of wants to get into what that exactly is. And that's a very weird way for us. You know, we. We don't want to essentialize, to say all black people feel a certain way. And Sartre is not even saying that. He says it's not an essence. He says it's an attitude. So you just got to get past the weirdness of talking like this about groups in the first place or understanding what kind of critique he's doing, that it is all backed by his bad faith sort of critique, rooted in his existentialism, the fact that we are free, that we can choose our attitudes well.

8:15 Wes: With Black Orpheus, right? He's thinking about liberation, and he's thinking about things according to a socialist paradigm where one must achieve a certain kind of consciousness. And he'll compare the consciousness that you would get, you know, if you're a member of the proletariat and engaged in revolution. He's going to compare and contrast that to what it means to do that on the level of race. Now, why is that an introduction to an anthology of black poetry? Because he sees this poetry as consciousness raising. And he's going to argue that for black consciousness, as he calls it, that that requires poetry, that.

That requires the use of poetry in a way that's not required for a typical member of the proletariat, a typical worker. And why is that required? Because the stigma is so directed, in a way, at his subjectivity. It's not just like a class situation where someone happens to be higher up in the hierarchy. It's not just situational in that sense. There's a visceral reaction to the subjectivity of another person. And the reaction to that itself has to be subjective, which is to say, in Sartre's terms, poetic. And that will get him into, ultimately a discussion of Negritude, which we'll get into, and the way in which the poetic captures that.

Sartre is a blend, right, of the existentialist part. But then there's the Marxism.

9:44 Mark: I actually was expecting more Marxism. This is not as late as I was thinking, just a little chronology. So the first thing we covered by Sartre was Transcendence of the Ego. That's from 1937, and his novel Nausea is right after that. 38. So those are the pre war things he Wrote Being and Nothingness during the war. No exit was 1944. Anti Semite and Jew was written also in 1944, 1946, existentialism, humanism. 47. What is literature which we're actually going to be covering coming up. And 48 is black Orpheus. I think there might be later works that are more thoroughly communist, but here he sort of anti Semite and Jew, he throws it in, in the very end, like, how can we get over anti Semitism? Well, it won't really go away until we get rid of all classes. Until the triumph of the proletarian revolution.

10:32 Wes: Yeah. The relevance here is that in each case, when he's arguing against Jewish authenticity, he's arguing for Jewish consciousness, consciousness of oneself as a Jew. And it's the same thing with Negritude, consciousness of oneself as black. But that's, you know, as the editor of the anti Semite book notes, it's sort of for now, you know, it's an embrace of those identities in the near term, but in the long term, the raising of class consciousness is going to wipe all of that out. So there's an ambiguity with Sartre because it looks like on the one hand he's embracing particular concrete identities, but on the other hand, the long term picture is socialist in which the solidarity is a solidarity based in humanity.

11:20 Dylan: Which one are we starting with?

11:22 Mark: If we're starting with the Anti Semite and Jew, we should probably give something. You know, this is a lot of the book and we don't want to spend all of our time on this. But on the analysis of anti Semitism

11:31 Wes: itself, I think I have a pretty quick summary of that. So his explanation of the anti Semite, it's ultimately, if somebody wants to escape from freedom, this is a very typical Sartrean explanation. They want to escape from their freedom, from their responsibility, from an intimate awareness of themselves and the aloneness that all of that implies. And I would say basically the maturity of that, I think it's regressive. And the way to do that is to inhabit this, what he calls a state of passion. And the antisemite, he says, loves this state of passion even though it's a hateful one normally.

Right. The state of passion itself attaches us to objects and it's loving. In this case, there's a sort of meta level element. It's love of one's own hate. And the purpose of that is to lend oneself a sense of certitude. So one of the things the anti Semite is doing is they're grounding themselves in the irrational and the concrete and the intuitive as over and against the universal and the rational. So the manifestation of that right is to say, look, I have a certain heritage. I have these societal values. My family's been in this country for hundreds of years.

I simply inherit and possess these things and I don't have to do anything for them. I don't have to be smart, I don't have to achieve a lot, because this is a strategy, according to Sartre, of the middle class. I just have to possess these cultural values. And in that sense I gain a status and a transcendence of everyday class and social hierarchies by way of that. So without effort, without having to compare my status to others. So he calls this a kind of mobility equalitarianism or mob egalitarianism, or another way that he puts it, I like is elite mediocrity, an aristocracy of birth, where someone who's not at the top of the hierarchy can enjoy a high level of status through identification with country.

I think he's relating this ultimately to nationalism and the Jew. For the anti Semite represents the opposite of that. They represent intelligence and a love of rationality, a love of abstraction. They serve as a scapegoat. So the anti Semite needs to localize evil in a particular group of people so that everything is simplified. So it's not that society is badly organized and we need to make things better. It's just that here's evil and society needs to be purified of it. And again, that's a way of easily escaping the responsibility of having to fix things, for instance.

So that's not everything. But that's a sketch of what he's getting at with this analysis of the anti Semite. I have a few quotes that I think are kind of nice summaries by Sartre himself. The anti Semite is afraid of discovering that the world is ill contrived. For then it would be necessary for him to invent and modify with the result that man would be found to be master of his own destinies, burdened with an agonizing and infinite responsibility. Thus he localizes all the evil of the universe in the Jew. So this is his explanation of the Manicheanism that the anti Semite enters into and the way in which it allows one to evade effort, to evade having to fix things.

And towards the end, just two more quotes. We are now in a position to understand the anti Semite. He is a man who is afraid, not of the Jews, to be sure, but of himself. Of his own consciousness, of his liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change of society and of the world, of everything except the Jews. And finally, the Jew only serves him as a pretext. Elsewhere. His counterpart will make use of the Negro or the man of yellow skin. The existence of the Jew merely permits the anti Semite to stifle his anxieties at their inception by persuading himself that his place in the world has been marked out in advance, that it awaits him, and that tradition gives him the right to occupy it.

Anti Semitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The anti Semite is a man who wishes to be pitiless, Stone a furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt, anything except a man.

15:47 Mark: Yeah. So that indication, that wholesale denunciation of his way of being there, I think is key. So that the way the whole thing starts off is, can it be that someone just has anti Semitic opinions but is otherwise a nice person? And it sort of seems like on the surface, yeah, a large portion of the populace at that time held these opinions, but that doesn't mean that they would treat non Jews poorly or that they couldn't keep a job or be responsible for their families or just exhibit all the sort of virtues you would expect. And so he wants to undermine this idea that it is an opinion. He wants to say that this is a whole orientation of someone's being a passion.

16:28 Wes: He calls it not an opinion or an idea but a passion.

16:31 Dylan: Yeah, he calls them dangerous and false opinions. And in fact, he says anti Semitism doesn't fall within the category of ideas protected by the right of free opinion because it's not idea at all, it's a passion, as west said.

16:44 Mark: Right. So it's not something you can argue with. And he kind of goes through, like, what arguments do they give? Well, they might point at the large number of Jews in the legal profession or the large number of Jews in government, or point at historical facts, but they're not arguing in good faith if you try to take them on. So he gives this picture of the Democrat, which he actually doesn't have nice things to say about, strangely enough, but who tries to argue against the anti Semite. And I hate to make this jump so fast, but it's exactly the same fricking dynamic of the fact free Trumpian mindset.

Not to say Trump is anti Semitic, but it was very hard to go through this without thinking about how it seems like the other side of the political divide here is immune to reasons. I have encountered folks through Facebook or whatever recently, where, you know, they hold some opinion about politics in this way. And it becomes clear when you sort of delve into it that it's not actually based on data of any sort. The data comes after the fact. The data is purely an excuse.

17:45 Wes: Sartre says basically, it's a matter of prejudice. It's a matter of prejudgment. You have this paradigm, you have this idea of the Jew is evil. So he says it's the idea of the Jew that is the essential thing, which is to say it's not that you're making inferences from data, that you come with the idea and then you can interpret history according to it, even if it's contradictory. Right. He tells the story of someone who says, well, I was denied my place, I guess, according to some standardized test in a university, because of a Jew or something like that.

And then admitting that he didn't really study for the test, and even Sartre speculates, probably had devalued the whole project, because if Jews could be good at such things, and who cares anyway, it has to be non achievement based in this mindset. So there can be complete doublethink in this sort of prejudice that serves as a basis for the interpretation of the world. By the way, I see both sides as completely irrational. So I'll just say that for our viewers who aren't. Yeah.

18:42 Dylan: The articulation that Sartre gives of this being a passion equally applies. In fact, you could have the account for the election in 2016 as the way in which people who voted for Trump understood other people, both sides, and the people who didn't vote for him. Articulate the other side.

19:05 Wes: Yeah. I spend enough time on Twitter, unfortunately, to see the excesses of both sides.

19:11 Dylan: Yes, exactly.

19:12 Wes: You see this psychology, you could call it a fascist state of mind. It's arguably something to which we're all prone if we're not careful. So I think it's important to think of this as a way of thinking that can enter into bigotries of all sorts and partisanship and so on.

19:27 Dylan: One thing that we haven't brought up yet, exactly, is that Sartre says that the Jew is created by the antisemite. And in general, what I think the claim would be that the categories are being created by people who are seeking to exclude. Right. So in that argument, right, black is created by whites and Jews are created by anti Semites. And it seems to me that's something worth talking about. That claim is that it's not out of a sort of internal integrity. It's out of an external sadism.

20:04 Wes: Yeah. So that'll be chapter three.

20:06 Dylan: Yeah. I thought that notion was brought in right at the beginning.

20:10 Seth: The notion that comes first at the very beginning is the idea that the Jew as envisioned by the anti Semitic. It's not a historical fact. It doesn't matter what a Jew or Jews do or have done. Their historical reality. And it's something that comes from inside the anti Semite. And that's why it's a passion, as west says, and not an opinion. You can have an opinion about a fact, but if you have a passion, it's constitutive of your entire identity. And the next distinction that he brings in and the next, I think key insight that he brings is he says, this is on page 12.

It is not unusual for people to elect to live a life of passion rather than one of reason. But ordinarily they love the objects of passion. Women, glory, power, money. Since the antisemite has chosen hate, we are forced to conclude that it is the state of passion that he loves. So you have this internal movement that has an external object, although it's not a fixed object, I guess you could say. And in some sense that object is created by the internal movement itself, but it also. It's negative. It's not aspirational towards achieving or accomplishing or grasping or having.

It's more of a nihilistic move. The hate is a hate for destruction

21:26 Wes: in and of itself. Hate is not pleasurable. It's an uncomfortable state of mind to be in, as Sartre points out. So then we need an explanation of why people are so attracted to that. If it's so agitating, if it's so uncomfortable. And we get into something meta, which is the love of the passionate state of mind itself and the kind of function that serves. So there's a payoff that's bigger than the uncomfortableness of the actual hate. And the payoff is this feeling of total security and transcendence of status. I think in a state of being where one doesn't have to make any choices to achieve anything, one doesn't have to worry about failure, risk, all that stuff.

22:07 Mark: I want to read a couple quotes from page 13 here. The Anti Semite has chosen hate because hate is faith. At the outset. He has chosen to devaluate words and reasons how entirely at ease he feels as a result, and later never believe that. Anti Semites are completely unaware of the absurdities of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge, but they are amusing themselves for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly since he believes in words. And then a little later, they delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument, but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. Now, you can't tell me that, oh, pox on both houses like that describes someone in particular.

22:52 Wes: I'm afraid I disagree, but I don't know how we can litigate that in this. But to me, it's pox on both houses.

22:59 Mark: Well, so this is just reflecting today as we record this on. I think this is entirely relevant to what's going on in the xenophobia and declaring a state of emergency about immigration and all those horrible Hispanics who are going to come in and destroy everything like this is. It's not the same as the anti Semitism here. Right. Cause Sartre describes the anti Semite here as actually wanting to kill people. And I would not impute that on anybody that I've actually heard talk at any length on that side. But certainly it's not just xenophobia, but this contempt for what?

The facts about crime rates and where do you get your data? And it's not just that there are no facts of the matter and everybody is equally full of shit. Like, you could hear people in the press trying to raise statistics from legitimate sources and just getting shot down by the usual rhetorical devices. That's the dynamic. I see. I'm not going to go on about it, but there you go.

24:01 Wes: Yeah, I mean, but this is the way discourse has been for a long time. I don't know. You know, public discourse is really irrational. I could point to other examples. And the right tends to have enemies outside of the nation and the left tends to have enemies inside it. So, for instance, class divisions. It's the bourgeoisie that's the enemy. It's white privilege that's the enemy, or it's immigrants who are the enemy, or used to be Russia. Now, oddly, it's kind of shifted. But, you know, I think one of the reasons this is so hard to have an argument about is because of the question of salience.

Like, what are we selectively focused on? It's easy to find all the irrational shit that one side is doing and focus on that, you know, and then if you have sort of the ethos of a centrist like me, and there's, you know, one could give an analysis of the possible bad faith in that position, then you're looking for it on both sides. One might say, well, and maybe Sartre

24:59 Mark: is not being fair here to the anti Semite. He's attributing to the anti Semite that the antisemite is bullshitting. The anti Semite knows that he has no good reasons, whereas I would think if the anti Semite is just a zealot, zealots usually think they have good reasons. This description don't think that they're completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge that particular method of bullshitting. I'm not attributing to the entire right wing or something like that. That's just an often used description of the way Trump in particular uses rhetoric. But even that, it's not clear whether he really is bullshitting on purpose or he's just that confused. And I think that we're probably not in a position to make that judgment about other people very often.

25:42 Wes: I think this is doublethink, right? People. People know they're irrational and they think they have reasons at the same time that they know that they have a disdain for reasons or discourse. So, for instance, a few months ago, the New York Times published an essay by a philosophy professor on free speech. And he basically says, look, the whole problem with free speech absolutists is they rely on this view from Mill and the Enlightenment. They believe in something called rationality, and there is no such thing as rationality in the conventional sense.

Right? He takes that tact. But then he goes on to say, but hey, we don't have to argue with people who are irrational. He equivocated on irrationality. He meant two different things. The irrational crazy people are the immoral people in his mind. And what he rejects is rationality in the sense of some sort of abstract discourse to be settled through rational arguments. So one can believe in rationality and disbelieve in rationality at the same time. And I think what Sartre is really very skillfully capturing here is the idea that there's a moral imperative which is a priori and fixed and in this case inherited by virtue of one's connection to a fatherland, let's say, which is more important than abstraction, which is what the Jew will represent.

27:05 Dylan: The essay writer you described just confirmed his bona fides as a member of the ivory tower.

27:13 Mark: So that's a good question. You know, Sartre is sort of famous for. There's never any foundational reasons that you can point to to make a decision about how you are going to be. We are radically free, not just in the sense that we can choose our whole being, but there are no foundational guideposts that we can turn to and decide based on those. You know, like a categorical imperative. There's no pre existent right and wrong. Even this authentic and inauthentic. You make sure to say, look, I'm not saying the inauthentic people are morally worse.

It's just this is a taxonomy that I think I can legitimately lay down. So even recognizing that one position is authentic, one is inauthentic does not in itself give you a reason to pursue one over the other. So it sounds like by this picture that all action is going to be irrational, but yet he wants to then within that make a distinction of people who are without foundation, embracing ultra rationality, which is how he's going to characterize some segment of the Jewish population who are acting in bad faith because of this. And the anti Semite who's embracing hate in a very irrational faith based way.

So I think he has a similar thing where there's no rationality, Big R. But clearly he thinks he can use this language here to say that the anti Semite is especially irrational compared to the human condition.

28:37 Wes: Yeah, I don't think he ever calls the anti Semite inauthentic though that's very clear.

28:43 Mark: If you say that the anti Semite wants to treat himself as a stone, wants to say that he has a specific human nature, wants to deny his own freedom, wants to deny his responsibility. That's what inauthenticity hates, his humanity.

28:54 Wes: Yeah, no you're right. Yes, you're right.

28:56 Mark: They weren't close enough to virtue to even merit. Yeah, using the authentic versus inauthentic distinction, they're so far screwed up.

29:03 Wes: Right. It's the difference between, yeah, just completely abdicating one's humanness and then the inauthenticity of abdicating a certain identity. In the case of the, the inauthentic

29:13 Dylan: Jew, just a few minutes ago we were talking about Mark quoted from page 14 and in my notes. I called it compartmentalization that Sartre seems to deny that the antisemite can be actually compartmentalizing and being self inconsistent without knowing about their own self inconsistency that they would be bullshitting knowingly always. So I wasn't sure about that because especially at that end section of part one where he goes through all the ways in which the anti Semite is inauthentic. If you said that they aren't compartmentalizing. You would say that they are authentically inauthentic.

They genuinely understand their inauthenticity, and they just hold on to it willfully in some way, as opposed to being kind of a mess and not having integrity. So it seems to me that's a more likely account, that they would be inauthentic and not sort of have an integrity of self. And the sign of that would be this kind everything that he points out, all this mutually inconsistent and conflicting aspects. And then therefore they're a bullshitter without really understanding all the ways in which they're being a bullshitter. Their passion leads them in a direction where I'll call it rationality in quotes.

Their sequence of reasons makes sense from this position of passion, but don't really add up. And so he's criticizing the way in which they don't really add up, and he gives us analysis of that. But it's not like that person holds that sequence of reasons in their passionate point of view and doesn't feel like it's consistent. They do feel like it's consistent. They feel like it makes complete sense, at least in this section. Sartre doesn't seem to agree with that.

31:02 Mark: I think he would have to say everybody who is a xenophobe is a bullshitter, right? He thinks that xenophobia is evidently not supported by good reasons. So anybody you know who's thinking about it at all would realize that and must be then lying to themselves about it. That's just his form of bad faith, that you can't just be ideologically wrong about obvious things. You have to be engaging in bad faith about it.

31:24 Seth: How is that bad faith? If they know they're saying frivolous things and their goal is not to, as he says, they delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument, but to intimidate and disconcert.

31:37 Wes: Well, they don't. They don't know that they're fleeing from their own freedom and their own responsibility, right? They're trying to inhabit a kind of position of power which is a priori and ready made, that they can just have, by virtue of inheritance, a casual possession. And they think that's the real thing. I think they don't know that there's such a thing as a position of maturity, a position of responsibility, and that that feeling that they want for free actually only legitimately comes with effort.

32:07 Mark: So they don't know it or they won't admit it. Because I feel like Sartre Just thinks that everybody can know. It's just part of human phenomenology to know the human condition of our ultimate freedom. And that whenever you deny that you're not just wrong, you're lying to yourself, you're always in bad faith.

32:22 Dylan: Yeah, see that's the part that I'm not sure that I buy because he has this analysis which I think makes a lot of sense of the Frenchman believing in basically that the true Frenchman grew out of the ground based on their history. All the stuff that Wes brought up at the beginning, that is the self understanding the essences, understanding the world in terms of essences is part of the position of the antisemite. And that, that metaphysical position, I don't know if it's a precursor exactly, but it is certainly part of the rationality of then generating the Jew and being anti Semitic in order to raise themselves up.

You know, that's where it becomes a kind of class conflict. But that position of understanding that I'm born out of the earth and because of my history and my biological relation in a very particular way to the people around me, that that makes me more genuinely. Pick your thing. A Frenchman, an American, a Jew. I don't know any of these things. That's an intrinsic part of your identity as a member of a group that seems to me have a pretty clear rationality to it, but it denies that all human beings are fundamentally part of the same group in some way.

That's a metaphysics of radical distinction between members of the human populace that denies that there's something bigger that we ought to be part of. And that seems to me wrong but consistent.

33:49 Mark: Yeah. I wasn't entirely sure how to take Sartre's comments. I wrote Virtue Ethics, this is on page 24 where he's talking about that an anti Semite can recognize that a Jew is intelligent or is hard working or something. But those qualities don't mean the same thing when a Jew has them. And he says this is based on this belief that a whole is more and other than the sum of its parts. A whole determines the meaning and underlying character of the parts that make it up. There is not one virtue of courage which enters indifferently into a Jewish character or in a Christian character, in the way that oxygen indifferently combines with nitrogen and argon to form air and with hydrogen to form water.

Each person is an indivisible totality that has its own courage, its own generosity, its own way of thinking, laughing, drinking and eating. So stated in the abstract, it seems like any virtue ethicist might agree with that.

34:37 Wes: Well, Sartre agrees with that. He doesn't agree with the particular, but he will explicitly say that he agrees with the antisemite on what he calls the spirit of synthesis.

34:46 Mark: That's interesting that. It's just that the Dylan was saying earlier that they're being good faith about not being compartmentalized. That they admit, rightly, according to Sartre, that you can't be a compartmentalized person. You can't be, you know, a Nazi during the day and then a good family man at night or something like that.

35:04 Wes: I think you could be a good family man. But, you know, the example he gives, for instance, is of the fishmonger who denounces someone. You know, I have been assured that this fishmonger was in other respects a mild and jovial man, the best of sons, but I don't believe it. A man who finds it entirely natural to denounce other men cannot have our conception of humanity. He does not see even those whom he aids in the same light as we do.

35:29 Unknown speaker: So.

35:29 Wes: So, you know, I think in a way that supports your position, Mark. But it's the question of what it means to be right, a good husband or family member. On the one hand, there's just the external behavior. You could be functionally a good husband, but you might sort of have a psychopathic character. Ultimately, we're talking about inauthenticity and authenticity. We don't want to give the impression that something as extreme as antisemitism is coextensive with that right. He'll say most people are inauthentic, and we don't necessarily expect them to be such extreme cases.

The way he defines authenticity, this is page 64, is if it is agreed that man may be defined as a being having freedom within the limits of a situation, then it is easy to see that the exercise of this freedom may be considered as authentic or inauthentic according to the choices made in the situation. The situation, right, is just deterministic forces that make us who we are and constrain our choices in any given circumstance. Authenticity, it is almost needless to say, consists in having a true and lucid consciousness of the situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate.

The way he'll apply that in the case of the authentic Jew right is that there has to be an embrace of Jewishness, even if that involves humiliation, and not a fleeing from that. In other words, fleeing, meaning trying to forget that you're Jewish. Trying to pretend that there's no differences between Jews and other people.

37:07 Mark: Before we get to the authentic Jew and the ways of going wrong, I want to touch on these two little portraits of people that don't fall into either of these categories. So the end of the Anti Semitism Chapter, page 36. The portrait is complete. If some of those who readily assert that they detest the Jew do not recognize themselves in it, it is because in actual fact they do not detest the Jews. They don't love them either. While they would not do them the least harm, they would not raise their little fingers to protect them from violence. They are not anti Semites.

They are not anything, they are not persons. Since it is necessary to appear to be something, they make themselves into an echo, a murmur. And without thinking of evil, without thinking of anything, they go about repeating learned formulas which give them the right of entry to certain drawing rooms. Thus they know the delights of being nothing but an empty noise, of having their heads filled with an enormous affirmation which they find all the more respectable because they have borrowed it. Antisemitism is only a justification for their existence.

So I wrote sub man next to that. That's what de Beauvoir was talking about. Is the subman, which I think she describes as just the antisemite in general would be subman.

38:11 Wes: Wouldn't he be a serious man?

38:13 Mark: Yeah, yeah, it sounds like the antisemite is serious man. Except this kind of anti Semite, which is not the kind that actually is a passionate. At least the serious man has a passion. The anti Semite, as we've been describing it, is one level above this, just drifting along and mouthing anti Semitic slogans because everybody else is. So that's the only paragraph he gives about that kind of person. But then he has a whole second short chapter on the Democrat. Did you see Mill in this?

38:42 Wes: Not Mill necessarily, but this is the guy, right, who has no eye for concrete synthesis. In a sense, he's analytic and he's the exact opposite of the antisemite. But the error is to treat the whole as simply as the sum of the parts. There's all just these sort of universal traits. And the individual is a collection of these traits. And one can add them or subtract them. The problem with that is the Democrat will fight for the rights of the Jew as a man, right, in these universal terms. But to use Sartre's phrase, he annihilates him as a Jew. He fails to treat him as this concrete, thick identity, as Sandel would put It. So where the antisemite is afraid of the self, the Democrat is afraid of the self being dissolved into these collectivities.

39:33 Mark: So you're giving the analysis. I don't think we've made it clear what concretely he's talking about. Right. He's talking about somebody who just.

39:39 Wes: The liberal.

39:40 Mark: Yes. A liberal who proclaims everybody has equal rights. We live in a post racial society. I don't want anybody to be anti Semitic. I will argue against anti Semite, but I don't want anybody to be too Jewy either.

39:52 Seth: Right.

39:53 Mark: If you're too Jewy, you're provoking anti Semitism. Everybody. You should just chill out. Exert your right as a citizen, but don't try to be recognized as a member of a group. Right. Which is explicitly like what Fukuyama said.

40:07 Wes: I think you're putting a little more strongly than Sartre does though. Right.

40:11 Seth: We have to take this in the context of French nationalism and the French identification that Sartre is working for, which is always your French first and your Algerian second. You're French first. France has a very strong sense of national identity in that way, and they believe in assimilation. So the liberal here is essentially saying you have to make sure that you're French first. And they associate being French with a universalism that is somehow tied to various national traits which include a humanist association with reason and so forth. But the idea is you have to have the universal identity first.

And then it's okay if you eat special little foods. Right. Or you wear funny hats or whatever. That's what essentially the Democrat is kind of pointing to. He doesn't want to excise the Jew from society and exterminate him the way that the anti Semite does. But essentially he wants there to be no sense in which there's any content to being Jewish that would create a discontinuity for some kind of being part of some social fabric that made a universal community of Frenchmen and French women.

41:19 Wes: The Democrat is okay with pluralism, but he's worried about identity politics. He's worried about the ways in which class consciousness, not just Jewish consciousness or black consciousness or whatever, but class consciousness in general, could undermine societal harmony.

41:36 Dylan: But this is what makes him a feeble defender. This is his main criticism. Right. The Democrat appears like the defender and on the side of the Jew. But in the end they don't really mount much of a defense at all against anti Semite and don't amount for much in this case because they don't come out and say what he says. At the beginning that anti Semitism is dangerous and false. They fall into the trap of just calling it. Well, it's just their opinion and of making such attitudes in a kind of nihilistic morass of mere opinion.

42:10 Wes: They try and argue with the antisemite, but they're never as mean as the antisemite. The anti Semite, by the nature of their passionate position can say all kinds of over the top crap. And the liberal, the Democrat, if they're truly that way, are there interested in reasonable rational discourse. And so the worry is that that is a weak response to an authoritarian threat.

42:35 Dylan: They're sanguine about the danger early on

42:38 Mark: in the essay Sartre says on page 6, anti Semitism does not fall within the category of ideas protected by the right of free opinions. That's right, because it's not an opinion, it's aimed at people, it's not an idea. You can argue about ideas all you want, but since this is a passion against a people, then what you were saying, Wes, about the Democrat being analytic as opposed to synthetic, sentimental in the sense is that he would have to see every difference argument as a mere difference of opinion. And this is why I was trying to equate it with Mill as yo, we just need to argue it out.

We just need to be rational. But given that anti Semitism is not an opinion, it is not something that is held rationally and he thinks it is a different language game. It's the person is self consciously bullshitting, has embraced unreason, then that is not within the realm of discourse anymore. And so it would be okay to prohibit that kind of stuff. And in fact it's incumbent upon us to wipe it out like a plague.

43:39 Wes: Well, you know what Mill would say about all that, and I agree with Mill, which is that we can always call our opponent's view irrational. And there's no higher authority to appeal to about whether it's rational except for the flow of discourse itself over time as a structure, the flow of the conversation, of the discussion. There is no higher authority to say, oh, this is irrational and it's not allowed. And this is rational and it's allowed. But I think there's something there though, because Mill also talks about stuff like billboards. Free speech is a complicated thing.

There are different sorts of speech acts. Are you allowed to put anti Muslim stuff on billboards? Or maybe let's say it was anti Semitic stuff, just put them on buses, put them on billboards that you're driving by? Mill would say no, and I think he'd be right. And I think you could see this on Sartrean grounds, this talk about passion. You could talk about speech acts which are not actually contributions to a discussion. They're not actually statements of an opinion. They are attempts, obviously attempts to intimidate. And so I think there's some common ground there.

44:40 Seth: One of the things we haven't mentioned here is Sartre's characterization of the anti Semite as living in kind of a Manichaean world. That what the Jew really represents is evil and that the anti Semite sees the world in terms of this good versus evil and they need to rid the world of evil. But the failing of that relative, say to the proletarian revolution. Right. Is there's no end game for him if the Jews are exterminated. He has no sense of what will actually be accomplished. Right. It's the passion, the hate against so called evil isn't for the purpose of building a better world or for serving some other purpose. It's just purely motivated from the self. In that respect, the Democrat does have some ideal in mind. The desire to face difference in order to create a unified community does have its roots in some kind of a higher ideal.

45:31 Dylan: You're pointing to the kind of class analysis that Sartre's talking about and that distinction between the view of the world in terms of class struggle that the person participating in that is arguing for a new world order that will realign the power structure. So the way you put it, there's an end game involved. There's something to accomplish that involves building something that changes the relations that individuals have and communities have within the community. Yeah, and that's different than the hate of the antisemite, which in this Manichaean good versus evil universe. That the only end game which I agree with you is really not an end game is just the annihilation of the quote unquote evil. And that doesn't involve any new world order. That means everybody is in the same relation as they had before.

46:22 Wes: Well, yeah. The difference is he doesn't think that there's a Manichaeanism to the class struggle. There's conflicts of interest. It's not about good and evil. It's just different interests in conflict with each other. And when we side with the proletariat, we are doing that for ethical and pragmatic reasons, not because the bourgeoisie are evil. And ultimately, as you guys pointed out, is we want to change the organization of society. We want a new world order. And for the anti Semite, the effort of producing a new world Order is exactly what they're trying to avoid instead of saying, look, there are these structural things wrong with society, then that's the evil.

It's not particular people that are evil. They need to localize it in a particular people so that they can be good. And the good is already given prior to any sort of effort. The good is not something you're trying to achieve in the future. You already have it, it's very manic. You just have it by way of birth and you're done. And that's exciting. The Sartre puts it. There's a kind of optimism to that, right, Everything's going to be all right and okay. We have the fatherland. If you look at films of the Third Reich, that's the manic spirit you see, and people inhabiting this idea of a Volk.

47:34 Mark: So I'm not sure if this constitutes a criticism of the accuracy of the view. The fact that some of this can be applied to groups nowadays, conspiracy theorists, for instance, all this talk very strongly resembles the way he's talking about that. But yet I feel like even among conspiracy theorists, a lot of them, they might not pick out Jews or blame everything on immigrants. It's more diffuse than that. It's like elites, maybe liberals, the liberal elites that are running things. And the fact that you can have a dynamic that is so similar in many ways to what he describes here, but yet doesn't have that specific, identifiable racial component, makes me think that actually what's going on here is a combination of things that he's maybe oversimplifying and saying.

The anti Semite is seized with a soul consuming unitary passion that thereby determines his bullshittiness. It determines his conspiracy thinking. It determines his not wanting to take independent political action. It determines his thinking that he's a real Frenchman, real American. Whereas I feel like all these things are actually quite separable and we see them in separated groups. Now that you might see. Where are the real Americans? Keep those damn immigrants out of here. But yet they're actually also very willing to be politically active like and think that it's not just a matter of getting rid of the immigrants.

Even the Nazis took political action to achieve their supposed aim. They're not like the anti Semites that Sartre is describing in France, who are entirely politically passive.

49:18 Seth: Would that that were true. Part of what Sartre's responding to here is that France had to struggle to acknowledge and deal with the collaborators, the people who collaborated with the Nazis. And it was not well known, it was not well documented, but part of what he's trying to accomplish in this essay, he's trying to point out that if you're looking at French society and you're thinking that somehow the Nazis brought anti Semitism to France and connected with a few individuals, you're missing the point that anti Semitism is a force, is a movement in the society, and that it wasn't invented or brought by the Nazis. In fact, it existed across all of Europe.

49:56 Wes: Europe.

49:56 Seth: And that it's a sickness inside of French culture which manifested itself in the form of collaboration. I wouldn't state it as strongly as you just did, Mark. Maybe the casual anti Semite, but I think there are strong real political ramifications which became quite evident in France.

50:15 Mark: Yeah, well, even his distinguishing. Okay, well, they're the anti Semites I've been talking about who fit this whole complex. And then the other antisemites that are merely submen don't have any strong opinions. Like what you describe as the casual anti Semite probably doesn't actually fall into either of those things. Again, he only spends the one paragraph on the casual anti Semite. But it's kind of part of the initial thesis that the guy who's like a good family man and otherwise really upright, but yet who would. Well, he says, you know, the fishmonger condemning somebody.

I don't know if condemning someone in that strong terms, in other words, take this person out and kill them, like that would indicate that this is not a nice person, no matter how much nice they seem in other contexts. But could such a person engage in casual racism? Engage in casual antisemitism? I would say, obviously, yes, that what he's pointing to is an extreme pathology, maybe very common, but that there have to be complexities here that maybe his idea of the synthetic nature of the personality is not allowing that he's actually giving him more black and white analysis.

Everybody's either a Manichean or they're in one of these other categories. I don't know. Am I just complaining about his lack of ink on certain personality types or is he really being this overly simplistic?

51:34 Wes: If he were Orwell, he would be very careful to append. And I'm also prone to thinking this way and so is everyone else. It's not just something that we can localize, to use Sartre's word, in a certain type of person. And there are those people and then there's us. It's something to which everyone is susceptible to one degree or another. Not anti Semitism necessarily, but various kinds of bigotry. And the reasons for that are complicated and various and so on.

52:01 Mark: Yeah, certainly bad faith is ever present danger in the human condition. And slipping into inauthenticity, even for someone that does not hold blatantly false views like this is a constant danger. Just the way you were describing, like the differences between the anti Semite and the good fighter for communism. Like the good fighter for communism is not emotional at all about these things. They're very analytic about this, you know, and we're doing what we're doing for the good of mankind. And we would never demonize the bourgeois. Like, okay, maybe that's his little communist discussion group that he's having. But certainly that's not the historical picture of the communist side of history.

52:42 Wes: I think the basic psychological mechanism here is in taking responsibility for ourselves and our situation. You know, this is the interesting thing about Sartre, right, Is that despite all the things that we might use as excuses, we can't do that. So I think another way to think about all that is we just have to accept our losses and then function within that paradigm. We have to do be able to be sad about things, for instance, we have to be able to have those types of uncomfortable emotions that people generally flee and when they flee them. One very common way to flee them is to become angry, to blame one's problems on others, to scapegoat, but mainly like to try and establish if you feel less than if you feel lower down in a hierarchy.

For instance, there's the trick of saying, no, I'm actually not just a shopkeeper, I am a Frenchman. There's a way to transcend hierarchy and to avoid taking account of one's losses, whereby losses I mean to include uncomfortable facts of life. Like, I'm not someone who's high up in the government, I'm just a shopkeeper, things like that.