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

0:00 Mark: I think we've given a pretty good picture of how Sartre analyzes human motives and the complexities and potential objections we have to that and how in particular that applied to the anti Semite. That's the least controversial part of the essay, right? Nobody wants to defend the anti Semite, but so what about this second part where he's unleashing this toolbox to say that a lot of Jews are behaving inauthentically, that they're not somehow reacting to their situation appropriately.

0:28 Wes: There's this idea that the Jew is created by the anti Semite, right? That they would have assimilated if it were not for the fact of anti Semitism. And that really all that they really have in common is that they're hated by people. He calls them ahistorical. That the foundation of the community isn't. It's not like the same foundation that a Frenchman would have with a common history and the active engagement of Jews and what happened in a single country and all that stuff. It's because of the Diaspora and other circumstances. And it's not even cultural or religious. The Jewishness is simply a matter of other people singling you out as a Jewish.

1:10 Mark: The preface, written by Michael Walzer, obviously Jewish and lists some other Jews who read his preface and commented on it. So we get the objections to that part of the text right there in the text, in the preface, that Sartre did not do any research for this. He kind of just reflected on the Jews that he was immediately acquainted with, who were very assimilated, educated intellectuals. He didn't look into Jewish history. He didn't look into religious doctrine. He didn't look. You know, he just reflected on the fact that, look, a lot of Jews are atheists. Like, obviously, there's no common religion. Yeah. He just thinks that Sartre completely undervalues what is distinctive about Judaism as a historical tradition.

1:53 Seth: So I think we should all acknowledge that there are lots of issues with the concept of authenticity and what it would mean for a Jew to choose oneself as a Jew as opposed to an assimilated Jew, or trying to get by or wanting to be part of something non Jewish. One thing that kept coming to mind was how much did Sartre actually know about Judaism? Like, I'm assuming he knew practicing religious Jews. But when he talks about Judaism and authenticity in this context of a kind of existential experience feels not at all resonant with what my understanding of authentic Judaism would be.

And I'm not saying that I am an authentic Jew by that definition either. I don't think I am by any definition. Here's a quote from page 98. Jewish authenticity consists in choosing oneself as Jew, that is, in realizing one's Jewish condition, whatever that means. The authentic Jew abandons the myth of the universal man. He knows himself and wills himself into history as a historic and damned creature. He ceases to run away from himself and to be ashamed of his own kind. So there's a whole sense in which you can satisfy that last condition of not being ashamed of your own kind and not in any way, shape or form think of yourself as damned.

And I don't even know about the first part about abandoning the myth of the universal man. Judaism is a religion of Anti universalism. Right. Jews are chosen. There's a historic and a narrative and a traditional and a path that Jews are supposed to walk, which is not universal. They're supposed to be separate and distinct. The issue is around what happens when that narrative comes in conflict with the fact that the Jews no longer have their own state and they are in the Diaspora. So this just doesn't really make sense to me, I guess. Or it's coming from the perspective of somebody who has a very one dimensional view of what Judaism is and what authenticity would mean for Jews.

He's at least acknowledging his parochialism when he. In other parts of the essay and specifically in Black Orpheus, when he's talking about being French and what have you. And maybe this was just one of those things where he maybe should have said, yeah, you know, maybe British and German and Italian Jews and Algerian Jews feel a little differently. It just, it kind of rang a little hollow for me.

4:38 Mark: Yeah, I think he's clearly talking about Jews in his super anti Semitic society, that the thing that unifies them, as we were saying, is the persecution. So if you want to try to modernize this, I mean, it has to be more. Again, he says at the end this, the Jew only serves a pretext to the anti Semite elsewhere. His counterpart will make use of the Negro or the man of yellow skin. So it's somebody who is in this position of being painted by a large portion of the population as the devil, as something to stifle being demonized, being deemed other.

So I know that people complain when African Americans make claims like that in terms of I feel a solidarity with other African Americans because we are persecuted in this way, that they're currently in the position that the Jew was in in this society that he's describing. And maybe some of us who are not African American say, come on, there's no comparison there. Racism is not nearly as virulent as some place like that where there just had been a giant war to exterminate the whole kind. I remember when we were talking to Law about this in one of the episodes where he's like, yeah, some of his older relatives, they feel it like slavery and Jim Crow are just like three inches away.

So I wouldn't want to be then one to white splain as an article I read today to them that they should calm down and not overreact. I know I've talked to Jews at some point who still feel actually like anti Semitism is still a very, very, very live thing. Do you feel like Seth, in your experience and those that you have talked with that one could unite with other Jews under the sentiment of being persecuted? Or is that just at least in our society you're just not on the persecuted list to significant extent anymore such that this sort of unity would make any sense to you?

What he's actually claiming would amount to authenticity.

6:38 Seth: Yeah, it would not make sense to me. But that doesn't mean that anti Semitism doesn't exist. It means that we live, at least, I'll say nominally and for the time being in a society that as far as Jews are concerned is under the rule of law. I'm not sure that every other minority group in the country feels the same way, but it certainly hasn't been that way for a super long time, less than a hundred years. But no, I don't experience persecution in any meaningful way in my daily life.

7:09 Mark: So does that mean that this critique is just entirely obsolete?

7:12 Seth: And yet the JCC in my neighborhood has a giant fence around it and a guard at the gate. And there are police at our grocery store, which has the only kosher deli I think for many miles around. So perhaps there are things I just don't know. Maybe I don't have enough of the archetypal physical traits to trigger the reaction in anybody. My nose isn't quite hooked enough.

7:39 Mark: So Wes, you had said you were going to just give a couple of the examples here that Sartre gives to see if they're resonant here.

7:46 Wes: So he has all these things about the love of the rational and the universal proneness to self examination and. But at the various points he takes several stereotypes and seems to sort of justify them even as he's excusing them. So for instance, he talks about the love of money as in part a love of abstraction which he's associating with Jewishness and loving the power of purchase in some way as a kind of security and the abstractness of money, right? It's not real property. And Jews were, there were significant barriers, right, to owning real property.

And then historically Christians couldn't be money lenders and Jews could. And Jews were excluded from all sorts of other professions. So he gives both a historical account and a kind of characterological account of relationship between Jews and money. And then he, you know, he thinks of this in the end as money is sort of the power of appropriation for the universal anonymous man. Because he sees the Jew as someone who in a way is tending towards assimilation and tending towards wanting anonymity, wanting to be invisible. And then there's the Whole aspect of the acquisition of social rights through money.

So there are all these different things. But you can see how this would be controversial because even as he's trying to explain away a stereotype, he's sort of granting it. I don't know what you guys think of that, but there are quite a few examples like that in here. Is that the kind of example I

9:20 Dylan: was supposed to give?

9:21 Mark: Yeah. Well, that's an obviously problematic one. You know, some of these other things sound more like the way like Nietzsche would again characterize the Geist of a group, the spirit, which he's still calling avenues of flight. Right. So they're bad faith, their avenues of flight from the truth of the situation of antisemitism. Kind of if you know anti Semitism is a lie and in reaction to that, if you buy into any of the lie and you act as if you realize that a lot of people hate Jews and so you try really hard not to act Jewish, that's an obvious avenue of flight if you are Jewish because you're essentially agreeing with them.

In fact, you might even become anti Semitic yourself. Just like anybody who's getting picked on as a kid might like find somebody else to pick on to deflect the bully's attention toward and of victimizing other Jews to avoid being persecuted yourself. That's an obvious avenue of flight that you're buying into part of the anti Semitic rhetoric. Yeah. He points to each of these things and say, the anti Semite will then see you doing that and will claim, see I'm justified in my anti Semitism. Even Jews hate other Jews. So that's pretty typical of the way.

He doesn't want to say he's victim blaming, but he's saying that the understandable reaction by some Jews is taken and used to ill purpose, used by the anti Semite to feed his already virulent anti Semitism. So I think that what you just said about money is a similar one, right, that the anti Semite claims. I'm a real Frenchman. I own France. France is in my blood. I own the soil even though I don't. And so if you as a Jew are threatened by that, if you kind of people say that to you or act that way long enough, then you might say, well, screw you, I'm going to actually buy the actual soil.

Like this might drive you to act in a way that you would not act if there wasn't this persecution going on that you're still trying to like justify your existence to the anti Semite. And even like I'LL show you kind of response is in some way falling victim to. The anti Semite is buying into their initial line of bullshit about owning the soil. You shouldn't give enough credence to that to then feel like you need to react to that in response. And in the same thing, if the anti Semites are excluding you from all these things and you say no, no, I'm going to fight to be a member of the country club, I'm going to fight a member of these high status professions.

Like if you're just doing that because you wanted to do that, that's fine. But if you're doing that because you're trying to get past the barriers of antisemitism, then somehow that is again reactive and giving the game to the anti Semite. And the anti Semit says, oh, look how ambitious they are, look how much power they want. When actually they're just reacting to your own hate. The anti Semites hate.

12:26 Dylan: Is this what he means by the masochism? He characterizes anti Semites as sadists. And then page 77 in the context of the inauthentic Jew, he goes on this discussion of them being masochistic and their desire to have themselves treated as an object.

12:45 Mark: Yeah, he says that's one of the reactions is that you can just really give into it and say, oh, woe is me, I am the persecuted Jewish. Persecute me. He just accepts that he is a Jew in essence. It's not just a thing that he does. This is just why last time we discussed bad faith in the other Sartre episode, it just seemed really hard to navigate the poles that on the one hand if you deny your Jewishness, you're in bad faith. But on the other hand, if you accept your Jewishness but wear it around as if it is your essence, that's also denying your freedom. So those are the two poles of bad faith.

13:22 Wes: The masochism is kind of a victim mentality. So where you relieved of all responsibility and need to struggle, you become passive. And then he contrasts anti Semite sadism and the Jewish masochism as two extremes of passive behavior. But basically in the case of the masochistic Jew, it's very similar to the anti Semite in the sense that it's an escape from responsibility.

13:45 Dylan: The criticism of inauthenticity means that in part you're not accepting responsibility for who you are, you're abdicating that.

13:55 Wes: Yeah. And don't have to do anything. I think that's a critical thing. Here is where you, you're no longer engaged in a certain type of struggle.

14:04 Dylan: One of the ways in which I get my head around the authentic versus inauthentic problem, and I admit both that it's slippery the way Mark was describing, but also that I don't feel expert in it at all. But the way I get my head around it is that there's an inherent activity of authenticity. That it isn't a state of being, but it's a state. Wes just uses a state of struggle. There's sort of a constant activity. And maybe the activity itself. Calling it a struggle is manifest all the time is probably overstating it, but that you are conscious of it being a struggle.

That your authenticity isn't something you settle into. It's something that you're actively doing, whereas your inauthenticity is something that you could settle into. And that's one of the vectors of bad faith, is its laziness and its settledness. Whereas authentic living is active in that way. I want to use that phrase, authentic living versus authenticity. Because he captures the activity and the struggle associated with. I almost said being in that mode. But what I'm trying to make the point that it's not about being. It necessarily. It's about activity.

15:25 Mark: Let's connect it to his language of a situation here. So page 42, right at the beginning of chapter three. For us, man is defined, first of all as being in a situation. He cannot be distinguished from his situation, for it forms him and decides his possibilities. But inversely, it is he who gives it meaning by making his choices within it and by it. To be in a situation, as we see it, is to choose oneself in a situation. And men differ from one another in their situations and also in the choices they themselves make of themselves. What men have in common is not a nature, but a condition.

That it is an ensemble of limits and restrictions. The inevitability of death, the necessity of working for a living, of living in a world already inhabited by other men. It's a little complicated. You know, the thing that we hate about, typically about Sartre's talk of freedom is it seems to discount, you know, in our previous discussion, it seems to discount the situation. You can always, by making your choices to give your situation one meaning or another meaning, you are choosing oneself in a situation. You're essentially. It sounds like you're choosing your situation, or that the situation doesn't matter because it's the choosing oneself in the situation that matters.

When, certainly when people are in a difficult situation, shouldn't we sympathize with their desire to mitigate that.

16:46 Wes: Yeah, I think some of this is a choice of the interpretation of the situation. So it's our comportment to it, which is a way of this is a little too strong, but it's a way we sort of construct the situation in part through our interpretation or through the sort of interpretive frame that we're bringing to it. In that sense we have responsibility for it. So if I'm encountering some difficulties and my interpretation is, you know, to put it in very simple terms has to do with this is part of life and I have to fix it, that's one thing. But alternatively I might say that this always happens to me and it's just there's no point in trying and it's unfair or a bunch of other things which might imbue me with passivity.

And I think the problem with that is part of our situation is psychology and character. If we take it to logical extreme, right, the situation is just all the deterministic forces that are for complete determinists going to dictate what we do and make it seem as if we have no choice. And it's hard to see how the existentialist who's trying to take account of that right in terms of essence and situation, how their conception of freedom is consistent with that and not just completely undermined by that.

18:12 Seth: To fast forward to the end of this book, we know the answer is the proletarian revolution. So is there a sense in which he's problem solving for the end that he's already decided that being essentially when you get to the end of this book, this is on 103. Anti Semitism is a regressive social force and a conception deriving from the pre logical world. The idea is it doesn't really matter if the Jew is authentic or inauthentic, attempts to assimilate or tries to set up shop in isolation somehow as a cell within the society. The Democrats resolution won't work.

You have to get rid of that regressive social force. We know that Sartre has attached that to. He has a class component since the antisemite comes from a certain class. I don't know if we talked about this explicitly, but Sartre mentions that antisemitism is a feature of. Let's put it this way, rich people and people in power use it, but they don't live it. So ultimately we have to do away with class in order to do away with anti Semitism. And by the way, conveniently that's also the solution for our pesky challenges with religious identity and so forth.

So is there a sense in which we can acknowledge his analysis and his diagnosis and his deep psychological insights, but also recognize that some of what he says is intimately connected with this resolution that he sees as, if not inevitable, at least necessary?

19:53 Wes: We should say that there are a few steps, though, to that. He gets to the socialist revolution in the end. But the beginning of chapter four, he's saying, is the solution assimilation? No, because the anti Semite will oppose that. And so his initial solution is what he calls concrete liberalism. So we grant rights to the Jew not as a human being, but as Jews, as concrete persons. And it's not entirely clear what that means exactly until he gives the example of a woman going to vote and drawing on her womanly intuitions when she's voting, which I thought was funny.

And then moving on from there, he talks about speech prohibition and propaganda and education, the things that we're going to use to prevent anti Semitism from flourishing. And then ultimately we get to the socialist revolution, where. And then also, by the way, you know, Jewish consciousness, in the same way that we start out with class consciousness, we don't just jump to the end when there's no classes. We start out with Jewish authenticity and Jewish consciousness, even if at the end we get a dissolution of all those divisions and solidarity in a society without divisions.

21:13 Mark: Yeah, I think the intro mentions that the Jewish Anti Defamation League or something like this was being formed at the time. And Sartre kind of refers offhand to that as the kind of political action that he approves of.

21:26 Wes: Yeah, because he says, we can't wait for the socialist revolution. And then he mentions the Jewish League, like, as a way of fighting between now and the socialist revolution. Jews should fight.

21:37 Mark: Yeah. It also, the preface kind of gets into, like, well, what does this mean in terms of, like, Zionism? Because you could kind of call it either way, that the authentic Jew is one that should. If I'm living in a crappy society like this and there's no unity between me and other Jews, besides being persecuted and then having a Jewish state seems like it would really help, that it would really give us the fatherland, that we need to have authentic solidarity, on the other hand, you could say, no, that's just a. It's a line of flight away from existing as a French citizen.

I think the author of the intro is saying that this is not. The tools that he's given us to evaluate what constitutes authentic behavior are not actually specific enough, like, to give a good decision on that case, maybe it could be that particular individuals might be authentic, you know, with opposite decisions on that issue. And likewise, Zionists and anti Zionists could both be inauthentic for different reasons. It's just, it's going to come down to the individual.

22:46 Seth: There is a nice quote before that that you mentioned about women going into the voting booth. It's on page 105. What we propose here is a concrete liberalism. By that we mean all persons who through their work collaborate towards the greatness of a country, have the full rights of citizens of that country. What gives them this right is not the possession of a problematic and abstract human nature, but their active participation in the life of the society. This means then that the Jews, and likewise the Arabs and the Negroes, from the moment that they are participants in the nation, the national enterprise, have a right in that enterprise.

They are citizens, but they have these rights as Jews, Negroes, Arabs, that is, as concrete persons. Which sounds good, but it's still a form of assimilation, right? There's still a national character that's been established by, presumably the white landed, have been there for a thousand years, whatever that he talks about earlier. If, as an Arab I believe that alcohol should not be consumed and a huge part of the French economy is built on lovely wines, how is it that the Arab is going to participate in France as a citizen and contribute to the greatness of that country?

Well, I don't know. I mean, is that possible?

24:13 Dylan: I mean, doesn't it have to be just that you don't understand being French as being about wine? It seems hard for me to understand how you have a society in which you have the possibility of the full participation of everybody, of all citizens, where you have that be regardless of these other individual identities, without having a notion of a whole that abstracts away from that. So that being French isn't about wine. Just so happens that there's a long history of winemaking in France. But there has to be a way to call yourself a Frenchman and not be a drinker. If there isn't, then that's a problem from the standpoint of this. And the same thing goes with being in America. There's got to be a way to call yourself an American without eating hamburgers or liking apple pie.

25:06 Seth: Right. I'm thinking more about a more contemporary view. And maybe, of course he wasn't comprehending this, but like, not that, oh, I can be a Frenchman and not drink wine. It's, I can be a Frenchman and think it's okay that other people drink wine, even When I don't. When I think that consuming alcohol is somehow against my beliefs. It's a pluralism. He's asking for a kind of pluralism that I think we've seen has not been practical, or at least we're struggling with right now. And it's also not something that's very. We've approached it from a different perspective in America than I think they did then.

But what this feels like to me, it feels like almost like Plato's ideal state. I say, okay, well, you're an Arab. What do you have to contribute and what are the limitations and what are the boundaries that we can set upon your experience as a. You contribute to France because you are the mathematicians, right? These guys are the soldiers or the labor. It's fine for certain groups to come into the country as long as they aren't running for office or whatever, they're just filling labor needs.

26:18 Dylan: But that's not assimilation.

26:19 Wes: Right.

26:20 Dylan: Assimilation would mean that everybody can do everything.

26:23 Seth: Right.

26:24 Dylan: When I think of it, I think in a kind of romantic way about the idea of becoming an American and participating in the American economy, that your kids can go to whatever college they want to go to, you can get cottage on a lake and go up there for the weekend. You can participate on an equal basis with other people, your friends and neighbors, and lay claim to the notion. And there's a conduit for you to say, I'm an American. Yeah.

26:53 Wes: And then there's Fukuyama's. Right, Creedal national identity, embracing those principles.

26:58 Dylan: Yeah, exactly.

27:00 Mark: So that is funny that I was seeing Fukuyama in the Democrat section that he condemns. But then when he's actually describing his solution, it sounds a heck of a lot concretely like Fukuyama as well. And maybe that's just because of the difference between. I know Fukuyama is talking not just about America. He's talking about. He looks at the conditions in Europe and integrating the Arabs there and folks like that. But he's still acting with the paradigm of a. What assimilation would be is the melting pot. That when you assimilate in the US then you are not becoming Frenchified.

Right. That. That France had a pre existent hundreds of years old long running identity of what it is to be French that was not creedal, that was specifically ethnic. And like this is the source of the particular brand of antisemitism that he describes here. And when we think of what is necessary, what Fukuyama has in mind of what's necessary to be a common member of a country, he does have something more like the American model in mind, even if he's talking about France.

28:09 Wes: Yeah, it sounds like it. I mean, he's using the phrase concrete liberalism. Right. So he's trying to have his cake and eat it too. He's very critical of the liberal, but in the end, I think that's right. What else are you going to do? He's a liberal liberal until the socialist revolution arrives.

28:26 Mark: The French liberal, though, that Sartre would be talking about would be somebody that say, cast aside your Arabic character, cast aside your Jewish character and become what the historical Frenchman is, insofar as we are now defining it as not requiring that your parents and grandparents lived here. So it's barely a creedal identity. It's still very, very strongly French, where that's predetermined. Do you think that this concrete identity does not imply a thick notion of the national character?

28:58 Wes: I was taking him to say just a thick notion of Jewishness or whatever subgroup you want to say. Yeah, and it doesn't make sense. I mean, I don't know really know what to make when he says granting rights to people not as abstract human beings, but as concrete persons and then talking about a woman voting using her womanly intuitions. I think that's a bunch of bullshit. Basically doesn't make any difference whether you say, oh, you have the right to vote and you have the right not to be treated like shit. It doesn't matter make a difference whether you say, as a human being or no. We're gonna give you the. Grant you this right, and we're gonna think about your particular identity when we do it. We hereby grant you this right in virtue of. I mean, it makes no sense to me unless you can explain it.

29:45 Seth: Yeah.

29:45 Mark: Couldn't there be, like, affirmative action or reparations or something as a way of cashing out what it means to give them full participation in the society? As a Jew would be, I would think, recognizing the historical persecution of Jews and perhaps some affirmative action.

30:04 Wes: Yeah, but he doesn't talk about that.

30:06 Mark: Prohibitions against. I'm just trying to flesh it out. And certainly this is the way that we have fleshed it out to say that employers no longer have carte blanche to just hire or not hire whoever they feel like because they're not allowed to discriminate. And when you have an anti discrimination law, then you are acknowledging that some citizens are, in effect, receiving special protections based on their group.

30:30 Wes: Yeah, I don't see any hint mark of what you're getting at. I mean, that is one way to flush this out. But I'm trying to make sense specifically what it means to give people rights as concrete and individual products of history.

30:43 Dylan: I don't know if it's affirmative action and that kind of thing, but it does seem that he's trying to preserve an integrity to their identity and acknowledging their situatedness in the history that they came from and whatever reality they face, interacting and interpreting their lives as any of us do in terms of the identity that we have. And he picks specific cultural and ethnic identities and saying that, well, recognizing them as concrete individuals amounts to recognizing them interacting in the world as Arabs or Jews or women or pick your identity. And that they would participate in public life as, let's call it instances of those identities. That sounds like the kind of thing he's talking about.

31:38 Wes: Well, one of you had read before. Yeah. This other part, which is what gives them right is not the possession of a problematical and abstract human nature, but their active participation in the life of the society. Which marks. Goes back towards your thick creedal national identity. Right. It's kind of confusing though.

31:57 Dylan: Yeah.

31:57 Wes: Is it in virtue of concrete particular identities or in virtue of a concrete thick national identity that is not predicated on Frenchness but on citizenship or something like that.

32:09 Dylan: And then you get raised the question of what kinds of revisions or attenuations of one's individual ethnic identity are required to participate in that creedal identity, that thick creedal life.

32:24 Wes: Because inevitably there are conflicts. Yeah.

32:26 Dylan: Yes, inevitably. And if you're going to say, well, I'm going to participate in this creedal national identity, in the end, it's going to mean that that trumps your specific individual ethnic identity just in the same way that federalism trumps states rights insofar

32:44 Mark: as your specific identity is exclusionary.

32:47 Wes: Exactly.

32:47 Dylan: But the point is that there is going to be that kind of conflict. Right. That there's going to be that kind of attenuation. And the stronger and more exclusive that individual identity is, then the more it's going to have to be attenuated. It doesn't keep you from saying, you know, being proud of your identity, just like it doesn't keep me from being proud of my college or rooting being a fan for something or being a. A Midwestern nativist. It just means that I can't say I'm gonna kill all the people from New England because they're not from the Midwest.

33:23 Wes: Good luck, buddy. You got Tom Brady.

33:29 Mark: Yeah. And he's going to treat the anti Semite, of course, not as just another identity. They're doing something, exhibiting their opinions, in embracing their way of life, they're doing something that is fundamentally anti human.

33:43 Dylan: That's a really good point, Mark. I wonder if an anti Semite would claim that as being their identity.

33:49 Mark: Well, they would say I'm the true Frenchman or I'm the rural American or however they want to set it up.

33:56 Wes: Proud to be a Frenchman.

33:59 Mark: Or maybe they're just like if a lot of Arabs are anti Semitic and I'm not claiming this, but let's pretend that that was like built in. Certainly anti homosexual is part of a lot of religious traditions. And so why the cake makers don't want to, you know, are we going to allow the conservative Christians full participation in the economy as Christians or are we going to say you have to bake the cake for the people that you don't approve of? This seems very on point and it seems like he's just going to have to say that any kind of intolerance is the same kind of pernicious stuff that was going on in his description of the anti Semite.

34:38 Dylan: I mean, it's the same reason why you would have a law that says you can't own a hotel and forbid people who are black from staying in your hotel just because you don't like black people. You can't participate in our creedal national identity and it's illegal for those reasons. Right? So dude, you have to attenuate your identity as a racist in order to own a hotel. That's a grunt of questioning and skepticism.

35:08 Wes: It's your Jewish love of self examination and abstraction.

35:13 Dylan: Bring out that rationality, Seth. Let's see it.

35:16 Seth: Yeah, that Jewish rationality. I mean, I feel like we're on the transition to black Orpheus. But this notion of concrete liberalism, there's a sense in which the idea that everybody who contributes to the greatness of the country is granted full power, participation, citizenship, regardless of whether they're black, white, Jew, Arab, whatever. But really what Sartre I think is, and what existentialism drives him to is, is not that we make this acknowledgment of the particular, the concrete, at the group participation level. So he says, oh well, you know, they're all granted citizenship, but granted citizenship as Arabs, as Jews, no, we need to grant them citizenship as Jean Paul Sartre, as Dylan, as Wes, as Mark, not based on any kind of racial or group association.

That the mere fact that you even appeal to the concept of a group or an identity that's associated like that already has within it the seeds of persecution, the Concrete liberalism we need is the concrete liberalism that recognizes individuals and not groups. That any acknowledgment of the group is inevitably going to lead to the possibility of persecution in that respect. But that in itself already requires this post revolution universality where there are no distinctions between. We don't, we don't see the distinctions. Or somehow we have to be able to not just say, oh, you're a Jew, but you're still allowed to own property and vote and run for office and all those kinds of things.

It has to be, you're Seth, and it just so happens that you're Jewish and you're, you've been here for two generations and what have you and all these, we acknowledge all of these things. But your recognition under the law comes not from you being protected in your group participation, but rather protected as an individual.

37:32 Mark: Yeah, no, that makes sense.

37:34 Seth: Well, I'm wondering if there isn't. Like, I can't tell if what he's driving towards is this is the interim before the proletarian revolution, or if there's an internal contradiction in what he's saying, that you're ultimately reduced to the individual who is a complex of situations and then makes meaningful choices. If you believe that, then why are we talking at the level of Arab and Negro and Jew? Why are we not talking at the level of individuals? Is it because he's making a political statement and not like a philosophically existential statement?

38:11 Mark: Yeah, he doesn't seem to distinguish the two because of the political situation that there is so much anti Semitism, anti other ism, whatever. Then both as a personal, psychological, existential thing, you have to acknowledge that and also as a political measure, you need to acknowledge that. So the democrat. And then he also says even Jews can be democrats. The Jewish rationalism, the royal road of flight, he calls it, which is to espouse a conception of the world that excludes the very idea of race. It's an attempt to conceal their situation as Jews.

He says the rationalism of Jews is a passion, the passion for the universal. He compares this to the Phaedo that Plato's whole if you want truth, the body has to die, and then you will awaken to reason. So that is a way in which anybody can deny the political facts of anti Semitism, of racism, and passionately adhere to a certain. He calls it an asceticism, a purification, escape into the universal. And he thinks it's ironic that this is. It's analytic, it's an abrasive reason, but it's done as A passionate move in some ways. There's no rationale for pursuing reason in this way.

And he parallels that to the rest of the, what he calls bad faith moves by Jews as saying that this kind of universalism is a reaction to Catholic universalism from which he is excluded. Right. The word Catholic means universal. That was sort of the point of Catholicism is that it's would be the whole Christian world, even though that Catholic sounds like a sect to us. That was supposed to be universalism. It was supposed to be open mindedness itself, strangely enough. And so to embrace this other kind of universalism in reaction to that is supposedly bad faith, which I guess I don't really see that it seems.

Yes, we want to have rationalism in response to irrationalism. That's not bad faith. That is properly reacting to the facts on the ground.

40:26 Seth: Can I read the last paragraph? In order to awaken this passion, what is needed is not to appeal to the generosity of the Aryans with even the best of them, that virtue is in eclipse. What must be done is to point out to each one of them that the fate of the Jews is his fate. Not one Frenchman will be free so long as the Jews do not enjoy the fullness of their rights. Not one Frenchman will be secure so long as a single person in France or in the world at large can fear for his life.

40:58 Mark: So that's. I totally agree with that. How does that follow from what he said before?

41:03 Seth: I kind of don't feel that it necessarily does

41:07 Mark: because it sounds like, I guess this is supposed to be a restatement of this concrete universalism as opposed to the abstract universalism. And I think it's just the, the trouble that we're having in understanding the difference between those is maybe what makes this less clear because that could be a statement of either kind of universalism as far as I can see. Right. Or is it just the fact that he's talking about safety makes it concrete somehow?

41:35 Seth: Well, no, I think he's trying to link it back to the idea that, you know, antisemitism is that essentially if you overcome this pre logical passion of hatred to that defines a group and isolates them, that you're not going to gain. He says secureness or secure, but it's really, it's not that they're threatened from the Jews. What he says is what to point out to each one of them that the fate of the Jews is his fate. So in other words, as long as the society harbors the possibility of a pre logical prejudice that isolates and creates an other and forms the possibility of persecution, then every member of that society can potentially be persecuted, maybe precisely because it's easy to take individuals and aggregate them into groups based on race, creed, color, ethnicity, sexual choice, whatever.

But the essay doesn't float along that line where he tries to make a point out of that the persecution of the Jews somehow represents the possibility of the persecution of everybody, even though it's very clear that he's talking about any minority group in France.

42:49 Mark: It can't just be that acting in reaction to the irrational and thereby letting the irrational kind of set up the terms of the debate, that every reaction to that is going to be wrong headed. Because it seems like the one he's recommending is also right. That's the way a dialectic works. You take the crappy thing you respond to, it's maybe you end up getting a synthesis that is better than either of them. But you don't say that the, the response was wrong because it's letting the initial term set up the terms of the debate. That's just the way debates work. So let's move on to Black Orpheus finally. So we already said what this was about at the beginning of the episode. Wes, did you want to recap, slash, elaborate?