PHILOSOPHY 201 (STOLZE) Notes on Thomas Wartenberg, Existentialism

Chapter Eight: Oppression Oppression = social structures that “enforce conformity and keep people from becoming the free individuals they have the potential to be” (p. 146) Wartenberg provides existentialist analyses of the following three forms of oppression: a.Anti-Semitism b.Sexism c.Colonialism

Jean-Paul Sartre on Oppression …[O]ppression…consists…in treating the Other as an animal. The Southerners, in the name of their respect for animality, condemned the northern industrialists who treated the workers as material; but in fact it is animals, not ‘material’, which are forced to work by breaking-in, blows and threats. However, the slave acquires his animality, through the master, only after his humanity has been recognised. Thus American plantation owners in the seventeenth century refused to raise black children in the Christian faith, so as to keep the right to treat them as sub-human, which was an implicit recognition that they were already men: they evidently differed from their masters only in lacking a religious faith, and the care their masters took to keep it from them was a recognition of their capacity to acquire it. In fact, the most insulting command must be addressed by one man to another; the master must have faith in man in the person of his slaves. This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism and all forms of tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognise him as a man. The concealed discomfort of the master is that he always has to consider the human reality of his slaves (whether through his reliance on their skill and their synthetic understanding of situations, or through his precautions against the permanent possibility of revolt or escape), while at the same time refusing them the economic and political status which, in this period, defines human beings. (From Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason I: Theory of Practical Ensembles, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, edited by Jonathan Rée [London: New Left Books, 1976], pp )

Sartre on Anti-Semitism Sartre rejects the view that anti-Semitism is the result of ignorance or false beliefs about Jews Anti-Semitism is instead a product of Bad Faith by the anti- Semite who fears his or her own freedom The anti-Semite needs and even creates “the Jew”

De Beauvoir on Sexism De Beauvoir’s distinction between sex and gender She argues that women may lapse into Bad Faith and choose to accept their dependent status

Fanon on Colonialism Fanon’s applied to the experience of “colonial subjects” what Sartre called the look, when “humans acquire an alienated understanding of themselves when they are looked at (or, at least, imagine that they are) by an other” (p. 158) Fanon’s participation in the Négritude Movement, which sought to create non-alienated forms of black consciousness and identity Fanon’s dispute with Sartre over the relative priorities of race and class