existential ontologies, subjects and truths
2010
axel //
The relationship between the philosophy of Alain Badiou and Jean-Paul Sartre is delicate. The topic of “being” is at the core of each of their investigations, serving as the first word in the title of each of their magnum opuses. While Sartre very clearly in the opening pages of his book declares his objective in a series of questions {1}, Badiou instead situates himself working within multiple discourses {2}. This subtle difference, I will show, reveals itself in a more severe way further into the two readings and acts as the foundation for the philosophical differences between the two thinkers. Both of the philosophers take up the topics of ontology and subjectivity as the core of their argument, and in both of their dialogues the idea of truth emerges as a result of this relationship. The distinct perspectives between the two are a result of the way in which they treat these ideas: Sartre begins with the subject, the individual, the one, and from it looks for the logics of a greater ontology {3}. Badiou on the other hand, starts with an ontology as the precondition for the subject and looks for the ways in which a subject can be formed within one. In both discourses, the idea of truth is revealed as a product of their ontology; a truth is that which abides by the rules and structures of such ontology. By deriving an ontology from the subject as Sartre does, truth is integral to the actions and psychology of the subject. This results in a much more subjective approach that emphasizes the role and significance of agency, which results in the idea and potential situations of bad faith. As Badiou attempts to establish the foundation of an ontology which subsequently can produce a subject, the subject is not necessarily synthesized with the truth. This is emanated in his concept of ‘fidelity’ that is a result of the event which spontaneously occurs and is a product of the situation’s structure {4}. While this is similar to the idea of bad faith, there are decisive differences, primarily that bad faith is framed in a negative light, where fidelity implies a positive attitude. This may seem arbitrary but is a revelation to their differences. For Badiou, maintaining a fidelity is the act of constituting a subject; in effect, when an individual is not a fidelity or does not maintain a fidelity, they are no longer a subject {5}. This closely resonates in Sartre’s idea bad faith, but is reflected not directly in Badiou’s conception of a subject, but in his formation of an ontology.
Bad faith is a logical fallacy by which two distinct states of being are affirmed as identical, “disintegrating consciousness”. It is a result of believing that the facticity of the individual is the same as their transcendent nature (or vice versa). This emanates deeply in Badiou work in how he explicitly establishes his ontology as the dialectical relationship between the one and the multiple {6}. As is stated, “the one is not” (Badiou, Being and Event, 23). Furthermore, “the one, which is not, solely exists as operation” (Badiou, Being and Event, 24). In this sense, Sartre’s idea of consciousness can be identified as Badiou’s concept of the one {7}. So in continuing this parallelism, what, for Sartre, is Badiou’s multiple? To this we must look deeper into what he means by multiple, particularly in relation to the one. If the multiple can be seen as the dialectic to one, this defines the multiple as a ‘presentation’ {8}. The similarities between the two philosophers is strikingly evident here; consciousness is represented in the relationship between transcendence and facticity, where as the one is reoresented in the relationship between (respectively) inconsistent and consistent multiplicities. This begins to allude to a relationship that Sartre makes in his negotiation of being / non-being:
“But non-being is not the opposite of being; it is its contradiction. This implies that logically nothingness is subsequent to being since it is being, first posited, then denied. It can not be therefore that being and non-being are concepts with the same content since on the contrary non-being supposes a irreducible mental act.” (Sartre, 14)
If this relationship is taken as a parallel relationship back to Badiou, the one is the contradiction, the negation of the multiple. If the one is not, then the multiple must be (a thing). This is affirmed by Badiou: “the one, in respect to presentation, is an operational result” (Badiou, Being and Event, 24); only some thing can be presented. While affirming a positive relation with Sartre by framing the one strictly as a ‘subtractive’ result from the multiple, this lays no immediate claims to what the one actually produces, and it is later revealed in Badiou’s philosophy that this is explicitly unknown. For Sartre, this conceptual ontological relationship makes no distinction between the ontology of the individual and the individual-as-subject, directing and revealing us the essence of Sartre’s ontology itself. Nothingness as the ubiquitous potential condition that ‘haunts’ being is the essential foundation upon which all subjective acts of being-in-the-world takes place. Conversely, Badiou, while establishing the framework for his ontology, declares that it must be axiomatic and implicit, and in such it remains non-prescriptive and open to situational appropriation {9}. This is not decisively different than Sartre’s approach (aside from being explicitly stated), but it is suffice enough to say that this enables Badiou’s adoption of Cantour’s set theory which folds in a greater complexity and depth into his ontological situation. Here the fundamental ontological distinction between Badiou and Sartre can be established: Badiou takes an objective approach by viewing the ontological problem as a situation in which there are elements within sets that can relate to each other to produce a subject without saying anything about the subject itself, where as Sartre takes a subjective approach to the ontological problem by viewing nothingness as a prevalent condition that structures the framework for subjectivity and the subsequent psychologies, motives, desires, expectations, and emotions of the individual.
While this may be a distinction that is consequential deeper into their respective philosophical styles, there is more to reveal in order to explicate this relationship more. The relationship between Sartre and Badiou has brought us thus far to the parallelisms in which Sartre’s empty consciousness is equivalent to Badiou’s operational one, and Sartre’s conception of a being is Badiou’s of a presentation, a thing. In both, the idea of the multiple, the being, the thing, poses a problem which must be resolved. For Sartre it is posed as the way in which we may view the act of asking a question {10}, and for Badiou it is in the way we may conceive of the multiple {11} that is essentially the response to “how do we view situations”. The way in which this split is brought up by Sartre leads to the relationship between figure and ground {12} that is intimately comparable to Badiou’s concepts of the inconsistent and consistent multiplicity. By framing it in the way Sartre does, agency directly acts as the foundation for being-in-the-world, where as in Badiou the topic of free will and agency is explicitly avoided to avoid structuralist paradoxes but is implied through the establishment of an ethics based on his notion of the truth {13, 14}. The ground, the multiple, is created in two distinct, non-simultaneous ways. It can be formed as the dialectic and structure of a figure, or it can be a figure-less situation in which every element fights for the status of one {15}. In Sartre’s analysis, the latter situation of viewing a ground in its undifferentiated state is a consequence of subjective negation, “an abrupt break in continuity which can not in any case result from prior affirmations.” (Sartre, 11). This reaffirms the subjective viewpoint of Sartre’s ontology, where as in Badiou’s philosophy the consistent multiplicity, viewing the situation as undifferentiated is a valid an option for consciousness. This act of having the perspective of a consistent multiplicity, or, ground qua ground, is of bad faith {16}.
The way in which this is bad faith is quite clear, explicated by the question “how can I, at one and the same time, both believe, for example, that I am a teacher and also that I am not one?” (Oaklander, 224). To have any perspective of a situation, one necessarily must be within it. But, in order to view the situation as one, as a completely undifferentiated ground, one must obtain distance from that situation.
“man is always separated from what he is by all the breadth of the being which he is not. He mkes himself known to himself from the other side of the world and he looks from the horizon towards himself to recover his inner being. Man is ‘a being of distances’.” (Sartre, 17)
In this sense, the only way to obtain an understanding, to identify something, to see something, is to ‘look from the horizon’. Therefore, if one is to have the perspective of a consistent multiplicity, they are inherently placed within a situation while they consciously detach themselves from it in order to view it in this certain way. This produces a logical fallacy of being what one is not, and not being what one is. This self-detachment is increasingly common and I propose it as a postmodern condition that is recently accelerated by the effective collapse of location. By enabling communications over virtually any length or in any geographical location via digital technologies, the significance of place and context has been radically diminished, critically threatening the foundations upon which we understand identity to be formed. This is possibly the efficacy and function of Badiou’s objective ontology as opposed to Sartre’s subjective ontology. By viewing situations in an objective manner, interpersonal relations can be identified without the typical constraints of place but instead are liberated to the limits of potential communications.
This condition makes bad faith a near-ubiquitous condition by separating the facticity and transcendence of the individual from the situation they are in. By establishing a subjective plurality to not only every situation but every individual, the relevance of traditional notions of “being” as “being-in-the-world” must be questioned. This transformation of the interpersonal realm demands a different take on Sartre’s conclusions to the questions of his original thesis1. At the very least, this situation invalidates an element of the second question which he asks by fundamentally altering the relationship between man and the world. The world has always existed as a being and a force that is much larger than man himself, but this makes the situation itself much larger than man by intensely complexifying the potential and subsequent nature of attention. The question then, if bad faith is prevalent in the psychologies and subjectivities of each individual, each situation, does this still mean that being is lost? If there is no being, what happens to those who do not be? Is there, must there be a new understanding of what being is? What is the relationship between this old understanding of being and the new one? Does the objective framework of Badiou’s ontology provide the answers to these questions and effectively resituate an existential ontology back into our contemporary ideology?
In short, the answer to this final question is yes. The objective nature of Badiou’s ontology allows for a plurality of the individual as it does not specify or demand a certain relationship between the individual, their surroundings, and their attention. By doing so, Badiou introduces an element that is extremely arbitrary, yet acts as the pivotal element in his logic. Badiou’s theory rests on the random happenings of events in which a truth is revealed as the potential interpersonal relation {17}. This event is explicitly different with different implications than the situation which Sartre rests his theory on. According to Badiou, the event is “A truth is [as the essence of an event], first of all, something new” (Badiou, Infinite Thought, 61). The way in which he implements this idea of the new is directly antithetical to the notion of expectations, which is a fundamental condition for the Sartrean event itself {18}. Both maintain that this act causes the production of an event, but for Badiou the new is that which could not be known before its emergence within the situation, it is undecidable.
“An event is linked to the notion of the undecidable. Take the statement: ‘This event belongs to the situation.’ If it is possible to decide, using the rules of established knowledge, whether this statement is true or false, then the so-called event is not an event. Its occurrence would be calculable within the situation. Nothing would permit us to say: here begins a truth. On the basis of the undecidability of an event’s belonging to a situation a wager has to be made. This is why a truth begins with an axiom of truth. It begins with a groundless decision – the decision to say that the event has taken place.” (Badiou, Infinite Thought, 62)
The question then emerges, how does one act within an event? Is there an element of agency that is embedded within the event? While the problem of agency is explicitly avoided in the beginning of his work, a trace is revealed here as the constituency of an event itself with the concept of anticipation {19} and its subsequent forcing. Anticipation incorporates the subjective tendency of looking into the future to see the potential situations which can be evaluated based on relative states of desire. The concept of forcing is the decisive turning point in which Badiou breaks from the similar logics of Sartre. The concept of anticipation and forcing affirms bad faith as the foundation for the unfolding of events and its subsequent production of truth and subjectivity. In Sartrean theory, this can be shown through his narrative of the waiter whom is in bad faith. For Sartre, if the waiter qua waiter acted not as one, he would be in bad faith (and vice versa). For Badiou, this affirmation of a fictitious potential, a transcendent possibility within the facticity of the situation, is that which engenders events and forms our identity. This is the way in which a “new” situation emerges and a singular relation between the actor and those whom they are interacting with by subverting the preconceived and established logics of the situation.
If the ideological foundation upon which events are formed has changed, it appears that the subject and being itself has effectively been redefined. This does not account for every situation, and thus does not stand perfectly on its own; it needs the support of Sartre’s phenomenological ground. By establishing this new condition in such developed terms (set theory), a plethora of new revelations into the nature of being has been revealed. This certainly incorporates Sartre's notions of being, and in no way negates them, but places it as one possible way to establish a subjective act among others. This drastically complexifies the situation and potentially demands the incorporation of arbitrarily emerging events. A disjunction arises between these two modes of thought when they confront each other. The psychological foundation for a subject who expects and anticipates is fundamentally different. An expectation is fundamentally based on the presence and performance of the other, while anticipation accepts the continuous nature of the individual qua individual with the temporal happenings of interpersonal relations.
While the philosophies of Badiou and Sartre are strikingly similar, there are distinct differences within them that may seem subtle at first, but upon further investigation reveal more severe implications. Badiou is certainly an existentialist, and continues the evolving theory of the subject in the line of Sartre. Sartre is mentioned a total of 3 times in Being and Event, and is most often done by refuting his concepts or explicate the differences of a similar concept (“This also means that the void is not that of consciousness: it is not Sartre's nothingness.” (Badiou, Infinite Thought, 88) and “The word 'situation' has a Sartrean connotation for us. It must be neutralized here.” (Badiou, Being and Event, 484)). It is shocking that when Sartre in his existential analysis specifically references the work of his predecessors (Heidegger, Husserl, Hegel), Badiou makes virtually none. While his lexicon bares a similarity, a stronger relation should be explicitly made in order to protect the integrity of the argument and provide further access points to his theory.
Notes:
1: “(1) What is the synthetic relation which we call being-in-the-world? (2) What must man and the world be in order for a relation between them to be possible?” (Sartre, 4)
2: “1. We are the conemporaries of a third epoch of science … 2. We are equally the contemporaries of a second epoch of the doctrine of the Subject … 3. Finally, we are contemporaries of a new departure in the doctrine of truth.” (Badiou, Being and Event, 3)
3: “we shall not limit ourselves to the study of a single pattern of conduct. We shal try on the contrary to describe several and proceeding from one kind of conduct to another, attempt to penetrate into the profound meaning of the relation ‘man-world’.” (Sartre, 4)
4. “From which 'decision', then, stems the process ofa truth? From the decision to relate henceforth to the situation from the perspective of its evental [evenementiel] supplement. Let us call this a fidelity. To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking( although all thought is a practice, a putting to the test) the situation 'according to' the event.” (Badiou, Ethics, 41)
5: “Some humans become subjects, but only some of the time, and often they break their fidelity to an event and thus lose their subjecthood.” (Badiou, Infinite Thought, 8)
6. “ontology counts as one is not 'a' multiple in the sense in which ontology would possess an explicit operator for the gathering-into-one of the multiple, a definition of the multiple-qua-one. This approach would cause us to lose being, because it would become reciprocal to the one again.” (Badiou, Being and Event, 29)
7: “Consciousness is not its own motive inasmuch as it is empty of all content.” (Sartre, 34)
8. “the one, being an operation, is never a presentation.” (Badiou, Being and Event, 24)
9. “An axiomatic presentation consists, on the basis of non-defined terms, in prescribing the rule of their manipulation.” (Badiou, Being and Event, 29)
10. “I pose a question. This question I can consider objectively, for it matters little whether the questioner is myself or the reader who reads my work and who is questioning along with me. But on the other hand, the question is not simply the objective totality of the words printed on the page it is indifferent to the symbols which express it” (Sartre, 4)
11. “the multiple evidently splits apart here: ‘multiple’ is indeed said of presentation, in that it is retroactively apprehended as non-one as soon as being-one is a result. Yet ‘multiple’ is also said of the composition of the count, that is, the multiple as ‘several-ones’ counted by the action of the structure … lets agree to term the first inconsistent multiplicity and the second consistent multiplicity.” (Badiou, Being and Event, 25)
12. “no one object, no group of objects is especially designed to be organized as specifically either ground or figure; all depends on the direction of my attention” (Sartre, 9)
13. “For Badiou, the question of agency is not so much a question of how a subject can initiate an action in an autonomous manner but rather how a subject emerges through an autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation.” (Badiou, Infinite Thought, 6)
14. See Badiou’s book Ethics, particularly the chapter entitled “The Ethic of Truths”.
15. “each element of the setting, a person, a table, a chair, attempts to isolate itself, to lift itself upon the ground constituted by the totality of the other objects, only to fall back once more into the undifferentiateion of this ground; it melts into the ground” (Sartre, 10)
16. “But bad faith does not wish either to coordinate them or to surmount them in a synthesis. Bad faith seeks to affirm their identity while preserving their differences.” (Sartre, 270)
17. “not every human being is always a subject;' yet some human beings become subjects; those who act in fidelity to a chance encounter with an event which disrupts the situation find themselves in.” (Badiou, Infinite Thought, 6)
18. “I myself expected to see Pierre, and my expectation has caused the absence of Pierre to happen as a real event concerning this cafe.” (Sartre, 10).
19. “we can always anticipate the idea of a completed generic truth. .. we can know, on a formal level, is that a truth will always have taken place as a generic infinity. This allows the possible fictioning [my emphasis] of the effects of such a truth having-taken-place. That is, the subject can make the hypothesis of a Universe where this truth, of which the subject is a local point, will have completed its generic totalization. I call the anticipatory hypothesis of the generic being of a truth, a forcing. A forcing is the powerful fiction of a completed truth. Starting with such a fiction, I can force new bits of knowledge, without even verifying its knowledge.” (Badiou, Infinite Thought, 65)
Bibliography:
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. London: Continuum, 2007. Print.
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: an Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London: Verso, 2002. Print.
Badiou, Alain. Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2005. Print.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: a Phenomenological Essay on Ontology. Trans. Hazel Estella. Barnes. New York: Washington Square, 1992. Print.