Negative Sociality
An Existential Study of Relational Alienation and Conflict in Jean-Paul Sartre and Ronald Laing
Introduction
In the tradition of Søren Kierkegaard, the central focus of existential theory is widely regarded as the subjectivity of the concrete and unique individual, assigning a subordinate status to social issues. This paper will help to rectify this situation by introducing the concept of negative sociality as an analytical prism to study the problematization of relational alienation and conflict in Jean-Paul Sartre and Ronald D. Laing. Using this concept makes it possible to examine how Sartre and Laing elucidate the fundamental connection between human sociality and subjectivity. To make sense of the concept, I will related it to the ideas of sociality in Martin Heidegger and Martin Buber.
Sociality to Heidegger and Buber
Sociality is as an explicit issue to Heidegger and Buber, who both turn against the tendency towards solipsism within the tradition of subject-philosophy from Descartes to Kant. Essentially, this solipsism involves that philosophy only takes the existence of the self and not the existence of the other seriously, because there is no necessary link between the subject and other subjects or objects. According to René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, I must understand the other person from my own self, which tends to make the other an alien, since my knowledge the other is firmly rooted in the content of my subjective consciousness (Descartes 1998; Kant 1999).
In ‘Being and Time’, Heidegger rejects the notion of the isolated subject by examining the ontological structure of human being as a Dasein (Being-there) that is always already in the world. Furthermore, Heidegger rejects the ontological separation between self and other by stating that Dasein exists as Mitsein, a Being-with others, as part of its Being-in-the-world (Heidegger 1996:118). Hereby, Heidegger only examines sociality as an essential feature of individual existence and not in itself (Schatzki 2008:233). However, since human beings exist in a primary coexistence with other human beings, one does not experience those others as alien beings from whom one distinguishes oneself. This ontological sociality is conditioned by Daseins responsibility for its own existence as possibility. Dasein can exist as inauthentic Being-with and loose itself in the they that is characterized by common impersonal relationships (Heidegger 1996: §29). Dasein can also exist as authentic Being- with in genuine relationships, which requires that Dasein is brought back from the they to realize its own Being-towards-death. Since death exclusively belongs to the jemeinigen Dasein, human being realizes its authenticity in “solitude rather than in negative sociality” (Manning 1993:53), and authentic sociality is therefore mediated by a sort of existential solidity.
Similarly, in ‘I and Thou’ Buber Buber rejects the ontological separation between self and other by describing the basis of existence as a two-fold interaction between human beings and the world that furthermore can be separated into two kinds of attitudes. The secondary I-It attitude is the origin of the subject-experience in Descartes and Kant and represents a depersonalized sociality characterized by distance between the self (ego) and other beings (Levinas 2008:15; Buber 2004:30). The primary I-Thou relationship is a mutual one that takes place as a meeting between people as persons with a whole existence and it involves love. This true encounter represents personalized sociality and it resemble the authentic relationship in Heidegger’s theory. However, personal existence does not derive from a relation to one’s own Being-towards-death. Rather, personal existence involves an including relationship with the other as part of a dialogical subjectivity (Ibid: 28).
Both Heidegger and Buber describe human being as constantly having to oscillate between two modes of sociality that they tend to conceive as ontologically neutral. However, Buber also explains modernity as containing an ontological crisis. Thus, modernity involves a movement from loving I-Thou modes of involvement to instrumental I-It ways of interrelating and in Buber there is a strong tendency towards an ethical understanding of the I-Thou attitude as more positive.
Sartre and the Look
The first and second part of Sartre’s ontological elucidation of human existence in ‘Being and Nothingness’ involves a distinction between two related realms of being: (1) the being of phenomena (being-in-itself), (2) and the human being of consciousness (being-for-itself). Fundamentally, this being-for-itself is freedom that is nothingness and as such transcendent negation of being.
To reject solipsism, Sartre also introduces being-for-others as a third ontological category, accounting for a further aspect of human subjectivity. Originally, the other is not revealed to me as an object but as a free subject who makes me aware of my own objectiveness as potentially being seen through the others look as an object (Sartre 2008:280). Thereby, this existence of the other-as-subject is revealed to me as certain (ibid:302).
Through the look, the other-as-subject reveals me to myself as having a self that is myself, and unlike in Descartes and Kant I cannot deduce this experience of me from my own consciousness. Rather, the experience is derived from an essential modification of my consciousness by the others gaze (ibid:262). Thus, unlike Buber, I do not become a whole person but a modified existence through the encounter with the other person. Furthermore, against Heidegger’s conception of Being-with, this encounter involves alienation through:
…a negation which posits the original distinction between the Other and myself as being such that it determines me by means of the Other and determines the Other by means of me (ibid:315)
The encounter with the other reveals that the relationship between me and the other person