Western philosophy has always been reluctant to address the problem o f ugliness directly and on its own terms. The ancient Greek physiognomical value system of
Kalokagathia, whereby the beautiful was seen as an expression o f the good, merely
made of ugliness a negative aesthetic and moral value. Its specificities were effectively flattened. Problems arose with such theories, however, when those specificities could not be flattened easily, as was the case with Socrates. The revered philosopher of the platonic dialogues was notoriously ugly. His appearance was often compared to that of the the satyr, Silenus, which meant that his greatness as a philosopher was seen to be sharply at odds with his face. This fact presented something of dilemma for physiognomy: either the tradition of Kalokagathia was flawed, or Socrates was the exception that proved the rule. The respective Symposia
of Plato and Xenophon, in which the problem o f Socrates’s ugliness is discussed, pursued the latter line of thought. His physical disadvantage was dismissed as mere surface appearance in order to focus more sharply on inner human qualities. Socrates was, after all, an exceptional man. The ugliness o f the philosopher was shown to have no bearing on his philosophy and the case was closed.
It was reopened in 1986, however, by Alain Buisine in his study of the most famous ugly philosopher in France, Jean-Paul Sartre. Buisine’s book. Laideurs de
Sartre, was described by one critic - whose view is reproduced with some glee on the
back cover - as ‘ce livre scandaleux. Le plus scandaleux, sans doute, qui ait été écrit sur Sartre’.^ The scandalous nature of the book lies in the fact that it dares to suggest that Sartre’s own physical ugliness profoundly influenced his philosophy: ‘il s’agit’, states Buisine, ‘d’intégrer le corps du sujet dans son corpus, de montrer comment Sartre va faire de sa propre laideur un object philosophique’ (Buisine 1986: 9). Of course, he adds in parenthesis, once Sartre’s ugliness becomes such a philosophical object, the object is no longer commensurable with its cause. Buisine thus recognises
the perverse nature of his own enterprise. He insists nonetheless that Sartre’s relationship with the image in his work would not have been as complex and ambiguous as it is were it not for his troubled relationship with his own face.
Buisine’s study documents and comments upon physical details concerning Sartre the man in relation to thematic elements o f his work that are assumed to be ugly. It does not attempt to analyse the nature of that presumed ugliness either empirically or philosophically. In this chapter I take the view that the ugliness o f Sartre the man is a matter o f pure contingency, whereas ugliness in his philosophical writing is not. The ugly for Sartre is part of a phenomenological structure through which the fact of contingency - the starting point for existential philosophy - reveals itself. In this capacity, ugliness represents an important philosophical (and not merely thematic) aspect of Sartre’s work. The aim of this chapter is to explore the relationship between the self and the other in this context. Part one looks at the issue of ugliness and existential nausea, and at ways in which manifestations of nausea (disgust, sliminess, the obscene and the ungraceful) forge links with ugliness. Part two examines Sartre’s theory o f the Other and of being-for-others, and the way in which the self is objectified and alienated by ‘the look’.
PART 1: UGLINESS and NAUSEA
The question of ugliness in existential terms calls, in the first instance, for a re examination of the notions o f the self and of the other. In L'Être et le néant (1943) Sartre takes a cautious approach towards the word ‘se lf to avoid any confusion between the existential self and the traditional notions o f selfhood that conform to the law of identity (A=A). For Sartre ‘le soi ne peut être saisi comme un existant réel: le sujet ne peut être soi, car la coïncidence avec soi fait [...] disparaître le soi’ (Sartre 1943: 115).^ The distinction being made here is the distinction between the subject as consciousness and the subject as embodied existence. For Sartre these two aspects of ‘the se lf co-exist, but do not coincide since consciousness cannot be sheer matter any more than matter can be consciousness: ‘[l]e sol représente donc une distance idéale dans l’immanence du sujet par rapport à lui-même, une façon de ne pas être sa propre
coïncidence, d’échapper à l’identité tout en la posant comme unité’ (EN 115). This law of separation, the ontological foundation of consciousness as consciousness o f
something, is designated by Sartre as being for-itself (‘pour-soi’), which arises through the negation of physical being in-itself (‘en-soi’). Thus the world of being in- itself can be seen as the ground o f otherness against which the figure of being for- itself appears.^ The for-itself (consciousness) transcends the in-itself (the body) in order to become itself, a fact which leads to the apparently chiastic assertion that the for-itself is not what it is and is what it is not, a situation neatly explained by Andrew Leak:
[...] the body is constantly gone past {dépassé) and is, as such, the past {le
passé). In its eruption towards its own possibilities, the pour-soi nihilates what
it is and projects itself towards what it is not yet. Within the unity o f the same project, the pour-soi flees one en-soi in a futile attempt at recoincidence with another: the aim o f human reality is to achieve the impossible perfection of being that is described as en-soi-pour-soi, or God. (Leak 1989:1Ÿ
This, as I shall discuss shortly, is precisely the drama of the self-other relation in La
Nausée. The diary o f Antoine Roquentin documents his experience of negotiating ‘the
se lf (the for-itself) in relation to the first ‘other’ (the physical world in-itself) and then seeking to escape towards another ‘other’ (the disembodied in-itself of a rag time song).
The for-itself s necessary connection with the in-itself is termed by Sartre its ‘facticity’ (we cannot escape the fact of our being in the world), but the fact of being
this particular in-itself, as opposed to any other, is entirely contingent (without
reason, without cause and without necessity). In the normal course of events, where the for-itself is engaged in the actions of everyday life, its facticity is obscured. In particular, the body appears to consciousness in its capacity as an instrument for carrying out such everyday actions, rather than as a contingent object. We do not
^ The in-itself is only one form o f existential ‘otherness’, however, and is not referred to by Sartre as
such in order to avoid confusion with his concept o f the Other, or the world o f other people. Sartre’s
experience a hand as a thing that just happens to be there, but as an integral part of our individual daily ‘projects’ of, say, picking up a glass, typing, or turning a key. It is only under more unusual circumstances - such as when we experience physical pleasure or pain - that the body makes its presence clearly felt.^ At other times the in- itself as a factual existence for the for-itself maintains only a vague, low-level presence described by Sartre in terms of an insipid taste, or rather our own insipid taste. This unobtrusive, but insidious taste of facticity (which in turn reveals contingency) is, for Sartre, the basis for existential nausea. The terms of nausea are set out in L 'Être et le Néant as follows:
Cette saisie perpétuelle par mon pour-soi d’un goût fade et sans distance qui m’accompagne jusque dans mes efforts pour m ’en délivrer et qui est mon goût, c’est ce que nous avons décrit ailleurs sous le nom de Nausée. Une nausée discrète et insurmontable révèle perpétuellement mon corps à ma conscience: il peut arriver que nous recherchions l’agréable ou la douleur physique pour nous en délivrer, mais dès que la douleur ou l’agréable sont existés par la conscience, ils manifestent à leur tour sa facticité et sa contingence et c ’est sur fond de nausée qu’ils se dévoilent. (EN 387)
Far from being a metaphor derived from empirical ‘écoeurements physiologiques’, argues Sartre, this form of nausea is the Nausea on which all other nauseas are founded. The nauseating experience of rotten meat, blood, excrement and the like - and the subsequent need to vomit - is an extreme manifestation o f a profound existential disgust that is always already there.^
The term ‘nihilate’ or ‘nihilation’ is coined by Sartre in order to differentiate its sp ecific existential
m eaning from philosophical negation in general. The relation between the f o r - i ts e l f and the in -itself
nevertheless remains a relation o f negation and not one o f opposition.
^ Cf. the mental pleasure and pain associated with the experience o f the sublim e (see chapter 3). ^ Existential disgust must be distinguished carefully from bourgeois notions o f disgust (bad taste). A s a m anifestation o f existential nausea it is a fundamental aspect o f human reality w hich should not be confused with objects that merely offend bourgeois sensibilities. For this reason, Sartre qualifies the
taste o f nausea as being f a d e ' or dull, rather than ''mauvais' or bad. I shall return to the issue o f disgust
La Nausée (1938)
‘La Nausée, c’est l’Existence qui se dévoile - et ça n ’est pas beau à voir, l’Existence.’ (Sartre: prière cL insérer for first edition o f La Nausée)
The semi-comic, semi-ironie tone o f the prière d ’insérer makes it hard to determine exactly what Sartre means when he says that Existence is ‘pas beau à voir’. The phrase is used both metaphorically and colloquially here. From the point o f view of existentialist philosophy, however, existence simply is and is therefore not susceptible to any judgements, aesthetic or otherwise. To say that existence is not beautiful can therefore simply be read as a way of stating this fundamental principle, in which case there is no place here for ugliness either. The fact that Existence (with a capital ‘E ’) is ‘pas beau à voir’, however, immediately implies an onlooker who evaluates. Existence in La Nausée is, then, the world o f what Sartre calls ‘human reality’ ; that is, the world as it appears to consciousness, rather than a philosophical ‘everything there is’. The ‘T who looks in this case is the fictional author/narrator, Antoine Roquentin, whose view of human reality at the end o f the novel, transformed by the experience o f Nausea, invites a retrospective reappraisal o f that nausea specifically in terms o f ugliness. In order to establish grounds for reading La Nausée
from the beginning as a novel about ugliness, it is worth stating this view at the outset. As Roquentin enjoys one last drink in the Rendez-vous des Cheminots before returning to Paris, he makes the following observation:
Tous les objets qui m ’entouraient était faits de la même matière que moi, d’une espèce de souffrance moche. Le monde était si laid, hors de moi, si laids ces verres sales sur les tables, et les taches brunes sur la glace et le tablier de Madeleine et l’air aimable du gros amoureux de la patronne, si laide l ’existence
même du monde, que je me sentais à l’aise, en famille, (emphasis added; Sartre
1938:242)
For Roquentin the world is ugly, existence is ugly and he now realises that it is the ugliness of existence that he has been grappling with all along. The ugly for
Roquentin, as for Sartre, is the manifestation of the contingency of existence revealed through the experience o f nausea. Encounters in the novel with obscenity, viscosity and the disgusting are all symptomatic of this underlying truth. In the light o f this, it seems appropriate to read La Nausée as a novel about ugliness, or rather as a phenomenological study o f contingency which has the ugly as its object and nausea as the human response to that object. Thus a fundamental connection is established between the condition o f existence as contingency on the one hand and the evidence o f that condition through ugliness and nausea on the other.
For Sartre, the principle focus of theoretical attention when writing La Nausée was always the problem o f contingency.^ He referred to the work as a ‘factum sur la contingence’. It was intended to address the question, raised later in Les Mots (written in 1963), of his sense o f absolute superfluity in contrast to the apparent ‘necessity’ of his bourgeois family background. His reflections on this aspect of contingency were always haunted by a sense of ugliness. The ‘comedy’ o f comfortable, conventional bourgeois life described in Les Mots - a comedy in which Sartre the child was able to play his rôle to perfection - was overshadowed by a growing conviction that ‘[i]l y avait un envers horrible des choses’ (Sartre 1964a: 83). Sartre’s fear of this horrible underside of reality was, he claimed, one o f the only authentic aspects of his childhood existence. The origin of the fear was a feeling of being ‘de trop’, a sense of being utterly contingent and unnecessary, which revealed itself to consciousness through ugliness. This confirmed ugliness, in supposedly autobiographical terms, as the physical correlative of Sartre’s theory of contingency.^
Contingency
At this point it is important to establish in more detail just what Sartre’s theory of contingency is. The best definition, according to Sartre scholars Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, is given in La Nausée:
^ See ‘N o tic e ’ to La N au sée by M ichel Contat and M ichel Rybalka in Sartre (1981: 1659).
* I use this exam ple from Les M ots as an illustration o f the continued significance in Sartre’s work o f
the connection between ugliness and contingency. U nlike A lain Buisine, it is not my intention to reinforce a specifically autobiographical link, since the status o f autobiography, from an existential point o f view , is highly problematic. If the for-itself is constituted by transcending both the in -itself and the past, then an ‘autobiographical s e l f is som ething o f an existential anomaly.
L’essentiel c’est la contingence. Je veux dire que, par définition, l’existence n ’est pas la nécessité. Exister, c’est être là, simplement; les existants apparaissent, se laissent rencontrer, mais on ne peut jamais les déduire. Il y a des gens, je crois, qui ont compris ça. Seulement ils ont essayé de surmonter cette contingence en inventant un être nécessaire et cause de soi. Or aucun être nécessaire ne peut expliquer l’existence: la contingence n ’est pas un faux- semblant, une apparence qu’on peut dissiper; c’est l’absolu, par conséquent la gratuité parfaite. Tout est gratuit, ce jardin, cette ville et moi-même. (Sartre
1938: 184-5)
Contingency is the simple fact o f being there for which (in the absence of God) there is no reason, no cause and no necessity. It is the condition o f human freedom and a terrifying prospect which some (or indeed most) people try to conceal by pretending to themselves that their existence is necessary in some way - by acting out the ‘comedy’ of bourgeois family life, for example. Sartre refers to this inauthentic mode o f existence as living in ‘bad faith’. But contingency, freedom and the responsibility that comes with that freedom are inescapable facts and however much an individual (or an entire ‘civilised’ society) might deny them, there is always the danger that they will be revealed unexpectedly. This is what happens in La Nausée to Roquentin for whom nausea is the figure for the experience of this revelation. The passage quoted above continues: ‘Quand il arrive qu’on s’en rende compte, ça vous tourne le coeur et tout se met à flotter [...]: voilà la Nausée’ (Sartre 1938: 185). Nausea describes the visceral response to intimations of contingency, but it is not a direct response to contingency itself, since contingency is an abstract metaphysical state. What Roquentin does not recognise at this stage is that there is a missing phenomenological link between nausea as response and contingency as abstraction. That link, as he acknowledges at the end of the novel, is ugliness.
Given the emphasis placed by phenomenology on the powerful effect o f the object - Husserl’s ‘donation originaire’ - we might expect that the nature of ugliness as a phenomenological link could be determined by focussing attention on the objects which trigger Roquentin’s nausea attacks. The list of such ‘objects’ includes a khmer statuette, a pebble, Roquentin’s own face in the mirror, other people’s faces and
hands, colour combinations (such as cousin Adolphe’s mauve braces against the blue of his shirt or the chocolate brown of the café walls), the bourgeois streets of Bouville (as opposed to the industrialised boulevard Noir), fog, humanism, a tram seat and a tree root in the park. The list is surprising in that none o f the objects is intrinsically ugly in the conventional sense. Nor do they appear to have anything in common. The only consistent feature is their relation to Roquentin. These are not ugly objects in- themselves, but they are ugly for-Roquentin. The starting point for ugliness, then, as far as the reader is concerned, is not the object but the subject. There is something unusual about the way Roquentin relates to the world o f objects.^
In L ’Imaginaire (1940), Sartre identifies two modes o f consciousness through
which the subject relates to the world: perception (where the object is real and present) and imagination (where the object is unreal and absent). The object of perception is radically distinct from the object of imagination and, as far as Sartre is concerned, there seems little room for confusion. Either the object is actually there physically, or it isn’t. But, as Christina Howells (1979: 4) observes, imagination and perception are necessarily inter-dependent and the act o f perception implies the