HUMAN OPPRESSION

Human Oppression



Human Oppression

Introduction

Some readers of Sartrean existentialism have interpreted Sartre's account of the human condition as the depiction of the human subject as an individual, radically free consciousness that ought to be unaffected by its environment, history, and contact with others. In this picture the human subject appears to be disconnected from the world and others. Whatever else may be true of it, oppression involves inter- subjectivity and relations with the world. The world itself does not oppress us, though facts about the world can make our lives difficult. Other people oppress us, by acting in such a way as to illegitimately make us worse off than we would otherwise be. But this being “worse off” is not simply a matter of our relations with others (lack of respect, recognition, and so on). Oppression has material effects, involving access to institutions and resources. Is we agree that oppression is founded on inter subjectivity and relations to the world, a philosophy that does not take these features of human existence seriously seems unlikely to assist us in analyzing or understanding oppression. Hence, Sartrean existentialism, if that were how we were to interpret it, would be of little use in explaining social phenomena such as racism and sexism in which the force of circumstances and the behavior of others play paramount roles (Hooks, 2002) (Guillaumin, 2001).

In opposition to this interpretation of Sartre, I argue for an alternative account of the Sartrean approach to human being, one in which the situation of freedom is stressed and through which the human condition is best understood as an ambiguous relation between free consciousness and facility. From the standpoint of this account of human being as ambiguity, Sartre's concept of bad faith emerges as an account of attempts to resolve the ambiguity of human being by denying or ignoring one or another of the sides of the ambiguity. Bad faith is then seen as comprising two types: one in which transcend dense is denied and facility affirmed, the other in which facility is denied in favor of a pure transcendence. This stands in contrast to commentaries on Sartre that tend to portray bad faith as being characterized only as a denial of transcendence (Guillaumin, 2001).

Human Oppression

Against the “digestive philosophy,” of which he accuses both idealism and Cartesian realism, Satre, following Husserl, proposes that consciousness is intentional. Intentionality refers to the way in which consciousness is directed toward (or intends) its object. All consciousness is consciousness of something.” As intentional, consciousness always posits an object, and thus, consciousness is directed outward and contains nothing, though it would be incorrect to say that it is empty. “Consciousness is neither empty nor full; it is neither to be filled nor to be emptied: it is purely and simply consciousness or the object.” Elsewhere Sartre describes consciousness as “clear as a strong Furthermore, “all consciousness is positional in that it transcends itself in order to reach an object, and it exhausts itself in this same ...