PhilosophersJean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre

Existence precedes essence: we are condemned to be free.

Existentialism1905 – 1980 FrancePhilosopher of freedomAtheist existentialistNovelist and playwrightCommitted intellectual
Being and Nothingness, 1943 (Part III, ch. 3, I)

Love is a contradictory project: you cannot possess a freedom

What it claims

The project of love is contradictory and doomed to fail: by essence, Sartre says, it is a deception. Freedoms clash from the start: "conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others".

Why

The lover wants a freedom that loves him freely yet stays captive; these two wishes contradict each other.

Valid with an implicit premise

When we love, what exactly do we want? Not a body: if love were only the wish to possess, Sartre says, it would soon be satisfied. Not a slave either: a tyrant is content with fear, and a lover who learned that the beloved was drugged by a potion would lose interest. The lover wants to be loved, that is, to have the other's freedom for himself, as freedom. But he also wants that freedom to choose him forever, to be everything in the world for it, never to be able to leave him. Sartre sees a contradiction: a captured freedom is no longer a freedom. Love would then be a project that destroys itself, and more broadly, he says, "conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others". Note: this is a description of relations between freedoms, not advice against loving, and in a footnote Sartre leaves open the possibility of another ethics, reached through a radical conversion.

P1The lover does not want to possess the beloved like a thing, nor to enslave: he wants to be loved, that is, to possess a freedom as freedom.
P2He wants this freedom to choose freely to love him, and not only once: at every moment. Fidelity to a sworn promise is not enough for him.
P3At the same time he wants this freedom to be captured, never able to detach itself from him: he wants to be "everything in the world" for the beloved, its limit and the ground of its choice.
P4 · implicit premiseA freedom that has been made captive, and can no longer detach itself, is no longer a freedom: it cannot be both possessed and kept free.
P5 · implicit premiseA project that demands a thing and its opposite cannot be realised.
So the project of love is contradictory and doomed to fail: by essence, Sartre says, it is a deception. Freedoms clash from the start: "conflict is the original meaning of being-for-others".

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a world in which the lover wants to be loved freely and also wants the beloved to be captivated, and yet nothing is contradictory: for example if one could freely choose to bind oneself forever.
Valid with P4 and P5, two premises Sartre does not state in this form but that his whole passage assumes. Without P4, wanting a free freedom and wanting a captive freedom could go together. Without P5, a contradiction in the desire would not prevent it from being achieved. To resist the argument one must deny P4 (a freedom can choose to bind itself forever and remain a freedom) or deny P1 or P3 (this is not what lovers want). An attentive reader will also notice that the last step, from "the project of love fails" to "conflict is the original meaning of every relation to others", goes further than this passage.
Analogy. It is like wanting a free bird that always stays perched on your hand. If you close your hand, it is a captive bird, and no longer what you wanted. If you open it, it can fly away. Sartre says the lover wants a bird that stays perched because it wants to, at every moment, and forever.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Simone de Beauvoir 1949 · attacks the conclusion

In The Second Sex, Beauvoir describes the love of the woman who loses herself in the man, and says that this is not love but a surrender. She concludes that authentic love is possible: it should be founded on the reciprocal recognition of two freedoms, where neither lover would give up transcendence and both would reveal values and ends together in the world. If that is possible, conflict is not the original meaning of all love: it comes from the way one loves.

Sartre replies
see the argument
Sartre Sartre's anticipated reply (1943 footnote, Part III, ch. 3, III)
In a footnote at the end of the chapter, Sartre writes that his analyses do not exclude the possibility of an ethics of deliverance and salvation, but that it would have to be reached through a radical conversion, which he cannot discuss in this book.
The debate goes on (our summary) This footnote does not answer Beauvoir, who came later: it only shows that Sartre left the door open. The two do not quite describe the same thing: Sartre describes what the lover demands when he wants to be loved, Beauvoir describes a love in which one stops aiming only at that. Our summary.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Many readers see in Beauvoir a "reformed" version of Sartre's analysis: conflict is the starting point, reciprocity is a goal to be won. The core disagreement is whether reciprocity is a possibility of love or a moral demand that transforms it. An open question.
E
Emmanuel Levinas 1961 · attacks premise 1

In Totality and Infinity (1961), Levinas describes the other through the face: a presence that resists being grasped and calls me to responsibility before any struggle between freedoms. If the relation to the other begins with this call, and not with the wish to capture their freedom, then conflict is not original. A restatement of his thesis for this debate: he does not discuss this passage of Sartre in what we have been able to read.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Sartre in the texts.
Where the debate stands (our summary)The core disagreement is over which comes first: the gaze that objectifies (Sartre) or the ethical call of the face (Levinas). Neither description has prevailed over the other. An open point.
D
Diotima (in Plato's Symposium) 380 BC · attacks premise 1

Diotima says that love is the desire for the good to be one's own forever, and that its work is to give birth in beauty, in body and soul. The lover therefore does not first seek to possess another's freedom, but the good and the beautiful, through them. The beloved is a path, not a prisoner to capture.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Sartre in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) This text does not talk about Sartre, who comes more than two thousand years later. Plato and Sartre do not describe the same thing: one what we seek through the beloved, the other what we demand of them. Diotima's "forever" nevertheless brings the two closer: it too is a demand for the absolute. Our reading.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Both descriptions of love are still defended. The core disagreement is whether love aims first at a value (the good, the beautiful) or first at a person (their freedom, their choice). An open point.