"The Praxis, Natality and the Temporal Being"

Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt privilege two different temporalities. Sartre uses the praxis, or any meaningful human action, which depends on the future to construct his political philosophy of action whilst Arendt focuses on the "miracle" of birth. These thinkers accomplish this task of action quite differently, yet share a great deal in common. They both use time as tools for their philosophy of action that is shaped from necessity and freedom and at the same time avoid individualism and communitarianism. The result is very particular philosophies that aim to rescue modernity from itself. Most importantly, neither of the two reduce the human experience, instead they focus on the richness of experience that is simply beyond intellectualization or the general.

Sartre's project or praxis is that "Most rudimentary behavior must be determined both in relation to the real and present factors which condition it and in relation to a certain object, still to come, which is trying to bring into being." (Sartre 1968, p. 91) Sartre privileges becoming over being . Arendt, on the other hand, privileges natality, the fact that we are born. Birth is what connects us all and deeds and speech are what separates us for Arendt. This is how Arendt avoids individualism and communitarianism. In order to reveal our true uniqueness we have to do it in the experience of human togetherness not as an agent of good or evil. The being is revealed by speech and action. Public realm is human togetherness free from necessity. For Sartre, the praxis or project is the present temporal being thrown into the future which interprets the past by the future and which in turn sheds light on to the present. For example, one can say that men make history while history in turn makes men. Sartre wants to move towards totalization (total revelation) which lies in the future. The being is revealed by transcendence and facticity. Facticity and transcendence are never experienced separately for Sartre.

Sartre's concept of necessity lies in scarcity and the facticity of our experience. This means that we are not purely free agents that can go beyond our context. Our freedom is bound and situated in the world. One may say that there is a vertical complexity to the being as well as a horizontal complexity. Sartre negotiates the question of freedom through the praxis. Though "Knowledge pierces us through and through; it situates us before dissolving us. We are integrated alive in the supreme totalization. Thus the pure, lived aspect of a tragic experience, a suffering onto death, is absorbed by the system as a relatively abstract determination which must be mediated, as a passage toward the Absolute, the only genuine concrete;" Sartre negotiates freedom by grounding existentialism in Marxism. "Thus a philosophy remains efficacious so long as the praxis which engendered it, which supports it, and which is clarified by it, is still alive" (Sartre 1968, p.5). The philosophy Sartre is talking about is Marxism which he thinks is the only living philosophy because we have not gone beyond the circumstances that engendered it (Sartre 1968, p. 30). The Praxis, deed or meaningful action, enables the being to transcend its facticity. Through transcendence, a being is free. It is no longer constrained to it by vertical axis.

Subjects need objects to see itself. When the subject can no longer see itself in the object is alienation. We are born into other peoples projects. Their projects are their own constructs of the world such as the bourgeois analytic society. He states that, ""In the present... Creative work is alienated; man does not recognize himself in his own product, and his exhausting labor appears to him as a hostile force. Since alienation comes about as the result of this conflict, it is a historical reality and completely irreducible to an idea. If men are to be free themselves from it, and if their work is to become the pure objectification of themselves, it is not enough that "consciousness thinks itself:" there must be material work and revolutionary praxis" (Sartre 1968, p. 13). This is the modern condition for Sartre. This is why he says Marxism needs existentialism. He states that modern Marxism is so wrapped up into its own totality that it refuses to add any new concrete evidence. "Marxism no longer knows anything. Its concepts are dictates; its goal is no longer to increase what it knows but to be itself constituted a priori as an absolute knowledge." Existentialism reaffirms the reality of men just as Kierkegaard tried to reaffirm his existence to Hegel (Sartre, p.16).

Sartre believes that the modern condition is in bad faith. Bad faith is the desire to want to be something and self-deception. The phrase "I am X" is in bad faith because X can never be anything. The identities can never coincide. We must try to coincide them through the move from the abstract to the concrete by the use of the project or praxis. The structure of being is more of an authentic living. Sartre believes that only true totalization can be achieved through the praxis.

What condition must exist for the possibility for action? Sartre states, "it is by transcending the given toward the field of possibles and by realizing one possibility from among all others that the individual objectifies himself and contributes to making history" (Sartre 1968, p.93). This is how we, as individuals, make history which in turn shapes and affects us back. The subject changes the object by realizing a possibility. Sartre is trying to evict apriorism of Marxism while constructing group ontology. The ebbing of apriorism affords the individual freedom free from mechanical determinism. Mechanical determinism can be thought of as necessity. We are freed from necessity, of constraint, through action. Sartre's praxis articulates a philosophy of action by not dissolving the individual experience into the abstract. If we can determine our own history through the structure of being, we are no longer able to be reduced to passive abstractions.

Arendt, just as Sartre, attempts to absolve the human element in history. The individual is rescued from abstraction by a particular praxis by Sartre while Arendt's praxis is action-as-freedom. Arendt uses the idea of natality to ground her philosophy of action. Action is freedom and one is able to begin something anew through action. Natality or the "miracle of birth" sets something in motion that "always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability." (Arendt 1998, p.178)
Necessity is bound up in the activity of labor. Labor is the natural activity of humans that meets the needs for survival. We labor for food, water, shelter, or basically bare essentials. Work on the other hand, makes up the human world that is distinct from the naturalist state. Work fabricates the common human world in which we are born. It is the collective public existence. Yet, work is still a kind of necessity because it is a means and not an end. Only an activity that is an end in itself can be free from necessity. Action is the only activity of freedom. Activity also requires speech because without speech we would lose the revelatory character as well as the subject. Arendt states, " in acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world...This disclosure of "who" in contradistinction to "what" somebody is ...is implicit in everything somebody says and does" (Arendt 1998, p. 179).

The distinctions between necessity and freedom lead into the activity of action and speech. Speech is necessary for action in order for it to be free. Through deed and speech, Arendt avoids individualism and communitarianism beautifully. The condition for action-as-freedom requires speech; it is only meaningful in the public realm. The public realm consists of people that validate deed and speech. Arendt states, "action and speech need the presence of others...and are surrounded by and in constant contact with the world with the web of acts and words of other men;" (Arendt 1998, p. 188) therefore, one reveals their uniqueness, but it is only validated by others. She even goes as far to denounce the myth of a "strong man" who did everything by himself. By incorporating the use of two different terms for action in both Greek and Latin, she arrives to the notion that the first word designated the beginning of the act and the other words conveyed the passing and finishing of the act. These differentiations further her incorporation of the individual and community without dissolving either into the other. The actors are always acting thus their actions posit reactions from other members which in turn take action, not merely reaction, because every action is start of something new. Natality sets into motion something completely new that has infinite possibilities and the realized infinite possibilities all have infinite possibilities each; hence, one can never know what one's action will set in motion.

We can go back to Sartre and his idea of the transcendence and facticity. The transcendence of the being is what gives freedom by enabling action. The future is privileged for the temporal being that enables that freedom. For Arendt, it is birth that affords the freedom and plurality. The fact that we are born into a web of human relations grants with endless possibilities for action is where freedom lies. Both of them get to the same ideas of action, yet do this in very different ways. The strength of the two thinker lie in the fact that one is not forced to choose individualism or the community, but need both for any meaningful life.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago P, 1998. 1-349
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. England: Penguin Books, 1990. 1-350.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Search for a Method. New York: Vintage Books, 1968