Rousseau

Rousseau appears briefly in Sartre’s discussion of how one person’s freedom becomes entangled with another’s. His political thought supplies a compact formulation of a persistent ethical paradox: a person may try to secure another’s freedom only by acting upon the other as an object, thereby compromising the freedom the action is meant to serve. A separate note cites Rousseau’s exhibitionism as an example of conduct that can belong to a masochistic attitude.

Political Freedom and Its Paradox

Sartre considers the effort to treat the Other’s freedom as an unconditional end. Yet once that freedom becomes someone’s goal, the Other is apprehended as an object of action; helping him then requires treating him as an object-instrument within a situation. The would-be helper can alter the circumstances surrounding the Other, but cannot thereby escape the problem of acting upon him.

Sartre associates this predicament with Rousseau’s one-word definition of the liberal political dilemma: one must “force” the Other to be free. The force need not take the form of physical violence. Consolation and reassurance, for instance, may aim to release someone from fear or grief, but they also organize means toward an end and act upon that person. The comforter distinguishes the freedom he identifies with reason and the good from affliction treated as psychic determinism, as though the two could be separated. Sartre’s objection is that affliction is itself made by freedom; trying to liberate freedom from it therefore acts against the freedom one intends to assist.

Exhibitionism and Masochistic Attitudes

A translator’s note places Rousseau in a different example: at least one form of exhibitionism, it says, should be classified among masochistic attitudes. In the cited episode from Confessions, chapter III, Rousseau exhibits to washerwomen “not the obscene object but the ridiculous object.” The example turns on what is displayed: not obscenity, but ridicule. It extends the discussion of interpersonal attitudes through a specific scene, without presenting Rousseau as the subject of a fuller psychological portrait.