Loving authentically is a daunting project rife with almost inescapable pitfalls. In this essay, I will first explore Sartre’s novel theory of love developed within his broader phenomenological ontology. Under this theory, the purpose of love is to escape from the Look and the groundlessness of existence. Then, I will critique his understanding from Beauvoir’s more socially situated perspective. Finally, I will use these concepts to conduct a philosophical analysis of love in Camus’ existential novel The Stranger. Sartre’s construct of love is promising but insufficient to describe the human condition as a whole and must be modified to account for power structures that warp relations between lovers. With this modified theory of love, using conceptual tools from both Sartre and Beauvoir, we can elucidate key elements of The Stranger. Ultimately, the joint Sartrean-Beauvoirean conception of love as a flimsy and ephemeral pursuit founded on bad faith can seem pessimistic. It is. However, my argument is that this theory is rooted in accurate existential underpinnings. I conclude by positively re-framing authentic love as a near-unattainable but powerful ideal that may still be worth striving toward.
I. The Sartrean Concept of Love
As Sartre’s analysis of love relies on the basic conceptual triad of his work, a brief review of being-in-itself, being-for-itself, and being-for-others is necessary. The in-itself is unconscious being – an object. The for-itself is conscious being – a subject. The for-itself requires a concrete object as its foundation and is thus grounded in the in-itself, but it also negates the in-itself. Sartre gives the example of feeling the “absence” of a person: when a friend is not present, I do not see them, but their lack (their negation) is visible to me. Through imagination (the magic of consciousness), we are able to see beyond the factical features of our surroundings: the object to my right and left, the light reflecting off my retinas, the structure and current state of my body. Sartre sees this imaginative transcendence as the defining feature of consciousness. As conscious humans, we transcend the “given” features of our situation (our facticity) and are always more than just our objecthood.
When one being-for-itself encounters another, a new ontological category arises: being-for-others. The Other is a being-for-itself like me, but one which possesses a foreign internal world I can never access – including a radical freedom to take up its own perspectives. When I meet the Other’s eyes, I experience the Look: the moment when a for-itself realizes it is not just a subject, but also a mere object in the Other’s world. I am a character in another person’s dream. This interrupts my “unreflective consciousness,”[1] as I can now reflect on my object-self; I recognize this version of myself in the Other’s eyes and this can create shame over what I see. The Look, and the caustic reactions it generates, led Sartre to exclaim “hell is other people,”[2] as being-for-others caged him in the Other’s eyes, scathed by their uncontrollable perceptions and evaluations. Our desperation to avoid being trapped in our objecthood by the Look leads us to pursue many escape routes – including love.
During being-for-others, we no longer possess ourselves, which creates staggering insecurity. Since I cannot control or even truly see the Other’s view of me, but this view constitutes my identity, the Other holds “the secret of what I am. He makes me be.”[3] Without my input, “it confers values upon me and removes them from me.”[4] Thus, being-for-others is fraught with conflict like Hegel’s master-slave dialectic: a perpetual cycle of subject-object relations in which both sides seek to out-transcend the Other.[5] We seek to remain subjects while turning the Other into an object. However, we also want the Other to use its free subjectivity to reveal our identities and affirm our existence.
This explains why the lover wants to be loved: love is the project of reclaiming his being by making the Other’s freedom subject to his own. But love would be simple if it only required physical possession. Instead, it entails capturing a consciousness, a task as daunting as caging a ghost. The lover wants the Other to freely choose to love him in each moment, to will her own captivity and become “both free and yet chained” in the lover’s hands.[6] Love is freedom’s willing self-enslavement. The lover desires to be the boundary of his beloved’s transcendence and limit of their freedom: “if the Other loves me then I become the unsurpassable.”[7] In love, he seeks to become the “center of reference” for the lover, the wellspring of all meaning, an absolute end to which everything else is merely a means.[8] Declarations like “I would kill for you” imply that all morality is subordinate to their partner.
Love allows an escape from the acerbic Look by catalyzing a metamorphosis in how the lovers apprehend the world. The lover does not encounter their beloved as a thing among things, or as a being to be compared to other beings. Rather, their beloved is the ultimate totality though which everything else is understood. The lover views the world through the lens of their beloved. Thus, love “no longer fixes me in what I am,” as the lover’s Look does not suffocate me in my finitude as an object.[9] In a genuine lover’s eyes, I cannot be ugly, wretched, or dumb; but neither as beautiful, impressive, or intelligent. Those are qualities that apply to contingent and relative objects, and they are meaningless when both lovers see the other as the absolute root of all value. Even my own actions and traits cannot define me. Thus, Sartre might say that if I have reasons to love someone, e.g. for their concrete attributes, I do not love them. I merely prefer their properties to the properties of other objects. Love is an absolute choice to establish another for-itself as the crux of one’s world and keystone of all values.
Love also liberates the participants from two of the most agonizing responses to the Look: fear and alienation. Fear is the feeling of being in danger as an object at the whims of the Other’s freedom. I am terrified because at any moment the Other can “constitute me as a means to ends of which I am ignorant.”[10] Alienation is the recognition of my slavery to the Other, as I am subject to their unknowable and uncontrollable evaluations of me: “Insofar as I am the object of values which come to qualify me without my being able to act on this qualification or even to know it, I am enslaved.”[11] I am alienated from my own possibilities and become subjugated by the Other’s freedom. When the lover is alone with her beloved, she is rescued from fear and alienation, as she is the endpoint of the Other’s freedom and foundation of their values.
Through love the groundlessness of existence is supplanted by the feeling that our lives are justified. In our normal condition, life is absurd, unjustifiable, and superfluous. We exist as a brute fact, the consequence of a series of contingent events beyond our freedom, a consciousness whose being is rooted in nothingness. When we are loved, “we now feel that our existence is taken up and willed even in its tiniest details by an absolute freedom.”[12] Who are we to dispute this justification? If we accept it, we are rescued from what Sartre calls the “unthinkable and insurmountable given which I am fleeing.”[13] If the Other is willing to make us the foundation of its being, we are handed the keys to Eden: we now have an essence and a meaning given to us. The Fall is reversed.
Theorizing love in this way makes it into a sublime ideal, a pinnacle of existence: the joy of finding one’s self-identity in the Other, of having a solid ground for living, and of escaping the Look. A lover provides us with objectivity in the anguish of a subjective world. But how can this be achieved? Here Sartre grows more pessimistic. He describes the triple destructibility of love – three vulnerabilities that make love a perilously fragile activity.
First, to love is to “to wish that the Other wish that I love him,”[14] which creates perpetual dissatisfaction. Love is a double bind: if the Other loves me, he will want to become the object of my ability (as a free subject) to ground his existence. He wants to avoid the nausea of subjectivity. But in love I also want to have my existence justified by the Other’s subjectivity. If I get what I want, I cannot get what I want. The catch 22 is that “the more I am loved, the more I lose my being,”[15] the more I am tossed away from my elusive object-self and back into my subjecthood and my own freedom. We seek the solidity of being defined by another, but “the Other is on principle inapprehensible; he flees me when I seek him and possesses me when I flee him.”[16] Reciprocated love is like two sinking ships bailing water into each other while trying to remain afloat. Neither partner can provide a ground for the other’s existence. Both are locked in total subjectivity, and nothing can relieve them of the agonizing duty to define their own meaning to existence.[17] Maybe it is too much to ask that love give ground to our lives in a groundless world.
On the same note, the process of becoming-in-love contains the seeds of its own ruin. In trying to make the Other fall in love with me (seduction), I preempt the possibility of genuine love. The structure of seduction is similar to that of pride. In Sartre’s view, pride is a response to shame in which I take responsibility for my objecthood. To the Other, I appear as an object, and in pride I attempt to improve this object’s properties so others will admire me. I try to make the Other see me as more intelligent, attractive, or successful. But pride is destined to fail. After all, I want the Other to freely choose to admire me, but I also undermine the Other’s freedom by attempting to control their view of me. Therefore, “the feeling which I demand from the other carries within itself its own contradiction since I must affect the Other with it in so far as he is free.”[18] Seduction is a sophisticated form of pride, and the joy of successfully making the Other fall in love is rooted in the pride that a free consciousness “gives us a positive evaluation.”[19] Seduction is self-defeating task because it involves attempting to manipulate the Other into freely choosing love.
Second, love involves the perpetual risk that the Other will awaken from the slumber, realize no real chains are binding their freedom, and choose to see me as an object. They may subject me to the Look, evaluating me and comparing me to others based on the properties of my object-self: my appearance, my traits, my actions. In any case, this violation of the underpinnings of love means “the spell is broken; the Other becomes one mean among means.”[20] Love’s intricate exercise in smoke and mirrors falls apart, and the illusion shatters.
The final weakness of love involves the moment in which both lovers are subjected to the Look by a third party. This causes the lovers to realize their objecthood together. Under the gaze of an Other who sees both lovers as objects and their relationship as relative, neither can see their lover as the absolute source of all value. Thus, Sartre declares that “one would have to be alone in the world with the beloved in order for love to preserve its character as an absolute axis of reference.”[21] The relativizing gaze of the Other annihilates love.
This is why lovers seek intimate solitude. For if the lovers remember their relationship is contingent and not absolute, the foundation of their meaning will implode. After all, lovers come together through a chain of haphazard events: being born nearby, meeting at such-and-such a place, having suitable biological and psychological constitutions to attract one another, and more. Realizing this contingency undermines the absoluteness of love with the recognition that loving any particular person is merely another arbitrary choice amongst the set of possibilities available in one’s situation. Love can therefore only exist through the self-deception of bad faith: lovers tell themselves they are soulmates, meant to be, made for one another.[22] They deny the contingencies involved so they can see their love as a necessity. Their love may be a satisfying foundation for meaning only if they are successful in preserving this fantasy.
The travails of seeking authentic love can lead people to resign to the attitudes of masochism and sadism. In masochism, “I refuse to be anything more than an object.”[23] I immerse myself in the Other’s subjectivity while attempting to renounce my transcendence, deny my freedom, and consent to my own alienation. This attempt is useless, because anytime the masochist seeks to extinguish his own subjectivity and become a mere object – e.g. by paying someone to whip him – he implicitly recognizes his own subjectivity. He is using the Other as a means to treat himself as a means. Masochism is a self-undermining attempt to flee transcendence by drowning in facticity.
Sadism is the equally hopeless attempt to do the opposite: become pure transcendence by fleeing facticity. The sadist purges away his own objecthood by treating Others as objects, revealing “by force” the Other’s flesh while denying the fact that he is also flesh.[24] The contradiction is that the sadist relies on the awareness that the Other they abuse is a genuine subject – they wouldn’t be satisfied to whip a wood desk. Despite this cognizance, they pretend the Other is only an object. The sadist is as self-deluded as the masochist.
II. Love and The Second Sex
Delving into Beauvoir’s work is essential to understanding Sartrean love. First, Sartre’s view of love was almost certainly rooted in his own experiences, and his most significant love was Beauvoir herself. As she avowed, “The comradeship that welded our lives together made a superfluous mockery of any other bond we might have forged for ourselves.”[25] Love was a lifelong conversation between the two thinkers. Their concepts of love were interdependent and studying both together yields a richer understanding. Second, it would be myopic to rely only on a man’s view of love. While Sartre seemed to assume his analysis of love applied to all humans, Beauvoir argued that women experience love differently. Her critique reveals a consistent flaw in Sartre’s philosophy: his ideas are not socially situated enough to see imbalances in being-for-others created by disparities in power.
Beauvoir begins her critique with a quote from Nietzsche:
“The single word love in fact signifies two different things for man and woman. What woman understands by love is clear enough: it is not only devotion, it is a total gift of her body and soul, without reservation…if there should be men who also felt that desire for complete abandonment, well, then they simply are – not men.” [26]
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 362, pg. 318.
Clearly this is an instance of the No True Scotsman’s fallacy—when Nietzsche sees exceptions to the rule, he changes the rule to exclude those exceptions from consideration; thus those who do not fit his definition are not “true men.” However, Beauvoir finds his characterization of the differences in gendered love accurate. Using the Sartrean terms, “feminine” love is characterized by the masochistic attempt to escape subjecthood, while “masculine” love by the sadistic attempt to escape objecthood. This patriarchal structure precludes authentic love. The man is taught to avoid seeing the Other as the origin of all values, and the woman is conditioned to negate her own subjectivity. The delicate illusion of love cannot be maintained, as both parties see only one side of the Other (either objecthood or subjecthood). Furthermore, neither can see their relationship as an absolute necessity because its contingent relativity is so glaring.
This condition is especially confining for the woman. As Beauvoir writes, women are “shut up in the sphere of the relative, destined to the male from childhood, habituated to seeing in him a superb being whom she cannot possibly equal.”[27] Recall that in Sartre’s authentic love, the beloved becomes the center of the lover’s universe. The woman in love clearly fulfills this condition, as for her “the measure of values, the truth of the world, are in his consciousness,” and she “tries to see with his eyes.”[28] But this is insufficient: the relationship is not reciprocal, as she is not the ground of the Other’s values. She becomes an object immersed in the man’s subjectivity. Therefore, she is in alienation, slavery to another’s values: “one of the loving woman’s misfortunes to find that her very love disfigures her, destroys her; she is nothing more than this slave.”[29]
Sartre did not consider that all persons might be barred from authentic love by the structures of patriarchy. After all, what the lover seeks is to attain a solid ground for his being by having another subject freely choose to love him and place him as the absolute foundation of value. This ideal is unreachable if either lover is seen as a mere object or if the love is seen as just relative. Patriarchy ensures that both of these conditions are violated. The world is in a mode of institutional bad faith which denies female subjectivity and pushes women to cement themselves in the roles of wife and mother. The woman’s transcendence is annihilated, and her possibilities are constrained to one all-consuming project: “find a man who will take the place of the father in establishing for her an objectified identity and creating a world in which she can live it out.”[30] Furthermore, as the man sees her as merely one means among many other means, and their relationship as contingent, neither can imagine that their love is truly absolute.
Beauvoir contests Sartre’s naïve assumption that both parties in relationships are on equal footing and both experience the same pressures and traps on the path to love. Power structures often distort relations between men and women, binding women to crushing objecthood, and preventing men from placing their female partners as the absolute center of their moral and perceptual universe. Men and women are trapped in attitudes of sadism and masochism respectively. This is a fundamental issue that may permanently preclude the possibility of authentic love itself:
“On the day when it will be possible for woman to love not in her weakness but in her strength, not to escape herself but to find herself, not to abase herself but to assert herself – on that day love will become for her, as for man, a source of life and not of mortal danger.” [31]
Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 664.
Therefore, Sartre’s vision of love is only potential, not actual. Concrete conditions prevent love from manifesting in the way he describes.
III. An Existential Analysis of Love in The Stranger
Mersault’s being-with-others is characterized by indifference; he does not think relationships can change his fundamental absurd condition. His mother’s death does not have an emotional impact, and he concludes “that, really, nothing had changed.”[32] His most important relation, with Marie, is ostensibly romantic but is actually devoid of love. This is strange in a Camus novel, as love lies at the heart of his ethics: “I recognize only one duty, and that is to love.”[33] I argue that Camus is using this relationship to evoke an understanding of inauthentic love and its fundamental paucity.
Mersault constantly describes Marie in terms of her appearance – her objecthood. He never refers to any of her non-cosmetic features. She always manifests as a body in his eyes, as facticity rather than as transcendence: he describes how he “brushed against her breasts,[34] how “she moved toward me with her whole body to offer me her lips,”[35] how “she was glistening all over with salty water,”[36] how “all I could see was the sparkle of her teeth and the little folds of her eyes,”[37] “the little pout of her lower lip,”[38] “her striped dress and her sun-tanned face.”[39] In this way, Mersault maintains his subjectivity as the freedom which looks and acts upon an object of flesh. He remains a transcendent conscious mind, and she becomes a mere body.
Whenever their relationship risks becoming more substantial than a subject-object dialectic, Mersault acts to re-establish Marie’s status as an object: “Marie looked at me with her eyes sparkling. I kissed her. We didn’t say anything more from that point on. I held her to me.”[40] While this interaction may seem insignificant, a philosophical analysis reveals key undertones. When Marie gazes at Mersault, she threatens to transcend him, toppling his status as the subject by placing him under the Look. She could become the subject looking at Mersault as an object. He kisses her to avoid this fate and remain transcendent. After he acts, she is silent, and Mersault is not reminded of her subjecthood. In Sartre’s words, the goal of the caress is to treat the Other as a mere instrument in the midst of the world: “her consciousness, which played on the surface of her flesh and which I tried to taste with my flesh, disappears under my sight; she remains no more than an object.”[41] This is why Mersault touches Marie – to avoid encountering her as a subject.
“Simplicities are enormously complex. Consider the sentence ‘I love you.’”
— Richard O. Moore, Writing the Silences
Clearly, Marie is just another object in Mersault’s world, a means among means. This is why he describes missing her as merely the loss of her physical form: “I used to wait patiently until Saturday to hold Marie’s body in my arms.”[42] During his stay in prison, Mersault explicitly recognizes that only his proximity to Marie’s body kept her in his mind:
“How was I to know, since apart from our two bodies, now separated, there wasn’t anything to keep us together or even to remind us of each other? Anyway, after that, remembering Marie meant nothing to me.” [43]
Camus, The Stranger, 115.
Of course, Mersault was not being deceptive in this relationship. He readily admits that he does not love Marie: when she asked, his response was to tell her “it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so.”[44] When he saw her on one of his last living days, he still felt indifferent: “my heart felt nothing, and I couldn’t even return her smile.”[45] He uses her body as a means of distraction, but never attempts to leap into authentic love to elude the groundlessness of Being.
However, Marie seeks to create something more. Maybe this is because she truly wants the ethereal escape of authentic love, or perhaps because marrying Mersault would fulfill the prescribed narrative for a woman. Either way, she feels the need to take the relationship forward: “she took my arm with a smile and said she wanted to marry me. I said we could do it whenever she wanted.”[46] As one of Camus character’s in another work states, “Women are different; they know that life is short, and one must make haste to love.”[47] Ultimately, this is because for women like Marie, there was no real alternative: “love was their only way out.”[48] Marie seeks something more because she must, for as a woman, “love is a supreme effort to survive by accepting the dependence to which she is condemned.”[49] In the patriarchal condition of Camus’ Algeria, women are seen as means to the ends of men. This becomes especially clear when all Mersault needs to do to exonerate Raymond for beating a girl is testify that she cheated. In this society, men’s voices constitute the only real voices.
The relationship between Mersault and Marie illustrates the fundamental conflict that prevents authentic love in a patriarchal society. Mersault as a man was trained to adopt the sadistic attitude, one focused on using lovers as objects for entertainment and as a means to reinforce his own transcendence. Each particular lover is just a contingent and temporary diversion from absurdity: he desires a woman, but comments that “I never thought specifically of Marie.”[50] On the other hand, Marie was taught to dedicate herself to a specific man, to view the world through his eyes, and see him as the absolute axis of value.
This disparity means the two are always falling victim to the destructibility of love. For example, Mersault notices other women and comments on their properties: “The women were beautiful and I asked Marie if she’d noticed. She said yes and that she understood what I meant.”[51] It is not clear exactly what Marie understood. Perhaps she recognized that to Mersault she would always just be an object in the world which can be compared to other objects based on certain properties (e.g. beauty). This is the second destructibility of love: seeing one’s lover as an object shatters the illusion of mutual subjectivity. Furthermore, when the prosecutor describes Mersault’s affair from a third-person perspective, “all of a sudden Marie began to sob, saying it wasn’t like that, there was more to it.”[52] This illustrates the third destructibility, where the Other sees both lovers as objects and transforms their relationship into a contingent, relative, and arbitrary situation. Marie is desperate to believe her relationship with Mersault was anything more than contingent, but the perspective of a third-party Other undermines this belief.
“What of people who aren’t able to form close and strong relationships? And people who cannot find fulfillment in their lives, or those who have lost hope, who live in disappointment and bitterness and find in life no joy, no love? These, it seems to me, are the real disabilities.“
— Fred Rogers, The World According to Mister Rogers
There are few rare moments in the novel ripe with the possibility for romantic love, but they all ultimately fall flat. Mersault describes that when he swam with Marie, “we felt a closeness as we moved in unison and were happy.”[53] This simple coexistence seems to approach Beauvoir’s description of authentic love as when each lover regards “the other simultaneously as object and as subject in a reciprocal manner.”[54] She envisioned this love as the “renunciation of all possession,” a “mutual recognition of two liberties” in which neither lover would give up their transcendence and neither would have to submit to objecthood.[55] However, the profound precariousness of love combined with the sabotaging effects of an oppressive male-centered society forestall him and Marie from ever reaching authentic love. Even still, their inauthentic relationship is a source of joy relished by both parties. Ultimately, Mersault does not ever see love as way to circumvent the meaningless folly of life.
Conclusion
The fundamental nature of Being-for-Others means that “the profound meaning of my being is outside me,”[56] as only the Other knows who I am. We therefore pursue finding ourselves in the Other through love. This being-in-love can provide a sublime but fleeting joy. But the triple destructibility of love and patriarchal social conditions synergize to make the prospect of authentic love almost hopeless. Both love’s inherent elusiveness and the socially constructed machinery which preempts authentic love are exhibited in the relationship between Mersault and Marie in The Stranger. This clear-eyed analysis seems preferable to pretending that love is not really that fragile or lowering our standards of what authentic love entails. Perhaps this lofty and difficult-to-achieve ideal makes love something worth fighting for.
Furthermore, love may be a worthwhile project even if we can never reach the ideal. As Beauvoir wrote, “An authentic love…would not pretend to be a mode of salvation.”[57] Even if it is doomed to failure, it is the closest I can ever come to experiencing the subjectivity of the Other while simultaneously being apprehended as a subject. The joy of being loved may be so inimitable that the risk and fragility involved seem inconsequential. This existential treatment of love – as a delicate, conflict-filled relation almost unavoidably doomed to failure – still leaves open the possibility that even an inauthentic or partially fulfilled form of romantic love is rewarding.
The song Goodpain by Yoke Lore exemplifies the concepts I discuss here. The need for both lovers to be “howling, keeping you between my eyes” to maintain the fragile illusion of love. The “little death inside my sides” – existential despair and emptiness which brings us to love as an escape. It also expresses that love cannot ultimately “make it right,” although it can perhaps alleviate our fear, our alienation, our shame, and our pride (the four responses to The Look).
Bibliography
Beauvoir, Simone de. The ethics of ambiguity. New York, NY: Philosophical Library, 1948. Trans. by Bernard Frechtman.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Camus, Albert. Notebooks 1935-1942. New York: Marlowe & Company, 1998.
Camus, Albert. Caligula & three other plays. New York: Knopf, 1958.
Menand, Louis. “Stand by Your Man.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker, June 19, 2017. Accessed 23 Nov 2019. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/09/26/stand-by-your-man.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1990.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science; with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1974.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and nothingness; an essay on phenomenological ontology. New York: Washington Square Press, 1996. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. No exit, and three other plays. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.
Chris Stevens, “A Critical Discussion of Sartre on Love.” Stance, Vol. 1, April 2008. Pg. 5.
Ogilvy, James. “Mastery and Sexuality: Hegel’s Dialectic in Sartre and Post-Freudian Psychology.” Human Studies, no. 3 (1980): 201-19. www.jstor.org/stable/20008762.
Walker, Michelle Boulous. “Love, Ethics, and Authenticity: Beauvoir’s Lesson in What It Means to Read.” Hypatia 25, no. 2 (2010): 334-56. www.jstor.org/stable/40602709.
Wyatt, Jean. “The
Impossible Project of Love in Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness,’ ‘Dirty Hands,’ and
‘The Room.’” Sartre Studies International 12, no. 2 (2006): 1-16.
www.jstor.org/stable/23510998.
[1] Sartre, Jean-Paul (1966), Being and nothingness; an essay on phenomenological ontology, New York: Washington Square Press, trans. Hazel E. Barnes. Pg. 260.
[2] Sartre, Jean-Paul (1956), No exit, and three other plays, New York: Vintage Books.
[3] Ibid, 264.
[4] Ibid, 366.
[5] Ogilvy, James (1980), “Mastery and Sexuality: Hegel’s Dialectic in Sartre and Post-Freudian Psychology,” Human Studies, no. 3: 201-19.
[6] Ibid, 367.
[7] Ibid, 369.
[8] Ibid, 369.
[9] Ibid, 370.
[10] Ibid, 268.
[11] Ibid, 267.
[12] Ibid, 371.
[13] Ibid, 347.
[14] Ibid, 377.
[15] Ibid, 377.
[16] Ibid, 408.
[17] Ibid, 376.
[18] Ibid, 291.
[19] Chris Stevens, “A Critical Discussion of Sartre on Love,” Stance, Vol. 1, April 2008. Pg. 5.
[20] Ibid, 376.
[21] Ibid, 377.
[22] Ibid, 370.
[23] Ibid, 378.
[24] Ibid, 400.
[25] Ibid.
[26] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 362, pg. 318.
[27] Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1949. Pg. 9.
[28] Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 663.
[29] Ibid, 675.
[30] Jean Wyatt, “The Impossible Project of Love in Sartre’s ‘Being and Nothingness,’ ‘Dirty Hands,’ and ‘The Room,’” Sartre Studies International 12, no. 2 (2006).
[31] Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 664.
[32] Camus, Albert. The Stranger. Cambridge. New York :Cambridge University Press, 1988. Trans. by Patrick McCarthy. Pg. 28.
[33] Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942, New York: Marlowe & Company, 1998.
[34] Camus, 19.
[35] Ibid, 43.
[36] Ibid, 52.
[37] Ibid, 73.
[38] Ibid, 93.
[39] Ibid, 75.
[40] Ibid, 35.
[41] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 398.
[42] Camus, The Stranger, 77.
[43] Ibid, 115.
[44] Camus, The Stranger, 35.
[45] Ibid, 105.
[46] Ibid, 42.
[47] Camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays, 86.
[48] Beauvois, The Second Sex, 655.
[49] Ibid, 678.
[50] Ibid, 77.
[51] Ibid, 42.
[52] Ibid, 94.
[53] Ibid, 50.
[54] Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 172.
[55] Walker, Michelle Boulous, “Love, Ethics, and Authenticity: Beauvoir’s Lesson in What It Means to Read,” Hypatia 25, no. 2 (2010): 334-56.
[56] Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 363.
[57] Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 28.