For anyone who struggles while reading Jean-Paul Sartre (including this reviewer), South African philosopher Mabogo Percy More’s recent book, Sartre On Contingency: Antiblack Racism and Embodiment (Rowman & Littlefield 2021), will be a welcome companion along the journey. His text addresses key debates within Sartrean studies and Africana philosophy that will appeal to established scholars and students approaching these topics for the first time.
More’s main thesis is that analyzing Sartre’s concept of contingency allows for a more complete insight into “the source origins” of antiblack racism (2021, 248). He writes that racism “originates from the category of double contingency. At the realm of existence, racism is one of the many responses we adopt in the face of contingency of our existence, the meaningless of our lives” (260), through our attempts to “justify … ourselves as necessary” by dominating “the Other who through historical, morphological, and social contingency appears different from us” (132).
As humans experience the world and develop consciousness through their bodies, the second part of the origins of antiblack racism equates the white body with humanity itself, thus creating what Frantz Fanon described as the tendency for the Black’s desire to be that which she cannot, a white. Hence, one of the key critiques of Hegelian ontology is that it is simply “speculative” in that it does not accurately describe “the actual existential situations” of Black people (231).
Throughout the book, More makes a persuasive argument that Sartre’s philosophy offers liberatory principles and critiques of mainstream western philosophy that assumed the white male perspective as the neutral starting point from which to examine metaphysical, ontological, and epistemological questions.
In the first two chapters of the book, More reviews the legacy of anti-Black racism in western philosophy, offering a concise review of the debates surrounding racist statements made by canonical thinkers like Hegel, Hume, Kant, and Voltaire. Although More is not the only contemporary Africana philosopher to connect anti-Black racism within the western canon (c.f. Emmanuel Eze), he provides a thorough synthesis of its key debates. More argues that it is not contradictory to find these philosophers both refute enslavement and justify or condone racist political ideologies, because the question of who a human is “is utilized as a moral or evaluative role rather than descriptive one; it is utilized as a moral ideological weapon” (25). In other words, it was not simply individual biases but systemic racism that was the foundation of western notions of human reason. As demonstrated in the texts of the Enlightenment canon, rationality was equated with the white body. More argues it would be irresponsible to ignore this fact by separating racist passages from the main tenets of western philosophy.
What makes Sartre different from other canonical philosophers? A salient fact is that Sartre did not one day start to write about the problem of colonialism and anti-Black racism in Euro-modernity during his later years as he protested France’s colonial rule in Algeria. Rather, More maintains that Sartre’s anti-racism is built into the foundations of his earliest philosophical works, both fiction and non-fiction. As the title suggests, More focuses on Sartre’s concept of contingency, which is essential for but irreducible to his much-discussed notion of “bad faith.” He summarizes Sartre’s position that “human reality is haunted by contingency,” i.e., humans are but there is always the possibility that we could not be (96). This connects to Sartre’s observation that human consciousness, by itself, is “nothingness” (71), meaning human existence is “accidental, not necessary, unjustified, and thus contingent” (ibid). Consciousness is relationality, and because humanity yearns for “that which it lacks,” human reality is always incomplete because it will never attain the status of a being-for-itself, i.e., a self-justified god, “en causa sui” (More 2021, 117). To summarize, we are born and experience the world through our body; however, it is possible that we could not exist. Consequently, humanity faces both contingency and responsibility, to “choose the meaning of its situation and itself as the basis in a situation” (136).
While the reader may be tempted to accuse Sartre of nihilism, More responds to this point with aplomb, noting that “human beings qua humans desire justification and will always be in pursuit of it, a pursuit which in principle never ends because it constitutes the human condition” (101). More importantly, Sartre’s descriptions of isolation and pessimism in Being and Nothingness reflect “human relations before the ‘radical conversion’ or the ‘self-recovery of being’” (165). In Sartrean language, this state of misanthropy is a condition of bad faith, which is not simply lying to oneself but a more profound self-denial of possibility. More gives the example of a white South African soldier during apartheid who tells himself that he can’t change his situation, trying to allay any sense of guilt for being an agent of repression. As More writes, bad faith “denies one’s transcendence, possibilities, or freedom in order to avoid facing the anguish such possibilities or freedom entail” (2021, 85). The soldier could desert his post, defect, and join Black South Africans in their fight for freedom, or simply refuse to carry out orders if he was really opposed to apartheid.
What are the conditions of possibility for solidarity between oppressed and oppressor?
First, More argues, Blacks must have racial solidarity before the development of a coalitional politics. Just as Sartre argues that Jewish solidarity is a prerequisite to overcoming anti-Semitism, More writes that while anti-Black racism confronts a more particular oppression centered on the body, the same applies for Black solidarity (2021, 201). In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre explains the problem of seriality for solidarity. When people are grouped in a series, they are atomized and “isolated” from one another through “a common product or object situated outside the collective” (More 2021, 209). What brings people together is the “group in fusion” situation, in which people “are united by a common or objective end” (212).
More provides a concrete example of this in the context of the Black student revolts in Soweto South Africa in 1976. Apartheid created a particular form of seriality in South Africa in which Black people were isolated from one another politically speaking. As More writes, “to see that black is to see every other black” (210). However, during the Soweto uprising, with protesters refusing the demands of the white supremacist state to accept “Afrikaans as a medium of instruction in black high schools,” protesters’ actions disrupted the practico-inert field (material realm). More describes how “Black students who were complete strangers to one another began to have a common interest, a collective and shared apprehension of a common project … a common destiny” in the face of state violence (213–214). Through their collective efforts of resistance, they cultivated “reciprocity” among one another, which is antithetical to the external imposition found in seriality (214).
More does not exempt Sartre from critique, especially when it comes to the latter’s inconsistencies regarding race and class. At times, Sartre’s reliance on a socialist transformation of material relations conflates race and class, and overlooks the fact that “antiblack racism has a long history that predates capitalism and industrialism” (192). However, in other works Sartre contends that class and race are qualitatively different, writing in “Black Orpheus”:“‘the notion of race does not mix with the notion of class: the former is concrete and particular, the latter, universal and abstract’” (More 2021, 196).
Is Sartre simply contradicting himself? More answers no, arguing that we should read the different positions as part of “a two stages program to the race/class problematic,” which contains both “particularist” and “universalist” stages, which Sartre envisions resulting in a “moment of universal humanism” (More 2021, 197).
How could we evaluate Sartre’s overall impact on Africana philosophy? Although he faced intense criticism at times, More writes that “unlike the liberals with their paternalistic attitudes toward blacks, Sartre neither considered himself in a position to speak on behalf of black people nor was his attitude patronizing and condescending toward them” (265). Sartre supported the Algerian revolutionaries fighting for their freedom and criticized the racism endemic to European society and politics, but, as More contends, he did not seek to profit off of his acts in a liberal fashion. While it would be a mistake to credit Sartre as the founder of Black existentialism, his philosophy made a significant contribution to the field, which More characterizes as “a collective instrument of emancipatory praxis” (265).
In summary, Sartre on Contingency provides a cogent argument of Sartre’s relevance in contemporary debates around anti-racist praxis. More makes a convincing case for why everyone fighting against anti-Black racism today ought to read and engage with Sartre’s complex thought. The way in which More clarifies and guides the reader through Sartre’s immense oeuvre for established and new scholars approaching this canonical thinker from a variety of methodological and disciplinary schools of thought is a significant achievement.
Brooks Kirchgassner
Brooks Kirchgassner is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Connecticut. He is writing his dissertation on the politics of solidarity, race, and identity in the Black Panther Party’s Rainbow Coalition in Chicago, Illinois. His research interests are in phenomenology, political culture and identity, social epistemology, and histories of The New Left.
