Self-Determination and Joint Action

Radical responsibility and radical choice, thus reconstructed, is not the illusion of being able to choose to be whoever one would like to be, at the level of some meta-volition or second order attitude, irrespective of biology or the social world.

Another way of putting this is in terms of the subject/object distinction — a distinction that features centrally in the early existentialist account, but that has gone out of fashion in the current discourse. An object is determined by its features; it has the features it has in the way that they make it what it is. A subject, by contrast, does not have its features in that way. It has the features it has in virtue of itself. As agents, we are subjects rather than objects. What characterizes us as agents is what we think, want, and decide to do. And whatever beliefs and desires, dispositions and character traits we might have (and whatever the biological and social background thereof might be), they are ours only through self-determination, that is, in virtue of our being self-identified, self-committed, and self-authorized in our having them.

Radical responsibility is best understood through its opposite, radical irresponsibility, which is the tendency to ignore that we are subjects rather than objects by ignoring that whatever role we play, refuse to play, or fail to play is ultimately a matter of our own self-determination.

There is, however, something fishy about the way in which early Sartre depicts the relation between responsibility (in terms of self-awareness) and irresponsibility (in terms of role identi­fication). True as it may be in some cases that taking oneself to be one’s role rather than playing it is a mistake that comes with a lacking sense of self-determination, it is certainly not the case that this is the case for all of our social roles (see Schmid 2017a). The Sartrean analysis might seem plausible in the case of mere jobs such as that of Sartre’s famous waiter (or merely ascriptive roles with which one has no reason to self-identify, such as the role of a slave). But what about the role of a true friend or an engaged citizen? These are not roles of the sort one just plays without being them. In fact, whoever has an extra reason of his or her own for taking on the commitments implied in the role of a good friend is not really a good friend, but just plays at being a good friend: he or she has one reason too many (and similarly for whoever engages in political issues for other reasons than her care for the issues at hand as a citizen, but acts for some private preference of hers). Some roles we have to be in order to play them well, or perhaps even in order to play them at all.

Sartre (and, mutatis mutandis, Heidegger) has no tools to distinguish these cases. What is the difference that makes a difference? I submit it is this: The roles one should play without mistaking oneself to be them are participations in a social activity in which one is not a full partner in the setting up of the role structure. The roles one cannot play without being them are participations in a joint intentional activity wherein one is a full partner in the setting up of the role structure. Thus, extending the notion of radical responsibility to certain types of social engagements requires of us to think about partnership in social activity, and the way in which role structures are set up.

The early Sartre’s problem is that he thinks of action — and, consequently, freedom and responsibility — only in singularist terms. Only individuals are proper agents, and what they do is their own action. There is no such thing as basic joint activity, wherein individuals engage only based on a sense of the activity being theirs, collectively. This leads to a conception in which social engagement in general comes with the air of irresponsibility, and quite explicitly so in his conception of the “we” in Being and Nothingness. “I,” that is (primarily) a subject that becomes objectified in interaction. “We,” by contrast, is not a subject. Rather, it is an object that is quite literally third-personally constructed (in the famous “gaze of the Third”(see Sartre 1978 [1943], 413ff.). Sarte’s early denial of the idea of a plural subject (a thought with which he struggled throughout his later work; see Flynn 1984, ch. 9) leaves a gaping lacuna in his conception of responsibility, and it is particularly obvious in the section on Freedom and Responsibility in Being and Nothingness, where he discusses responsibility for joint activity on the example of joining a war (the French resistance against occupant Nazi Germany serves as the paradigm of joint action in much of Sartre’s thought on the matter; see Flynn 1984, 173ff.).

If therefore I have preferred war to death or dishonor, everything takes place as if I bore the entire responsibility for this war. Of course others have declared it, and one might be tempted perhaps to consider me as a simple accomplice. But this notion of complicity has only a juridical sense, and it does not hold here. For it depended on me that for me and by me this war should not exist, and I have decided that it does exist.

(Sartre 1978 [1943], 554)

For lack of a plural subject, Sartre here ends with an overblown concept of individual responsi­bility and a sort of solipsistic idealism. For except perhaps from the perspective of an all-powerful leader, no war is “my” war; only my own participation therein is. The first-personal perspec­tive that is radical responsibility for the war is not mine, but ours — the French Resistance’s, if this is the case, or perhaps the “true” French nation’s. I self-determinedly participated in the war, but the war itself is not a case of individual self-determination. If anything, going to war is plural self-determination — a concept that Sartre comes closest to endorsing in his late (and unfortunately rather hastily written and badly redacted) Critique of Dialectical Reason (Sartre 1991 [1960]). Ifjoint activities are choices, they instantiate collective freedom, and radical col­lective responsibility. The lacuna becomes obvious if we consider the connection between radical responsibility and the possibility of change pointed out above. As a simple individual — one that is not authorized by the resistance army, or its exile government, as the army’s leader — one can either participate in or refrain from participating in the war, but the war itself is not one’s own action, which one could have done otherwise (perhaps by choosing a different strategy).

Thus, Sartrean radical singular responsibility is not the point of view from which the action in question is self-determined.

Who is the subject of the intention in the context of such large-scale actions — subject in the sense of something that is what it is in virtue of itself, rather than in virtue of some­thing else? One might think that the French Resistance’s leader, Charles de Gaulle, might have a better claim to saying “this war is my war” than Sartre’s simple pedestrian individual. But Charles de Gaulle is fighting the war against occupant Nazi Germany in a role, too. He is not the subject of the activity of fighting Nazi Germany out of singular self-determination in which he is self-identified, self-committed, and self-authorized in his “consciousness (of) being the incontestable author of the action.” As the leader, he is identified through appointment or tacit recognition, he is committed by his role, and he is authorized by the organization. The candidate for self-determination in this case is the collective that came to adopt the intention of fighting Nazi Germany, and to doing so by self-organizing as the French Resistance with Charles de Gaulle as its leader. Surely, the development of the French Resistance is a process that involves people deciding to join and choosing to play their role, and thus assuming their role-identity. This is abdicating their individual self-determination insofar as they are now being determined by something that is not (just) themselves. At the same time, however, they are not thereby turning themselves into a mere object. Rather, they join the plural subject of the intentional activity of fighting occupant Nazi Germany together. Their role engagement is not simply of the sort that they are letting themselves be identified, committed, and authorized by others; rather, their engagement involves the sense that who they are is determined by their joint intention, which is their joint commitment, of which there is first-person plural authority.

But is this really radical collective responsibility? Are there really plural subjects, and even if there are, can’t we engage and fully participate in joint intentional action just as a plurality of singular subjects?

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