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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: June, 1999
Latest Update: July 13, 2003
jeannecurran@habermas.org
takata@uwp.edu

Sartre's Angoisse and The Narrative of Learning Identity
Part of the Narrative of Learning Identity Series

Site Copyright: Jeanne Curran and Susan R. Takata and Individual Authors, June 1999, revised July 2003.
"Fair use" encouraged.

Certainty and mercy can be viewed as privileges bestowed by someone from above, in a hierarchical scheme, because the hierarchy invokes a certain irreversible quality associated with the power of the authority to decide, and consequently, to privilege. Although you can individually claim certainty and mercy, you are limited by the sharing of the normative perception of those qualities, which is reflected in the hierarchy. Such perspectives of certainty and mercy require a passivity on our part to accept the legitimacy of the power of sovereignty over us. Forgiveness, too, is often perceived as a privilege of the hierarchy to bestow. And this is one reason we have come to teach that first, one must forgive oneself, if one does not view the power to bestow such privilege as belonging to another. Some of us grant that authority to God, but our systems of criminal and social justice often presume such privilege.

Kenneth Anderson, , who "teaches law at American University" wrote a review of the Story of O, an infamous, though classic, work of pornography, as a fairy tale: "The Erotics of Virtue", p. 3 of Book Review Section of the L.A. Times on June 20, 1999. The analysis that Anderson did of the Story of O suggests that O was trying to escape the existential angst of individual responsibility in suffering the sexual abuse heaped upon her, in the hope that some abusive act would so demean her that her captors would no longer require her consent to the abuse. Such an attempt to avoid choice is what the existentialists described as man's angoisse. This is one plausible explanation for the non-aggressiveness of the abused, sometimes resulting in the "battered wife syndrome."

I would like to draw a parallel here to any abuse engendered by the arrogance of hierarchy, and I would like to point out that we are taught to accept passivity. Behaviorism is based on the assumption that humans are passive, that if you wait long enough humans, like the pigeon, will do something in the direction you want, and you can reinforce that step, and humans, too, will eventually be "conditioned." Our psychology books rarely speak of the rat that refuses to run the maze. We rarely hear mention of the famous white-footed mice. If one assumes the philosophical position that man has will and is responsible for his/her choices, then, like O, man cannot escape angoisse by consenting to that point of abasement at which consent no longer matters, and it is someone else's fault.

Nonetheless, rewards are seductive and omnipresent. And that is part of why Alfie Kohn speaks of rewards as punishment. To condition anyone to accept a reward in response to any performance is to attempt control, to remove choice, to falsely replace angoisse with control. Sartre, according to Gordon, would say that is not possible. You cannot escape the ultimate essential accounting of your actions. And so O's project failed dismally.

But this is the same with our authentication of a student's competence. The student, as well as the teacher, must accept the angoisse of authentication, not because we demand it, not because our standards dictate it, but because that is the nature of accepting responsibility for who and what we are, and in the academy, for the narrative of our learning identity. To refuse to accept that responsibility is to fail, for we cannot evade it. In the end, such a project must fail.

I am particularly distressed that so many of our good students are so unaccustomed to openly discussing the quality of their work that when I write glowing recommendations for them, they sit and purr, and thank me! No, no, no. Those recommendations come from my apperceptive mass, from the midst of hundreds of students per semester, and from what I could recall of our shared experience. And as long as my letter of recommendatioin comes exclusively from my lived experience, albeit shared with you, it represents my controlof your narrative identity of learning. Students have their own life space, focused on their own lived experiences. From that perspective they should be able to, and should demand, politely, but firmly, to include the incidents and situations that mattered to them, that formed the narrative of their learning identity. One student, one, in 1999, came with her own ideas of what her competencies were. And they did not fit in a one-to-one correspondence with those I had catalogued. Her perspective added a richness I could not have provided.

In 2003, another, Jennifer Glass, listened in good faith and told me what mattered to her in her learning narrative. See the difference it made in the letter I could write for her. Sample letter of recommendation. And I know that she had to struggle with herself to forgive herself what she had not done or accomplished, and to portray herself by actual skills she had acquired.

Assessment and authentication of competence, and documentation of the narrative of learning identity are life-long avtivities affecting our self-images. We must teach our students to assume both respect and responsibility, for we cannot aid them in the evasion of that responsibility. I remain enough of an existentialist to believe that ultimately such evasion of angoisse is impossible.

Discussion Questions

1. Why is it uncomfortable to provide detailed information of your learning?

   Consider that we have always been taught "not to blow our own horn." Also, if we really do assess our learning performance and identity we are admitting the role we had to play in that learning. Much easier to blame somebody else for an externally originating grade.

2. How does self-presentation grading support the position that learning is complex, internally motivated, and and interdependent with the teacher?

   Since you can't grade yourself, you are forced into an interdependence of evaluation with the teacher. That's personal and difficult for those who have never had a chance to develop personal relationships in the academic system, which includes lots of people. Yet, personal relationships are the most accurate predictors of academic success.