SARTRE ON THE “PLEDGE”
When freedom becomes common praxis and grounds the
permanence of the group by producing its own inertia through
itself and in mediated reciprocity, this new statute is called the
pledge…. It goes without saying that pledges can take very
different forms, from the explicit act of swearing an oath…to
the implicit assumption of a pledge as the already existing
reality of the group (for example, by those who are born into the
group and who grow up among its members). In other words,
the historical act of making a pledge in common, though it is
universal and always corresponds to a surviving group's
resistance to the divisive tendency of (spatio-temporal) distance
and differentiation, is not the only possible form of the common
pledge, in so far as the pledge is a guarantee against the future,
inertia produced in immanence and by freedom, and the
foundation of all differentiation. If we examine it in its explicit
reality as a historical act…this is only because this posits itself
as such and shows its structures more clearly.
A pledge is mediated reciprocity. All its derivative forms for example a witness's oath in law, an individual swearing on
the Bible, etc. - derive their meaning from this basic form of
pledge. But we must be careful not to confuse this with a social
contract. We are not trying to describe the basis of particular
societies - which, as we shall see, would be absurd; we are
trying to explain the necessary transition from an immediate
form of group which is in danger of dissolution to another form,
which is reflexive but permanent.
A pledge is a practical device. It cannot be presented as a
possibility for the individual, unless it is assumed that the
possibility is social and that it appears only on the basis of
groups which are already bound by a pledge. As we have seen,
the abstract experience of the practical organism, in so far as its
praxis is a constituent dialectic, can give us only the
translucidity of an action which is defined by its objective and
which exhausts itself in its objectification. But, in so far as it is
the group itself as praxis, this invention is the negation of some
exterior circumstance which defines it negatively…. In other
words, it is the affirmation by the third party of the permanence
of the group as the negation of its exterior negation. And
exterior negation must not be confused with the danger of
extermination by the enemy (or by a cataclysm); it only involves
the possibility that certain tasks involve the re-emergence of the
multiplicity of alterity or of exteriority, and this re-emergence
does not directly imply the annihilation of the individuals as
such. In this sense, the pledge is an inert determination of the
future: that is to say, this inertia is above all a negation of
dialectic inside the dialectic. Regardless of subsequent
developments of praxis, of the event, or of the developing
totalisation (up to and including the level of historical
totalisation), one element will remain non-dialectical: every
member's common membership of the group. The group will
enter into new dialectical combinations which will transform it
as such, but this will not affect its common unity, that is to say,
its interior statute as a group. The act of swearing an oath
therefore consists in freely presenting the dispersal of the group
in the future as an inert possibility (as a permanent negation of
certain possibilities within the field of possibilities) and,
conversely, in bringing the future group to the present
community as the limit to all possible transcendence. Here again
we encounter the dialectical law which we met at the beginning
of this investigation: the re-exteriorisation of inorganic inertia is
the basis of instrumentality, that is, of the struggle against the
inertia of matter within the practical field. The group tries to
make itself its own tool against the seriality which threatens to
dissolve it; it creates a factitious inertia to protect it against the
threats of the practico-inert.
The device itself, that is to say, behaviour as immediate
praxis, appears in the schema of intelligibility elucidated earlier.
There is mediated reciprocity; whether or not it is spoken, the
order: 'swear' certainly represents the invention as the regulatory
action of the third party in the existing group. But it should be
observed that in the milieu of the same, the third party fears
dispersive dissolution in the other third party as much as in
himself: the possibility of his being isolated may come to him
from the third party, but only to the extent that it can come to
the third party from him, or even, to the extent that it can come
to him through himself. This negative possibility is therefore in
everyone and here the same, and the reverse of the praxis of the
fused group as ubiquity. And it is the possibility in everyone of
becoming other through the other third party, and for him,
through himself and for himself. Thus, in the order: 'Let us
swear', he claims an objective guarantee from the other third
party that he will never become Other: whoever gives me this
guarantee thereby protects me, as far as he is concerned, from
the danger that Being-Other may come to me from the Other.
But equally, if he were to swear alone (or if everyone swore
except me), then I alone would thereby take responsibility for
bringing alterity to the group. But in fact the act of making a
pledge cannot be anything but common: the order is 'Let us
swear'. This means that I also make myself, both in and for him,
a guarantee that alterity cannot come to him through me (either
directly, as would happen if I were to abandon him in the middle
of a joint action on behalf of the group, or through the mediation
of all, as would happen if, within the majority, I abandoned the
struggle with them and fled or surrendered).
This reciprocity is mediated: I give my pledge to all the
third parties, as forming the group of which I am a member, and
it is the group which enables everyone to guarantee the statute
of permanence to everyone. A given third party can pledge the
permanence of the group against alterity only in so far as this
permanence depends on him, that is to say, in so far as the other
third parties have assured him, on their account, of future
unchangingness. For how could he guarantee that he will never
be the Other, if he does not begin with the assurance that alterity
will not come to him from outside and in spite of him (or
unknown to him)? Indeed, it is characteristic of alterity to come
to everyone through the Other. Thus my pledge to the third
party receives at its source a dimension of community; it comes
to touch everyone directly and through all. This common action
of the third party realises itself as an objective structure of
interiority and characterises the group as such. The pledge is not
a subjective or merely verbal determination: it is a real
modification of the group by my regulatory action. The inert
negation of certain future possibilities is my bond of interiority
with the sworn group to which I belong, in the sense that for
everyone the same negation is conditioned by mine, in so far as
it is his behaviour. Of course, it must be added that my own
behaviour is itself conditioned by everyone else's. But this is not
the most important point to emphasise: what appears at first,
indeed, is that the guarantee of permanence provided by the oath
of the Others produces itself in me as the objective impossibility
2
(in interiority) that alterity should come to me from outside; but,
at the same time, it is the possibility that I should make myself
Other (by betraying, fleeing, etc.) which is underlined as a
possible future coming from me to the Others. Now, this
possibility may realise itself in the free development of my
action: I may freely decide to abandon my post or to go over to
the enemy. It goes without saying that the word 'freely' - here
and elsewhere in this work - refers to the dialectical
development of an individual praxis, born of need and
transcending material conditions towards a definite objective.
Betrayal and desertion, brought about by fear and suffering, are,
therefore, from this point of view, free praxes in that they are
organised behaviour in response to exterior threats. It is also
clear that the fear of being afraid - for example, of letting the
side down, of being the one through whom the group changes
through panic into an inert mass - may be important for an
inexperienced young combatant. He is afraid of this fear as an
irresistible impulse and, at the same time, he rejects it as a free
preference for his own safety over that of all. In this sense, my
pledge becomes my surety for myself in that it is me offering
myself, in every third party, as everyone's guarantee of not
relapsing, in my person or through my conduct, into serial
alterity. Thus, in making a pledge, the first movement is to
swear so as to make the Others swear, through mediated
reciprocity, that is to say, so as to guarantee oneself against the
possibility that they will disperse. The second moment of the
operation is to swear in order to protect oneself against oneself
in the Others. It should also be noted that the second moment
cannot be that of the totalising action of a regulatory third party:
when I make a pledge, in fact, or when I swear or perform some
equivalent act, I remain in a relation of transcendenceimmanence to the group as a whole, and through my behaviour I
effect a totalising synthesis which does not actually integrate me
into the whole. My making the pledge thereby reveals itself as
common freedom, but not as the inert negation of my
possibilities. In other words, I unveil my future behaviour and
its objective, which is the permanence of the group; but I unveil
them in freedom, that is to say, the description expresses an
untranscendability which freedom, as practical transcendence,
cannot produce of itself...
A pledge necessarily involves the following: (1) the
characteristics of an order, of a regulatory action, whose
(reflected) aim is to involve third parties: I offer myself so that
they can offer themselves; the offer of my services (my life,
etc.) is already the same as theirs. At this level, my
commitment…is a reciprocal commitment, mediated by the
third party. (2) The characteristic of a manipulation of myself: to
swear is to give what one does not possess in order that the
Others shall give it to you so that one can keep one's word: I
define the permanence of the group as my untranscendability in
a practical movement of all which, through the totalisation of
pledges, must confer on me this untranscendability as a negative
limit and as an absolute exigency. These two characteristics are
indissolubly linked; in so far as each of them is a claim made
upon the other third party or myself, through the mediation of
the third party, these claims are immediately satisfied by the
pledges of all the Others. In fact, although the actual giving of
the pledges may be successive…and thus involve a quite formal
seriality, the entire real moment of the common action is
contained in the order 'Let us swear' - that is to say, in the
common decision to swear. At the moment of the decision, the
pledge still lies in the future, but its signification - as an
immediate objective of the group and as a means of maintaining
the permanence required by certain more distant objectives presents it to everyone as a common operation, or, in other
words, as the group acting on itself through every member. Thus
even if the pledge of one third party is given before that of
others (for example, in the serial order of signing), it can never
fail: it temporalises itself in an already limited temporality
which contains in advance the pledges of all. In a sense, to say
'Let us swear' is to swear: the possibility of a disagreement
about this is in fact normally purely formal. If the pledge is
recreated, this is because objective circumstances already
constitute it as the group's only reflexive means of preserving its
unity. It should be defined as everyone's freedom guaranteeing
the security of all so that this security can return to everyone as
his other-freedom so as to ground his free, practical membership
of the group as an untranscendable exigency. Indeed, after the
pledge, as before, the third party makes himself a member of the
group through his common praxis, and therefore in freedom:
this means that his very action develops in dialectical freedom,
either within a sub-group or as the common praxis of an isolated
individual. The pledge is simply the coincidence, at the source
of his practice, of the security of the absent third parties (which
he guarantees) and of his own security (guaranteed by the third
parties). Exigency and untranscendable permanence as an inert
negation of possibilities reveal themselves under the influence
of definite conditions (actions of the enemy, for example, such
as terror, torture, or separate offers to negotiate, etc.).
(Excerpted from Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique of Dialectical
Reason, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith [New York: Verso,
2004 (1991)], pp. 419-424.)