"Border States:
When the Abyss Looks at You" by Jean-Paul Sartre, summary

This book is a compilation of five key philosophical treatises by the thinker, exploring in detail the situation of the solitary individual in the face of nothingness, the will of others, and oppressive social structures. Sovereign existence is revealed through the inevitability of action in a world devoid of divine guarantees and predetermined models. The texts were written between 1936 and 1957, reflecting the intellectual journey from phenomenology to the theory of practice, and the combined collection was published in 2024.

This volume is part of the "Power of Thought" book series published by Rodina. This series also includes Julia Kristeva’s "Powers of Terror," Roger Griffin’s "On the Nature of Evil: Fascism and the Myth of Rebirth," and Auguste Forel’s "The Sexual Question." The volumes are not numbered sequentially.

Choice and the burden of freedom

A craftsman sharpens a paper knife. The essence of such a handicraft object entirely precedes its actual creation, determining the blade’s purpose long before the craftsman’s work. Human beings are born differently. Initially, the individual encounters the world by chance, finds themselves in a specific situation, and only through a series of subsequent decisions does they create their own image. There is no predetermined nature for people. Based on this premise, Sartre rejects critics’ accusations of encouraging contemplative quietism and pessimism, proclaiming existentialism a philosophy of direct action, placing upon each individual full responsibility for the shape of an entire historical era.

The realization of such responsibility gives rise to excruciating anxiety. The biblical patriarch Abraham received a threatening command from an angel to sacrifice his son, left without a single irrefutable proof of the authenticity of the heavenly voice. The hallucinations of a madwoman demonstrate the fragility of omens. Before an attack, a military commander makes a unilateral decision to send soldiers to certain death, interpreting the general staff’s general orders at his own risk amid the smoke of battle. The leaders’ anxiety becomes a prerequisite for action. A hypocritical attempt to hide from this anxiety marks the common man’s retreat into false self-justification.

During the Occupation of Paris, a confused student came to the philosopher. The young man’s family was divided: his father had embraced collaborationism, his older brother had died on the battlefield in 1940, and his grieving mother saw her second son as the only meaning in life. The young Frenchman faced an insoluble dilemma. A trip to London through Spanish filtration camps promised illusory benefit to the nation, while staying at home guaranteed concrete support for his suffering mother. The established precepts were silent. A collaborationist priest would have given the young man the exact opposite advice from a Resistance priest, forcing the petitioner to predetermine the nature of his response through his choice of counselor.

Action creates value. George Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver rejects the love she desires for the sake of solidarity with her rival, while Stendhal’s Duchess Sanseverina sacrifices everything for passion. Both choices affirmed freedom. A person’s behavior is entirely determined by the sequence of their specific earthly actions, not by their innate physiological temperament.

A man is entirely equal to the sum of his actions.

Capturing the gaze and a love duel

The gaze of a stranger splits the world. The appearance of an outside observer deprives consciousness of its status as the undivided center of the universe, turning the body into a vulnerable object among other earthly things. Another holds the secret of my essence. The passionate desire to reclaim an elusive existence results in a project to absorb another’s freedom, giving rise to a constant struggle between two irreconcilable consciousnesses. Love seeks voluntary captivity. The lover categorically rejects the submissiveness of a slave or the mechanical attachment of an automaton, demanding that the partner freely choose them as the meaning of the universe and the insurmountable limit of their own aspirations.

A love potion destroys the spell of Tristan and Isolde. The lover demands vows of fidelity, irritated by the forced fulfillment of a promise once made. The love plan fails. When the chosen one reciprocates, he himself begins to demand recognition of his absolute value, reducing his partner to the role of a justifying subject. The double elopement resumes. The appearance of a third party finally destroys the illusion of an isolated paradise, reifying the union of two people under the mocking gaze of a passerby.

Masochism chooses the opposite path of submission. Ashamed of his own existence, the guilty man attempts to hide in dense physical passivity, hiring a woman with a whip to stage a cruel punishment. The undertaking ends in utter failure. The martyr Leopold von Sacher-Masoch himself orchestrated the woman’s rage, remaining the secret master of the scene and turning the executioner into an obedient instrument of his own fantasies. Subjectivity emerges from the humiliation.

Transparency of consciousness and the elusive self

Traditional psychology placed the ego inside consciousness. Sartre decisively exposes this opaque center, declaring the self to be an external, worldly object like a cabinet, a stone, or a wooden bench. Unreflective thinking is completely impersonal. While a running passenger tries to catch a tram or a reader follows a line in a book, there is no hidden overseer in the head. Only the action itself exists. Psychologist Edward Titchener experimentally confirmed the absence of the self in many spontaneous mental acts.

François de La Rochefoucauld explained altruism as secret self-love. Secret self-interest was declared the hidden springboard for all noble impulses, subtly replacing selfless assistance to Pierre with concern for eliminating one’s own emotional discomfort. This view distorts reality. At the unreflective level, the sole impulse exists to provide support to the suffering, while the selfish motive is introduced by a later, reflective examination of one’s own nobility. Reflection poisons spontaneous compassion. Hatred also lives beyond the immediate experience, remaining a dubious transcendental object whose constancy the reflective consciousness attributes to future outbursts of anger.

A sudden burst of pure spontaneity plunges a person into genuine terror. Psychiatrist Pierre Janet documented the confessions of a young married patient who experienced a panicky fear of being left alone in a room near an open window. The woman was tempted by the possibility of an obscene scream. Neither her strict bourgeois upbringing, nor her parents’ authority, nor her exemplary family structure offered her any reliable guarantee against committing a shameful scandal, revealing to her numb soul an abyss of absolute vulnerability to a sudden burst of spontaneous consciousness. The ego serves as a protective screen. A constructed personality image conceals from the individual the dizzying unpredictability of their true freedom.

The Limits of Cartesian Thought

René Descartes explored the sovereignty of the mind. A schoolchild solves a complex problem before a blackboard, ignoring external pressure, utilizing his ability to distinguish truth from error. Arithmetic dictates a definitive result. Adding numbers yields an unchangeable sum, barring individual creativity and forcing the will to bow unconditionally to the obviousness of divine laws of nature. Thought submits to a predetermined truth. The thinker salvages autonomy through negation, proving the independence of the spirit through an act of comprehensive, methodical doubt.

A malignant genius is powerless before renunciation. Man is capable of distancing himself from the deceptive evidence of the senses, his own mortal body, and the flow of earthly time, transforming himself into the pure, empty nothingness of the cogito formula. Renunciation protects against lies. Descartes transferred his creative power to God, fearing ecclesiastical persecution after the uproar surrounding Jansenius’s book on Augustine’s teachings. Divine will creates laws. The Creator is free to make the sum of the angles of a triangle different from two right angles, establishing the rules of the universe from absolute nothingness. Humanism returns this creativity to people.

A living person inside history

Marxism remains the unsurpassable horizon of the era. Material production and class confrontation define the framework of social practice until the victory over resource scarcity opens the way to the reign of true freedom. Stalin’s bureaucracy paralyzed dialectics. Party functionaries reduced flexible historical knowledge to a set of ready-made administrative directives, eliminating the verification of the party line by the lived experience of the masses. The theorist Georg Lukács simplified culture. The cultural space of the era was indiscriminately declared a carnival of fetishized subjectivity, ignoring the fundamental differences between the quests of Marcel Proust, James Joyce, and André Gide.

Scholasticism destroyed individual destiny. Analysts label Paul Valéry a petty bourgeois, completely ignoring the concrete process of transforming a particular member of his class into the author of complex works of poetry. Warsaw’s propaganda posters exposed a dead end. The formula for correlating factory output with tuberculosis cynically dismissed the suffering worker from the purview of institutional economists. Existentialism fills this gap. The inclusion of psychoanalysis and microsociology allows us to trace the maturation of a child’s character within a family under the pressure of the economic deformations of the era.

The nobleman Marquis de Sade lived through the decline of the feudal nobility. Drawing on the revolutionary idea of the goodness of nature, the Bastille prisoner paradoxically justified the aristocrat’s right to violence, making executioner and victim the only form of human interaction. The individual always transcends the situation. The airplane hijacker expresses the colonial population’s hopeless protest against disenfranchisement, choosing the brief freedom to die in the midst of a future closed to him. Childhood becomes a guidepost for destiny. Human practice shapes the course of events through the constant overcoming of the imposed boundaries of work and everyday life.

The German Peasants’ War ended with the victory of the princes. The scattered local uprisings of Thomas Müntzer’s troops enriched territorial rulers due to the lack of national unity among the rebels. Individual actions produce unforeseen results. The revolutionary crisis in France gave rise to General Napoleon Bonaparte, whose military dictatorship slowed the country’s industrial rise and determined the nature of the upheavals of the Restoration era. Concrete anthropology explores living goals. Based on material needs and early childhood experiences, living individuals continually project themselves into shared labor, transforming the rigid social world into a dynamic space of fierce struggle for the practical realization of open historical possibilities.