Hazel E. Barnes 1915-2008: A Farewell to America's Foremost Sartre Scholar

Existential Analysis 19.2: July 2008

Hazel E. Barnes 1915-2008 A Farewell to America's Foremost Sartre Scholar

Betty Cannon

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This is the second essay for the Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis on my friend and mentor, Hazel E. Barnes. The first, written in 2000, started out as a short review of her autobiography, The Story I Tell Myself (1997). It ended as a thirty-page article about her autobiography as an existential-analytic example of the good life. It is hard to write about Hazel Barnes without getting lengthy. This is so not only because of her marvelous contribution of bringing existentialism to the English speaking world with her translation of Sartre's Being and Nothingness and her many books and articles on humanistic existentialism. It is also true because of her deep personal influence on her students, friends and colleagues. The thing to understand about Hazel Barnes is that she combined the unusual qualities of brilliant intellect and warm and generous humanity. These did not diminish with age. Her contributions to existential psychology, direct and indirect, are enormous. I will begin with her intellectual legacy. Then I would like to include some personal reminiscences, my own and others, concluding with an account of the last

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decade of her life after the publication of her autobiography. I have decided after much deliberation to include a discussion of the circumstances surrounding her death as they relate to her philosophy and values. Hazel Barnes' intellectual achievements are a matter of public record. She was a widely read and published humanist who crossed disciplines with ease. She completed her doctorate in classics at Yale University in 1941, published on both classical and modern themes, and taught classics and humanities as well as philosophy for many years. She chaired both the classics and the humanities departments at the University of Colorado at Boulder. When she retired, she was awarded the title of Distinguished Professor Emerita, the first woman to hold this title. The most prestigious faculty award in "teaching, research and scholarship" at the University of Colorado was established in her name as the Hazel Barnes Prize in 1991. She was for many years a member of the national Phi Beta Kappa Senate and a visiting Phi Beta Kappa scholar at many universities. She was a distinguished visiting professor at various universities, returning to Yale in this capacity in the spring of 1974. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship and was the recipient of numerous awards by various philosophy and humanities groups. It is as a very modern thinker, indeed as America's foremost existential scholar, that Hazel Barnes is known to the world. She taught the first course in existentialism in this country at Toledo University in the spring of 1950. Her publications on existentialism began in 1953 with an essay on "Existentialism: Positive Contributions." This corrected her earlier off-hand response to a student in 1948 who had asked about existentialism. Hazel dismissed it as a "fashionable philosophy of defeatism and despair" from post-war Europe without really knowing enough about it. Misgivings over her answer led her to begin a study of Sartre's philosophy, which had not yet been translated into English. It became the major focus of her academic career. Her sense of its positive implications never left her. Her translation of selections from Sartre's Being and Nothingness was published in 1953 as Existential Psychoanalysis. With an insightful introduction to existential psychoanalysis, it contains two of Sartre's three most important contributions to existential psychology, the sections entitled "Bad Faith" and "Existential Psychoanalysis." The third is the section on "Concrete Relations with Others" that appeared in her 1956 translation of the entire book. The translation of Being and Nothingness with its impressive introduction to Sartre was followed by Barnes' own book, The Literature of Possibility: A Study in Humanistic Existentialism in 1959 (reprinted as Humanistic Existentialism: The Literature of Possibility in the Bison Paperback edition of 1962). She translated Sartre's Search for a Method, which is a prelude to Critique of Dialectical Reason, in 1963. Her translation includes a fine introduction to Sartre's later philosophy. Four

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books on Sartre and existentialism followed, with many significant insights for psychology. An Existentialist Ethics (1967), probably her most original book on philosophy, also contains many insights pertinent to existential psychology – since Sartre's ethics and his psychology were inextricably intertwined. Her Sartre (1973) is the most clear and insightful introduction to Sartre's philosophy that I know. It also provides some invaluable insights into the significance of his psychology, including a look at the implications of his later philosophy for his earlier psychological insights. Barnes declined an invitation to translate Sartre's monumental three thousand-page unfinished biography of Flaubert in favor of writing her own book on Sartre and Flaubert (1981). She modestly claims that her study is only a beginning, since "it would take a lifetime to arrive at a full appreciation and worthy appraisal of this totalizing culmination of Sartre's life work" (p. 418). There is no question that her book will stand as the definitive study of Sartre's philosophical/psychological synthesis. Sartre himself sent her his notes for the fourth volume, which he was unable to complete because of near blindness, with permission to quote as liberally as she liked from them. She basically constructed an account of what the fourth volume on Madame Bovary would have been, relying not only on Sartre's notes but on her profound understanding of his philosophy. The Flaubert biography, as she says, is the synthesis of Marxist sociology and existential psychoanalysis that Sartre had made the aim of his social science theory in Search for a Method. It shows us how an individual human being (situated in his family and his social milieu) comes to make himself out of what he is made of - and then to have an impact on his era. It contains many insights about infantile and childhood development, including an understanding of the lived body in infancy and later. It also includes a social psychology perspective not as strongly present in Sartre's earlier work. Barnes' book, which both presents and critiques what Sartre has done in view of what we know of Flaubert elsewhere through his own writing and other biographies, is in some ways more satisfying (and certainly more compact) than the original. Psychologists might want to read, in the original, the passages in volume one on infantile development. Barnes' research and presentation in this book is flawless. Though she wrote many articles, her only full length book after this is her autobiography, The Story I Tell Myself (1997). I will not repeat my earlier discussion, except to say that it is a masterpiece of existential self-analysis. Unlike Sartre's The Words, it follows her into maturity and into the dilemmas of old age and the eventual approach of death. The reception of the Flaubert book perhaps had something to do with her reluctance to write another. Though accepted without revision by the University of Chicago Press and subsequently praised in many journals, the book received criticism from deconstructionist quarters. Hazel notes in her autobiography

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that one reviewer wrote "…condescendingly that what I had done was fine as an example of nineteenth-century criticism" (p. 177). According to him, the book failed entirely by deconstructionist criteria. Fundamentally, he wondered why she bothered to raise the question of verisimilitude. Obviously this takes us far from Sartre's own purpose in writing the biography, though, of course, deconstructionists would not be concerned with this. Sartre says his purpose was to answer the question, "What do we know of Flaubert?" Hazel was dismayed by the deconstructionist idea that "any mention of the author's intention is taboo" (p. 177). Though appreciative of some of the contributions of deconstructionist and structuralist authors, particularly in classics and feminist texts, she is aware that the fundamental principles of deconstructionism "…seemed to challenge the validity of all that I had been doing" (p. 177). Her position, she concludes, has been changed with regard to the academic Zeitgeist, and she remains unconvinced by the position that has taken its place. Especially she found herself "…dismayed by the overall tendency of Deconstruction to depersonalize, to reduce the person to modes of discourse, to view individuals as only the reflections of the input of others" (p. 178). Perhaps this is why Hazel in later articles turned her attention more and more to existential psychology. It is a place where existentialist ideas have more of a place than deconstructionist ones - perhaps because existentialism is more clinically viable. Of course, there have been deconstructionist and structuralist applications to psychology. The work of Jacques Lacan and his followers in psychoanalysis is the most well-known example. Hazel does not agree with Lacan and the deconstructionists that we are "'spoken by language,' its servants rather than its creators and users" (p. 178). Actually, this was exactly Sartre's point with regard to Flaubert - that he was badly inserted into language because he experienced himself as an object rather than a subject. So what Lacan says is normal is pathology, not optimal development. Many of Hazel Barnes' most significant articles and book chapters on psychology were written during or after her work on Sartre and Flaubert - and several of the most provocative and insightful were written after her retirement from teaching at the University of Colorado in 1986. In writing this article, I had originally given an account of Hazel's contributions to psychology in all of her books and essays. This proved a bit unwieldy, but the original summary is available to interested readers who contact me by e-mail. Instead I would like to mention here only a few of her many insightful additions to existential psychology in the later articles. The books, of course, are still accessible to all. The articles, because they were written late in her career after Sartre had produced all of his major work, including some posthumously published material, go further than synthesizing his thought. Barnes clarifies some confusion in Sartre's often

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unwieldy writings, notes the connections and disconnections between the early and the late Sartre, and adds original insights of her own. These late essays provide in her own clear and discerning voice invaluable material for existential psychology. In "Sartre's Concept of the Self" (1980-81), Barnes clarifies a confusion that many readers of Sartre experience regarding his usage of the term "self." I think her explanation might also help to clarify the confusion concerning the use of this term in contemporary psychoanalytic theory, as I have argued in Sartre and Psychoanalysis (1991). Sartre, of course, does not believe that we have a fixed self or even a fixed potential that is somehow to be realized in the world. Instead human consciousness is free non-personal spontaneous presence to its objects. Yet Barnes notes that Sartre uses the word "self" in three ways: the self as agent or non-reflective consciousness, the self as ego or personality, and the self as aim or value. All are important. There is also a fourth form, implied in his later philosophy, the self as embodied consciousness. Barnes argues for a precise use of the term self in a Sartrean oriented psychotherapy. Such a psychotherapy would reject the idea of a structured psyche, such as Freud and Jung present. It would also reject the humanistic idea of self-actualization of inborn potentialities, the idea that a person is like an acorn with certain potentialities of development similar to the fulfillment of the acorn in the oak tree. Instead it would challenge clients to keep the various categories of the self clear in their attitudes toward life. While recognizing themselves as embodied consciousnesses and acknowledging responsibility for past actions, they would use neither the past nor nature as an excuse not to make a different free choice of being in the present directed toward a different future. The first form, the self as agent or non-reflective (prereflective) consciousness, is individual though not personal. It moves out of the past toward the future. It "creates" the world through "nihilation," the recognition that it is not its objects. In this sense there arises a rudimentary self-consciousness (conscience (de) soi de l 'objet). This is the taste of self, the awareness of being located here rather than there, that accompanies awareness of objects. It is always world directed, always consciousness of something. That of which it is conscious ("being-in-itself") is undifferentiated being before the addition of consciousness. All we can say about it is that it "is." Non-reflective consciousness is free and could make a different choice of being in the world. The second form, the self as ego or personality, is the object of reflective consciousness. Conventional psychology makes the mistake of regarding this as the actual self with its various qualities and characteristics. Taken for the self in everyday reality, the ego (in the Sartrean, not the Freudian sense) is actually only a unity that the present consciousness imposes on its past and future intentional acts. To mix this up with the self as agent is to

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mistakenly (in bad faith) attempt to view oneself as an object like other objects in the world. Barnes notes that Sartre sometimes discusses "pure reflection" as the basis for effecting a purification of reflective consciousness and getting back to the self as agent, an acceptance of one's freedom. Strictly speaking, she thinks pure reflection is impossible since there will always be a gap between the consciousness reflecting and the consciousness reflected on - one cannot lay hands on a subjectivity. Yet if Sartre means that its purpose would be not to discover a reified self but to liberate consciousness from the incrustations of the ego, then she believes that pure or purifying reflection might have some meaning. Barnes notes that the third form of the self in Sartre, the self and aim or value, is the self that is being brought into being down there in the future. It is not the self that is, but the self that is being pursued. It is not being, but the desire for being. It exists only in the imagination, and yet it has real consequences in the world. When consciousness makes one of those radical ruptures with the past, as in the appearance of the "psychological instant," past and future change together. The perspective on the past changes as the trajectory toward the future changes. Untangling these three forms of the self is immensely useful in the practice of psychotherapy. Something like pure reflection, Barnes notes, would not only open up the past to new meanings but open the future to the possibility for change. It would release us from making the future a repetition of the past, out of anxiety or insecurity. Barnes notes that the fourth form of the self, embodied consciousness, is not really separate from the first except that Sartre emphasizes embodiment more strongly in the later philosophy. In Being and Nothingness Sartre had insisted that consciousness is always bodily lived consciousness. In the Flaubert biography he shows more deeply how consciousness is embodied, first in the development of Flaubert's passive "constitution" at the hands of his dutiful but unloving mother, secondly in the hysterico-epilepsy that he developed as he found himself on the verge of entering law at his father's insistence, and thirdly in the neurotic way in which he lived his sexuality. Sartre says that Flaubert's seizures (which gradually subsided after his father's death two years later when he had started to establish himself as a writer) were "intentional but not deliberate." This indicates a shift in Sartre's idea of consciousness, which Barnes had already noted in Sartre and Flaubert. Le Vecu (lived experience), though intentional, is not always transparent to reflective questioning. It overflows reflective conceptualization. It has a certain opacity. It is conscious, but can never be completely known. Flaubert's passive "constitution," deriving from his having been an "underloved" infant and child, is one example. Barnes notes that what is surprising in all this is the degree to which Sartre presents Flaubert as an embodied consciousness ensconced in his family history and his era from earliest childhood. Yet there is bad faith involved.

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Flaubert hid from himself his ability to make decisions, while at the same time directing his life through passive activity. He played, as Sartre says, the game of "loser wins." Barnes' "Sartre on the Emotions" (1984) is a breakthrough article. I have always considered Sartre's The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, to be the least satisfactory of his philosophical works. I think Sartre is right in seeing emotion as intentional and world-directed. But he goes on to denigrate emotion as "magical" behaviour where realistic action seems impossible. An example is the person who faints in the presence of danger. Another, more positive example, is the little dance of joy we perform when we are unable all at once to possess a happy situation, as in the bestowal of an award or a proposal of marriage. Still the implication is that emotion is an inferior way of relating to the world. Barnes notes that Sartre, over time, comes to a more positive concept of the emotions, one that we might compare with the conclusion he drew at the end of The Psychology of Imagination with regard to imagination. There he spends most of the book exposing the escapist nature of imagination. Then at the end he makes a startling about-face. He notes that imagination is what makes us human, that in order to bring about a different future (or a future at all) imagination, the gap between what is and what might be, is required. Imagination is thereby made almost equivalent to the nihilation that is the function of consciousness. Without it no action on the world would be possible. "More slowly," Barnes says, "over the length of his whole career, Sartre seems to have followed a somewhat comparable course with regard to the role of emotion" (p. 13). Barnes notes that in the Flaubert biography, Sartre assigns a more positive function to love, especially mother love. In Being and Nothingness, love (in bad faith) had been reduced to the desire to be loved. In The Transcendence of the Ego, Sartre says that love is not an emotion, but a state. It is to be contrasted with immediate, spontaneous impulses of tenderness, affection or desire by its attempt to mortgage the future. As such, it is a stance assumed in bad faith. By way of contrast, Sartre in The Family Idiot maintains that maternal love is that through which the infant comes to find his way as a "valorized" person in the world. Although Sartre says that "maternal love is a relation and not a feeling," Barnes notes that "he describes mother love as the overt expressive conduct resulting from a feeling which cannot be faked" (p. 11). In this sense, it is an emotion. The mother reveals her love through her "physical handling of the child, her caresses, smiles, tone of voice - in short, her 'language'" (p. 11). It is this - or its lack - which is internalized as the child's constitution. To the extent that the mother values and respects the child as a subject-agent with whom she will establish reciprocity, the child comes to feel himself or herself as "a conscious arrow," a person with a mandate to live and act in the world.

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Barnes points out that an even more radical version of this idea appears in the interviews with Beny Levy shortly before Sartre's death. There he talks about the idea of fraternity or brotherly love where "the motivations of an act are of an affective order, while the act itself is of a practical order" (quoted on p. 12). In the final analysis, Sartre sees the relationship that binds people to each other as not political but affective. Perhaps a similar translation could be made for all of the emotions, allowing for the idea that affective life, like the imagination, has effective consequences in the real world. I think The Emotions is a book that needs reworking in the light of Sartre's later philosophy and Barnes' commentary. Barnes continued to follow Sartre through his posthumous publications - and her own retirement. "Sartre's Scenario for Freud" (1989) is a discussion of The Freud Scenario (posthumously published in French in 1984). This five hundred-page book was originally intended as a screenplay that Sartre wrote at the request of John Huston in 1959. Barnes explores the ways in which Sartre has and has not taken liberties with the facts of Freud's life. She also discusses the philosophical ramifications of the work. Essentially she asks the question: Did Sartre change his mind about the unconscious in the writing of the piece, as some critics, such as Arthur Danto, have claimed? Regarding verisimilitude, she concludes that Sartre did not create his own Freud but rather recreated Freud from the sources at hand. He rather remarkably presents Freud as Ernest Jones, and Freud himself, took him to be. While he invents certain scenes, what he actually presents through imaginative empathy is "the drama of Freud's own myth of himself." That, she thinks, "is perhaps the secret power of the work" and what makes it a magnificent screenplay (p. 58). What captures Sartre's imagination is Freud's passion "to uncover a certain kind of knowledge that may serve to totalize man's understanding of human reality and of himself as what Sartre would call a 'singular universal'" (p. 58). In other words, Freud's pursuit is in some ways similar to Sartre's. Yet Barnes does not believe that Sartre comes to accept Freud's doctrine of the unconscious. Sartre's emphasis on hysterical symptoms in the piece, an emphasis one finds in Freud's early work, presages Flaubert's hysterico-epilepsy in The Family Idiot. Yet if we look closely we can see that the dramatic depictions in the screenplay can just as easily be interpreted in terms of Sartre's theory of bad faith and the interplay of reflective and non-reflective consciousness as in terms of Freud's theory of the unconscious. Sartre does not obtrude his view into the screenplay, but he does depict the intentional nature of the symptoms. I think it is also possible that the screenplay led to Sartre's greater emphasis on the role of the body in depicting Flaubert's nervous attacks, which Sartre says were "intentional but not deliberate" (quoted on p. 63). Barnes thinks that in the final analysis, while The Freud Scenario may have increased Sartre's respect for

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Freud and helped to bring the two closer together, "neither has been submerged in the other. The differences remain" (p. 63). One is reminded of Sartre's later comment that while he accepted the facts of disguise and repression as facts, he rejected the mechanistic underpinnings of Freud's system. He was impressed by the phenomenology, but dubious about the explanations. One also wonders if this encounter with Freud in any way influenced Sartre's later assertion that non-reflective lived experience (le vecu) is more opaque and less open to reflective examination than he had earlier thought. "The Role of the Ego in Reciprocity" (1991) is an important addition to Sartre's thinking about the ego and hence to existential psychology. Barnes considers the ego as Sartre presents it not only in Being and Nothingness and The Transcendence of the Ego, but also his reflections on the ego in Notebooks for an Ethics (posthumously published in French in 1983). Admittedly what Sartre has written about the ego is mostly negative. Constructed by reflective consciousness, it is primarily an "obstacle to authentic choice of action" (p. 151). Yet Barnes argues that there are reasons for giving to the ego, both my ego for me and my own and the other's ego for each other, a more positive role if Sartre's philosophy is to make sense. Indeed when Sartre asserts at one point in Notebooks that our goal should be to get rid of the "I" and the "me," Barnes replies flatly that "this is nonsense" (p. 152). I presume this is so because it is impossible to live without an ego, since consciousness always turns and makes an object of itself. Barnes thinks Sartre himself perhaps felt that he had gone too far in his assertion about dispensing with the "I" and the "me," since he immediately says that he could accept living with the ego if it were redefined. This is so because "subjectivity [non-reflective consciousness] and the ego together have 'moral and temporal ontological priority' over any alienation" (quoted on p. 152). He would like to see this ego as an "always open Moi" rather than a well defined psychic "I" and "me." In other words, Sartre still objects to the ossification that getting caught in the ego implies, but he accepts the inevitability of forming an ego and that it is not necessarily negative to do so. Barnes points out that Sartre, in The Transcendence of the Ego, had commented, "The ego is to psychical objects what the World is to things" (quoted pp. 153-54). Hence she suggests that "the ego is always at the horizon of my choices as a kind of imposed ordering (imposed by consciousness, of course) which must be taken into account but can be modified, just as my notion of 'the world' is" (p. 154). Of course, the world from a phenomenological perspective is also a structure of consciousness. Like the way in which I structure the world, the way in which I structure the ego can change. Purifying reflection would reveal this to me. It might be possible to have an ego without inevitably getting caught in it or using it

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as an excuse to escape my freedom. I am reminded of a passage in the Flaubert biography where Sartre seems to define the difference between a true and a false ego along these lines. Particularly important there is the idea that in constructing a false ego Flaubert gets caught up in the reflected self he is for others, hardly being aware of himself as an agent creating his own life. The true ego would require such an acknowledgement. Barnes thinks that perhaps even more important than my ego for me is the role of the ego, my own and the other's, in reciprocity. Sartre's discussion of positive reciprocity in Notebooks is new. It is the answer to whether something other than the conflictual relations described in Being and Nothingness is possible. It is the basis for an existentialist ethics, as it is for a positive psychology of human relations. It defines an alternative to the idea, expressed by a character at the end of Sartre's play, No Exit: "Hell is other people." Barnes thinks that we can only understand the other's "appeal" and the meaning of "authentic love" as described in Notebooks as referring to my grasp of the other's ego and the other's grasp of mine. When I respond to the other's "appeal," I make his end my end and attempt to help him realize it for himself. In doing so, I recognize the other's freedom without being paralyzed by it as when I respond to the look. The other in appealing to me (in contrast to demanding or begging) offers me his gift of freedom. He does not say you ought to help me, but "You can." Barnes points out that the only way I can comprehend and empathize with the other's ends, as Sartre says I must do in authentic relations, is through his body. Indeed it is not as an abstract freedom that I respond to the other but as an ego, as a self that I comprehend in the world. Although I do not view him as a fixed object when I aid him, I do understand him through his object side. The "imbrication of two freedoms" that Sartre talks about, as Barnes points out, inevitably includes "the other's ego and mine" as "essential parts of the gestalt" (p. 156). This is even more true in authentic love when I relate to the other as a freedom through her body. Sartre says that "to love authentically is not to try to appropriate the other's freedom." Authentic love, unlike love in bad faith as described in Being and Nothingness, is not reducible to the desire to be loved. Such love, Sartre maintains, is a "creative revelation." It is not limited to the erotic. Yet it is only through the body - and the ego as postulated on the face of the body, as Barnes maintains - that I may grasp the other's ends. She quotes Sartre here: "Freedom as such is not lovable, for it is nothing but negation and productivity" (quoted on p. 156). It is the other's body - and the other's ego as an open possibility - that is loveable. Sartre's ideal of "transparency" in human relations, first introduced years earlier in the War Diaries and reiterated in later interviews, now becomes comprehensible. Such mutual waiving of inhibitions and the need for secrecy could only take place in a relationship in which each values the other's freedom as her own. Yet this is not an abstract impersonal freedom

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that is valued, but freedom individualized in the body, personalized in the ego. So long as each does not demand that the other "identify with a completed ego, that he be what he is," then Barnes believes it is possible to value "the evolving product of the other's consciousness and the comprehending acceptance of one's own" (p. 157). Without the ego, Barnes insists, other persons would be largely undifferentiated. We could not know them. If we know each other through the body and the ego, without trying to manipulate or control or ossify, then, like the purified view of my own ego, this relationship through the ego of each can be a relationship in good faith. One of Hazel Barnes' last essays is a completely new inquiry into the possible relationship of Sartre's theory of consciousness to neuropsychology. Entitled "Consciousness and Digestion: Sartre and Neuroscience" (2005), it provides a Sartrean perspective on the work of Nobel prize winning scientist, Gerald M. Edelman, on the biological underpinnings to consciousness. The metaphor has to do with the fact that digestion is not identical with the physical organs that produce it any more than consciousness is identical with its neurological underpinnings. When Edelman read it, he called Hazel up to discuss it. Hazel wondered why the article did not produce more interest among Sartreans. I think I know the answer. Hazel, as usual, was ahead of the game. Despite the fact that neuroscience is having an enormous impact on contemporary psychology, most Sartreans (and perhaps most existential psychologists) simply do not know enough about it to discuss it. As Hazel herself says in the opening to 1

the article, "While Sartre scholars cannot fairly be described as being opposed to science, they have, for the most part, stayed aloof" (p. 117). The article is not aloof. Hazel insists that the connection between psychology and biology is important. At some point, she believes, an organic foundation for the behavior of the conscious organism must be found. After all, both existentialism and phenomenology insist that consciousness is always embodied. She argues that Edelman's position "provides support and a possible biological foundation for Sartre's view of what consciousness is - and does" (p. 118). The two theories, she thinks, are complementary. She believes that "in explaining how consciousness has emerged and how it functions, Edelman provides a rational context for Sartre's view of the conscious human individual as free, self-making and ethically responsible" (p. 119). She believes that Edelman's evolutionary perspective, far from being inimical to Sartre, takes into account chance and indeterminacy in a way that is compatible with Sartre's philosophy. Indeed the revised view of modern physics, which sees matter as the interplay of forces or energies and which asserts the importance of chance even at elementary levels of particles, makes way for something like a Sartrean philosophy on the level of human consciousness.

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Edelman's "Theory of Neuronal Group Selection" (TNGS) is a theory that "acknowledges both the diversity of locations and functions in the brain and its tremendous adaptability in overcoming fragmentation" (p. 121). He stresses the importance of environmental input in the development of brain synapses from before birth to the developed organism. Barnes finds particularly significant his theory of "reentry." This is the interchange of signals in various brain areas allowing for a coordinated sense of the outside world or perception of the meaning of internal signals. Though none of this necessarily involves consciousness, when we get to consciousness Edelman's account fits well with that of Sartre - and of William James. Edelman, like James and Sartre, views external reality as a jumble of things without differentiation or significance until the brain (or consciousness) has imposed order on it. For Sartre, Being-in-itself simply is. Consciousness reveals being. Edelman describes how this happens on a neuronal level. Like the phenomenologists, including Sartre, Edelman sees the object as being revealed in profiles. Gradually, as Barnes summarizes Edelman's position, "our series of neuronal responses constitute the object as a whole, and ultimately the world we live in" (p. 123). What Edelman has found is the neurological underpinnings for perception as described by the phenomenologists. Furthermore, Edelman's account of memory is also phenomenological as is his account of the developing sense of self. He rejects the traditional idea of memory as the retrieval of stored representations and impressions. He considers memory to be an active process of re-categorizing earlier categorizations rather than a passive retrieval. As such, it can be mistaken, reminding us of Sartre's idea that we sometimes confuse memory and imagination. Edelman sees certain sets of neurons as "value systems" because they relate to activity necessary to the survival of the organism. They are "good for" or "bad for" the organism. Though hardly the basis for an ethics at this point, Barnes thinks that Edelman's comments provide a rudimentary biological basis for Sartre's description of human reality as "for-itself" or value-seeking. Edelman's work also provides a biological basis for the "self." "Self" is implied in all his discussion of "good for" and "bad for." This, of course, is not yet self-consciousness in the reflective sense, but it is still a kind of rudimentary consciousness (of) self (Sartre's conscience (de) soi de l'objet). Here another concept of Edelman's explains the emergence of consciousness in the human sense. Edelman calls it the "phenomenal transform." Barnes remarks that he could not have been unaware of the double-entendre. Edelman defines the phenomenal transform as "the process by which neural activity in the reentrant dynamic core (C') entails the phenomenal property of consciousness (C)" (quoted on p. 125). Suddenly there occurs a recognition of "qualia" (which Edelman defines as perceptions, images, memories, sensations, thoughts, emotions, moods,

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desires, beliefs, intentions, signals of bodily states, motor scenarios and so on). Edelman says he uses the term as "coextensive with conscious experience" (quoted on p. 125). Edelman distinguishes between primary consciousness, which we share with animals, and higher-order consciousness. Higher order consciousness has a concept of self and a conceptual grasp of past, present and future. It deals with symbols and is conscious of being conscious. C' is the bodily constructions and reactions which have brought into existence C. The latter (consciousness) cannot exist without the former, but is not reducible to it. We immediately see the connections with Sartre's philosophy and the possibility that Edelman has provided it with physiological underpinnings. TGNS, as Barnes observes, is the very opposite of determinism since it insists on the indeterminacy of the organism's behavior. As she says, "It does not by itself prove the existentialist assertion that we are free, but perhaps sets the stage for it" (p. 126). What is required next is a theory of nihilation for Edelman's theory to prove to be an adequate neurobiological basis for phenomenology and existentialism. For Sartre, consciousness becomes aware of itself by being aware that it is not its objects. This is rudimentary or non-reflective consciousness. The ego arises when consciousness turns and nihilates its former self, creates a not between the consciousness reflecting and the consciousness reflected on. Barnes notes that Edelman's theory of "discrimination" is close to Sartre's idea of nihilation. Edelman claims that the development of conscious life is "bound up with the capacity to form complexities of increasingly refined discriminations" (p. 126). Qualia are "high-order discriminations in a complex domain" (quoted on p. 126). Though perhaps not exactly the same, Barnes sees no contradiction between Sartre's description of consciousness as negating activity and Edelman's idea that we become conscious through discrimination. Barnes sees even more significance in the parallels between what Edelman says about the construction of a self and Sartre's ideas on this. For Edelman, the self is constructed through internal neural activities. Barnes quotes Edelman, "The ability to construct a scene related to the value-category history of an individual marks the appearance of the self" (quoted on p. 126). Sartre would say that the self of non-reflective consciousness appears with the nihilation of objects in the world, what Edelman calls discrimination. There is also for Sartre another "self," as we know. This is the self that is a product of reflective consciousness, the ego. Although Edelman does not explicitly make distinctions between these two selves, he does hold that primitive discrimination is followed by the appearance of a self in the more personal sense, and that this self includes memory and value systems in the unifying activity that creates it. Both Sartre and Edelman believe that the essential characteristic of human consciousness, as contrasted with animal consciousness, is "being conscious of being

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conscious" (p. 127). The self under construction by consciousness is not a fixed entity but is constantly changing, according to both Edelman and Sartre. Both also recognize the importance of other persons in grasping my own objective existence. Edelman calls this the "social concept of self" since it arises out of communication with other persons. Sartre calls it "being-for-others." Neither believes that one can grasp the other's consciousness directly. Although Edelman, as a neuroscientist, does not attempt to construct an ethics or a psychology, he does claim that the capacity to make value decisions is essential to survival even in the pre-conscious organism. He remarks that higher-order consciousness is capable of making decisions against its own survival for the sake of another person or a principle. Such value decisions are not inborn, but "created by mappings that take place after the phenomenal transform" (p. 128). Both Sartre and Edelman affirm our freedom to construct ethical systems by which we evaluate our own and others' behavior. Although Edelman at one point defends Freud's idea of repression as being advantageous to helping a person sustain self concepts, Barnes notes that his way of conceptualizing this may evoke echoes of Sartre's notion of bad faith. Sartre, as we know, accepted the facts of disguise and repression in Freud, as facts. Furthermore, Edelman does not see dreaming as unconscious but views the dream as the work of consciousness in a particular state, as Sartre does. Though there are differences, Barnes concludes that "overall Sartre's phenomenological descriptions of consciousness can accommodate and be sustained by the neurobiological foundation Edelman has given us" (129). She goes on, however, to question both Sartre and Edelman on one point. Both assume "the closed causality of the physical world." Consciousness does not directly affect the physical world. Barnes agrees that the body is the intermediary. But, she asks, "why does the body do one thing rather than another if its acts are not caused by consciousness?" (p. 129). Although consciousness cannot act on the physical world without the body any more than it can perceive without the senses, it is an activity that has consequences. While Sartre's for-itself is a more inclusive term than consciousness, and implies embodiment, Barnes believes that it would be helpful if Sartre had spelled out a theory of action. Edelman, she complains, comes close to describing consciousness as a passive reflection of the underlying neural pathways. The phenomenal transform, he says, is not causal. Yet both writers see consciousness as a self-maker. I might add that for psychology the impact of consciousness on the body, as in reactions to trauma or psychosomatic symptoms, could also use a further understanding of the relationship between consciousness and matter. I think Hazel has raised the right question. Edelman, in his phone conversation with her, approved of the essay as a whole, but still maintained that consciousness is not causal. Hazel's reply is that while we

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may grant that "consciousness cannot exist and a fortiori cannot initiate action without the brain's dynamic core" (p. 131), in other words that it is embodied, this may not mean that its activity has no causal input. She thinks the question demands further exploration. So do I. Written just before the preceding essay, Barnes' final published essay will appear in the Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry later this year. Entitled "Taking a Chance on Chance: A Sartrean Perspective," it forms a pair with the essay on Edelman and Sartre. Hazel has taken off in a new direction. She is interested in both scientific theories of chance and evolutionary theory as they relate to Sartre. I will not attempt to preempt this article by paraphrasing it, but I cannot help noting that in rereading it I felt some eerie connections with the last year of her life, which I shall discuss at the end of this essay. Basically, her conclusion is that without chance, in a determined universe, freedom would be impossible. Chance in French has the same double meaning that it has in English: It is both the unexpected and unpredictable incident that happens without reason and derails our plans, and it is an opportunity. For Aristotle, chance is the unintended intersection of separate lines of causation, as in the example of a traffic accident or one's own birth. Being born, Barnes comments, is "a miracle of chance." Sartre says that freedom and the situation are two sides of the same coin. Chance is both opportunity and restraint - and without restraint freedom has no meaning. It is we who decide the meaning. This keeps us from making excuses or assuming a "victim psychology." This does not mean that one should not protest against injustice, but rather that we if we are free we must always act without guarantees. On the negative side, Barnes notes, it is because of chance that Sartre rejects Heidegger's idea that we "live our death." The other, Barnes quotes Sartre as saying, "lives my death and determines the meaning of 'my dead life'." We cannot plan our death. It is a matter of chance, and chance "removes from it any character as a harmonious end" (quote from Being and Nothingness, pp. 536-37). Although chance is a possible threat to the hoped-for result of any free choice I make, this does not mean that its outcome has been determined. Chance is not destiny. Instead it is the "necessary condition for freedom." The positive and negative aspects of chance are interdependent. Though chance may cut off my life completely or radically distort the results that I intended, chance also offers opportunities. As Barnes says, "Chance does not threaten freedom; freedom requires it." We must grasp it as the occasion to create meaning. We must transform the "offerings of chance into chances [opportunities]." Perhaps the ill luck that occurs will turn out, as Beauvoir often seems to view it in her autobiography, as what Hazel says she and a friend often refer to as "obligatory benefits - unwelcome happenings we wished had not occurred but which later proved beneficial." The friend was her partner, Doris Schwalbe, with whom she often shared

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these reflections. Of course, Hazel is not saying that a positive outcome always or even most often turns out to be the case, but she is saying that whatever happens, it is we who choose the meaning and what we will make of it. Obviously, all this has many implications for existential psychology. Psychopathology from such a perspective is perhaps most simply defined as the attempt to escape from our freedom in situation - the refusal to "take a chance on chance." Hazel Barnes was actually always interested in the psychological implications of existentialism. She read with pleasure the work of existential psychologists, including J.H Van Den Berg, R.D. Laing, Irvin Yalom, M. Guy Thompson, Ernesto Spinelli and myself. The public television series with which she introduced the American public to existentialism in 1962 was entitled "Self-Encounter: A Study in Humanistic Existentialism." The psychological as well as the ethical implications of the title are obvious. Long thought to have been lost, this series of ten thirty-minute programs has recently been recovered from the Library of Congress by Erik Sween and Jeffrey Ward Larsen. Jeff, who is writing his dissertation in intellectual history at the University of Colorado with this public television series at the centre, began interviewing Hazel last spring about these tapes as she watched them with us at her home in Boulder and at the cabin she and Doris owned in the mountains. She is as brilliant as ever, perhaps even more so, on the video and audiotapes from these sessions. At some point, the tapes from the TV series should once again be made available to the public. Jeff plans to archive them with the later interviews and Hazel's papers at the University of Colorado. Perhaps he will also at some point provide a videotaped intellectual history of Hazel's contributions to existentialism. Jeff Larsen is the last of a long line of students and colleagues who have gratefully worked with Hazel Barnes on existential topics. On the human side of things, besides being a generous, kind, and engaging friend, Hazel continually challenged her students and colleagues to go beyond any limiting ideas we may have had of ourselves and our life possibilities. She believed in us when we had our own doubts. Her colleague Jim Palmer, at her memorial, told the story about how he was almost dismissed from his job in the humanities department at the University of Colorado because of an unfinished dissertation. Hazel promised the university he would finish it by spring. Despite having only a poorly taped together first draft of the manuscript, he managed to complete it because he "couldn't make a liar of the one person who was the soul of integrity." Many of us have felt similarly inspired by her confidence in us and mortified at the thought of disappointing her. I first heard Hazel Barnes lecture when I came to the University of Colorado as a graduate student in 1966. I startled the friend who attended the lecture with me by saying, "I want to be Hazel Barnes." I was 23. Of

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course, I did not achieve that illustrious ambition - no one could come even close. But I think it speaks to the inspiration she provided for so many of us. Hazel was always demanding of quality work in her students and the scholars whose work she reviewed. She would not accede to anything she did not consider up to par, but she was open to possibilities. I remember my own trepidation in asking her to be on my dissertation committee in literature at the University of Colorado. I had a plan for using some of Sartre's ideas to discuss the plays of George Bernard Shaw. Hazel looked puzzled and said, "Well, I guess you could compare anything to anything." Regaining my composure with some difficulty, I said, "Well, if I do it, will you read it?" She said she would and she did, and somehow she found it acceptable. Over time we became close friends. She later confessed her concern at the time that what I was about to write would be utter nonsense. After switching fields, I dedicated my book on Sartre and Psychoanalysis (1991) to her. It probably would not have been written, and it certainly would have been less precise, without her exacting influence. She read it from start to finish, made many helpful suggestions and even spot checked the French translation with me. When, as the book neared completion, I decided that I absolutely must write three more chapters, she and Doris practically wrenched it from my hands and insisted that I send it to the publisher. Many other Sartre scholars attest to the encouraging letters and the enlightening conversations they have had with Hazel Barnes about their work. Thomas R. Flynn, who is himself a fine Sartre scholar, told the North American Sartre Society at the April meeting just after her death in March of this year about his first encounter with Hazel. Tom met Hazel when he was a young lecturer at Carroll College in Montana interested in existentialism. He came to Denver to hear her deliver a major address at a professional conference in 1963. The talk, he says, "was informed, insightful and delivered with the grace that I learned to expect of her oral presentations." Most memorable, however, was her kind welcome "…to a young teacher posing so many questions as if I were the only one in attendance that day." He soon learned that this was how she treated everyone: "She had just earned a fan for life." Tom later became close friends with Hazel and Doris, visiting them in Boulder and at professional conferences as well as traveling around France with them visiting "Flaubert country." It was during this time that Hazel had the memorable visit with Simone de Beauvoir described in her autobiography. Hazel Barnes was a brilliant lecturer as well as a teacher who engaged deeply with her students. Our mutual friend and her former student Marcus Edward tells the story of how she arrived at one class years ago to discover that she had forgotten her notes. She then proceeded to give a flawless lecture without them, only to discover at the end that she had had them with her all along. At her memorial, one speaker noted that contemporary

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students who object to lecture classes simply have not heard the caliber of lectures consistently delivered by Hazel Barnes. Jeff Larsen was surprised to discover that her talks for the "Self-Encounter" series were made entirely without teleprompts or notes. Her flawless engagement with her audience and the material is totally obvious. Hazel herself, despite her great knowledge and eloquence, was certainly never pompous or overconfident. She was even humble and sometimes concerned about the value of her own work. She was even more demanding of herself than of her students. I remember traveling with her to the first meeting of the North American Sartre Society at the New School in New York where she gave the inaugural address in 1985. It took me a while, as we were having cocktails on the plane, to realize that she was serious when she wondered whether what she had to say would be of value to Sartre scholars. Of course, the lecture was brilliant and enthusiastically received. Three hours before she died, in that kind of twilight reverie that people sometimes fall into as they near death, Hazel said to my husband Reed Lindberg, who had become her good friend, "My words were good." Then she apparently questioned this, "Were my words good?" Reed reassured her that they were indeed more than good, they were excellent. She smiled and seemed satisfied. Like Sartre, Hazel often "thought against herself" (Sartre meant that he kept himself open by continually calling into question his previous ideas and life choices). It kept her on her toes and intellectually honest, as well as open to new ideas and approaches -- and new people. At her memorial, among her newer close friends was an Egyptian opera singer and doctoral student who was fifty years her junior. Ashraf Sewailam, touched by Hazel and loving her as we all did, sang Brahms' "Wenn ich mit Menschen (Four Serious Songs)" in her honor. The words are from First Corinthians 13:1, translated in part, "Faith, hope and love abide, these three; but the greatest of them is love." Though Hazel explicitly directed that no religious services be held in her honor, I think this was all right, considering how much she loved and was loved by her friends -- and, of course, it was appropriately sung by someone outside the western Christian tradition. Hazel's closest friends were an interdisciplinary and international group, including Americans from all parts of the country, two Egyptians, a Greek, two Germans, and a defector from the Hungarian Olympics gymnastics team. They included writers, musicians, entertainers, psychologists, physicians, business people and administrators, and, of course, philosophers and classicists as well as a former existential psychology student turned international investment banker and a classicist turned llama breeder. One of her friends, Dr. Niles Utlaut, watched over and advised her on medical and other matters during the last year of her life. The memorial itself, held at the University of Colorado on April 12, consisted of tributes by friends and colleagues orchestrated by her friends, Bill Mooney and

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Valorie Goodall. It concluded with Jeff Larsen and Erik Sween's videotape consisting of still shots and film clips from her life and work. Toward the end, there is a recent frame in which she impishly asks, "Haven't I said enough?" The answer, for those of us who knew her as well as for the world of existential philosophy and psychology, will always be, "No." Hazel Barnes continued to think in new paths despite advancing age and even up until her death. She never, as she feared she might in her autobiography, "outlived" herself. This is evidenced by her last two articles on existential psychology, as well as the interesting and thought-provoking conversations she had with many friends and her videotaped interviews with Jeff Larsen. It is also clear in a fictional piece written for her ninetieth birthday celebration and performed by her actor friend, Bill Mooney. It was later published in Amphora (2006). Entitled "Whatever Happened in Thessaly? A Postmodern Fantasy," it is a delightful postscript to Euripides' play, Alcestis. Fifty friends were invited and attended, along with her brother Paul Barnes who had flown in from Massachusetts. The celebration was videotaped. Hazel had long thought of writing a novel. Though she never got around to doing so, this piece suggests that she certainly could have. Her story is based on speculation about what happens when Alcestis, who has agreed to die in the place of her husband Admetus and is rescued by Heracles (Hercules) at the end of Euripides' play, breaks the three-day silence imposed by the gods as a condition for her release. The modern frame for Hazel's narrative is Greece in 1948 just after the second world. Hazel herself was teaching in Athens during the time chosen for the narrative, an adventure she remembers fondly in her autobiography. The narrator of the story is spending Easter at her friend Stella's home in Larissa and has gone for a picnic with Stella and her aunt Clio in the countryside. The countryside where the three friends in the frame story have their picnic is just outside the city of Pherae on the road to Larissa, where Alcestis' tomb is supposed to be. They discuss what happened after Alcestis broke the three-day silence. In their version, Alcestis has some second thoughts about the whole thing and especially about Admetus' willingness to sacrifice her. Hazel's sequel to Eurpides' play is narrated by Clio, who insists that it is based on legends passed down from ancient times. Clio tells the story that she remembers her grandmother telling her - the way she herself has often imagined it. In her version, Admetus will eventually get what he deserves. Clio's tale follows. Alcestis wakes to find the god Hermes offering her two vials that are presents from Persephone. One is a deadly poison sealed in black. The other is an elixir that allows a person to live forever. He tells her that Persephone wants her to have the two vials. The story of Alcestis' return to Admetus is told with ironic wit. Overjoyed to be alive, she comes gradually to see her husband through different eyes. Admetus is a comic

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prototype of bad faith, much like some of Sartre's characters in his retelling of ancient Greek myths. But there is more lightness to Hazel's touch. What is not light, though certainly ironic, are the implications of what happens to the vials. Some time later Admetus, wounded by a hunting accident and declining into invalidism, begs Alcestis for the vial of poison, of which she has told him. She gives him instead the other vial, which she has not told him about, presumably reserving for herself the poison in case her life should decline further to the point where she needs it. She then smashes the empty vial to the ground. The narration stops here. In the Epilogue, the narrator, Stella and Stella's brother go to an old taverna in the town where they meet an old man everyone calls simply "The Ancient." He rises from seeming incapacity to dance an incredibly complex dance, then returns to his seat with a hopping motion. The narrator asks in Greek, "What is your name? Is it Admetus?" He croaks out a reply, which sounds something like Aristophanes' frogs: "Brekekekex." Although Hazel Barnes' mind did not decline in extreme old age, her body, like that of Admetus, was eventually not as resilient. Her bones were apparently brittle. After publishing her autobiography in 1997, she had some years unencumbered by physical difficulties. She continued to write, and she and Doris and their friends Hal and Haroula Evjen traveled the world extensively together. She and Doris even attended a philosophy conference in Iran at the invitation of the minister of culture in 1999. Hazel apparently delivered a brilliant lecture on Sartre and was interviewed by an Iranian women's magazine. She learned Spanish in her mid eighties, a goal she said, in her autobiography, she probably would not meet. She was easily reading Isabelle Allende and other novelists in Spanish before she was done. Hazel suffered her first fall, in which she broke her femur, at the mountain cabin she shared with Doris two weeks after her ninetieth birthday celebration. It was fortunately held early on November 11, 2005, rather than on her actual birthday of December 16, so that more of her friends could attend. The face of the invitation is an artistic rendition of Sisyphus pushing the stone up the hill entitled "Sisyphus, Still at It." Though distressed, Hazel fully recovered from the fall. This was followed by a broken wrist, after which she announced that she would not put up with a series of broken bones leading to physical helplessness and dependency. Nonetheless she continued to enjoy life. Doris died after a brief bout with cancer on July 8, 2007. Hazel and Hazel’s niece, Gale Barber, were with Doris in hospice when she died. Though Hazel missed her, she continued to enjoy a vigorous social calendar, including lunches, dinners, opera and other cultural events. Her habit of voraciously reading books on a variety of topics continued as well. She was following the American political primaries with gusto. She was well into the project of interviews with Jeff Larsen regarding her influence on American

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existentialism together with sorting her papers with him for the University of Colorado archives. She continued to read and review articles and book chapters that various people sent her. Then on November 7, 2007, Hazel broke her hip. Her friends feared the worst. We knew her written and verbal declarations about the right to "self-deliverance" (an interesting term from the right to die movement that she uses both in her autobiography and in the Alcestis narrative) under conditions where life seems too diminished or likely soon to become too diminished to be worth living. Hazel, we knew, was a member of the Hemlock Society. When she got out of the hospital, she refused the offers of friends to convalesce at their homes and hired a helper service. It seems that most of her helpers became absolutely devoted to her. They reported many conversations that both interested and inspired them. Friends visited frequently, and she continued reading, conversing and allowing herself to be interviewed for Jeff's dissertation. She had progressed to using a walker when, on December 19, three days after a festive ninety-second birthday dinner at our house, she left a suicide note and took thirty sleeping pills. Apparently the note had been written just prior to her birthday and made it apparent why she had a policy of absolutely no presents - though she accepted cards. The note explained that while she was not unhappy and realized that she had much for which to be grateful, she felt that the time had come to take action while she could still do so. It is obvious from the pictures fortunately taken at the party that Hazel was happy. Why then would she do this? I think the answer lies in the chapter on old age in her autobiography. I imagine that Hazel herself would approve of this discussion, as it demonstrates putting into practice her avowed intentions and values. It brings up an important issue, one that Hazel herself approaches head-on in her autobiography and elsewhere. After she woke up from a thirty-six hour undisturbed sleep and several days of disorientation in which friends watched over her, she first asked, "Why am I still here?" After we assured her we had not intervened and told her what had happened, she had me type up - and she herself gave to family and friends - the explanation in her suicide note. There she says in part that "…upon a realistic appraisal of my present condition, and after assessing the possibilities and the overwhelming probabilities of what is to come, I cannot imagine a future that is not too diminished and bleak for me to be willing to accept it." She says that she wishes to "act before I am no longer able to choose freely and with full control." What she does not say, but discusses in the autobiography, is that this would be unnecessary if our legal system did not make assisted suicide under previously designated conditions illegal. Psychologists have long regarded suicide as an irrational decision made in a state of depression, one for which most states in the United States require mandatory intervention

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on the part of mental health professionals. It is probably time to consider the possibility that suicide can be, as Hazel says in her autobiography, a free choice that is sometimes, like abortion, not a happy decision but preferable to its alternatives. Hazel would not, of course, prescribe this choice for everyone faced with a debilitating condition. Doris, for example, always said that she would prefer to live out whatever happened. She did. But Hazel never wanted to live in a state of helplessness or incapacity. I agree with her that she and others deserve to have legal sanction for this choice. The irony is that what Hazel might have wished, had she had the liberty to choose assisted suicide, is essentially what happened. She lived for three months after her attempt, visiting with friends, going out to lunch and dinner, having afternoon cocktails, attending social and cultural events, and watching movies and reading, all in full possession of her faculties. I think she appreciated and enjoyed these events, though she did not like the specter of helplessness that haunted her. Jeff continued his interviews and wrote a fifty-page thesis proposal that had her enthusiastic approval. The last week of her life, she read and made some insightful suggestions for a chapter I had written on Gestalt therapy and existential psychoanalysis. She also critiqued the beginning of the final version of Reed Lindberg’s comic novel loosely inspired by a spiritual community in which he had once participated. She had enjoyed the first version and expressed pleasure at the thought that he would finish it. All of us cherished the extra time with her. She cut back on the time her helpers spent with her up until the last few days. She was active and interested in life. She assured us she would not put us through another suicide attempt, though she did stop taking her heart medication. Although she fell twice during her last week, she fortunately did not break another bone or let her increasing weakness due to a heart that was failing stop her from going out or visiting with friends at home. Yet she clear-sightedly saw what was happening, saying to me one day close to her death, "It's perfectly obvious that I'm dying." On the Sunday before she died on a Tuesday evening, she spent an evening with friends, partially dozing but waking to interject remarks that let us know she was present.

She even had us collapsed with laughter at times. For example, when someone said, "Maybe it's time to open another bottle of wine," she interjected, "Maybe it's time for me to wake up." Then on Monday morning she entered a kind of twilight sleep punctuated by moments of remarkable clarity. She died sleeping peacefully in her own bed just after friends had left for the evening on March 18, 2008. Her favorite helper called us just as we got home at 10:45 to say, "She didn't wake up at all. She just slowly stopped breathing." We returned to take care of things and to say our farewells.

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Other friends arrived in the morning and many visited during the day. We spent the time reminiscing about Hazel, laughing and crying, and feeling her loss as we waited for the funeral home to take her body away for cremation at 4:00 in the afternoon. Later we were amused to learn that we had perhaps held an atheistic existentialist version of what the Irish Catholics would call a "wake." Her memorial at the University of Colorado on April 12 was followed the next day by about twenty of her closest friends and her brother and niece going to the mountains to scatter her ashes by the cabin in the same location where she and friends had earlier scattered Doris's ashes. This was her request. I'm sure she would have enjoyed the potluck where we reminisced about her afterward. Probably Hazel would have chosen this ending had she been assured that others could have assisted her with suicide if she lapsed into a vegetative state or became mentally or physically debilitated. It was only chance that she did not. I am not, however, saying that Hazel was or might have been a victim in coming up against the limitations of the current legal system. Just as the existentialist idea that freedom is inherent even in the most limiting conditions does not justify social injustice, so social injustice does not annihilate freedom. As Hazel says in Humanistic Existentialism, "…we have seen that freedom can exist only where there is a choice, and choice demands a limiting facticity. Man's factual condition, his mortal body, his position in time and place - these do not prevent freedom; they are the stuff of which it makes itself" (p. 365). I think Hazel would have chosen waiting to commit assisted suicide in the face of debilitation or helplessness if this option had been open to her. It was not. She accepted her freedom in the midst of the current legal situation and chose to end her own life while it was still possible to do so. The attempt failed. A friend who had been out of town during this time returned to hear us asking her with much apparent concern in our voices how she was feeling. He looked puzzled and asked, "Have you been ill, Hazel?" Handing him a copy of her suicide note, she responded with an ironic remark that ended our uneasy silence, "There's nothing more shameful than a botched suicide. Here, read this." Perhaps the additional time her friends had with Hazel after her suicide attempt falls within the purview of those "obligatory benefits" that she and Doris used to discuss. Certainly the conversations we had, the time to express love and gratitude, the pleasures we shared together were "goods." Hazel herself often said following a lunch or dinner or movie watched at home during this time, "We had fun, didn't we?" Yes, we did. This does not, of course, excuse inhumane laws that forbid people from making personal choices about how to end their lives. It does show the part that "chance" plays in it all. What is important, as Hazel says in her final forthcoming essay, is the possibilities we may snatch from the chance occurrences of our lives. We are always responsible for what we make of

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Betty Cannon

the givens of our existence. I am grateful for what we made of those last three months. The thought has occurred to me that I should be able to continue my on-going conversations with Hazel Barnes in my head since they have gone on for over forty years. Alas, I realize this will not be possible. Hazel was always so present, so brilliant, so delightfully original and so able to "swing free" (to use a metaphor she introduces at the end of her autobiography) in her views that she is impossible to replicate. I only hope that what I have said here will give readers unfamiliar with her work or person a glimpse of who she was. As she said in her suicide note, "It is time now for others to decide on the meaning 'of my dead life,'" repeating the quote from Sartre in the essay on chance. These are harsh though realistic words for a responsibility that I take on in this essay with some concern. What I have presented here is of course only a snapshot of my version of the meaning of Hazel's life and work. Her autobiography and other writings should fill this out for interested readers. Several things seem certain: She had courage and passion for life, a talent for friendship and a genius for making difficult ideas accessible in writing and in conversation. She will be deeply missed.

Betty Cannon, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist practicing in Boulder, Colorado. She is an emerita professor of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines, senior adjunct faculty at Naropa University, and president and co-director of the Boulder Psychotherapy Institute. The Institute trains mental health professionals in an existential psycho-dynamically oriented version of Gestalt therapy. She is the author of numerous book chapters, articles and a book on existentialist therapy, Sartre and Psychoanalysis. She is a member of the editorial boards of three professional journals, including Existential Analysis. She is Hazel E. Barnes' literary executor. She plans to co-edit with Jeff Larsen a collection of Hazel Barnes' essays on existentialism. She can be reached at be t ty.cannon@boulderpsych .com or found on the web a t www.boulderpsych.com.


Notes Actually, since Hazel wrote her article, more existentialist considerations 1

of the implications of neuroscience have come out. Hazel herself notes at the end of her article that Edelman had suggested she get in touch with Nancy Holland, who sent Hazel three unpublished papers she had written relating Edelman's theories to the positions of Merleau-Ponty. Interestingly, one of the original researchers in the 1990's on "mirror neurons," Giacomo Rizzolati, was interested in the phenomenology of Merleau Ponty. Marco Iacoboni (2008) calls this research on mirror neurons a "new existentialism" and is very interested in the parallels with Merleau-Ponty and others. Kathleen Wider (2007), in an excellent article in Sartre Studies International, relates some of this neurobiological research on mirror neurons to Sartre. Nonetheless, it remains true that Hazel was one of the earliest people to catch the implications of the new neuroscience research for existentialist inquiries.

References Books Barnes, Hazel E. The Literature of Possibility: A Study in Humanistic

Existentialism. University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1959. Reprinted as Humanistic Existentialism, Bison paperback edition, 1962, with a new "Afterward." (Quotations are from Humanistic Existentialism.)

Barnes, Hazel E. An Existentialist Ethics. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1967. Reprinted with a new preface by University of Chicago Press, 1978.

Barnes, Hazel E. Sartre. J.P. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and New York, 1973.

Barnes, Hazel E. Sartre and Flaubert. University of Chicago Press, 1981. Barnes, Hazel E. The Story I Tell Myself: A Venture in Existentialist

Autobiography. University of Chicago Press, 1997. Cannon, Betty. Sartre and Psychoanalysis: An Existentialist Challenge to

Clinical Metatheory. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991 (French translation by Laurant Bury, Presses Universitaires de France, 1993).

Iacoboni, Marco. Mirroring People: The New Science of How We Connect with Others. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existential Psychoanalysis, a selection from Being and Nothingness, trans. with an introduction by Hazel E. Barnes.

Documents

Hazel E. Barnes 1915-2008: A Farewell to America's Foremost Sartre Scholar