The tyrant’s sophism divides humanity into self-transcendence and others’ immanence

Evidence

The trick of tyrants is to enclose a man in the immanence of his facticity and to try to forget that man is always, as Heidegger puts it, “infinitely more than what he would be if he were reduced to being what he is;” man is a being of the distances, a movement toward the future, a project. The tyrant asserts himself as a transcendence; he considers others as pure immanences: he thus arrogates to himself the right to treat them like cattle. We see the sophism on which his conduct is based: of the ambiguous condition which is that of all men, he retains for himself the only aspect of a transcendence which is capable of justifying itself; for the others, the contingent and unjustified aspect of immanence. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 103

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the core diagnostic for identifying oppressive ‘serious’-style bad faith: the tyrant claims transcendence for himself while enclosing others in immanence.
• XREF: Crisp articulation of the bad-faith mechanism the reader is tracking across the typology: the tyrant is the extreme end of the serious man. — connects to: Beauvoir’s threefold ambiguity defines the human as immanent-transcendent, free-yet-unmade, and conflicted-with-yet-requiring the Other. — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 112; Asymmetries of knowledge and power divide humanity into tuners and the tuned — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1060