Author: ericdaeuber@daeuber.com

The question of why the asshole always gets all the women has puzzled philosopher for a long time. I imagine they have a bit of a personal stake in the game. It could be that some woman somewhere once said, “Damn, that philosopher is really hot,” but verifiable accounts of that sort of thing are hard to find.  Friedrich Nietzsche gave some thought to this problem, and it may have been because he was a bitter guy about whom no woman ever claimed such a thing. He had an incredible mustache, to be sure, but I don’t think it was enough. He proposed to Louise von Salomé three times, and she said no all three times. That had to sting a bit. Louise was a Russian psychoanalyst and a friend of Sigmund Freud so I think Nietzsche dodged a bullet there, but I’m sure he didn’t see it that way. Some say the reason he went a bit barmy in his last year and a half of his life was that he threw his arms around a horse’s neck in a tender and passionate appeal to its owner to stop beating it, the kind of sensitive act you’d think would drive women crazy. It didn’t.

Nietzsche said that we all feel a tension between the Apollonian side of things and the Dionysian side of things. Apollo is all about order, harmony and sobriety while Dionysus is all about chaos, passion and intoxication. In stories, and in life, presumably, heroes are Apollonian, always trying to return the plot back to some predictable course where girls are girls and men are men. Villains, on the other hand, are Dionysian, always trying to upend this relatively sane trajectory and leave us sitting in the alleyway behind the bar scratching our heads and wondering if we said anything stupid.

Hot guys have more of the later. The fellow on the riding lawnmower listening to Chopin on a pair of Bose he got at Sam’s club while picking up a rotisserie chicken for supper has more of the former.

The big question is, why don’t women prefer chicken, nice lawns and piano music over drunk guys in sleeveless tees? Well, first, they don’t always. Something in them still wants Apollo, which is why the hot guy is hotter still if he has a puppy. But, that said, they still won’t go for the nice lawn or, if they do, they still don’t have much respect for the guy who mowed it.

The problem lies with our 21^st century inability to grasp nuance. Here’s what Nietzsche wrote in 1872. “To reach a closer understanding of both these tendencies (Apollo and Dionysus), let us begin by viewing them as the separate art realms of dream and intoxication, two physiological phenomena standing toward one another in much the same relationship as the Apollonian and Dionysian..”  In 1972 ZZ Top wrote, “Beer drinkers, hell raisers, yeah. Well, baby, don’t you want to come with me?” It’s probably safe to say that Nietzsche didn’t have this in mind, even when he talked about intoxication. Intoxication is what happened when you listened to Wagner and let it do to you what it was intended to. As a side note, Nietzsche hit on Wagner’s wife, too. Still no luck.

Here’s the thing. Apollo and Dionysus were two faces of the same person with a lot of variations that show up in a lot of ways. At both ends were mythical characters. One was  stuck in utopian dream that would never come true. The other lived in a chaotic world of unbridled emotion. Neither really exists. Nietzsche was clear on this point. But we think they do. And we go looking for them.

So when we think of heroes, we think of Batman, Katniss Everdeen, and Rocky. When we think of antiheroes we think of the Joker, Mad Max and Mitch St. John. There is nothing in between, and, because there is nothing in between, Apollo and Dionysus get mixed up in our heads. Our heroes and our antiheroes are the same people. Is the meth-cooking chemistry teacher of Breaking Bad someone to admire or to despise? We don’t really know. The result? In order to have any identity at all, we abandon the struggle to manage the two and, instead, try to be both at the same time or, perhaps, entirely one or the other at one time or another. That’s impossible, at least in Nietzsche’s model, because this is a hypothetical construct meant to explain complicated people and the tension they feel between the wild side and the safe side. They don’t really exist. But somehow, we really think there are bad boys. Given that the chicken-buying-Chopin-listening lawn mower is the only alternative to the really bad ass bad boy, pathetic that he is, many think it’s best to opt for Dionysus.  This is why teenage boys ride Ninjas and middle aged golfers wear short pants and drink too much. They really think they can get to anti-hero status by doing these things.

You can’t. So better to go home after a solid days work during which we put back at least as much as we’ve taken out of the world, listen to Wagner, cut loose with a glass of wine, and feel something honest and human.

Towards the bottom of any list of cheerful Russian novels, you will find Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov in which Dmitri is arresting for killing his father Fyodor in order to get the money he needs to pay back his lover Katerina so he can run off with Grushenka who has since run off with Kalganov while Dmitiri’s brother Alyosha is visiting Ilusha after visiting Father Zossima on his deathbed and after Smerdyakov tells Ivan, Dmitiri’s other brother, that he is afraid Dmitiri might murder Fyodor who everybody thinks is the father of the epileptic servant Smerdyakov who hangs himself during Dmitiri’s trial. And Kolya gives Ilusha a dog.

In the middle of this, Dostoyevsky pens a parable about freedom which has become a staple of existential thinking even before there was existentialism. In it, Jesus returns to the 17^th century in Seville where the Spanish Inquisition arrests him and finds him guilty of being himself. The Grand Inquisitor is a fairly insightful fellow and he also has a nack for getting to the point pretty quickly. Given that they are going to burn Jesus at the stake as soon as it gets light enough to see through the eye holes of his pointy hood, he gets to the point right away. Jesus made a lot of mistakes, he says, and the biggest one was to not take Satan up on at least one of his three offers designed to set Jesus and his followers up for life: turning stones to bread, impressing the crowd by tossing himself off the temple and not hitting the ground, and play second fiddle to the devil himself, for just a minute or two mind you, in exchange for the opportunity to run the whole earthly show by himself. This would mean that Jesus’ followers would always have enough to eat and always have a leader who was both charming and smart.

The cost for this Shangri-La? Freedom. If Jesus had just agreed, they would have given up their freedom but gained a boatload of happiness. By turning this package down, Jesus doomed people to think for themselves, make their own decisions and generally sleep in their own beds. And that, says the Grand Inquisitor, means that they can never be happy. The church, on the other hand, really cares about people and set things up so they could, in fact, be happy.

““For only now has it become possible to us, for the first time, to give a serious thought to human happiness. Man is born a rebel, and can rebels be ever happy?”  The implication is, no, they can’t. Rebels always sit in the corner with their backs to the wall because they can never be sure that they didn’t piss off the guys in charge. But if someone is told exactly what to think, and thinks it, and if their friends are all on board and are quick to tell them what a wonderfully good person he or she is, then it’s easy to be happy.

But not so easy to be free.

Of course, no one likes to think she or he gave  in to the Man. So there is always a symbolic effort to exert one’s independence. Ride to Live. Rage against the machine. You’re not the boss of me. Dostoyevsky anticipated this and the Grand Inquisitor admits that there will be times when the plucky among us don our denim jacket with the anarchy symbol on the back and flip off the powers that be. Here’s what he says about that:

“Man is weak and cowardly. What matters it, if he now riots and rebels throughout the world against our will and power, and prides himself upon that rebellion? It is but the petty pride and vanity of a school-boy. It is the rioting of little children.”

But the guy who really stands his ground, makes his choices and lives with the fallout, knows the next critical decision will define him for now and forever and doesn’t pass the buck and keep the change – he’s free.

I don’t imagine he has many friends, but he knows who the guy in the mirror really is. And he has only himself to thank or blame for that.

Perhaps the guy who brought existentialism its fullest expression, and the only one who accepted the name “existentialist,” was Jean Paul Sartre. He was rather struck by the fact that nothing much in the world makes any real sense. Life is not only hard to understand, it’s un-understandable. Absurd, was the way he put it. And living in a world that you finally realize is this ridiculous means that nothing means anything.

Sartre probably figured this out after a long life of trying unsuccessfully, to figure it out. He started this search while he was in a POW camp during World War II where he read (wait for it) Heidegger who was a big fan of the very politics that put Sartre in the prison camp to begin with. After that, he went on a political binge supporting and condemning this or that political ism by pointing out the benefits and atrocities associated with them. The upshot of all this is that any organized effort to address the rotten things that happen to people, or the really good things for that matter, seem to have such mixed success as to make one wonder if the effort had anything to do with the outcome.

So if life has no meaning, you can either give up, or you can make it meaningful by accepting what you do as a reflection of what it means to be, well, you. Who you are is little more than the sum total of your choices. If you make these choices recognizing that you are absolutely free to make any choice you want, and you are ultimately responsible for the outcome of every single choice, then you are on your way to being authentic. If you make these choices with genuine angst, knowing that you can’t be sure if the gun will go off when you pull the trigger because, well, life doesn’t make any sense, and you still accept responsibility for the outcome of your choices, then you are being authentic. If you can say you had no choice, you were following orders, you did what you thought was right, or someone else expected you to do it, then you are acting inauthenticly. You are acting in bad faith because you don’t intend to take responsibility for your choices anyway.

If you act in good faith, though, you are doing so from a place in which you know, for a fact, that you always have a choice. There’s almost nothing else you can be sure of, is there? You can’t control what made the choice necessary and you can’t control the outcome of your choice. The only thing you can control is the choice itself. It’s the only thing this is truly and uniquely yours. This realization comes at very specific times in your life. Since the industrial revolution anyway, we generally find ourselves living a rather rote, mundane and mechanized life. We all get so used to this that it surprises when this mechanized life fails. I lose my job or my wife leaves me or I get terribly sick with an awful disease that turns my feet to lead so I can never be on Dancing with the Stars. If I had always trusted that my mechanized life of work, wife and dancing would get me through and I hasn’t, what do I do? I can do one of three things. I can re-mechanize, pull myself together, and get on with a new, mechanized life that involves the kinds of rote, mundane and mechanized activities I can do with heavy feet. This is what most people think is a really good idea. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. Of course, this will fail again, but I can keep on re-mechanizing until I die. Sartre says this is a bad idea because it will eventualy wear you down. All you end up with is a long list of failures and gallons of lemonade. Secondly, I can commit suicide because life didn’t have any meaning in the first place and it’s clearly not getting any better. This is a bad idea too, because it doesn’t solve anything. Life is still meaningless and all you have done is another meaningless act so you are now part of the problem rather than the solution, and you’re dead to boot.

Sartre suggests the third alternative might be the best choice. Recognize the absurdity of it all and start making deliberate, honest, choices that shamelessly announce to the world who you are and accept what those choices say about you. You can’t deceive yourself 100% of the time. Eventually even you will see through your bogus excuses for inauthenticity. Even you can see that you are condemned to be free, to make your own decisions and to live with the outcome. Why? Because not choosing is the same as choosing. You can deny this if you like and pretend that not making a choice gets you off the hook for the consequences. And it seems to work because no one cares if you renege on your responsibilities to actually do something. They’re not doing anything either and, frankly, they don’t think about you that much anyway. But, in the end, not making a choice to do something means nothing gets done and knowing you haven’t done anything wrong as a result of doing nothing is just plain stupid.

If you want to mean something, then you have to see the connection between the choices you make and who you are. Who are you? You are the kind of guy that makes those kinds of choices. It’s not complicated.

But here is where things can go wrong. Exactly what are you supposed to do? Sartre, and most existentialists, are not very good at telling people how to behave because it violates the only real principle of existentialism – you are ultimately and completely free. And if I even hinted at what you should do, you wouldn’t be free, would you? So most existentialist say that ethics is a matter of valuing someone else’s freedom. Admittedly, that’s not much help. But there is one thing you most certainly shouldn’t do. You shouldn’t call yourself a Feminist or a Communist or a Republican or anything of that nature. Why not? Because you’d be buying a package that you didn’t decide on. And that’s just like re-mechanizing your life. Being a Democrat isn’t that much different from Dancing With the Stars – at least not on that front.

Perhaps the first real existentialist was Søren Kierkegaard who was quite a bit ahead of his time when it came to seeing the kind of mental chaos that made existentialism a better explanation for the bedlam we call human existence than a lot of other philosophies. He said, “Yes… ok… truth is subjective. Everyone has his or her own truth. You all want to believe this because it means you don’t actually have to talk to anyone who disagrees with you. That’s messy and nobody can afford to lose a drinking buddy over something as trivial as how people should treat one another. So have it your way. But…” That’s not really what he said, of course, but it’s close to what he would have said if he lived in the same self-centered universe we live in today. But there is a flip side. If you want your own truth, you are responsible for acting on it. And this doesn’t happen based on a simply evaluation of how you want to act at any given time. It assumes a level of responsibility that we are not used to taking on in the 21^st century. Here’s how it works.

Because truth is subjective, and because I do not have a real essence when I first come to the realization that I exist, I am responsible for making something of myself. I become a project that converts my behaviors into a character who behaves in the way my previous actions indicate. I am a self, and I am made up of what I have done up until now.  I am responsible for the choices I have made, I am free to make any choices I want in the future, and I will be responsible for those once I have made them. When I look at a truth I subscribe to, one that is personally mine, and for which I accept full responsibility, I need to give serious thought to its place in the world. If I do this honestly, I will almost always find that it corresponds, to one extent or another, to the personal truths of a great many other people. In other words, I begin to see myself, not just as my own project, but as an object in the project of others who are putting themselves through the same self definition I am putting myself through. I can address this one of two ways. I can see myself in the third person – as a project of my own, making my own decisions in the company of others. Or, I can take on the other’s definition of me. If I make my own decisions, become who I am in my own project based on my own choices, and take my place in the project of others seriously, then I am being authentic. If I take on the role assigned to me by the others, then I lapse into boredom, anxiety and despair which are sure signs that I am not acting authentically.

Martin Heidegger took this a step further. He agreed that we are made up of our experiences but he rejected the idea of a subjective or an objective view of the world. We are not distinct from the world. Our experiences make up our place in it. People are not human beings that happen to rattled around in the world. We are “being there.” Our humanity consists of this journey to death and we can either be what “Das Man,” (The They, The One, The Nameless, Faceless Other Guy) tells us we are, or we can be authentic. If we are being authentic, we find ourselves engaged in the world, and we act instinctively toward others as a genuine self. We don’t have to prove it to anyone. We don’t have to say it out loud. We just do it. It’s not easy and it causes us quite a bit of angst, but we keep it up because people acting authentically know that Das Man can’t be trusted to get it right. Angst is the insecurity we feel when we know these engagements are governed by unpredictable rules. Still, we act and, in acting, both define ourselves and find a kind of humility.

In 1849, Fydor Dostoyevsky was arrested for Inciting against the Russian government because he read an essay by  Vissarion Belinsky. Had he known that it would not be on the test, he wouldn’t have bothered reading it, and so the trajectory of one of the greatest existential thinkers of all time would have been changed, not because of what Belinsky said, but because Dostoyevsky’s wouldn’t have been lined up in front of a firing squad to face the ultimate existential question. What happens now?

Dostoyevsky wasn’t shot. A minute before the firing squad was to pull the trigger, a horse rode into the jail yard and announced that the Czar had commuted the sentence. Instead of ending up with a bullet in the chest, Dostyevsky was sentenced to four years of hard labor in Siberia and then a few more in the Siberian regiment of the Russian army, something not considered a big improvement. Normally, you don’t get much of a hint as to what happens in the mind of someone staring at the business end of a bunch of emotional dullards pointing guns at you with less than 60 seconds to spare but, years later, he wrote a novel called the Idiot. In it, he describes a scene that fills in that blank for us.

“…But better if I tell you of another man I met last year…this man was led out along with others on to a scaffold and had his sentence of death by shooting read out to him, for political offenses…he was dying at 27, healthy and strong…he says that nothing was more terrible at that moment than the nagging thought: “What if I didn’t have to die!…I would turn every minute into an age, nothing would be wasted, every minute would be accounted for…”

Now, before one goes on to say that this is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect someone to think at a time like that, there is a difference between this and the modern, bucket-list approach to living each day to its fullest. Dostoyevsky wasn’t talking about visiting the pyramids and bungee jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. To him, the point isn’t that he could do more stuff if he lived. His point was that he would have to do more stuff if he lived. It wasn’t an option but an obligation. And the thing he would have to do was to made decisions. Decisions about things much more significant that, “where will I para-sail next?” And, with what he decided each time he asked the question, “What happens now?” he would add another brush stroke to the picture of who he was.

This is the heart of existentialism. Existence precedes essence. You are not born a person who then adds experiences to his or her personhood to become who you are today. You are not much of anything when you are born, at least not much of anything that can be called a person. All you’ve really got is your existence, and that’s not very much. And you don’t become the person you are based on the experiences you have. Everybody has experiences. Experiences are thing that happen to you. You become the person you are by the way you answer the very, very big questions that you don’t have the time or background to answer in the thoughtful, academic way that most of us like to answer big questions. Everyone knows that it’s better to be kind that to be mean. But when you least expect it, and the option to be kind seems so terribly remote, unnecessary, unnoticed and superfluous, the opportunity to do just that will present itself. Whether you are a kind or a mean person will be noticed as soon as the last decision-making neuron fires in your distracted head.