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.