In the 1988 movie Beetlejuice, we meet a young couple (Geena Davis and Alec Baldwin) who have met an untimely death and find themselves involuntarily haunting their own home. They eventually discover that they have access to a kind of administrative center for the afterlife. As they enter the waiting room for the center, through a one-way turnstyle, we notice that a sign over the door says:
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NO EXIT |
This is an allusion to another story about the afterlife, a play by Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) called, indeed, No Exit (1944). The allusion is apt since neither version of the afterlife is very appealing. In Sartre's play, a man and two women find themselves trapped in a hotel room. They have been escorted into the room without knowing how or why they are even in the hotel or what they are supposed to be doing in the room together. Once they are in the room, however, they discover that they cannot get out and that all their efforts to summon help are fruitless. They also discover a rather unpleasant dynamic among themselves. The man is attracted to one of the women, but she happens to be a lesbian and is only attracted to the other woman. The other woman, however, is not a lesbian and is rather attracted to the man -- who, of course, does not find her attractive. Soon they realize that they have died and that this the afterlife, the wrong kind of afterlife. They are in hell, and the lesson of the play is nicely summed up as, "Hell is other people."
Now why is it that "hell is other people"? Well, Jean Paul Sartre was an Existentialist, this is an Existentialist play, and hell being other people is a consequence of Existentialist principles, as we shall see. Existentialism proper is a movement of the 40's and 50's, literary and artistic as well as philosophical, with Sartre himself as probably the most famous representative. Sartre is also a convenient representative because for a time he actually acknowledged being an Existentialist and offered a definition for the word. It was unusual for Existentialists to identify themselves as such, much less define what it was all about, so Sartre is a convenient place to begin.
What Sartre did was to contrast a divine viewpoint on the world and on human nature with a human viewpoint where there is no divine element. Thus, when God thought about creating the world, he conceived it first -- he had in mind what the world was going to be and what human nature was going to be. These were the "essences" of the world and of humanity, the things that will make them what they are. Then God created everything and gave existence to the essences. Thus, to God, "essence precedes existence." Now, Sartre did not believe in God, so there was no place for the essence of humanity to be before human existence. To us, existence comes first. The essence comes later. Indeed, the essence is whatever we decide it is going to be. So, from our point of view things are just the opposite of what they would be for people who believed in God. Now it is "existence precedes essence." Hence, "Existentialism."
The most important thing there for Sartre is not so much the distinction between essence and existence but the absence of God. For Existentialists like Sartre, the absence of God has a much larger significance than the metaphysics of creation: Without God there is no purpose, no value, and no meaning in the world. That is the foundational proposition for Existentialism. A world without purpose, value, or meaning is literally senseless, worthless, meaningless, empty, and hopeless. It is, to use a favorite Existentialist term, absurd.
To be without value and meaning is also to be without standards for behavior. A favorite quote in that respect is from Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), a novelist who himself was a Christian but who has characters that often display what later will seem to be Existentialist attitudes and ideas. One of those characters (in Crime and Punishment, 1866) says, "Without God, all is permitted." Indeed, if the loss of God means the loss of all meaning and value, then actions are without meaning or value either, and one cannot say that it matters whether actions are "right" or "wrong," since those words, or the corresponding actions, don't mean anything more than anything else.
Now, when Existentialism was popular, it struck many people as liberating and enjoyable to think of the world as absurd and behavior without limitations. But the real value of Existentialism as a philosophical thought experiment was to understand the true consequences of such a world. It would be a nightmare. An absurd world, and everything else in it, is actually empty and pointless. There is no reason to do anything, even to continue living. Thus, in Woody Allen's 1972 movie Play It Again Sam, in one scene he is trying to pick up a girl in a museum and asks her about the dark abstract painting that she is looking at. She answers with an Existentialist catalogue -- "void," "emptiness," "horror," etc. When he then asks her out, she answers, "I am committing suicide." That, indeed, would seem to be the obvious response to such a world.
The starkness and hopelessness of this problem is portrayed in an essay, "The Myth of Sisyphus" (1942), by another great French Existentialist, Albert Camus (1913-1960). In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, who had once deceived the gods and cheated death, was condemned for eternity to roll a stone up a hill. Every time he was about to complete his task, the stone would roll free back down to the bottom of the hill. Sisyphus would then have to start over again, even though the same thing would just happen again. Thus, the punishment of Sisyphus is a punishment just because it is an endless exercise in futility. Sisyphus is stuck in an eternally pointless task. Now, if the world and everything in it are also pointless, the lesson is that the task of Sisyphus is identical to every thing that we will ever be doing in life. We are no different from Sisyphus; and if his punishment makes the afterlife a hell for him, we are already living in that hell.
Presumably, Sisyphus is unable to escape his condition through suicide. So if we can, why not? Arguably, there is no reason why not. But suicide is not the typical Existentialist answer. What can Sisyphus do to make his life endurable? Well, he can just decide that it is meaningful. The value and purpose that objectively don't exist in the world can be restored by an act of will. Again, this is what has struck people as liberating about Existentialism. To live one's life, one must exercise the freedom to create a life. Just going along with conventional values and forgetting about the absurdity of the world is not authentic. Authenticity is to exercise one's free will and to choose the activities and goals that will be meaningful for one's self. With this approach, even Sisyphus can be engaged and satisfied with what he is doing.
Now we can answer the question why "hell is other people." If we live our lives just because of the completely free and autonomous decisions that we make, this creates nothing that is common with others. If we adopt something that comes from someone else, which could give us a common basis to make a connection with them, this is inauthentic. If it just happens, by chance, that our own decisions produce something that matches those of someone else, well then we have a connection, but it is likely to be volatile. As we make new decisions, the probability of our connection with others continuing is going to decline. We are isolated by our own autonomy. The values and decision of others, whether authentic or inauthentic, will be foreign and irritating.
This sense of estrangement from others is found in another classic of Existentialism, the novel The Stranger (1942), by Camus. Like many of Camus' stories, this one is set in Algeria. It is about a fellow whose mother dies but who can't stand sitting up at her wake. He leaves, and offends the community by his evident disrespect. Later, he kills a local Arab. This is not something that the French colonial judicial system would ordinarily take very seriously, but local French opinion is so unsympathetic with our "stranger," just because he left his mother's wake, that he is condemned for the killing of the Arab. The absurdity of all this is the point of the story. An Existentialist is always a stranger to others and is certainly going to have no patience with conventions like wakes for the dead or, for that matter, laws about murder.
The isolation produced by Existentialist value decisions also explains why few Existentialists are self-identified as such. Calling someone an "Existentialist" imposes an essence on them, telling them what they are. This violates their absolute autonomy and freedom and makes it sound like they actually have something important in common with some other people, other Existentialists. This is intolerable.
Sartre himself felt the moral loss involved in all this. Traditional ideas about moral responsibility disappeared when there was nothing meaningful to be responsible about. Sartre consequently tried to compensate for this by introducing a new, strengthened sense of responsibility. His view was that one is "responsible" for all the consequences of one's action, whether it is possible to know about them or not. He illustrated this in a short story about the Spanish Civil War. A young Republican partisan is captured by the Fascists. He is told that he will be executed unless he betrays some other Republicans who are considered more important. Not knowing, in fact, where they are, he makes up a story that they are hiding in a cemetary on the edge of town. He is then put in a cell. Later, the Fascists return and release him. What happened? Well, it turned out, just by chance, that the Republicans he pretended to betray actually were hiding in the cemetary, and were captured. So it's his fault.
Now, what is the point of this story? The man is, after a fashion, "responsible" for the capture, and probably execution, of the other Republicans; but the problem with this notion of responsibility is that one cannot govern or alter one's behavior on the basis of things that one cannot know about. You may be "responsible" for all the consequences of your actions, but if you don't know what they all are, then it really doesn't make any difference. This is why traditional morality and law have the category of "negligence," that one is responsible for things that one could know about but didn't bother to find out. Things that one cannot know about cannot impose any obligation.
The lesson of the story might be that one should never lie, or that even if it is OK to lie to the wicked, one should not make up stories that might be true and might make something bad happen. This, however, makes it sound like Sartre is looking for general moral principles, and that hardly can be the case. "Never lie" would be just the kind of rule that Existentialists are rebelling against, and Sartre certainly wouldn't like "never lie to Fascists." And once we start worrying about what "might" be true or what "might" happen, things are much to vague and problematic to have any clear guidance.
More important is what Sartre's new sense of "responsibility" leaves out. It leaves out, indeed, the original meaning of "responsibility," which was "accountability." It doesn't really matter that you cannot alter your behavior on the basis of consequences that you cannot know, because you are not accountable for your behavior anyway. The man in the story is not going to be brought to trial before either God or man, much less punished. Being "responsible" for the deaths of the other Republicans just means he will feel bad about what he has made happen. That's it.
This is just a version of what the ordinary meaning of "responsible" has come to be, namely "conscientious." A responsible person is a conscientious person, which means someone who is trying to do the right thing. Now, in Existentialism there is no "right" thing, so what can "conscientious" possibily mean? It just means that one meant to do something and accepts it. One accepts and acknowledges the consequences of one's action, and "accepts responsibility," because one really intended to do the action. The opposite, not accepting one's own actions or just doing something because it is expected, is "bad faith," the only real sin in Existentialism. But this just means that any action is OK, as long as one "accepts" it, not that one should be called to account or punished for it because, after all, "all is permitted."
This morally empty meaning of responsibility has entered deep into popular art and public discourse. A humorous example of it is in the 1978 movie The Big Fix, with Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Anspach, John Lithgow, Bonnie Bedelia, and F. Murray Abraham (quite a cast). Dreyfuss is a divorced detective whose ex (Bedelia) has taken up with a psychobabble guru, whose training program, BEST, is clearly based on the popular EST therapy of the 1970's. Every time Dreyfuss has to meet his wife, over their children or his child support payments, this guru pronounces some absurd chestnut from his therapy program. Dreyfuss starts counting them. Meanwhile, murders have occurred (Anspach), and Dreyfuss has to track down the bad guy, whom he thinks is the former campus radical (Abraham) but is actually the spoiled rich kid (Lithgow). At one point, an attempt is made on his life by mafia hit men from Nevada. He realizes that they might go after his (ex-) family also, so he goes to warn his ex-wife to go into hiding with their kids. Unfortunately, she has entered the BEST training seminar with her boyfriend, and, like EST, no one is allowed to enter or leave after it has begun. Dreyfuss bursts in anyway, and is indignantly told by the guru that no one has interrupted his program before. Dreyfuss explains that hit men are possibily trying to murder his ex and their children, to which the guru says, "Then they will just have to take responsibility for that." At that, Dreyfuss says he has allowed him enough such sayings and punches him out.
The implication of the guru's saying is that the problem with murder is just that you might not "take responsibility" for it. That one might want to avoid murderers, or that they are evil and the action wrongful, is beside the point. "Taking responsibility" is all that counts and ends the matter. Just such uses of the expression we can see more recently in real world affairs. When a car bomb blew up a U.S. Marine billet in Beirut early in the Reagan administration, there was some discussion about who was responsible for the lapse in security. This ended when President Reagan himself said he would "take responsibility" for it. This did not mean he would resign in disgrace. It simply meant that was the end of the matter and everyone should forget about it, which they did. Then years later, when the attempt to "rescue" the children in the compound of the Branch Davidians at Waco ended in their all being suffocated or burned to death, there was also discussion about who was responsible for ordering a raid that was so thoroughly misconceived. Attorney General Janet Reno immediately said that she would "take full responsibility," and the next day President Clinton offered that he instead would "take responsibility." Again, what this all meant was that no one would actually be accountable for all this supposed "responsibility." Neither Reno nor Clinton resigned and, when pressed, they really blamed David Koresh for everything. He was already dead and so could not dispute the blame. A pliant federal judge was then allowed to lower the boom on the few survivors by using a legal trick to impose long jail sentences for the only minor offenses that a jury found them guilty of.
"Taking responsibilty" has thus become a way of denying accountability, deflecting true responsibility, and diverting blame to others. Sartre thus can be said to have altered the meaning of "responsible" in just the way that he wanted, which is to create a lot of moral sounding talk while actually eliminating morality. This may be been convenient for Sartre himself, whose own actions may not have been above moral reproach. Although Sartre is commonly said to be have been in the French Resistance during World War II, he staged plays, which had to be submitted to the German censors, in Paris. Camus suspected, consequently, that Sartre was more involved in collaboration than in resistance. Again, although Sartre had a famous relationship with the feminist Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), stories persist that he actually treated her very badly, and that the later years of their relationship consisted of her acting as a procuress for him -- then he left his estate to his most recent lover, not to de Beauvoir.
Camus was also estranged by Sartre's lack of concern for the French colonials in Algeria, a third of the population, who stood to lose their homes and livelihood with the coming of Algerian independence. Sartre's attitude, indeed, owed nothing to Existentialism but to the extremely doctrinaire Marxism that he eventually adopted. Fixing up "responsibility," evidently, was not good enough. The Existential Void of value had to be filled by Dialectical Materialism. How blind and arrogant this became was evident in Sartre's remark on hearing of Khrushchev's "Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin in 1956. Sartre said that it should indeed be kept secret because it might discourage the "working class." The egotism and paternalism of this is typical of leftist intellectuals, but it hardly seems like the kind of thing that would allow the "working class" to "take responsbility" for their own actions. Grafting Marxism onto Existentialism thus simply rendered Sartre's thought incoherent.
Would Existentialism consistently dictate a certain political attitude? One would hardly think so if "all is permitted," but one need not appeal to logic, only to another conspicuous Existentialist figure, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). Both Sartre and Heidegger were disciples of the founder of Phenomenology, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and Sartre himself, somewhat younger, was then influenced by Heidegger. The enduring, embarrassing detail about Heidegger, however, is that he enthusiastically joined the Nazi Party and somehow never got around to explaining just why he had made that mistake or why, for that matter, the Nazi Party was really unworthy of his attention. Indeed, until the end of his life, it always sounded like he was unable to distinguish what it was about the Nazis that was bad, and in fact Naziism followed much more coherently from Heidegger's thought than Marxism ever did from Sartre's. That is because, as a true Existentialist, Heidegger did not impose any timeless moral judgments, let alone liberal or democratic ones, on history. Instead, events were supposed to disclose, violently, a new "uncovering" of Being, which would overthrow previous views about justice and order. This is no less than what Hitler was doing. Heidegger was such an enthusiastic Nazi that he stiffed his graduate students who were Jews, refusing to sign their dissertations, and excised the dedication of Being and Time (1927), which had been to the inconveniently Jewish Edmund Husserl.
Although one might think this all would have discredited Heidegger in the post-War world, we have already seen how philosophers like Sartre had been busy undermining the forms of traditional moral judgment. Thus, Heidegger's influence actually grew after the War, even in France, where a living and celebrated philosopher like Jacques Derrida has said that there is nothing in his thought that was not already in Heidegger. Although no secret, Heidegger's politics did not begin to embarrass his followers until the 1980's. The response to this has not been to alter any of the essentials, but to change terminology to conceal the continuity, i.e. Derrida's "deconstruction" has become, otherwise unaltered, "post-modernism." Although this now tends to be associated with leftist causes, following Sartre, we should not be surprised to find it hostile to liberal principles and promoting totalitarian rules (e.g. "speech codes" at universities) that would not be unfamiliar to Heidegger.
The Marxism of Sartre and the Naziism of Heidegger are sufficient to prove that Existentialism, which already denies any reality to moral principles, can randomly be associated with any sort of politics. Oddly, what it seems less conspicuously to be associated with is liberal and free market politics, which were despised, not just by Sartre and Heidegger, but by most other Existentialist figures and their spiritual descendants. One might think that this is because intellectuals find private life and hard work boring; but then, after the "Myth of Sisyphus," one might think that any mundane task could be valorized into the most important thing ever. The truth seems to be that Existentialists never really believed that life was as meaningless as the task of Sisyphus. They actually demanded a real world of meaning vast beyond the confines of ordinary life. Thus, Marxism probably appealed to Sartre because of its pretence that it was scientific and about facts, and, as it happens, Heidegger did not really have the classical Existentialist belief in the meaninglessness of the world. The "uncoverings" of Being made for real value, however "terrible," which means that Adolf Hitler gave real meaning to the world.
Although the classic forms of Existentialism are characteristic of post-World War II philosophy, literature, and art, we have aleady seen, with Dostoyevsky, that Existentialist-like ideas were anticipated long before then. Dostoyevsky, although articulating the ideas, did not believe them; but there were real Existentialists-before-their-time. The most important was certainly Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). There are at least three ways in which Nietzsche qualifies as a classic Existentialist, all of which we can see in what may have been his magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885).
The title itself is a bit of a puzzle. "Zarathustra" is a German rendering of Zarathushtra, the name in the language of the Avesta (Avestan), the sacred scripture of Zoroastrianism, of the founder of that religion, the Prophet Zoroaster (his name in Greek). Since Zoroaster preached a great cosmic conflict between Good and Evil, this is perplexing, since Nietzsche denies the reality of good and evil. But that may be the point. What Zoroaster started, he has now been brought back to end.
It is astonishing that this nasty and contemptuous philosophy has become the darling of the Left, who actually want a society very precisely of the "slave morality" of altruism and self-denial. Perhaps it is because (1) leftist intellectuals know that ordinary people don't actually read Nietzsche, and (2) that they see everyone else as slaves to them, where the masters' duty, noblesse oblige, is to arrange everyone else's lives in the proper way. This is certainly the most common use of Nietzsche, from Adolf Hitler to Garry Wills (cf. his recent authoritarian paean, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, saying that the Constitutional principle of limited government "...is a tradition that belittles America, that asks us to love our country by hating our government"), to imagine one's self as the Superman, floating above others, dispensing justice, or wrathful punishment, to them. Nietzsche's own critique of Christianity, that the doctrine of love of others actually translates into resentful hatred of others, applies with full force to his most ardent devotees, whose talk about freedom and creativity translates into constant assaults on the freedom and preferences of others, and deep resentment for those, the industralists and inventors (as Ayn Rand understood), who have created the modern world and a better life for all.
What Nietzsche's Superman gets is a little more durable that the decisions of Sisyphus, since Nietzsche always saw systems of value, like traditional religions, as persistent and living, endowing things with real value, if only for a time. The Superman thus need not suffer from the nausea and dread that are characteristic of later Existentialists, who are always poised on the edge of oblivion. But this is really less honest than the later fears. Making up values doesn't make them so, and Nietzsche himself made it possible for this to be felt so intensely later. After the Superman has "transvalued" his own values a few times, he may begin to detect an arbitrariness and emptiness in them. As Nietzsche himself said, you stare into the Void long enough and the Void begins to stare back. Thus, by the time we get to Camus, we get the Stranger, not the Superman.
So far I have been considering atheistic Existentialists, like Sartre and Nietzsche; and the way they formulate their doctrines, it might seem that atheism would be intrinsic to Existentialist ideas. The absence of God implies the loss of value. However, that is not quite right, and as we continue into Existentialists-before-their-time, we cannot avoid encountering such a one, one of the earliest, who also happens to be a theistic Existentialist. Thus, in a sense Existentialism begins as a form of theism and only later appears in atheistic form.
Our theistic Existentialist is Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Kierkegaard is an Existentialist because he accepts, as fully as Sartre or Camus, the absurdity of the world. But he does not begin with the postulate of the non-existence of God, but with the principle that nothing in the world, nothing available to sense or reason, provides any knowledge or reason to believe in God. While traditional Christian theologians, like St. Thomas Aquinas, saw the world as providing evidence of God's existence, and also thought that rational arguments a priori could establish the existence of God, Kierkegaard does not think that this is the case. But Kierkegaard's conclusion about this could just as easily be derived from Sartre's premises. After all, if the world is absurd, and everything we do is absurd anyway, why not do the most absurd thing imaginable? And what could be more absurd than to believe in God? So why not? The atheists don't have any reason to believe in anything else, or really even to disbelieve in that, so we may as well go for it!
This is sometimes compared to Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who said, "The heart has reasons that the mind cannot understand"; but really, if the heart has reasons, then, indeed, there are reasons, and the world is not an absurd place. Pascal is a mystic (like some other mathematicians), not an Existentialist. The precedent for Kierkegaard is really more like the Latin Church Father Tertullian (c.160-220), who, when taunted about the absurdity of Christian doctrine, retorted that he believed it because it was absurd. Without reasons of heart or mind, Kierkegaard can only get to God by a "leap of faith." This is the equivalent of the acts of will in the classic Existentialists, and equally fragile. A leap of faith attains no reasons it did not have before, and so the position of faith remains irrational. But it does achieve something a little different. A position of faith, however it is attained, does bring with it certain responsibilities. Belief in a real God is going to bring with it the Law, as the moral teachings of one's religion, whichever it is, cannot then just be ignored. This returns one to the complications of tradition morality, the kind of thing that Nietzsche or Sartre or Heidegger would just as soon ignore. In retrospect, however, the three of them should have taken traditional morality a bit, or a lot, more seriously than they did. The project of dumping the whole business did not have edifying results, either personally or politically.
Kierkegaard's moral and religious seriousness offered a more promising basis for the development of Existentialist themes than the basically nihilistic, egocentric, and hopeless approach of Nietzsche, Sartre, and the others. Philosophers who make their own leap of faith to Marxism or Naziism have really discredited their own source of inspiration. Thus, while Sartre achieved for a time a higher profile in the fashionable literary world, theistic Existentialists, like Nikolay Berdyayev (1874-1948), Paul Tillich (1886-1965), and Martin Buber (1878-1965) continued Kierkegaard's work with updated approaches to traditional religions. Atheistic Existentialism really exhausted itself: The effort of will required for Sisyphus to maintain his enthusiasm is really beyond most human capacity, and better the solace of traditional religion than the vicious pseudo-religions of communism or fascism.
The personal failures of Sartre or Heidegger, however, do demonstrate their seriousness, and the fact that the absurdity of the world for them was not a joke, was not fun, but a terror. Their failure was in the direction of the solution they sought, a solution that could not be bound by some fairly simple and fundamental moral considerations. It wasn't just that they couldn't bring themselves to believe in God. They couldn't bring themselves to believe in right and wrong. But the principle of Dostoyevsky's nihilist, that "without God, all is permitted," really represents an impoverished reading of the history of philosophy, and of religion also. Plato's Forms did not depend on God, nor Schopenhauer's sense of justice and compassion (of which Nietzsche cannot have been unaware), while the Buddha Dharma is the moral teaching of a religion that explictly rejects the existence of a God. Thus, Nietzsche and Sartre base their thought on a false inference. It simply does not follow that if there is no God, then all is permitted. It doesn't even follow that there is no religion. Nor does it follow that everything is without meaning. When Beethoven faced his own growing deafness, he knew that he could still create music, create beauty, even if completely deaf. That is what happened. But Plato already pointed out that beauty is a tangible kind of value, something we can see and touch (or hear), and a clue to the reality of all value, even the kind that we cannot see. The Existentialists, even the theistic ones, seem to have overlooked that.
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