Man is condemned to be free
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Religion, Faith, and Spirituality
ShinrinyokuYuugenShoganai — 9 years ago(February 17, 2017 12:30 AM)
Usually existence hides itself. It is there, around us, in us, it is us, you cant say two words without mentioning it, but you can never touch it If anyone had asked me what existence was, I would have answered, in good faith, that it was nothing, simply an empty form which was added to external things without changing anything in their nature. And then all of a sudden, there it was, clear as day: existence had suddenly unveiled itself. It had lost the harmless look of an abstract category: it was the very paste of things The diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder naked, in a frightful, obscene nakedness.
Towards the end of Jean-Paul Sartres novel Nausea (1938), the main protagonist, Antoine Roquentin, undergoes a horrid epiphany as he discovers at last the cause of the nausea, the sweetish sickness, with which he has been afflicted by contact with everybody and everything around him. Stripping away the false veneer the colours, tastes and smells that conceals the raw, undifferentiated mass of being beneath, he is appalled and overwhelmed by the brute fact of existence: existence that is bloated, cloying, repulsive existence everywhere, infinitely, in excess, for ever and everywhere a fullness which man can never abandon. Choked with rage and disgust at its grossness, Roquentin shouts Filth! what rotten filth! and shakes himself to get rid of this sticky filth, but it held fast and there was so much, tons and tons of existence.
Anguish caused by the sheer, physical burden of existence lies at the heart of the existentialist vision. For the French intellectual Sartre, existentialisms best-known exponent, existence is a palpable fact, a force that must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast. But while existence itself is cloying and oppressive, it is also quite contingent, a chance affair: you are but you might not have been your being is pure accident. There is no God, in Sartres view, to provide any explanation or reason for our existence; and equally there is no given purpose to life. The universe is indifferent to our aspirations, and this is the cause of the inevitable existential anxiety. But this very fact also gives us a freedom a freedom to make choices for ourselves and a responsibility to engage in the world and to take on projects and commitments that alone can forge meaning for us. Thus condemned to be free, we are responsible for creating purpose for ourselves and validating our lives through the choices we make.
Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.
Jean-Paul Sartre, 1946
Existentialist roots Existentialism was always as much a mood or an attitude as a philosophy in the strict sense, and it remained a somewhat loose bundle of diverse ideas and concepts. The shared emotional tone that lies at its core was prompted in part by a realization of the pointlessness of the human condition its absurdity in the sense that we are thrust, products of chance without reason or purpose, into an uncaring world which is itself beyond rational explanation. Existential broodiness was perfectly in tune with the mood of despondency and anxiety that coloured the decades following the Second World War, and it is popularly thought of as (primarily) a 20th-century phenomenon. This perception was reinforced by the figure of Sartre himself, who (with the French writer Albert Camus) became the popular face of existentialism. Sartres intellectual and literary skills combined perfectly to give expression to a movement that straddled the conventional boundaries between academia and popular culture.
In spite of the popular perception, much of the theoretical groundwork for existentialism was in fact carried out by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom Sartre studied in the 1930s. Heidegger himself a highly controversial figure whose reputation is clouded by his Nazi connections was heavily indebted to intellectuals of the previous century, especially to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
It was Kierkegaard who first insisted that human life could be understood only from the first-personal perspective of the ethically existing subject; and it was he who first impregnated the word existence with a richness of meaning that signified a distinctively human mode of being. For him, existence as a real subject is not something to be taken for granted but is an achievement: it is impossible to exist without passion; realizing our full potential as individuals, with a proper sense of our own identity, calls for an active engagement of the will: a commitment to make choices that forge long-term interests and give an ethical framework to our lives. In the end, the essential commitment, in Kierkegaards view, is the leap of faith by which we bind ourselves in a relationship with G