Existentialism: A Beginner’s Guide - by Thomas Wartenberg

One fundamental thesis of Existentialism: human beings value their freedom more than anything else.

Social and political freedom: social conventions and political institutions must not illegitimately constrain the human beings who are governed by them.

Metaphysicalconcept of freedom: the capacity to initiate a series of events.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) was perhaps the greatest philosophical novel ever written. Sartre was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature but he refused it lest it seem that he endorsed its bourgeois values.

Everything that is not a consciousness has a nature that it must embody to be the thing that it is.

A person does not, as a consciousness, simply perceive the world. He simultaneously is aware of himself perceiving the world. Consciousness is the only entity in the world that does not just exist, but also presents itself to itself as existing.

Seeing chocolate cake on a menu does not force me to eat it, though I love chocolate and could eat the cake if I decided to. Existentialists will not accept addiction to chocolate as an excuse. You could have refrained from eating that cake. There was nothing in your nature as a consciousness that required you to be a ‘cake-eater.’ You were free to eat the cake but didn’t have to.

I can nihilate the desire to eat the pie. I can control it. This is what it is to be a free being. We have the ability to nihilate every desire.

I am a being who exists through my own nihilation of my circumstances.

Only the human being is what it is not and is not what it is.

Being free forces you to take complete responsibility for what you do. It’s totally up to you. This responsibility can seem overwhelming. You remake the world according to your own design.

Human beings, because they are free, exhibit transcendence - an ability to move beyond their given circumstances. Our freely chosen projects are evidence of our transcendence. We take it upon ourselves to create something through our own actions.

Engaging in our ‘projects’ – a term used to refer to any of the undertakings we choose. We are able to undertake our projects, in which we seek to go beyond the given conditions in which we find ourselves, only in those very conditions themselves.

Our projects often involve creating ourselves to be, in the future, something that we are not now. Although we do create ourselves in the course of our lives, we are never what we have made of ourselves, for that created self becomes simply another factor in our factical situation. And, as transcendent beings, we are once again free to become what we are not.

People do not want their freedom; it only scares and troubles them.

People perpetrate social evil because they think they are better than other people and know what is best for them. Because they believe they have unique access to ‘the truth.’ They think people who do not comprehend their ‘truth’ need to be guided by themselves and others who are ‘in the know.’ Thus, a small group of knowledgeable insiders can embrace all sorts of ill-treatment of outsiders.

We fear our own freedom because it brings responsibility in its wake and it’s that that daunts us. A free person has to accept complete responsibility for the choices he or she makes. No gods determine how we shall act.

Protestantism saw the interior lives of people as more significant than their external behavior. The standard views of people in the twenty-first century remain significantly influenced by this revolution. Existentialists believe that an emphasis on intentions rather than actions encourages the tendency human beings have to deceive themselves about why they do what they do.

Our knowledge of the existence of other minds is based on what we each see - that other bodies behave much like our own body.

Once you become aware that you are in a certain state, you no longer fully inhabit that state.

Existentialists value individuality. First-person singular, rather than plural. ‘Why am I here?’ rather than ‘Why are we here?’ Existentialists sought to counter the tendency to live guided by standards valid for all. People have to work out fundamental questions as individuals. Hence, distrust of the general and their admiration for the particular.

Why Sartre thinks that ‘hell is other people’: Their look pulls us out of our own world and turns us into an object in theirs. Our self-consciousness makes us doubt their validity, but are also unable to be fully present within them.

The key to humans discovering their own nature, according to the Existentialists, is anxiety. Anxiety allows humans to correctly understand the nature of the being that they are, but only if they have a full and complete experience of this emotion. Anxiety is crucial because of the significance of what it signals. Worry is characterized by something about which I am worried, some ‘object’ which is the focus of my concern. the target of my worry is some future event. Anxiety, on the other hand, has no obvious object toward which anxiety is directed. Yet it is at least as upsetting an emotion as worry and maybe even more so, particularly since it’s so hard to figure out what is making one anxious. From a psychoanalytic perspective, anxiety is really a form of worry, only the object of one’s worry is unconscious.

Existentialists’ say anxiety’s object is the fact that we have to make decisions that ‘make all the difference,’ but have nothing to rely on in making them. We lack adequate grounds for deciding the fundamental issues of our lives. You have to take a leap and stake your entire existence on your faith. (Kierkegaard’s idea that one had to stake one’s existence on what one had faith in is one origin of the term ‘Existence-ialism.’) We experience anxiety because we lack rational justifications for all the crucial decisions in our lives. We are, as Sartre puts it, condemned to be free.

Existentialists differ from other schools of philosophy that only put forward their own theories without attempting to confirm them experientially.

People find this form of philosophizing so compelling, for it starts with our ordinary experience as human beings and shows it to have deep, philosophical significance.

Absurd is to say that it contradicts reason. Life is absurd. Contrast it with its opposite, namely the contention that life possesses a meaning. By claiming that life is absurd, Camus intends to deny the possibility that there is a meaning just waiting to be discovered.

We are free to create outselves in accordance with our own desires. Our freedom means that we do not have any essence, any nature, that is given to us from outside ourselves.

The act of rebellion or revolt is a crucial means of self-realization in an absurd world.

Every development contains within itself a ‘negative moment,’ that is, the seeds to its own destruction. Every negation contains within itself the seeds of the next positive development.

Although Zeus has the power to condemn him to an eternally unachievable task, he does not have control of Sisyphus’s mind. So, instead of seeing himself as a victim of a cruel fate as Zeus would like, Sisyphus is able to choose a different way of interpreting his situation, to free himself from a sense of defeat.

He is becoming an individual. Achieving individuality. Being an individual requires one to separate oneself from the conformity that dominates sociality.

Camus’s novel, The Stranger, continues to introduce young people to some of the basic ideas of Existentialism.

One impetus to conformity is the denial of death. On his death-bed, he finds himself alone, separate from the others. His scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest were false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false.

Conformist behavior’s problem it is legitimated by something external to an individual human being, either the general consensus of a ‘They’ or the authority of a Grand Inquisitor. An individual has not had to reflect on and acknowledge the validity of the action itself.

Your freedom requires you to respect and support the freedom of others. We inhabit a world that contains other beings. If we do not act so as to foster their freedom, we jeopardize our own freedom as well.

The tyrant who thinks he is free is not. When he oppresses others, he contradicts his own nature as a free being.

Society enforces conformity and keeps people from becoming free individuals.

The anti-Semite conforms to a set of norms in order to be part of a social group. The benefits felt as part of a group to fend off the anguish that comes from acknowledging one’s freedom and responsibility. Not comfortable with acknowledging their own acceptance of such leveling norms and so need to find a way to see themselves as superior. It is a mistake to treat anti-Semitism as simply the result of ignorance on the part of the anti-Semite.

All must be mediocre in order to ensure the social uniformity.

Things that initially appear to be structured in one way turn out, upon deeper analysis, to be the exact opposite, as when the supposedly independent being turns out to really be the dependent one.

‘Woman’ as the negation of ‘man,’ which is the primary or ‘valorized’ term. To be human is, implicitly, to be a man. To be a woman is, inherently, to be relative to him - defined and differentiated with reference to man. Men, especially those who feel inferior to other men, benefit from gender oppression by allowing them to feel superior to women.

Jews or Blacks can seek to liberate themselves from their oppressors, since they don’t need them. But women need men in order continue the propagation of the human race. Women are different from that of other oppressed groups, for they cannot simply live in isolation from their oppressor.

Nothing is more essential to us than our freedom. Freedom is so important to humans that we would prefer to go insane rather than accept the idea that our actions are completely determined. I’ll do something stupid, unexpected, just to show you that I am different - that my actions are not determined.

The general human tendency to forgo freedom and aspire to a more thing-like status that allows people to evade many of the difficulties that freedom.

Their oppression has provided women with the metaphysical solace of avoiding the burden of freedom. Freed’ from the burden of their own freedom, saved from having to face all the difficult and painful questions about life.

Objects from tables to trees have a nature which observation can reveal. Human beings, though, are different. We do not have a predetermined nature that can be read off our appearance. Objectification: legible nature by reading it off his appearance. His black skin means that his accomplishments are never seen as those of a human being, but always of a Black man.

Children in the colonies are taught to read the literature of the colonizer. As a result, the young internalize the colonists’ values, which emphasize the inferiority of the colonized.

The fundamental message that the Existentialists hoped to deliver to us is that we have many more options for living our lives than we typically acknowledge.

Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus: Being and Time.

You are free to make your nature. You are not determined by your past, but always have the option of changing how you act. You can decide to climb mountains because you do not want to be a person whose life is determined by fears.

To be in contact with nothingness, (refusing everything), to determine how things might have been otherwise.

Only the human being is what it is not and is not what it is. You can change and make of yourself something different from what you appear to be at any time.

You are also creating yourself to be, in the future, something that you, now, are not.

People perpetrate social evil not because they have evil aims, but because they think they are better than other people and know what is best for them. They believe they have unique access to ‘the truth.’ As a result, they believe that people who do not comprehend their ‘truth’ need to be guided.

Freedom is actually a source of much of our trouble and pain. Most people would prefer to live a life without the pain resulting from possessing freedom. Better to be a satisfied fool than Socrates, troubled but free.

We have abandoned the gods by no longer giving them control over our actions.

There is a great deal of security to be had from seeing oneself as simply following someone else’s orders.

The Catholic Church stressed the importance of rituals. Protestantism focus on interior lives of people as more significant than their external behavior

“It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.” This is often seen as laughable in these days of seemingly unbridled competition. Claiming that what matters are not external factors which are not completely within one’s control, but the internal attitudes one takes to one’s actions.

Emphasis on intentions rather than actions encourages you to deceive yourself about why you do what you do.

Freedom is difficult for humans to bear. Because we are free, we have to accept responsibility for our actions. There is no one else to blame. Our freedom to transform the circumstances of our existence and remake the world and ourselves in accordance with our own ideas.

Once you become aware that you are in a certain state, you no longer fully inhabit that state. When you become aware of what you are feeling, you feel alienated from that feeling. It was sort of act you were putting on.

Human beings have developed a range of different ways to slough off responsibility for their actions. God is a prime example. There are way more commandments than just those ten. The Old Testament actually lists 613 commandments that determine virtually every aspect of a person’s life.

The religious observant do not have to decide which norms of conduct adhere to. Moral rules are determined for them. No freedom to decide whether or not to obey the rules.

Understand how people benefit existentially from giving up control over their own lives.

Purely dyadic (twotermed) relationships are impossible, for we are always aware of the possibility of being observed by a third person, the ‘other’ who takes us out of our primary ways of being. This explains why Sartre thinks that ‘hell is other people’: Their look pulls us out of our own world and turns us into an object in theirs.

Unable to be fully present doing our projects, incapable of embracing them as meaningful. We acquire a self-consciousness that makes us doubt their validity.

Existentialism can be thought of as a form of radical empiricism.

To call something an absolute evil is to say that it is so horrible it cannot be redeemed or justified in relation to something else.

Kant was so worried that he would not finish explicating the Critical Philosophy that he adhered to a rigid schedule.

The basic feature of religion was its positing of things that were absurd, that is, contrary to reason. Calling a religious belief ‘absurd’ is not a way of denigrating it, but a matter of describing a specific feature of it: its violation of the norms of human reason. Existentialists’ use the concept of the absurd as, partially at least, a technical term with a very specific meaning. To say that something is absurd is to say that it contradicts reason.

It’s a mistake to say that nature is indifferent, for this suggests that nature has that very minimal attitude toward what happens, one situated midway between cruelty and compassion, as if it just didn’t really care what its effects on human beings were. Nature is simply incapable of having any attitude about what it brings about. It simply is what it is. What’s absurd is that we are creatures who demand reasonableness of a universe that cannot provide it.

Man is a useless passion.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. Sisyphus is happy. His scorn for Zeus and the fate to which he has been consigned allows him to take control of his own situation. Sisyphus is able to choose a different way of interpreting his situation.

One impetus to conformity is the denial of death.

An authentic action is one you do in full awareness of your freedom. When you act authentically, you have to accept complete responsibility for what you do, and not attribute the action to any form of influence or compulsion.

Your freedom requires you to respect and support the freedom of others.

While the anti-Semite may be ignorant about many features of Jewish culture, this cannot explain why she favors the oppression of Jews. I know very little about the Inuit, for example, but think they deserve the same respect due any human being. Without the presence of the Jew there would be no one whom the anti-Semite could use to secure her sense of her own superiority. Without the Jew, she would be forced to either invent a replacement or face her own life without this strategy of denial.