How To Be An Existentialist
How To Be An Existentialist
How To Be An Existentialist
Gary Cox
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B819.C66 2009
142’.78–dc22
2009005317
Introduction 1
1 What is an Existentialist? 7
2 What is Existentialism? 12
Brief overview and quick history lesson 12
Existentialism and consciousness 21
Temporality 31
Being-for-others 36
Freedom and responsibility 44
Freedom and disability 49
Possible limits to freedom 51
Freedom and anxiety 54
3 How Not to Be an Existentialist 56
Bad faith is not self-deception 58
Flirting and teasing 59
Waiters, actors and attitudes 62
Homosexuality, sincerity and transcendence 65
Wilful ignorance 69
Contingency, nausea and the Existential
Alka-Seltzer of bad faith 71
Moustaches and salauds 74
4 How to Be Authentic 81
Authenticity and getting real 82
Being-in-situation 83
Freedom as a value 85
The problem of being authentic 87
Bibliography 114
Further Reading 116
Index 117
ever seen are fat and heavy, because it has a practical sounding title
and not one that is totally obscure and pretentious like Being and Time
or Phenomenology of Perception, because it appears to offer you the
opportunity to become something quite mysterious and special, if only
you can be bothered to read it all.
Perhaps you haven’t picked this book up in an idle and thoughtless
way at all, but with a very clear purpose. Good. With that kind of deci-
sive attitude you are already well on your way to becoming a true exis-
tentialist. You ordered it on the internet the other day using that much
abused credit card and found it lying below the letter box a moment
ago. You’ve ripped open the bubble wrap lined envelope and dived
straight in. You are looking for direction in your life and to that end you
have decided to become an existentialist; to join that most peculiar and
misunderstood of cults, that society which has no membership fee
unless it is your sanity and your very soul, that exclusive club which is
comprised of the kind of independent minded people who never join
clubs or follow the crowd. The comedian Groucho Marx – not to be
confused with the philosopher Karl Marx, although equally intelligent –
once said, ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a
member.’ Well, a true existentialist wouldn’t join a club that had
members.
Once all the preliminaries are out of the way the first thing this book
tries to do is explain in as simple and straightforward a way as possible
what existentialism is. There are hundreds of other books that explain
existentialism in far more philosophical detail, a few of which I have
written myself, so if you want to get really deep into the theory of exis-
tentialism and possibly never surface again, check out the further read-
ing section at the end of this book.
Having given it some thought, I’ve decided that a person can’t be an
existentialist unless he or she knows a bit about the philosophy or
world-view of existentialism. Knowing a bit or even a lot about existen-
tialism, however, will not, by itself, make you an existentialist. To be a
true existentialist you also have to try to live in a certain way, or at least
adopt a certain attitude to life, death and other people. Being an exis-
tentialist is definitely not just a matter of knowing stuff. For this reason,
some of the most famous philosophers of existentialism were not in fact
true existentialists at all, because although they knew a lot of theory
they didn’t live the life; they didn’t practise what they preached.
Perhaps the main value of having a working knowledge of existen-
tialism as a philosophical theory is that you will hopefully understand
why it makes sense to live according to the existentialist world-view;
why it is a more honest, more dignified, even a more moral way to live
than other ways you might live.
The founders of Western philosophy, the Ancient Greeks, guys like
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, thought that the most important philo-
sophical question in the universe, the question to which all other philo-
sophical questions lead, is the question, ‘How should I live?’ If you are
at all interested in becoming an existentialist then it is in fact the oldest
and most important question in philosophy, ‘How should I live?’, that
you are really interested in. Unlike a religion, existentialism does not
say, do this, don’t do that, eat this, don’t eat that, follow all these petty
rules and don’t dare question them. Instead, it describes in a coherent,
honest and uncompromising way what it is like to be a person passing
through this weird and wild world. It aims to show you what you really
are when all the nonsense and bullshit that is talked at you by scientists,
preachers, parents and school teachers is binned. It aims to reveal to
you that you are a fundamentally free being so that you can start living
accordingly; so that you can start asserting your individual freedom,
your true ‘nature’, rather than living as though you were a robot pro-
grammed by other people, social convention, religious dogma, morality,
guilt and all the other age old forces of oppression.
Existentialism is all about freedom and personal choice. It is all about
facing up to reality with honesty and courage and seeing things through
to the end, as well as being about putting words like choice in italics.
Becoming an existentialist requires a certain amount of effort. The real
difficulty is keeping it up, sustaining it, maintaining what existentialists
I drank it.’ McDonald’s are responsible for their coffee being hot, and
for a lot of other things besides, but the customer is responsible for
buying the coffee and drinking it. There are morbidly obese people
waddling around out there who chose day after day to supersize them-
selves beneath the yellow arches who are now suing McDonald’s for
making them fat and unhealthy. Relinquishing responsibility and blam-
ing others for what you do is very fashionable, but it was, is and always
will be extremely unexistentialist, that is, extremely inauthentic.
Existentialism has often been accused of being a set of dangerous
ideas. In 1948, for example, the Catholic Church in its infinite wisdom
decided that Jean-Paul Sartre’s atheistic, iconoclastic, anti-authoritarian,
revolutionary existentialist ideas were so dangerous that they placed
his entire works on the Vatican Index of Prohibited Books (the Index
Librorum Prohibitorum), even those books he hadn’t written yet! But
really, there are no dangerous ideas, it is only what people choose to do
with ideas that might prove dangerous, especially to the status quo and
the powers that be, like governments and religions and other multi-
national corporations. Choose to do with these ideas as you please, or
choose to do nothing – personally, I don’t care – but remember what
the existentialist philosophers say: to choose not to choose is still a
choice for which you alone are responsible.
in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘“I do not like it.” – Why? – “I am not up to
it.” – Has anyone ever answered like this?’ (Beyond Good and Evil, 185,
p. 107). As will be seen, understanding existentialism requires far more
intellectual honesty and courage than cleverness and academic ability.
3. A person has to strive with some success to live and act in accord-
ance with the findings and recommendations of existentialism. A person
can know about existentialism and be convinced of its truth, but they
are not a true existentialist if they make no effort to live the life.
It is quite possible for a person to know about existentialism, recog-
nize the truth of it on an intellectual level, yet most or all of the time fail
to live accordingly. To fail to live accordingly is to live in what existential-
ist philosophers call bad faith. Bad faith is a certain kind of bad attitude
and I’ll explain it in due course. For now, let it suffice to say that bad
faith can be very difficult to avoid. We live in a human world built on bad
faith. Bad faith offers convenient excuses, cop-outs and coping strate-
gies, various distractions that seem to make everyday life more
bearable.
So, the true existentialist knows about existentialism, believes in
existentialism and continually strives to live according to existentialism.
He or she continually strives to overcome bad faith and to achieve what
existentialist philosophers call authenticity. Authenticity is the holy grail
of existentialism, the great existentialist goal or ideal. More about
authenticity later.
Interestingly, it seems it is quite possible for a person to be authentic
without ever having heard of existentialism. Otherwise, we would be
claiming that authenticity can only be achieved as the ultimate result of
an intellectual exercise – as though you have to be able to read and
study and have lots of time to swat to stand any chance of becoming
authentic. Some people seem to hit on being authentic through their
direct experience of life or because they choose to be particularly brave
or genuinely philanthropic. Bugs Bunny is such a one, although who
would be surprised to discover he reads Nietzsche when he is not busy
exercising his will to power over Elma?