Jean-Paul
It’s funny how we get introduced to a concept, and how that introduction can shape our impression of that concept for years. Even a lifetime.
When someone first introduced existentialism to me, 1) they only talked about the concept of radical freedom, and 2) they talked about it as a monolithic philosophy. What I now know is that this was both an entirely Sartrean understanding of existentialism (obviously he was a big deal, but he was by no means the defining voice on existentialism), and even there, it oversimplified things.
The way (Sartre’s) radical freedom concept is usually understood is in the context of Western philosophy’s ongoing debate regarding determinism; that is, how much/many of our choices are we “freely” choosing, as opposed to being directed by unseen forces outside of our control. This is a massive debate, and I won’t get into it here. But suffice to say, I don’t think it’s really the right starting place for Sartre’s radical freedom. From what I can tell in my albeit limited reading of his work, Sartre wasn’t really “doing” physicalism. That isn’t to say that he believed in a soul, or that he rejected natural science. But Sartre was primarily concerned with what a human being is from a human being’s perspective. From a human being’s perspective, we are not atoms and neurochemicals. As an example, as I write this, I am not experiencing myself as an anatomical substrate, with electrical firings going off in my “brain.” I’m experiencing sitting in a chair, with my laptop on my lap. I’m sitting in a funny spot in my kitchen, because the morning light is killer on the other side of the kitchen, and I see my little black cat Charlotte off to my right. My back hurts a little, and I’m thinking that it’s because I didn’t get any exercise yesterday.
Sartre was analyzing this reality. The lived reality. And his concept of radical freedom also held the reality of being “condemned to be free”; that is, for humans, there is an element of the necessity of freedom. You cannot escape the fact that you could, in fact, decide to do any number of things, including one of the most apparently absurd actions, suicide.
This isn’t how it was presented to me. It was presented in a sophomoric, “We can do whatever we want!” kind of way. When what Sartre is saying is, “We can do whatever we want . . . or don’t want . . . or what other people want . . . and it’s terrifying.”
Groundlessness
I should preface this part by saying that I am not yet deep enough into Sartre, Yalom, and Buddhism to offer a robust defense of this idea. But here goes.
In my own work, as a therapist — as an American therapist, in the 21st century, shaped by a childhood in the Cold War, and an adulthood defined by technological rapaciousness and ongoing conflict in the Middle East — I think that the word freedom is pretty irredeemably tainted. Americans have, overwhelmingly, naïve and self-gratifying ideas about freedom. If they want cherry soda, they think it’s freedom to get cherry soda. If they want to make other people sick, they think it’s freedom to make other people sick. As a nation, we’re not very good at considering nuance, and we’re so accustomed to a shopper’s mentality that freedom does often seem to boil down to getting what we want.
A big part of therapy, in my opinion, is coming to terms with how little you are going to get what you want. So the word freedom, to me, just muddies the waters. What I’ve landed on, to convey the same concept, is the Buddhist idea of groundlessness.
We encounter groundlessness whenever we discover that our neat and tidy little assumptions weren’t in fact true.
Oh, you thought you were going to get married and have a couple of kids? Surprise! You’re infertile!
Thought you were going to move out to one of the San Juans and watch your golden retriever galumph through the long grass? Surprise! You’re getting a divorce, and now you’re in a custody battle over the dog.
You lose your job, after building the technology that’s replacing you. Your kids have “special” (most obnoxious euphemism of them all) needs. You get cancer. Your spouse dies.
And each horrible step along the way, you have to choose. You have to make decisions about what to do next, or you avoid making choices, and that is actually itself a kind of choice.
Yes, you can go through IVF. And it’s absolute hell for a lot of people.
Yes, you can do couples therapy. And it won’t save a marriage that’s been unraveling for decades.
This is groundlessness, and I think it’s also a lot closer to what Sartre was describing than my ability to choose chocolate versus vanilla. Perhaps a better word, instead of “freedom,” would be, “anchorlessness.”
Pessimism versus optimism
I realize that, at this point, existentialism might sound like a fairly bleak approach to life. Westerners tend to gravitate towards more cheerful philosophical concepts, and groundlessness — and, if I’m right, Sartre’s “freedom” — are anything but cheerful.
So here’s what I’ll posit: the main reason we think this sounds so damn bad is that we’re addicted to problem-solving. In grad school, one of my professors brought up Maslow’s law of the instrument: to paraphrase, give someone a hammer, and suddenly everything looks like a nail.
Give someone Python, and suddenly everything looks like a problem to solve. Give someone structural engineering, and suddenly everything looks like a problem to solve. Give someone cardiology, and suddenly everything looks like a problem to solve. They may be smart enough to know that their wife’s sadness will not be solved by Python, or their child’s’s Level 2 autism will not be solved by cardiology. But in the modern world, we have a very real tendency to view everything that we dislike — everything that makes us uncomfortable, everything that our minds suffer over — as a problem to solve. We search, and spin, and play out arguments and scenes in our heads, striving to find the solution.
In this context, I believe, Sartre’s freedom is both intimidating and liberating. Because at the end of the day, if my child’s emotional volatility is a safety risk for my other kids, that just is what it is. I can’t make autism go away. What I have the power to do is decide how I want to relate to it. And in Sartrean fashion, I really do have that freedom. I can decide, for example, that it’s more than I want to handle on a daily basis, and that I think my kid would be better served at a residential program for high needs kids. I may even surprise myself, and be reminded that I do, in fact, love them. I may feel guilt, and compare myself to parents who kept their Level 2 kiddos at home.
If my spouse is sad — and maybe she’s sad a lot, maybe it reaches to the level of clinical depression — I can decide how I want to relate to her depression. I certainly can’t make it go away, but I can support her in getting help. She can also decide she doesn’t want help. I can decide that I want time away from her heavy depression sometimes, and do my own thing. And maybe we do grow apart. That’s entirely possible. I can absolutely decide I don’t want to live with a depressed person anymore. Or not! I can decide that it’s not worth the cost of divorce to me, and I want to stick it out.
The point is, much of our lives, we like to tell ourselves stories about how it’s just obvious that we can’t get a divorce. Or, conversely, that it’s just obvious that we can’t stay married to someone who never wants to have sex with us. We tell ourselves that no reasonable person would choose to quit their job in this market. Or that no reasonable person would decide to go to nursing school in their late forties.
Existentialism’s job, in these cases, is to keep holding up a mirror and say, “No, no, my friend. You have chosen to remain in a sexless marriage.” “No, no. You are choosing — right now, every day — to remain in a miserable job, with a boss you hate.” Importantly — I can’t emphasize this detail enough — you get to. You get to remain miserable. You get to be mercilessly selfish. But existentialism says, “Don’t you dare write the story with yourself as helpless pawn.”
To me, this seems incredibly . . . well, not exactly optimistic. But helpful. Genuinely helpful. Because when you reflect on your life, it is shocking to realize how little of it you had control over. You were born in a certain place, to certain parents. You were a certain race, which is its whole own can of worms. You were born with a certain, shaped body, and everyone around you interpreted that in certain ways. And then you went to schools (not of your choosing), in certain places (not of your choosing), speaking a specific language (or languages) (not of your choosing), a member of a certain religion, or not (not of your choosing), and you felt certain sexual impulses (not of your choosing), and there was a whole world around you full of people buying and selling things, among which were things like housing and medical care and clothes and food, and you were equipped with whatever cognitive and physical capacities you had to try and navigate the balance of your needs and that world. People around you were always going to get cancer, or be infertile, or enter your life after experiencing trauma, and you were always going to be constantly trying to respond to a world of impermanence.
That is a lot of stuff completely outside your control. In this context — which, I believe, is a usefully accurate view of human life — deciding how we respond, how we interpret, how we make meaning . . . that is all we have. And it is actually, incredibly powerful. I get to decide — you get to decide — how we respond to our loneliness. We get to decide how we live in relation to our jobs, how we interpret our familial religion. And yes, we get to deal with the consequences of those choices. That is Sartre’s freedom, and it is both freeing, and sobering.