Existential_Angst

Existentialism is a doctrine that stresses the importance of men having free will, realizing themselves, and in doing so taking full responsibility for their actions. It’s comprised of both theistic and atheistic views. With theistic existentialism comes the concept of God and the idea that essence precedes existence. We are creations made with the same basic quality and that quality is given to us before our birth by God. After we are given our essence then we begin to exist but we live by a set of God-given principles. God knows what he is creating beforehand and thus there is no real choice given to man. All of our lives have already been preordained for us. In atheistic existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre says that there is no God so man makes himself what he will become. “Man is nothing but what he makes himself and existentialism’s first move is to make every man aware of what he him and to let him know that the responsibility for what he is rests upon him.” Jean-Paul Sartre says that when we choose for ourselves, we also choose for everyone else. Man must realize that he is not the only one affected by his actions. When we choose to do something we must also see that our actions set a precedent that others may follow. We are setting an example for all those around us. The theistic existentialist is very distressed by the idea that God does not exist because without God the concept of good and evil go with him. If there is no God then there is no set of principles for people to live by, everything would become possible for every man. But also with the loss of God we lose a higher being to blame for our mistakes meaning that all responsibility will be placed solidly on our shoulders. Existentialism has been charged with many things by many people and all of those charges have been listed by Jean-Paul Sartre. Communists accused Existentialism of being a bourgeois philosophy. Their reason for this accusation was that since Existentialists say that there are no solutions, everything we do should be considered impossible. That makes existentialism a philosophy of contemplation and that is a luxury since all we are doing is sitting down and thinking. Existentialism has also been charged with “dwelling on human degradation” (Marino, 341) because people think it only points out the dark sides of human nature while ignoring the good points. The Communists also had more accusations saying that the existentialists take pure subjectivity as their starting point. When man becomes an isolated being and when that happens he will unable to return to a state of solidarity with his fellow man. The charge given by Christians was that existentialists “deny the reality and seriousness of human undertakings” (Marino, 342). They say that since existentialists reject God’s commandments and the quality of truth there no longer remains anything but impulsive changes in thought. Everyone would be permitted to do as they pleased and because of that they would be incapable of damning the point of views of others. Sartre responds to the accusation of existentialism being a doctrine of pessimism by saying that in all reality “there is no doctrine more optimistic, since man’s destiny is within himself” (Marino, 357). We are given full power over our lives, whether or not we fail or succeed rests fully on us. There is no control or structure given by a higher power so there is no limit to what you can be. “If existence precedes essence then man is responsible for what he is” (Marino, 345). If God doesn’t exist then God had nothing to do with man’s essence, man is responsible for who he is and what he does, according to an atheistic existentialist. And when it is said that a man is “responsible for himself” it not only means that he is only responsible for his own individuality, but that “he is responsible for all men” (Marino, 345). This means he takes responsibility for his influences and surroundings. For example if a man says to his son “be a good father” yet abandons the family then he is not taking responsibility for who he made himself to be,(a father), or how he influences others (being a contradiction and subliminally showing his son what is acceptable. The quality of our lives are determined by the choices that we make, everything that we do has an impact on what we will become and whether that is a good or bad thing is completely up to us. We must all take full responsibility for what we do because no one is forcing us to do anything, everything is a choice made by free will and if so we are fully to blame for whatever outcome we get. Even people who are considered heroes are at fault for whatever bad befalls them; they are not exempt from blame just because they have acquired that title. There are some people however that believe that life has no meaning no matter what we do. They believe that all existence is futile and that there is no need to strive for anything better than what they are given at the moment. Those people are content with every situation they are put in and never try to do anything that may seem heroic to modern society. In modern society a hero is someone who puts his or her life on the line for the sake of others; they are usually characterized as having a kind heart and a great deal of honor. This differs greatly from the original Greek heroes. Those men were usually selfish, antisocial, brutal in nature, and not too keen on helping others. In The Stranger Meursault is a hero by Greek standards. “The judge stood up, as if to give me the signal that the examination was over. He simply asked, in the same weary tone, if I was sorry for what I had done. I thought about it for a minute and said that more than sorry I felt kind of annoyed” (Camus, 70).He shows himself to be someone with no regard for human life such as when he shows no remorse for the murder he has committed (Camus, 70). Instead of feeling guilty for needlessly taking a man’s life he expresses annoyance instead, this annoyance coming from the fact that he now has to go through a court procedure because of the crime he committed. Meursault also cares little for other people and this has been shown in many instances in The Stranger. “Mamam died today. Or yesterday maybe, I don’t know. I got a telegram from the home: ‘Mother deceased. Funeral tomorrow. Faithfully yours.’ That doesn’t mean anything. Maybe it was yesterday” (Camus, 1). He shows boredom and disregard when he learns of his mother’s death , he doesn’t even show a bit of emotion when he attends her funeral. He smokes, drinks coffee, sleeps, and refuses to even view her body . Not one time does he shed a tear for his lost mother; in fact he seems almost annoyed that he even has to be there. He also displayed a stunning lack of emotion when his new friend Raymond beats the girl that he had helped lure back to Raymond’s apartment. When his girlfriend asked him to go get a police officer to help the poor woman Meursault refused and claimed that he didn’t like cops .The sheer amount of selfishness that he exudes makes him like a Greek Hero rather and not a modern day one. Modern day heroes are usually thought to be noble and are characterized by a strong will to persevere through great adversity. This definition qualifies in many ways for Melinda, the protagonist from Speak by Laurie Anderson. The book chronicles the school year of the traumatized girl after the summer where she is raped at a party. She has no friends, indulges in minor self-harm, and has lost the will to speak. Her perseverance in these things is what makes her a hero; Melinda is a downtrodden girl who manages to find herself while wading through the insanity that has become her life. Her shining moment in Speak, and the moment that truly makes her seem heroic, is the part where she confronts her rapist. Melinda had cowered in fear of him the entire year but in that moment she overcomes that fear of him and the terrible moment in her life that he stands for. Melinda is a conventional hero in the sense that she is all about nobility and overcoming adversity, she Is neither selfish nor does she accept the absurdity of her life like Sisyphus. The myth of Sisyphus is about the absurdity of life and it is in essence trying to show how nothing we do matters. The ‘absurd’ man knows that his life has no meaning while normal people go on with the notion that everything happens for a reason. Someone who is absurd is fully aware that things like ambition and hope are meaningless and that they mean nothing just like everything else in life. Sisyphus is a man who has been given the job of pushing a rock up a hill in the underworld. However no matter how many times he gets the rock to the top it will always roll back down and when it does he will have to start all over again. Sisyphus knows that he is on a futile mission but he isn’t sad or depressed. He sees the situation for what it is, he knows that he will never succeed and he doesn’t harbor any hope of doing so. Sisyphus doesn’t look outside of his situation, to him pushing that rock is just what he has to do and it doesn’t matter that he’ll never truly carry out the task assigned to him. Meursault is very similar to Sisyphus in the way that he doesn’t think that life has any meaning. He goes through the motion of life without caring the way other people do. Since nothing matters he doesn’t really show emotion or a distinct preference about things. When Meursault kills an Arab man he shows no sign of remorse because to him it all doesn’t matter. At the end of his life Meursault can’t bring himself to care that he is going to die and only wishes for a sharp guillotine. It is also Meursault’s point of view that causes his self-imposed isolation. Meursault is an isolated being but not because he is being ostracized from society. He chooses not to engage with other people, he chooses to not let himself form an emotional attachment to his lover, Marie. While he enjoys spending time with her he expresses on multiple occasions that he feels a cold indifference to her even though they are intimate. “That evening Maries came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to” (Camus, 41). When she asked if he loved her he said that it didn’t mean anything but he didn’t. He even agreed to marry but in a very nonchalant and removed way. Meursault even admitted that if any other woman that he was in a similar relationship with had asked him to marry them he would have said yes to them too. “She just wanted to know if I would have accepted the same proposal from another woman, with whom I was involved in the same way. I said, ‘Sure’” (Camus, 42). That shows that Meursault had no love for Marie herself, he just enjoyed her company in an abstract way. Meursault also showed how far his isolation went in the social sense when he helped Raymond form a letter to lure a former lover back to Raymond’s apartment so that he could beat her for cheating on him. He didn’t question the morality of helping Raymond do such a thing and when he heard the commotion of the woman getting beaten he refused to get a police officer. Melinda is both a leper and a victim of her own self-imposed isolation. While she is in some ways shunned by her fellow students for calling the cops on what was supposed to be the party of the summer she also doesn’t really seek companionship most of the time. “I am outcast” (Anderson, 4). She indulges in a lot of self-reflection and her isolation is in part because she is processing her rape, her newfound lack of friends, and the fact that the boy that raped her attends her school and she does all she can to avoid him. Her isolation is complex in the way that she doesn’t seek people to hang out with but she craves having a companion. She sticks with Heather when she meets her because she wants a friend and she’s willing to be at peace with whatever she gets even if it happens to be someone who is kind of using her. Melinda is a self-made product of her own isolation and grief. Sadness and depression play a big part in Melinda’s story; she had been raped and felt like she had no one to talk to about it and she began the book with no friends. Her world had been turned upside down by one event and with no outlet she has resorted to self-mutilation and silence. “I get out of my bed and take down the mirror. I put it back in my closet, facing the wall” (Anderson, 17). The fact that Melinda no longer wanted to see her own face shows how deep her depression went. She didn’t want to deal with herself, with her rape, with her friendless situation. Meursault is the opposite of Melinda; his undoing isn’t his sadness but his lack thereof. He is essentially put to death not for the crime he committed but for the lack of remorse he has expressed about recent events in his life. “Soon one of the women started crying… I thought she’d never stop… The woman kept on crying… I wished I didn’t have to listen to her anymore. But I didn’t dare say anything” (Camus, 10). Meursault is at his mother’s wake and he is annoyed at the grief expressed by another person while he shows no sadness. His lack of sadness is brought up repeatedly in the trial, it is showcased that he is a soulless monster who felt no grief about the death of his own parent. “The investigators had learned that I had "shown insensitivity" the day of Maman’s funeral… He asked if I had felt any sadness that day… I answered that I had pretty much lost the habit of analyzing myself and that it was hard for me to tell him what he wanted to know. I probably did love Maman, but that didn’t mean anything. At one time or another all normal people have wished their loved ones were dead. Here the lawyer interrupted me and he seemed very upset. He made me promise I wouldn’t say that at my hearing or in front of the examining magistrate” (Camus, 64). Meursault’s apparent lack of love for someone who had raised him was the prosecutors going against him. It was used as an explanation for why he could do something so terrible, someone who didn’t even love his mother was capable of killing a man in cold blood and feeling no remorse for it. This case brought up against Meursault combined with his lack of sadness about the murder that he committed resulted in him getting a sentence of execution by guillotine. We are nothing except what we make of ourselves, our essence as a person revolves around our choices but in all truth choices are situational and subjective. How one person reacts or fails to react can cause a string of events to happen that not even they anticipated but at the end of the day we are all responsible for our own outcomes. No matter if out life turns out good or bad we must take full responsibility for it and accept that we are to blame, totally and unconditionally. The philosophy of existentialism examines the uniqueness or essence of individuals. That means what sets one human apart from another, since the essence of a person makes them who they are. One’s essence is a compilation of a person’s values, cultural background, religion or lack thereof, and one’s basic beliefs. Jean Paul Sartre, an atheistic existentialist, said that “existence precedes essence” (Marino, 345). Existentialism negates the existence of God and in doing so put full responsibility on the shoulders of man. With no one to blame for what ails us we have to take responsibility for ourselves and those who dwell around us. This gives freedom in the sense that only we determine our future but there is also anguish when we see others doing what they should not. The burden of responsibility is both a blessing and a curse. What we do with this gift is entirely up to us and if the outcome is not to our liking there is no one We can blame except for ourselves. Works Cited Camus, Albert. “The Stranger” United States: Alfred A. Knopf Inc. 1942. Print Marino, Gordon D. “Basic Writings of Existentialism” New York: Random House Inc. 2004. Print Beckett, Samuel. “Waiting for Godot” New York: Grove Press Inc., 1954. Print