PHIL103: Moral and Political Philosophy

What view of human nature can emerge from this view of the individual? One such view is the view of human nature identified with the name Existentialism.  Sartre says that what all existentialists, both atheistic and christian, share in common "... is that they think that existence precedes essence, or, if you prefer, that subjectivity must be the starting point". Sartre explains what this means by contrasting it with the opposite slogan: ESSENCE PRECEDES EXISTENCE.  He uses the example of a paper-cutter to explain how the old view treated human beings as artifacts, whose nature is tied to a preconceived essence and to a project outside of them, rather than as absolute individuals.  He says in Existentialism and Human Emotions:

Let us consider some object that is manufactured, for example, a book or a paper-cutter: here is an object which has been made by an artisan whose inspiration came from a concept.  He referred to the concept of what a paper-cutter is ... .  Thus, the paper-cutter is at once an object produced in a certain way and, on the other hand, one having a specific use ... .  Therefore, let us say that, for the paper-cutter, essence ... precedes existence.

Of course, the artisan in our case is God. Sartre continues:

When we conceive of God as the Creator, He is generally thought of as a superior sort of artisan.  ... Thus the concept of man in the mind of God is comparable to the concept of the paper-cutter in the mind of the manufacturer... .  Thus, the individual man is the realization of a certain concept in the divine intelligence.

On this view, the one Sartre is attacking, we get our nature from outside of us, from a being who created us with a preconceived idea of what we were to be and what we were to be good for.  Our happiness and our fulfillment consist in our living up to the external standards that God had in mind in creating us.  Both our nature and our value come from outside of us.

According to the existentialist, however, EXISTENCE PRECEDES ESSENCE.  Sartre explains:

What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means that first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.  ... Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.

Thus, there is no human nature which provides us with an external source of determination and value. Sartre says: If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature.  In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom.

Nothing outside of us can determine what we are and what we are good for; we must do it ourselves, from the inside.  What we will be and what will be good for us is a radically individual matter. If we are radical individuals, there is no place else for our nature and value to come from, except from within us.  It is this view of human nature, or the lack thereof, from which the existentialist conceptions of freedom and value flow.

We are now in a position to begin to answer the first of our three main questions: What is human freedom? What, exactly can the freedom of an absolute individual consist of? At first, it may seem clear that if we are islands of subjectivity, isolated from the forces of the outside world, we not only are capable of acting freely of outside determination, but we cannot help doing so since the only possible sources of action are internal.  The situation, however, is somewhat more complex than this.  To understand what freedom is for the Existentialist we must first see how, even though our inescapable nature is to be free, we all inevitably tend to try to escape our freedom.  We all tend to act in what Sartre calls 'bad faith'.  We attempt to deceive ourselves and act as if we weren't free, as if we were really determined by our nature, our body, or the expectations of other people.

The picture we drew earlier of the human individual trapped in a dark room perceiving the world only through our mental TV screens was too simple, for humans have a dual nature.  Among the things we find on the mental tv screen, besides objects, other people, emotions, and desires, is ourselves.  I see my body, and this thing I see is me.  The human condition, for the Existentialist is a tension, a vertiginous imbalance, between the self that watches these images, standing apart from them, and the self that appears as an image.  Just as I feel an imbalance upon walking into a department store and finding that one of the people on the video monitor is ME (caught by some unseen camera); or just as we feel a tension looking in the mirror wondering how the person in the glass can be ME if I am standing out here looking at it; so the self feels a tension between identifying itself with mind's eye behind the screen (standing apart from the give and take, the flux and flow, of our experience) and the images of us that appear as part of our experience (engaged in the world). 

Thus, we all have the tendency to act in bad faith, to identify ourselves with one of the pictures we find on our mental TV screen, and to see ourselves as determined by one of the outside influences we find pictured there: our nature, our body, the physical world, or the expectations and pictures other people have of us.  We are all familiar with the ways in which we try to excuse our actions by pretending that we are simply our bodies and are controlled by the forces that determine them.  We have all said things like:

I can't talk to people, I just don't have that kind of personality.

I can't pass this course, I'm just don't have the brain for calculus.

I can't help the fact that I was born a man (or a woman); Certain things come naturally for certain types of people.  (Says the man who can't take care of his children, or the woman who can't fix her car.)

I'm no good at this; I guess I just wasn't made to go to college.

Gee, I'm sorry about last night.  I guess my hormones just got out of control.

I'm sorry I bit your head off yesterday.  I must be premenstrual. 

I don't know what happened.  I guess the beer made me crazy.

In these cases, I am identifying myself with one of the pictures of me I find on my mental TV screen: I am my body, or my brain, or my personality, or my hormones.  In each of these cases, I am deceiving myself.  I am more than just these, and no matter how I try to avoid it, I am free.

We are also familiar with the way we all play roles, identifying ourselves, or seeing ourselves, in terms of how other people see us, letting other people determine what we are instead of deciding, ourselves, what we will be.  We all to some extent tend to make ourselves into the image other people have of us.  We are a different person with our friends than with our parents. We are a different person with a lover than with our acquaintances, and we are different still when we are in the classroom or at a job interview.  It is often easier to let someone else determine what we will be than to do it ourselves, especially when we see our value in terms of the acceptance we get from other people.  We all see little pictures of ourselves projected by other people and we often tend to try to make ourselves into these little pictures by playing roles.  We play at being college students out for a good time, at being macho men or nurturing women, at being sons or daughters, at being businesswomen, policemen, scientists.  We play at being students taking notes, and professors giving lectures.  We play the roles; we make ourselves into characters in the plays; we make ourselves into little pictures on our mental tv screen determined by the script written by the expectations of other people.

But all of this is self-deception.  We are more than any of the pictures we find on our mental tv screen.  We stand behind it, watching it, making of it what we will.  It is impossible to abdicate our freedom.  In choosing to identify ourselves with some externally determined object we are choosing none the less. We cannot escape our freedom.

One might well ask at this point, "What does this freedom consist of.  Am I free to become George Bush right now? Am I free to become a woman (without some fairly extensive and unpleasant surgery)? Am I free to fly up to the ceiling and hover above your heads? Am I free to close my eyes right now and find myself in the Bahamas when I reopen them?  Unfortunately,it appears not. How, then, can I be free when most of my external circumstances are determined by forces beyond my control, when I cannot help where I was born, what type of body I have, and what type of abilities my brain has predisposed me towards?"

The answer to these questions lies in the nature of our radical individuality.  I am not identical with any of the externally determined images on my mental TV screen.  I am forever beyond the reach of their determinations within the island of my subjectivity.  Even if I were a puppet, my body and its actions completely controlled by some malevolent master, what I am, my mind's eye would still be free and untouched.  I could still be free to rebel against my master or make whatever I wished of the situation.  They can do what they want to my body, manipulate the objects or pictures of me on my mental TV screen, but they can never touch or control the real me.  The self within its island of subjectivity is radically free in virtue of its radical individuality.

Furthermore, I have control over the content of my TV screen as well.  External circumstances may determine the objects that appear, how they appear, and when they appear, but I control how these various components will be put together into a coherent picture.  Sartre compares the type of freedom we have to that of an artist.  An artist cannot control the nature of the canvas, nor of the paints that she has to work with.  Nor can she control the nature of the subjects she will paint.  But she can control how she will view them, how she will put these various elements together into a unique whole.  Likewise, we may not be able to control the various elements within our experience that come from outside us, but we can view them and combine them in any way we like.  Our experience is not any one of these; it is the way in which we combine these into a unified whole.  We have the power to edit the frames which constitute our experience into the film that is to be our life.  We all know the power of good editing, of the creative juxtaposition of determinate elements.  It can transform experience; make the ugly beautiful and the ordinary, sublime.

Our freedom is, thus, a freedom of synthesis.  It is the freedom to pull ourselves together into the type of coherent whole that we will ourselves to be.  Even if the raw materials from which we construct ourselves are determined (just as the materials of the artist are determined),  what we make of ourselves out of these materials is up to us alone (just as what the artist makes of her subject is up to her alone).  We can not make the external world determine this even if we try.  The sentence of freedom is the necessity of pulling ourselves together at each moment out of the myriad different influences imposing themselves upon us from the environment, our community,and from our own bodies.  We are required to make ourselves, to pull ourselves together, and we can make of ourselves what we will.

The answer to our first question is, then, that we can be free because (1) Our absolute individuality isolates our real self from the determining influences of the outside world; we can always rebel against its influence; and (2) Even though the raw material that makes up our experience is determined by outside influences we are free to put these elements together into a unified whole; we must make ourselves anew at each moment, and what we shall make of ourselves is up to us.  We now need to see what view of human happiness and of morality arise from this conception of human freedom.  Both of these can be summed up by the single slogan BE AUTHENTIC.  The secret of human flourishing and of moral action lies in avoiding bad faith and honoring the responsibility we have to create our own nature and values.  The Existentialist enjoins us to be ourselves and make the source of our nature and values our own internal decisions rather than the pictures of ourselves that appear in our minds from external sources.  Let us now see what view of human happiness this implies.