9   Responsibility

In the long run, we shape our lives and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility. (Eleanor Roosevelt, You Learn by Living, Foreword)

‘Responsibility to me is tragedy.’ So sang Sister Sledge (‘Lost in Music’), expressing what most people feel most of the time, that responsibility is a burden they wish they could escape. Existentialists also recognise that responsibility is a burden, but their hard-nosed view is that responsibility is a burden people should learn to relish as it is not a burden they can ever abandon.

Sure, people can downshift, or avoid shifting up in the first place. Get a job where they have less responsibilities in the sense of having less people placing constant pressure on them to make difficult decisions and complete complex tasks. But in existentialist terms, to stick near the bottom of the professional or social ladder is not to escape the burden of responsibility. This is because what existentialists understand by responsibility is somewhat different from what is ordinarily understood by responsibility.

Ordinarily, people equate responsibility with a person’s responsibilities and obligations, the things they are obliged to do to put food on the table and keep the wolf from the door. When existentialists talk about responsibility they tend to mean self-responsibility , a person’s responsibility for their own inalienable freedom, for the choices they make and the actions they take.

An existentialist will accept that in the ordinary way of speaking a head teacher probably has more responsibilities than one of the people who clean her school, but the existentialist will insist that both the head teacher and the cleaner are equally responsible for who they are, for what they do and don’t do and for the path they steer through life generally. Both cleaner and head teacher have to make decisions all the time, not least in the world beyond the mere job they choose to do, and they are equally burdened with, and equally responsible for, the decisions they make and the person those decisions create.

To fully grasp the existentialist view of responsibility we have to begin by re-stating what is perhaps the central maxim of existentialism, namely, that human consciousness is not a fixed, determined entity. There is nothing that a person is or can be in the mode of being it. A person must continually create herself in response to her situation through the choices she makes. A person cannot not choose herself in response to her situation because not to choose is in fact a choice not to choose.

In other words, the only limit to a person’s freedom is that she is not free to cease being free. As her responses to her situation are always chosen, she is responsible for them. As said, she is burdened with the responsibility of her freedom. Now, a person is not always responsible for her situation, for her facticity, but in so far as she must choose her responses to her situation, and in so doing choose herself in her situation, she is obliged to assume responsibility for her situation, obliged to take on her situation.

A disabled person, for example, may well not be responsible for bringing about her disability, but she is nonetheless responsible for her disability in the sense that she is free to choose her response to it and decide upon its meaning. If she decides that it is the ruination of her life then that is her choice, her responsibility. When looking specifically at freedom and choice in Chapter 6, I noted Sartre’s provocative claim that a person chooses to be a cripple. Sartre does not mean to be offensive here but to emphasise the point that disabled people, though they do not possess the freedom of movement able-bodied people possess, nonetheless possess unlimited freedom when it comes to deciding what being disabled means to them and how they will deal with the facticity, the brute fact, of their disability.

To insist that a disabled person is, existentially speaking, responsible for her disability, is certainly a tough and uncompromising view. It even seems a harsh and politically incorrect view in a culture that consistently undervalues individual responsibility and consistently overvalues the blaming of circumstances and facticity. This view should, however, be seen as empowering and very much politically correct in terms of the respect it shows disabled people.

To tell a so-called disabled person that she is, existentially speaking, responsible for her disability, is not to insult her or show her a callous lack of consideration, it is to inspire her and offer her genuine hope. Any disabled person whose choice of herself is not to wallow in self-pity would surely embrace this description of her situation. Few disabled people want to be reduced to their disability; considered as just a broken thing in a wheelchair. The existentialists are saying precisely that a disabled person is not her disability but instead her freely chosen response to her disability and her transcendence of it. This realisation is, or should be, enormously empowering. Personal empowerment is right at the top of the existentialists’ responsibility agenda.

It is important to note that bad faith, as a choice not to choose, is above all else an attempt to evade or relinquish responsibility. In the previous chapter we met Sartre’s flirt and Sartre’s homosexual. These two characters represent two forms of bad faith, both of which aim at avoiding responsibility. Sartre’s flirt attempts to avoid taking responsibility for her present actions and the demands of her immediate situation, while Sartre’s homosexual attempts to avoid taking responsibility for his past deeds.

Another form of bad faith in which a person attempts to avoid taking responsibility is sincerity. A sincere person, a person who makes a confession for example, declares, ‘I am what I am,’ in order to instantly abandon what she is to the past. In reality she is the transcendence of the facticity of her past, and as such is responsible for her past, but she aims at separating her facticity and her transcendence, her past and her future, so as to become a pure transcendence in a virgin future where she has escaped what she was and is no longer responsible for it.

Authenticity, as the antithesis of bad faith, involves a person taking full responsibility for herself, her past and her situation without blame, excuse or regret. Rather than seeking to deny the reality of her situation, the authentic person acts positively and decisively to meet the demands of her situation without complaint; without wishing she was not responsible for meeting the demands of her situation.

To embrace and celebrate being responsible is to embrace and celebrate being free. Freedom is not freedom from responsibility, freedom is having to make choices and therefore having to take responsibility. The person in bad faith, the inauthentic person, seeks to avoid recognising that one of the fundamental existential truths of her existence is that she is free and responsible, whereas the authentic person not only recognises that she is free and responsible, she strives to come to terms with it and to treat it as an ultimate value. Responsibility is certainly not a tragedy for the authentic person.

The theory of radical freedom and responsibility put forward by such hard-line existentialists as de Beauvoir and Sartre has been criticised as too uncompromising by more moderate existentialists such as Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty and his clique argue that there are limitations to freedom; that people do not always choose their responses to their situation and are therefore not always responsible for their actions. One of their main arguments is that each person has a natural self based on the natural limitations of her body.

This natural self renders certain evaluations inevitable and disposes a person towards certain choices. In failing to acknowledge that a person’s interactions with the world and other people are pre-structured by a natural self, the hard-line existentialists also overlook various behavioural and dispositional phenomena that signify limitations to choice and responsibility. Among the phenomena that the critics identify are sense of humour, sexual preference and mental disturbance.

Examining these phenomena reveals that perhaps not every conscious response is freely chosen. Although education and experience may change a person’s sense of humour over time, if she finds a joke funny at the time she hears it she is not choosing to find it funny. Similarly, although a sane person is responsible for actions that stem from her sexual preferences she is not responsible for her sexual preferences. She does not choose them and cannot choose to change them. Finally, psychiatrists recognise that the genuinely mentally disturbed have obsessive, compulsive tendencies over which they have little or no control. The radical freedom and responsibility theory of the hard-liners does not allow for the diminished responsibility that is one of the central features of insanity.

The hard-line existentialists are right that responsibility cannot be avoided or freedom limited by choosing not to choose. They are also right that helplessness in many if not most life situations is a pathetic pretence. They appear, however, to be wrong that people are always responsible for what they do and the evaluations they make.

Perhaps, in the end, the hard-line existentialists are not offering us a philosophical theory worked out in every single detail, so much as an ideal to aspire to through sheer unrelenting willpower – a dignified life of maximum responsibility and minimum excuses. Or, like so many people in our decadent, undignified western culture, would you rather aspire to be a whinging, irresponsible waster?