part0016

Existentialists are not the type of people to send a card saying, ‘Congratulations on the birth of your baby’, but then, they are not the type of people to send congratulations and greetings cards full stop.

The polite, reflex reaction of most people when told that someone they know personally is having a baby is to offer congratulations. But how many people really feel that congratulations are in order? Why congratulate a person who is about to sink into a self-inflicted mire of domestic drudgery stinking of vomit and shit? Rather selfishly perhaps, the first thought of many people when they discover a friend is having a baby is, ‘Well, that’s the end of them as a friend in any practical sense, at least for a number of years.’

Parenthood will almost inevitably disengage them from their broader social group as visits to Mothercare and Legoland take precedence over climbing holidays and weekend raves. They will become invariably busy, tired and distracted. None of their peers will be particularly keen to visit them in their den of diapers, not only because of the smell, but because adult indulgences and uninterrupted grown-up conversation will have been replaced by watching the babe throw-up on its comfort-blanket. ‘If you’re happy with a nappy then you’re in for fun’ (Wham!, ‘Young Guns’).

This is a cynical view no doubt, but certainly one that existentialists would tend to sympathise with. Generally, the existentialists’ view of birth is that it is an extremely unfortunate occurrence, both for the parents and for the newborn itself. It is no mere coincidence that none of the great existentialists, as far as I know, had children. Kierkegaard, for example, deliberately gave up his plans for a family when he broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen in 1841 to devote himself to philosophy. Sartre and de Beauvoir were lovers but they made sure no children came of it. De Beauvoir writes:

I had no dreams urging me to embrace maternity; and to look at the problem another way, maternity itself seemed incompatible with the way of life upon which I was embarking. I knew that in order to become a writer I needed a great measure of time and freedom. (The Prime of Life , p. 78)

Admittedly, Sartre had an adopted daughter called Arlette, but she was well out of nappies when he adopted her. In fact, he first met her when she visited his Paris apartment to discuss Being and Nothingness for her philosophy dissertation. The perfect child for an existentialist would be born potty trained, addicted to cigarettes and able to discuss the finer points of phenomenological ontology.

Sartre even wrote a novel, The Age of Reason , in which the central character, a professor of philosophy called Mathieu Delarue, strives to obtain sufficient funds to have his child aborted before its birth destroys his profligate lifestyle free from bourgeois expectations and constraints.

Nowhere in The Age of Reason are children spoken of with any positive regard. The foetus that Mathieu and his partner, Marcelle, have inadvertently conceived is variously described as a tumour, a pustule, a blister, ‘a little, vitreous tide within her … opening out among all the muck inside her belly’ (The Age of Reason , p. 20). Such are Sartre’s thoughts, or at least those of his alter ego, Mathieu.

When Mathieu meets a friend’s little boy, far from being moved by the joys of an expectant father, he thinks:

Pablo’s expression was not yet human, and yet it was already more than alive: the little creature had not long emerged from a womb, as indeed was plain: there he was, hesitant, minute, still displaying the unwholesome sheen of vomit: but behind the flickering humours that filled his eye-sockets, lurked a greedy little consciousness … in a pink room, within a female body, there was a blister, growing slowly larger. (The Age of Reason , pp. 43–44)

Existentialists tend to hold that it is an act of profound bad faith to have children. To have children is to choose to be determined by the domestic circumstances child rearing demands rather than a choice to affirm one’s own freedom and creativity. ‘Literature, I thought, was a way of justifying the world by fashioning it anew in the pure context of imagination … Childbearing, on the other hand, seemed no more than a purposeless and unjustifiable increase in the world’s population’ (The Prime of Life , p. 78). Having a baby threatens, perhaps more than any other single act, to drive people down into domesticated dullness and bad faith, down into an insipid and weak minded state where they hope to evade responsibility for themselves and their destiny by burdening themselves with the responsibility of a child and its destiny.

This seems an absurd view given that reproducing is so widespread and necessary, so natural, but there appears to be some truth in it when the motives for having children of at least some people are scrutinised. That mankind, including existentialists, would soon become extinct if nobody reproduced, does not mean that having children is never an act of bad faith. Certainly, some people have children in order to live for others rather than for themselves, in order to give themselves a ready-made destiny, in order to avoid the effort required to pursue their own genuine creativity and so on.

Children can be a convenient, guilt free means by which people give up on themselves. All that can be expected of people with children, burdened as they are, is that they raise their children well, and often the self-thwarted ambitions of parents who have chosen to live vicariously are made to be the responsibility of their offspring. The anthropologist and sorcerer’s apprentice, Carlos Castaneda, says, ‘When one has a child that child takes the edge off our spirit’ (The Second Ring of Power , p. 117). An edge that, in the existentialists’ view, many people who have children are quite happy to have taken from them.

In the existentialists’ view, if having a baby is a misfortune then being born is a disaster. The average doting, deluded parent may feel that their offspring is a gift from heaven and a necessary being, but the existentialists know that each fleshy, squawking package of desire and dissatisfaction that is born into this cruel world is utterly superfluous . It makes no difference that the baby is wanted, that it was planned for, it is nonetheless a cosmic accident, the ultimately absurd and pointless continuation of an absurd and pointless species.

If the existentialists had their way, every baby would be born to the sound of ‘Riders on the Storm’ by The Doors: ‘Into this house we’re born, into this world we’re thrown, like a dog without a bone, an actor out alone.’ This would serve to emphasise that the baby has no raison d’être ; that the only meaning and purpose it can ever hope to have is the relative meaning and purpose it chooses to give itself as it grows up.

Sartre claims to have recognised the contingency and superfluity of his existence from an early age. His doting family treated the infant Sartre as a necessity, as a being that was meant to be. Sartre, however, precocious youth that he was, saw himself as travelling on a train without a ticket; travelling through life without justification for his absurd existence, troubled by a ticket-inspector that was also himself. ‘Stowaway traveller, I had fallen asleep on the seat and the ticket-inspector was shaking me. “Your ticket!” I was forced to admit that I had not got one’ (Words , p. 70).

We appear on life’s train, a train bound for nowhere, ticketless passengers born of equally ticketless passengers, all of us utterly abandoned – at least according to atheistic existentialists like Heidegger, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir and Beckett. This is not to say we have been abandoned in the sense of ‘left behind’ or ‘neglected’ by someone or something. For the philosophers named, there is nothing ‘out there’ that could have abandoned us in this way. Rather, we are all abandoned because there is no God to give human life purpose or moral direction. We have always been alone and will always be alone in an ultimately meaningless universe. Even if there is intelligent life on other planets, it is equally abandoned and alone in the sense of inhabiting a godless, meaningless universe.

The atheistic existentialists’ adoption of the notion of abandonment is the clearest possible expression of their atheism, their view that humankind is a cosmic accident and not the product of some higher design on the part of God or gods. As humans are uncreated – the process of reproduction that works through parents is not creation on their part – the idea or essence of each person does not precede his or her existence. People exist first – accidentally, unnecessarily, superfluously – and must invent their meaning and purpose afterwards.

Ultimately, despite the rather negative tone of this chapter so far, atheistic existentialists do not see abandonment as grounds for pessimism. In their abandonment people are free to create themselves and to become masters of their own destiny. To be free of the will and design of a creator, as one of the inescapable existential truths of human existence, is or should be a source of inspiration rather than despair.

Existentialists tend to be more positive about children, or at least more interested in the pathetic, superfluous little creatures, when viewing them from a developmental perspective. Existentialists are most interested in the human condition as suffered and endured by full-blown adult consciousnesses, but in recognising that, as the saying goes, ‘The child is the father of the man’, they are inevitably drawn to study the child’s psychological progress.

The starting point for the existentialist interested in child development is invariably the work of the Austrian psychiatrist, Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud was not an existentialist but his controversial ideas became so prominent in the first half of the twentieth century that they had a profound influence on many schools of thought, including existentialism. Although the existentialists admire Freud’s radicalism and his efforts to think outside the box on the subject of personal development, they have little respect for many of his conclusions and generally tend to disagree with him, though they do agree with him on certain key points.

They certainly agree with Freud that the main features of a person’s character are formed in her early years in response to her immediate circumstances and her treatment by others. This, in itself, is no great revelation. Anyone can tell you that Laura is the way she is largely because of her early experiences and the way she was brought up. For example, Laura is claustrophobic because her parents often locked her in her room as a child. But Freud in his way and the existentialists in their way go beyond mere cause and effect explanations that rely simply on knowing, for example, that many people who have claustrophobia were confined as children. They undertake to explore and describe the psychological mechanisms whereby early experiences shape personality and influence behaviour.

Freud, famously and controversially, places the emphasis on sexuality . Freud argues that young children progress through several stages of psycho-sexual development: the oral stage, the anal stage, the phallic stage and the latency period. During each stage the pleasure-seeking energies of the Id – the subconscious mind and the seat of primitive drives and desires – are focused on the erogenous zone where bodily pleasure is felt most acutely at that time. For example, during the oral stage the child is engrossed with the pleasure she receives from her mouth. According to Freud, excessive frustration or satisfaction at any stage can cause a child to become fixated at that stage. A person fixated at the oral stage displays an oral personality characterised by a constant craving for the oral stimulation provided by food, drink, cigarettes, talking, kissing and so on.

The existentialists appreciate what Freud is getting at with all this psycho-sexual stuff, his insight that intimate, seemingly trivial experiences during childhood have a huge influence on adult personality. But they think that he places far too much emphasis on sexuality and sexual development to the exclusion of other factors. Not least, existentialists think that sexuality is a phenomenon that can be further analysed, explained and reduced. It can be subjected to what they call a phenomenological reduction . In their view, Freud mistakenly treats sexuality as irreducible, as something fundamental which cannot be further analysed and reduced which is then used as a basis for explaining everything else. The existentialists’ view of sexual desire, their phenomenological reduction of this pseudo-irreducible phenomenon, is explored in Chapter 15.

As a response to Freudian psychoanalysis, Sartre founded existential psychoanalysis, a theory that was developed and applied in a clinical setting by the Scottish psychiatrist, R. D. Laing. Both Sartre and Laing argue that to explain a person in terms of pseudo-irreducible drives and desires, as Freud does, is to reduce her to those drives and desires, and hence to explain her away.

Explained in terms of fundamental drives and desires a person loses her unique individuality. She becomes a ‘personality type’, an oral or an anal personality type for example, rather than a person shaped both by a set of life circumstances unique to her and by her freely chosen responses to those circumstances. Reflecting on the spread of psychoanalysis in France in the 1920s, de Beauvoir says that she and Sartre ‘rejected psychoanalysis as a tool for exploring a normal human being’ (The Prime of Life , p. 21). She goes on to say:

Freud’s pansexualism struck us as having an element of madness about it, besides offending our puritanical instincts. Above all, the importance it attached to the unconscious, and the rigidity of its mechanistic theories, meant that Freudianism, as we conceived it, was bound to eradicate human free will. (The Prime of Life , p. 21)

For the existentialists, while sexuality or the lack of it is clearly a key element in the make-up of any personality, individual character is to be explained not by psycho-sexual fixation but by detailed biography. Only an exhaustive exploration of an individual’s personal history, guided by the existentialists’ insights into the nature of consciousness, choice, freedom, anxiety, bad faith and so on, will reveal what makes a person tick, what makes them feel, value, act and react as they do.

Laura is claustrophobic because her parents often locked her in her room as a child. Certainly, experience teaches us that many people who were excessively confined as children tend to develop the deeper than average aversion to confined spaces known as claustrophobia. But what of the person who was locked in her room as a child who takes up caving as a hobby or mining as a career, or the person who was never confined as a child but who is profoundly claustrophobic? To understand such diversity of outcomes we need, as the existentialists strongly suggest, to do away with neat psychological labels and one size fits all causal theories and really get to grips with each person as a unique individual.

R. D. Laing would argue that even a person with claustrophobia does not have claustrophobia in the way that a person has flu, for example. Traditional psychiatry identifies claustrophobia as a general condition that people suffer from as though it were an illness. It is assumed that because claustrophobics tend to exhibit similar symptoms they have claustrophobia in much the same way as a person has a virus. This approach does not so much explain a claustrophobic person as explain her away by characterising her condition as the product of various impersonal processes. No one has claustrophobia. Claustrophobia is not an entity that a claustrophobic possesses in common with other claustrophobics but a product of her own unique choice of herself in response to the peculiarities of her own unique situation.

For the clinical psychologist or professional counsellor the main problem with the existential psychoanalytic method is that it can be extremely time consuming as applied to each individual client, which is perhaps the reason why Freudian psychoanalysis is still far more widely practiced than existential psychoanalysis. It is quicker and easier and therefore more economical to take some ready-made psychological categories and to conduct a formulaic assessment that inevitably pigeon-holes people into those categories. To truly understand what makes a person tick can take years, and certainly there can be no predetermined time limit placed on the task of fathoming a person out.

To demonstrate in detail the methodology of existential psychoanalysis, Sartre wrote several large biographies of French writers: Baudelaire, Genet and Flaubert. Each biography was longer than the last with Sartre’s unfinished biography of Flaubert, The Family Idiot , running to nearly 3000 pages. This work has been described as the most ambitious attempt ever made by one human being to understand another, but clearly, if this is what is required to truly understand a person then most people are going to remain more or less a mystery to everyone including themselves.

To be fair, Sartre was out to totalise Flaubert, to synthesise the results of an analytic/psychoanalytic investigation of Flaubert’s personality with the results of a sociological investigation of Flaubert’s economic, political, historical and cultural context. Sartre even thought that to truly understand Flaubert as a totality, as a unified whole, it was essential to acquire a detailed understanding of nineteenth-century French literature and Flaubert’s complex relationship with it.

Sartre went so far with ‘The Flaubert’, as he nicknamed it, not least because he was also exploring his own personality as a French writer by comparing himself with Flaubert. So, in writing ‘The Flaubert’, Sartre was in some senses continuing to write his autobiography, continuing to explore why he had chosen writing as his raison d’être .

Fortunately, it appears that existential psychoanalysis can yield valuable insights into a person without the need to go to the extent Sartre did with Flaubert. Only when the subject is a great writer, perhaps, is the analyst required to understand that person’s complex relationship with literature. A relationship which may well have begun, as it did with Sartre himself, at a very early age. Sartre tells us in yet another of his biographies of French writers – his own – how he devoured his grandfather’s library before the age of ten.

At the heart of existential psychoanalysis is the analyst’s search for a person’s unique fundamental choice of herself and the fundamental project that stems from that fundamental choice. A unique fundamental choice of self is, in the existentialists’ view, what shapes each and every person and makes them tick. For the existentialists, fundamental choice replaces the Freudian notion of personality type.

To understand the meaning of fundamental choice it is necessary to recall the existentialists’ claim that consciousness is constituted as a lack of being that has the fundamental project of overcoming that lack. As a lack of being, consciousness aims to be being. It aims to be complete; a godlike being in which existence and essence are one. Existentialists are fond of saying that to be God is the fundamental project of human reality. As Sartre says, ‘To be man means to reach towards being God. Or if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 587).

In the everyday, concrete situation of an individual person the general project of desiring to be God, of desiring to be totally fulfilled, is expressed in the form of a desire to be united with a particular way of being that is perceived to be presently lacking. The project of seeking unity with a particular way of being that a person perceives to be presently lacking is the fundamental project of that person.

Her particular fundamental project is established via an original or fundamental choice whereby she chooses herself as a particular kind of lack. In choosing herself as a particular kind of lack she constantly chooses to project herself towards the ends that would overcome that lack. Indeed, her personality is comprised of the host of behaviours and attitudes that she employs in her constant effort to overcome the particular lack that she has chosen to be.

To take a simple example, a person may fundamentally choose herself as lacking equal status with others, as essentially inferior, and as a result spend the rest of her life striving to overcome that lack. She may project an air of superiority and her achievements may far outstrip those of her peers, but it will all be rooted in that fundamental choice of herself as inferior which she constantly affirms by the very fact that she is constantly motivated to refute it.

Alternatively, a person may project an air of superiority and strive to achieve more than her peers because she has indeed chosen herself as superior. She will continue to lack superiority as a possession – there is nothing that she is or can be in the manner of simply being it and it is impossible for her to be a superior-thing – but she may nonetheless spend her entire life affirming that fundamental choice of herself as superior which she once adopted as a reaction to her essential nothingness and indeterminacy.

It is even possible for a person to project an air of inferiority and underachieve precisely because she has chosen herself as superior, but is embarrassed and ashamed of that fundamental choice of herself as superior. Only a detailed analysis of personal history can hope to reveal the truth.

A fundamental choice is not the product of antecedent tendencies. Rather, it is the basis of all consequent ones. As an aspect of the dawning of self-consciousness, it is an original choice of self made in response to an event in early life. The event demands that some original choice or other of self be made. Though the event may be trivial in itself, it is, nonetheless, as Sartre says, ‘the crucial event of infancy’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 590). It is crucial because it is here that a person first begins to choose those responses that affirm or deny her view of herself as a certain kind of character.

As a choice of self that establishes grounds for subsequent choosing, the fundamental choice is itself groundless. Though the fundamental choice is groundless, it is nonetheless necessary in that it cannot not be made. Consciousness, as a lack of being, must choose some particular project or other through which it can aim to overcome the lack of being that it is. The fundamental project upon which consciousness embarks depends upon the fundamental choice it makes as to the value and meaning of its own lack of being.

Recall Sartre’s childhood view of himself as a stowaway travelling on a train without a ticket. This was how he represented his own indeterminacy and absurd superfluity to himself, his essential lack of being, his nothingness. Realising that he had no ticket, that nobody had or could have given him a ticket, how was he to justify his presence on the train? Well, from the age of seven, Sartre chose writing as his ticket to life and his reason to be. His choice to be a writer was his fundamental choice of himself, a choice that influenced all his subsequent choices and so shaped his entire life and personality.

I was born from writing: before that, there was only a reflection in a mirror. From my first novel, I knew that a child had entered the palace of mirrors. By writing, I existed, I escaped from the grown-ups; but I existed only to write and if I said: me – that meant the me who wrote. (Words , p. 97)

Sartre claims in Words that it was his desire for heroic immortality as a writer, set alongside his early dismissal of Christian notions of salvation and the afterlife, that motivated him rather than any particular gift or genius. He is fond of arguing that genius is as genius does. ‘The genius of Proust is the totality of the works of Proust; the genius of Racine is the series of his tragedies, outside of which there is nothing’ (Existentialism and Humanism , pp. 41–42). Sartre deliberately set out from childhood to create himself as a ‘genius’ through sustained hard work and unflinching self-belief.

Constantly making himself a writer through the act of writing enabled Sartre to maintain an illusion of substance and purpose that effectively kept at bay those disturbing childhood feelings of pointlessness and superfluity. He maintained this grand illusion so well by his efforts, believed so strongly in his vocation, in his capacity to achieve his destiny, that as a young man he was, unlike his friends, untroubled by fears of an untimely death. ‘I had forearmed myself against accidental death, that was all; the Holy Ghost had commissioned a long-term work from me, so he had to give me time to complete it’ (Words , pp. 123–124).

Towards the end of Words the ageing writer finally writes himself out of the grand illusion that has sustained him since childhood. He finally confronts what he has always known, what he has spent the greater part of his life striving to deny, that writing or any other activity cannot remove his superfluity and make him a necessary being at one with himself. Like everyone else he remains a ticketless traveller on a journey to nowhere. ‘I have become once again the traveller without a ticket that I was at seven’ (Words , p. 157). Despite his monumental efforts he remains contingent and mortal, his immortal status as a writer existing only for future generations of equally contingent mortals.

The fundamental choice is the original and most fundamental attempt on the part of consciousness to escape the utter contingency and superfluity of its being. By choosing itself as a particular kind of lack it hopes to make sense of its being by overcoming that lack; as though in a final act of complete overcoming it could establish an ultimate raison d’être for its otherwise contingent being. But of course, there can be no final act of overcoming whereby consciousness establishes itself as a determinate, necessary being once and for all.

Though consciousness constantly aims to overcome the lack that it is, it can never do so. Only death can annihilate the lack that a person is. Only by ceasing to exist at all can a person finally cease to exist as a being that constantly lacks identity with herself. Death transforms her life into a fixed entity, not for her but for other people, although even then what she was is open to endless interpretation.

So, a person is the product of her choices. The core of her personality is not a fixed nature or essence but her fundamental childhood choice of herself. The actions that a person chooses in response to her fundamental choice comprise her fundamental project. Often a life is defined by a single fundamental project based on a single fundamental choice. However, existentialists hold that it is possible for a person to undergo a radical conversion in which she establishes a new fundamental choice of herself. After all, at the risk of stating the obvious, fundamental choice is a choice , an expression of freedom that endures only because it is chosen. As a choice it is forever susceptible to freedom, to conversion, to being radically overthrown by a new fundamental choice.

The type of radical conversion that existentialists are most interested in is the radical conversion from bad faith to authenticity, and by ‘radical conversion’ they generally mean ‘radical conversion to authenticity’, although they allow that a radical conversion in the opposite direction is also possible.

Radical conversion to authenticity involves a person abandoning a fundamental project in which she strives in her own particular way to deny that she is free, in favour of a new fundamental project in which she affirms her freedom and takes full responsibility for herself and her being-in-situation.

According to Sartre, the French writer, Gustave Flaubert, underwent a radical conversion in his twenties. This was yet another reason why Sartre thought Flaubert worthy of that vast biography, The Family Idiot , a work that dominated the last few years of Sartre’s working life and helped to send him blind.

According to Sartre, Gustave’s mother wanted a daughter, a female companion to compensate for her lonely childhood. Her husband was no companion, he had lost interest in her and was having affairs. Furthermore, baby Gustave was not expected to survive as the two siblings immediately preceding him had died. As a result, the disappointing, futureless child received skilful care, the aim of which was to pacify him, but very little real maternal affection. Sartre identifies Flaubert’s passivity as his first fundamental choice of himself. He was not encouraged to respond, to feel that he had a purpose, to feel that he could be something more than an object his mother was obliged to care for.

Gustave faired no better with his father, whose attentions and hopes were directed towards Gustave’s older brother, Achille, who eventually became a successful doctor like his father. Pacified, overlooked as a person, Gustave’s intellectual development was slow. He was unable to read at the age of seven. His family further reinforced the low self-esteem at the heart of his ennui by viewing him as an idiot.

Gustave was eventually taught to read by the local priest. Though still passive in his general demeanour and given to meditative stupors that made him appear a simpleton, Gustave took possession of his new found ability and by the age of nine was writing stories. Gustave’s father decided, however, that Gustave would be a lawyer. Passive as ever, Gustave followed this plan, all the while developing a nervous disorder.

The defining moment of Gustave’s life occurred in 1844 when he suffered a nervous crisis, possibly an epileptic fit. Incapacitated by this crisis he was unable to pursue the legal career his father had chosen for him. Gustave’s crisis, arguably self-induced, allowed him to finally free himself from his father’s domination and become a writer. The invalid, being no good for anything better, was left to write. The idiot was at last free to transform himself into a genius.

For Sartre, Flaubert’s nervous crisis was in reality a radical conversion to authenticity, an act of self-assertion in which he finally dispensed with his passivity, his choice not to choose, his bad faith. Through an act that had the outward appearance of a mental collapse, but was, in fact, a positive affirmation of freedom, he finally abandoned his fundamental choice to exist passively for other people in favour of a new fundamental choice to exist actively for himself.